We had five riders for tonight's NCC Team Time Trial -- Melissa, Carson, Shawn, Bill and I tackled the Watopia's Waistband route, a flat 16-mile loop around the outer perimeter of Watopia.

Bill had some technological challenges at the start -- he got on our team Discord chat, but his mic didn't work, so he could hear us but we couldn't hear him. We managed to work through that though, and our pulls went smoothly in the early going despite the communications challenges. The tech gremlins struck again though about six miles in, when Bill's power suddenly went to zero. Not sure whether this was a network outage or a trainer issue (since we couldn't hear him), but we decided to forge ahead without him.

With five starters, the fourth person over the line is the time that counts, so once we lost Bill, we couldn't spare anyone else. Melissa started to creep into the red zone about two-thirds of the way through, so she sat in the rest of the way while Carson, Shawn and I traded pulls. Everyone put in big efforts on their final pulls, and Melissa managed to hang on, and we finished together with a time of 40:25. Results are still trickling in from the west coast as I write this, but currently we are placed 68th of 180 in our category, which I think is pretty respectable given that we did most of the race with only four riders.

We'll be racing again next Thursday night, I'll post the sign-up link once it becomes available during the day on Friday.