Back in the Saddle

Today was the first day of the road cycling season here in Rocky for me.  (Last weekend was actually the first race.)  I entered into the B grade field for the race.  It was 51 km and we had a small of field of 14 guys.  The race started out into a tailwind (or as it always is, a cross tail) for the first 10K. We were riding pretty hard and at one point I was wondering if I was going to make the finish. The wind was wicked this afternoon (20-30km/hr) and it was hard to find a place to hide and draft in the bunch.  Especially as we turned around and battled the headwind.
Nothing too exciting happened until we went past the start/finish line and onto the part of the course that we would only race once.  It was rolling with some fairly short steep hills.  A friend who I train with had been putting in a bunch of attacks and was struggling up one of the hills (not that I was in much better shape), and I figured he would last a lot longer in the flat sections of the race than I would, so I dropped back to help him over the top.  Once over we had to catch back on and I pretty much pegged my heart rate doing this.  Back in the field I tried to recover, but after we turned around and came back over the hills again I was having some trouble.  I just kept telling myself to hang in there a little longer.  Again through the start finish line and I had recovered a bit.  I decided to ignore my HR monitor because it seemed to be too high for too long already anyhow.  We had been over this part of the race once already so I had a clue what to expect.  I tried to stay out of the wind and save some energy.
When we turned around for the last 10 K to the finish we received a brutal cross head wind.  This made it really hard to draft as we could really only echelon 3 riders across the road (it was narrow and we could only use 1/2 the road.)  At about 9K to go my friend put in an attack.  I figured what the hell and bridged up to him.  I asked him if we were too far out and he thought we should give it a go.  We went about 4K before the group caught up to us going up a hill.  One guy jumped across the gap as we crested and we held a slim lead for another K.  At this point I dropped back into the peloton to rest. 
As we came up to the next hill I thought it was the last before the finish, with a long downhill on the other side.  I was wrong, I had sprinted up to the guy dangling in the front and then realized my mistake and fell back.  From here on out I stayed in the group.  As we swept down the final hill into the last 1000m, I was sitting 2 to 3rd wheel, right where I wanted to be.  Coming into the last 500 meters we were slowly pulling in the lone rider at the front.  I had told myself prior to the race not to sprint too early as it was slightly uphill and into a headwind.  I did not follow my own advice.  I didn't think we had time to catch the rider up the road and I went for the win at about 300 meters.  We quickly surged up the road and caught the rider, but by then all the work I had recently done caught up to me and I could not longer stand and sprint.  I ended up in 5th place.  Not bad, but I wish I could do it over again.
I was surprised on how good my legs were at the end.  It has been awhile since I could stand up and really power out a sprint at the end of the race.  Maybe all the track racing paid off.  Halfway through the race I thought I was not going to finish, by the end I was one of the stronger guys out there.  On a finial note I have to figure out what my lactate threshold HR actually is.  I spent 45 min of the race above 168 bpm, which I thought was near my threshold, but obviously it is higher.  (Sorry no pictures, the camera battery died.)