Parrulo said:
I am a very jealous man right now
Did he push it a bit at some point and showed every1 what a bunch of fat freds they were?
I can only put a duplicate of the post I sent Hitch in another thread. It should suffice to appease everyone's curiosity and make others even more jealous
:
Yes, he seemed rather down to earth. It was funny, you know. At the start of the Granfondo there were like over 1000 participants. Myself and the guys I ride with were in the first grill, though it still took about 3 minutes to actually depart, because there were about 300 riders in front of us.
The first 20K were lightning fast and so it was a matter of getting your a$$ up to the front without crashing or going
fuori giro, then the first climb came!
I got over that with the leaders. We were at that point a group of 40-50, no more. Then there was another climb and that shed another 20 or so out the back. Finally the pace dropped back down in the valley and one could take a bit of a breather before the next climb (there was over 2300 meters of total vertical ascent on the course).
It was at this point that I noticed two really fit guys with sky blue kit among us. I immediately realized neither had race numbers on and remembered that Nibali and Agnoli were above Fiuggi at altitude according to
la Gazzetta dello Sport. Then I thought "Sh!t, that's Nibali and Agnoli."
We had been going so hard before and I was so concentrated on my race and holding position, first getting up to the front, then on the climbs, that I hadn't even noticed them. Then I thought, pfff, gotta say something to the bloke, so I did. No big deal. He got a kick out of the fact though that, while American, my mother's side of the family had emigrated to the US from Messina a century or so ago. After our brief exchange then came the next climb to Fiuggi, not the longest of the day, but the steepest. A brutal series of switchbacks, with brief sections at 20% for about 3-4k. Still there, but a break of 4 gets away, among whom was the eventual winner.
It was on the next climb of 10k that Nibali and Agnoli bridged up to the leaders. Bye-Bye…or rather,
ciao.
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