Race Report # 9

So I’m a little tardy in my race reporting, I’ve been busy yadda yadda yadda, who cares.

Two weeks ago by the numbers
# of races...........................................................................3
# of which I kicked butt in..................................................1
# of which my but was kicked in.........................................2
# of race weekends that have been tougher.........................0
# of opponents caught being a chucklehead cheater.............1

The races this weekend were part of the Wenatchee Omnium, it started with the time trial Saturday morning followed by the crit that evening and then the road race on Sunday.

The time trial was 9.4 miles out and back course of gently rolling road on the outskirts of Wenatchee with 30 second intervals between the riders. I had been looking forward to this event since finding out that my 30 second man was a rider named Ian McKissick. Ian is the only other racer in the Pro-1-2 field that started the season as a cat 4 rider. He is strong as an ox, friendly, fun, and an all around great guy so of course I want to beat him badly. It also doesn’t hurt the competitive spirit that in pretty much every meeting that we’ve had he’s come out on top (grrrrr). While I was warming up about 20 minutes before my TT Suz Weldon (a woman who used to be on our team until she went pro—now rides for Subway) came up to me and offered to lend me her aero wheels. This is no little thing as they represent well over $1000 in equipment. I eagerly accepted the loan of her front trispoke wheel, but couldn’t take her rear disk wheel because it wasn’t compatible with my bike. This caused one minor issue in that her wheel didn’t have a magnet for my bike computer to read so I wasn’t going to have any idea how fast I was going, a mild annoyance at worst.

I caught Ian before the turnaround halfway point and caught one more rider after that. In the end I placed 5th out of 44 starters, not bad considering the fact that 1st place is a rider that got 4th in the nation last year, 3rd place was a pro a couple of years ago and 6th place is a professional cyclist now.

The criterium was a twilight crit that didn’t start until 8:10 that evening. I had never done one of these and it was very cool to start just before sunset, race into the dusk have the street and flood lights come on and then continue racing into the dark. The race started off fast and stayed that way. It was a four corner crit two blocks long and one short block wide. The two short blocks were small hills with flat stretches for the long segments. After corner one we would bomb down the hill bringing us into corner two at a blistering pace over uneven ground, cracked pavement, and manhole covers. It was a good thing that it was dry because we definitely would have had some crashes there had it been wet. Even with the good weather I still lost traction with my rear wheel a few times going around corner two but managed to stay rubber side down in all instances. Corner three took us around a large orange plastic traffic barrel and into the uphill. The uphill was short but if you had some extra juice in your legs it provided a good opportunity to move up in the pack before turn four and the final block and a half to the start finish line. Once the sun had set and the flood lights were turned on the race took on an entirely different feel. Monster cycling shadows chased you in and out of corners and over the flats giving you a slightly discombobulated feeling, but it was very cool. Also exciting was the fact that this was the best attended race thus far this season with spectators on every corner and along the length of every street. About halfway through the race (60 minutes total) I decided to go for one of the primes, sprinting up the hill and over the next block and a half to the start finish line. Unfortunately Russell Stevenson (current Washington State Champion and former pro) decided to go for the same prime and nosed me out by half a wheel. The effort left me pretty darn gassed and when the pack caught back up to us a lap later I quickly dropped to the back and had to struggle to hang on. The next ten to fifteen laps were wretched because just after I was reabsorbed into the pack an attack went off the front driving the pace and giving me no chance to recover. With three laps to go that attack had a twelve second lead on the pack, a lead that was erased in the last three laps. I still hadn’t really recovered, and it was all I could do to keep pace, but I managed to hang on for a 15th place finish. Not a good finish by any means, but it was better than a lot of good riders, and over half the field didn’t even make it to the finish, so I’m not too disappointed. Another cool little tidbit is the race director/announcer/ regional USCF (United States Cycling Federation) representative used the PA system to point out my quick upgrades from cat 4 to cat 2 and said I was a strong rider with all the tools to become one of the top racers in the region. Or so I’m told; between the blood pumping through my head and swallowing mouthfuls of bile, I didn’t hear a word of it.

The road race was just hard. It was a 13 mile easy flat lead up to a loop that was not easy, it was 12 miles of climbing followed by about the same distance decent. We had to do the loop twice. To make a long climb short I got flicked off of the lead pack about 9 miles into the climb and just couldn’t quite catch back on. I finished the rest of the race more or less solo and placed 20th. One loser on a team that shall remain nameless did the first lap went and rode circles in the parking lot then hopped in the second group heading towards the finish line. I would be pissed, but the guy is obviously an idiot that is just cheating himself out of training and toughness, and I will have fun every time I beat him for the rest of the season.

In the G.C. I ended up 14th overall thanks to my good TT, but I was too far back in both the crit and the road race to earn any points.

The race report for last weekend (once again this one was for two weeks ago) is coming soon, and I did pretty well (yay!).