The final race of the summer/fall Monday Night Race Series featured Melissa, Zinj, and I on two laps of France’s Douce France course, a flat loop with one small hill in the middle, for a total of 31 miles. It was a well-matched group, and we stuck together pretty well for the first 20 minutes or so, before I started getting random power drops every few minutes, forcing me to spend much of the race chasing to get back to the lead group. Zinj kept the pressure at the front and made this difficult, but I repaid the favor by putting in a few attacks once I would reconnect, which I hope made him hurt a little. By the time we got to the end, I was gassed, and totally mis-timed the finishing push. Melissa, on the other hand, was paying close attention, and dropped an aero helmet and launched a perfectly-timed sprint to blow past Zinj and I and easily take the win. Zinj nipped me at the line to get second. We awarded double points for this super-size series finale.
1. Melissa Warwick – 6 points
2. Zinj Guo – 4 points
3. Jonathan O’Keeffe – 2 points
Final series standings:
1. Jonathan O’Keeffe (8 races) – 25.5 points
2. Melissa Warwick (7 races) – 17.5 points
3. Charlie Bailey (5 races) – 9 points
4. Michael Bello (5 races) – 7 points
5. Jamie Parr (1 race) – 4.5 points
6. Zinj Guo (1 race) – 4 points
7. Kevin Weinman (1 race) – 3 points
Thanks to everyone who came out and raced over the course of this series — it was a lot of fun to hang out with folks during the races and try out a new race format. Along those lines, we will be trying out a new race format when we start our next series in a couple of weeks. We will still be racing on Monday nights, but this time we will be joining scheduled Zwift races and mixing it up with the whole online community. More details to come soon on the race format.
