Strength or Stupidity

Yesterday I competed in the first of three one-day races that I have scheduled for this weekend. The race was called Grand Prix du Muguet, it was 110km road race consisting of 4 small laps each being 12.5km and 3 big laps of 20km with a steep hill of about 1km only 3 km into the lap.  As soon as the race was out of the neutral zone an escape of 5 riders formed gaining an advantage of around 30sec, after 10km I broke away from the peloton with Florent who is a team mate of mine and 3 other riders.  Within five kilometers of our group forming we caught the front, now with 10 riders in the break the time gap went out to and stayed at about 1.20 min. On the first of three big laps going up the climb I found myself with a small gap on the break. I decided to keep going and see what happened, by the time I was at the top of the hill I had taken the KOM points and had about a 20sec gap. I decided to take it one lap at a time as there was still 60km to the finish and I was by myself. For the next 40km I found a pace that I felt comfortable on and thought I would be able to hold for a prolonged period. Now that I had been away for 40km solo I had about a 1min gap on the break behind me. When I started the last lap with a 1 min gap I thought that it would be quite possible to stay away as I felt pretty good considering what I had done already.  With 10km to go the break behind me was caught by the peloton, I still had around 1min so pushing myself through the red zone I rode on, I knew that the peloton could quickly close a 1 min gap in 10km. Fortunately I held the peloton off and went across the finish in first place recording my first win of the season and also taking the KOM jersey. I am still unsure as to how I managed to pull this off as the odds of a single rider holding off a peloton for over 60 percent of the race coupled with the fact that I didn’t drink much throughout the race as I had taken water bottles that had pure cordial in are quite slim, but I will take it none the less.