BEN'S JOURNEY

BIG ISLAND STAGE RACE
"IT'S ALL ABOUT TIMING"

Last weekend was the Big Island Stage Race in Kona, Hawaii. Jeff, Dev and myself left Honolulu on Friday to head to the Big Island. We stayed at a huge villa called Paniolo on the Greens. The First race of the Stage was a 6 mile Time Trial. As you can see the above picture, I had no aero bars or any aero equipment. I was pleased with my time and finished 4th. Dev was close behind and finished 2 seconds back.

The second race was held several hours later which is called a criterium. Its sort of like a NASCAR race but with bicyles. We had a pretty good size field and it was fast and each loop had a 13% grade climb. I really felt great until the 2nd to the last lap I was stung by a bee on my head! But I pressed on... After the race they had timing issues and could not determine who finished after 2nd place. I know for a fact I finished 3rd or 4th based on my Garmin GPS. They missed me on a lap and forgot to put check marks down. They did not post results and said that they would work on it that evening. Per USA Cycling (this was an USA Sanctioned) results will be posted 30 mins following the race and you have 15 mins to protest from there.

Knowing that I finished well that day, I was sitting pretty well in the standings for the road race the next day. The morning of the road race (15 mins before start) I was told that I wouldn't be scored for the race the previous day. I was disaapointed with that decession since I invested a lot of training, time off from work and quite a bit of money for the weekend. It sort of took the wind out of my sails and I asked myself why even start the race. I did start the race and ended up scorching the down hills with Mike Z close to 50 mph! I also made the decession to pull out once we got on the back side.

Later that afternoon, I guess the race folks made a decession at the awards ceremony, which we were already at the airport. I would have had around 30+ points which would have taken me to an overall 3rd place finish. I told race director that I would return next year only if they had electronic timing. It's been a real frustrating year of racing which 4 races ended up with timing issues for me. This weekend is a 40k Time Trial and I am looking fwd to that. Other than the timing issues, I had one heck of a fantastic weekend with my 2 buddies Dev and Jeff! This may have been the last race weekend we had off island before they transfer very soon.

Tuesday night we went to see my cousin perform at the Hale Koa Hotel in a Magic Show called "Magic in Paradise". A huge dinner buffet with show made it a awesome evening. The Soots and Andrews family both attended and cousin Mark even came over to the table during dinner to perform a trick on Marita and Robert. The evening ended with spending time with family and family (Andres and Soots ae like family to me). Not once thru the evening we talked about racing or bikes...