Race Report # 10

Number of pro teams at the race last weekend 2
Number of pro riders 13
# of women who lost teeth and had to get their jaw wired shut after crashing
Cloud she was on after a whole lot of Percocet ™


Last weekend was the Enumclaw Stage Race, a local favorite because it is the only stage race in the region that is less than three hours from Seattle. As is the routine it started with the time trial Saturday morning/early afternoon followed by the criterium later in the day, and the road race on Sunday. This particular race was missing some of the local big names, but we had the entire Symmetrics team to make up for it. Symmetrics is Canada’s top pro team and has a lot of talent. This same team competed against top level European teams at the Tour de Georgia last month.

The TT was a 10km loop (6.2 miles) that is mostly flat starting with ~2 mile straight away, followed by a sharp right turn into another 2 miles of winding farm roads with one small 30 foot climb that then led into a 1.5 mile straightaway before the final left turn 400 meters before the finish line. Once again my friend Suz (the women’s pro rider for Subway) was kind enough to lend me her aero trispoke front wheel, so once again I was without any way to determine how fast I was going other than how blurry the ground in front of me looked. My 30 second man was a Symmetrics rider who was pretty impressive looking with his tricked out TT bike complete with a set of Zipp (top of the line very expensive) aero wheels. He made a good carrot to chase over the first two miles and I found myself slowly closing on him. By the time he made the right turn onto the winding portion of the race I had cut his lead to 15 seconds, but could no longer see him as 15 seconds was plenty of time to get around the next bend and out of site. I caught site of him just before the small 30ft climb—a 30 foot climb doesn’t sound like much but after pushing yourself at or above your lactate threshold for seven minutes it feels like a mountain. I stumbled up and over the hill trying to balance my need to conserve momentum with my fear of pushing myself too far into the red with more than a third of the course left. At the top of the climb he was within striking distance and I passed him shortly after managing to wheeze out a “LEFT” as I started my pass in order to get him to yield the inside of the bend that we were approaching. On the last leg of the race the wind picked up a bit and I found a new carrot to chase. My minute man hadn’t started the race, so this was my minute thirty man. Catching the rider who started a minute and thirty seconds in front of you on a course that is only a hair over six miles long is no simple task so I started to really bury myself in the effort (I also wanted to demoralize the pro-rider that I had just passed). I caught the minute thirty man just before the left turn signaling four hundred meters to go and sprinted out the remainder of the course. Later in the day at the criterium course I found out that my time was good enough for fifth place; I was bested by one local rider and three of the Symmetrics riders, one of which is the current Canadian TT champion (Svein Tuft) and another (Eric Wohlberg) won the eight consecutive Canadian TT championships before that and is a three time Olympian. Considering that resume I suppose that I can accept losing to them (this time).

When I was checking out the TT times at the crit course there were a couple of racers from a local team called “Valley Athletics” who were looking at the results and saying

“We need to steal this James Strangeland guy before some other team does.”
I said “You mean James Stangeland?”
“You know him?”
“Pleasure to meet you.”

It was pretty funny to see the looks on their faces at that point. About an hour later I got my first official offer to join another team. I politely declined, it was fun to get an offer but I don’t want to leave my team, even if we aren’t quite as strong as some of the other local teams.

The criterium is a figure eight course that would be fun if it stayed dry, but it never seems to do that and as such has a bad history with our team. Last year there was a bad crash in every single race and all but two of those crashes involved someone from our team. The worst involved a teammate who landed hard fracturing his chin resulting in it being wired shut for six weeks (that’s a whole lot of ensure that you have to drink). This year the weather started out dry and then started to rain midway through the races steadily getting heavier through the day until the final (my) race. Nobody on my team crashed, but once the rains came one woman pulled a repeat of what my teammate did last year. The crash combined with my discomfort with crits in general plus the increase in rain made me a very unhappy racer. I started near the front, but was tentative about bombing through the wet corners at high speed (I didn’t have a computer, but the cops who were acting as traffic control clocked us going 32 mph through the corners, that’s fast given that the corners should be the slowest portion of the race). I quickly dropped to the back of the pack and sat there for the entire race. Symmetrics was on the front controlling the race very effectively and I knew that I wouldn’t be in contention for the time bonuses (top three places) so I sat on the back and finished with the pack thus receiving the same time. At the finish I had so much dirt on my face that it looked like I was growing a beard. I didn’t care I just threw my hands in the air after crossing the line in 44th place yelling “I didn’t crash!!!” Then I crashed.

Just kidding.


The road race was a 15.5 mile loop that we went around five and a half times including a two mile climb that we went up six times. Symmetrics went into the race with first second and third place firmly in their grasp. They just went to the front and set the pace. A few breaks would go off of the front, but the Symmetrics would pace them a few hundred meters back and let them wear themselves out. In general this made it really easy for me on the flats because I could just sit on the back of the pack and rest assured that while there would be some attempts at break aways I didn’t need to concern myself with them because it was handled. One exception was a portion of the flats where we had some severe cross winds, I can’t hazard a quantitative guess as to how strong they were, but I will say that they were fierce. In those portions of the race Symmetrics would form an echelon, giving themselves shelter from the team but providing little to no draft for anyone behind them. Then they would hammer, this split the pack a couple of times, but most of them caught back on, of course if they didn’t I probably wouldn’t have noticed. The hill portion was more of the tough and less of the easy. It’s safe to say that there is no such thing as taking it easy up a climb in a race, especially when you have a pro team driving the pace. The final climb up the hill was a doozy and nearing the top I was caught behind a small group of riders that was getting gapped by the leading group of ~15 riders. At the top of the climb the route takes a left and there are two miles of ridge riding flats before the finish line. I wanted to catch back on before the flats because I wasn’t confident that I would be able to do so once the pack started hammering for the finish line. With a big last push and a whole lot of lactic acid four other riders and I managed to catch on just as they were cresting the climb and making the left turn onto the ridge. The last couple of miles consisted of lots of jockeying for position and at one point I was ¼” from being shoved off the side of the road and into a ditch. Just after the 1 km to go sign a Broadmark (local team) rider made a break for it. I jumped and got on his wheel ignoring the nagging voice in the back of my head that said this wasn’t quite right. As would be expected he blew up shortly with at least 500 meters to go in the race. This left me in the lead position long before I would have liked to be. The smart move would have been to sit up and wait for someone else to jump, but substantial lack of experience, a generous dosage of exhaustion, and a touch of hypoxia ganged up on my brain and apparently rendered me incapable of logical thought because as soon as the rider in front of me blew up I jumped providing the perfect leadout for everyone behind me. Ooops. I managed to hang on for ninth place in the sprint but if I had acted with a little more intelligence I could have done much better.

End result 5th place GC finish and $175 check for my troubles.

No racing this coming weekend, I’ll be back in the mix June 5th at Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill. So if you’re in Seattle and you want to watch, it’s a great venue for spectators.