I woke up today after a good 6 hours of quality coma time, rocking out the compression socks, then waking up my legs with a roasting hot shower. We drove south of Kona to the start of the road race at the Pu'uhonua O Honaunau national historic park.
The Senior / Master men fields were combined, and we had to do two big loops of a course, with 2 smaller loops per lap at higher elevation. The section of course closest to sea level was on a single lane road with a good 2ft drop either side into some nasty looking lava rock. Not somewhere you would want to land!

BME Racing doing a little pre-race stretching.

I nudged the page on the flat / rollers section for the first 20mins of the race along with Jason Smith and Kevin Kawainui from Tradewinds. When we hit the first climb, Jeff Roberson (BME Racing) and Penn Henderson got on the front and ramped up the pace. We rode up there at tempo, then made a left-hand 180 onto the first of two smaller loops at the top of the course. A few of us put in a few attacks but nothing too aggressive. On short uphill section of road I did a seated acceleration at 500w, looked back and saw that I had 30ft on the group, so I took off and got down to business. I got myself into an low aero tuck on the bike, and used the downhill section of road to press on at +/- 40mph... After a few miles I was eventually reeled back in, and supposedly it took 3 guys working together to catch me. Hey, got to make it interesting! The next big lap and two smaller loops were like the first, except our group whittled down rider by rider until it was myself, Tony Lang, Ray Brust, Penn Henderson, and an Aussie (Ben). Ray and Tony are in the 40-44 age group, and Penn and Ben were in the 30-34, so barring any mechanical problems, I had my 15th Hawaii state championship title in the bag. We stayed together until the end of the race, then right after the final lump of road, Penn attacked with about 500m to go. I took a gamble and hoped that he'd gone a bit early. I waited... waited... waited, then with about 250m to go launched my attack from 5th wheel in the group to fly past Penn (fast enough that he couldn't latch on my wheel) to take the win by about 10 bike lengths.

Phew! I'm so happy to get #15! Rolling across the line at 40+ mph on my Zipp 202's.

The course was awesome and the racing was very positive. No bullshit, everyone putting in an equal share of work to animate the race and initiate splits in the field. The perfect example of how racing should be!

Casey was on a bad day and abandoned the race. Jeff got stung by a bee on the first climb and also had to abandon. Ed Kurzenski took win 50-54 age group and Voytek took 60-64. Another day of great racing by the BME guys!