Florida State Time Trial Championships 5/30/09

I am not usually a big fan of time trials, but this race is the state championships and it was fairly close. This was going to be my first 40km time trial. It was located just West of Jacksonville. I met Dave and David and we headed out around 7:30.
We arrived to find the main parking lot full, but we double parked and registered before finding the overflow lot. The overflow lot turned out to be a muddy field. With the beautiful Florida sun already hitting the wet ground I think the humidity was 99%. No warming up on the trainer luckily their was a paved trail to warm up on. Ben arrived just after us and we all headed to the trail to warm up.
David was first to hit the course at 9:55, Dave was up at 10:14, Ben was off at 10:27 and I was the last of the Cat 4s from our team at 10:28. None of us had any fancy time trial bikes or disc wheels, so it was a bit intimidating watching people roll around on really fast looking bikes.
All I can say about time trials is when it hurts you have to go harder. My goal for the race was to finish in the top 10 and hopefully post a time under 1 hour for the 40 km (24.85 mile) course. I caught Ben about 5 miles out and could see the next guy ahead. He was wearing a bright yellow skin suit so was kind of hard to miss. Maybe I could catch him by the turn around. My legs burned and I pushed a little harder slowly reeling him in. I managed to catch him just before the turn around. The best part about catching this guys is he was rolling on a Cervelo P3 with Zipp 404 front wheel and a Zipp disc wheel in the rear. I bet the whole set up cost him upwards of $10K.
Unfortunately as I made the turn I could not see anyone to chase down ahead of me. This return trip was going to be tough with nothing to take my mind off my burning quads. I got the speed back up and the finish line came into sight faster than I expected. You could see the finish from probably 3 miles out and this helped the morale. Shift down let the pain come I knew I was almost done.
I finished in 9th place with a time of 59:45. David finished in 14th and Dave in 20th. Ben was in the Cat 5 group and finished in 17th. Our other team mates who raced in the Cat 3 race also finished well Andrea took 1st and Eric was in the top 15. Amy represented the women and finished in 8th. I am really happy with my results and am looking forward to the Ocala stage race in a couple of weeks.