Johnny Cake Lane, Coxsackie NY, 3-24-07

TARGETRAINING makes it 1 and 3; or “how Kyle rocks and Justin needs to eat more”.

The neutral roll out ended with Justin Lindine (self-admittedly) a little further back in the pack then he might have liked. Max Zippolis, Paolo Mion, Kyle Wolfe and Mandy Lozano were up front, knowing that this race often starts fast. A break rolled off the front on the first turn. In the move were four key players including Kyle.  Justin made his way to the front as fast as possible and on the first little riser jumped off the front to bridge up to the breakaway.  He brought along with Matt Purdy of NAV it looked like they might have all the firepower they needed to make it stick.

Max, Paolo and Mandy sat in the field, covering every move that attempted to reach the breakaway, and making general nuisances of themselves.

This is where the good and the bad news come in.  The good news is that the break averaged a blistering 25.83 mph for over 50 miles. With two laps to go, Kyle, Justin, and Mike McGinley from Anthem put in a hard charge up the course’s only "hill" to drop the other three members of the break.  The bad news is that on the last lap, about halfway through, Justin began to hit a wall of monumental proportion.  He admits he got caught up in what he was doing and forgot to eat or drink properly. Understandable, for a phenomenally-talented novice who has raced his way into the Elite ranks quite quickly. Fortunately, when after the last corner his two breakaway companions dropped him, Justin was able to grit his teeth, make a lot of painful noises, and hang on for third.  Luckily Kyle is a pretty handy sprinter and took the win over McGinley.  Justin says that the morals of the story are:

1.      Eat every 20min to a half hour if you actually want to finish the race

2.      Long breaks are super cool