Another year, another Poolesville. You can take it for granted that the race will be well run, and that it will be an adventure, and that a lot of people will have their day prematurely ended by mechanical or pneumatic happenstance. I have fallen victim to pneumatic happenstance on 3 separate occasions.
One twist for this year was having the women's 1/2 race start with the men's 3. I'd thought that this might be a neat thing, but there wound up being very few women racers (likely having more than a little to do with having to share a race with us, I think). The logistics of road racing are going to force compromises. It's probably a self-defeating thing now, though - a compromised scenario for the women's elite race put fewer women in the race, which means that their race will likely be less prioritized in the future. However you slice it, a race that long with 5 people in it is going to suck eggs anyhow. No chance of it being that fun. It turned out to have less impact on the 3 race than I thought it might. I didn't sense or hear of any negative will on behalf of the 3s about it, I was fine with it and it seemed like all the other guys were, but I'd bet the women felt very slighted. Chicken and egg deal, as is so often the case with women's fields. I think the final answer is that races have to either have a completely dedicated women's race and accept that there might be few to no racers, or if they can't be in a position to do that, then don't damn them with compromises. This is in no way an indictment of how NCVC played Poolesville, it is just my comment on how I see it with hindsight.
Anyhow, the gun fired and... not much happened. Robb went off the front, we went through the dirt, a friend of mine and I were riding next to each other through the dirt and simultaneously thought we broke our bars in potholes, then Robb got caught and... not much happened. Lots of half-hearted moves, which I wound up wasting a lot of chips on. I think that's the real danger when you realize that you're racing not to lose: I spent a ton of energy in tiny little increments going with a bunch of little accelerations that probably weren't going to amount to much. I kept fooling myself by saying that I'd go with moves if I could do so "for free." Basically I think I was doing what is often referred to as "covering" moves. If someone wanted to rip a gap open or slam across a gap to a nascent move, great, I'd take the tow and rotate if it seemed to have any legs, but I wasn't going to be the guy on the attack. I didn't have the big legs I had at All American, so wasn't going to be too much with the crazy attacks. Unfortunately I think my strategy diluted whatever juju I did have in my legs and despite being relatively strong compared to the field, I pissed away my chances trying too hard not to miss out. And then the break went and I missed out. Tried to go across a few times and there didn't really seem to be any worm holes to sneak through. Mostly I would go real hard and get a tiny gap and then look back and see the field lined out and no progress made. I was far from the only person to experience this.
My bars and shifters finished the day in different places than where they started it, which caused my rear brake to nearly lock (good thing I could open the quick release) and unfixed the fix (in fact worsened the problem by quite a bit) I thought had worked following a somewhat recent and regrettable "Quarq magnet running through the drivetrain incident" - the putty they supply is useless.
At the end, I got a great reminder I don't really do the field sprint thing in situations like that. The ding dong who got seventh hooked my bars coming through a hole that didn't exist but that he was determined to create, lifting my front wheel off the ground and nearly causing a huge pileup. In order to get fifth in the field sprint. Good choice guy, but like you said "that's racing!" Dangerous, stupid, and bad racing, but racing no less.
After the race I saw the guy who got second pretty much dry heaving on the ground and thought how great it is when you pour it all on like that. Yes he didn't win and in cycling if you ain't first you're last but both those guys rode very admirably, and props to both.
Monday, 13 May 2013
Monday, 6 May 2013
Ironed Flat
Iron Hill is a great venue. There are a lot of different courses they can run there, and this year was a different course from the two I've raced on before. No mega dip, general counter-clockwise-ness of direction, every rock in the joint in play.
Mentally, I was just flat at the start. No jitters, no pop, no nothing. Allowed myself to get shuffled around and wound up near the back. It's a self-reinforcing negative cycle when you do that in a start like this - you lose the joust for the line in a bend, dab the brakes, and 3 other guys roll by. Then of course you have to spin back up to speed. The good hole shots I was getting last cross season were the product of a lot of practice, I need to remember that.
Soon enough we were turning onto a gravel road, and I could pass a bunch of guys. A group of three or four was slowly opening a lead, and some number of us were effectively the chase group. At one point my front skewer decided to come loose (Rock Shox forks have WAY too much paint on the drop outs - I thought I was long past this problem, but not), so I had to pull over to fix that and then chase my balls off to get back to the chase group.
Part of the issue with my flatness at the start was just being a little burned out from mountain bike racing. It's a funny thing to have a lot of relative strength in the pedaling part, but glaring weakness in doing an endless series of tight 180* turns on rocks. I'm at the point now where I can do it okay, if I'm riding in a pack of guys from my field I'll typically hold my place just fine, but it's mentally exhausting. It seems like other guys are just having fun with their dogs, where I'm doing things that are outside of my comfort zone and it fries me. It keeps getting better the more I do it, but yesterday's course was really taxing in that regard.
Sometimes life hands you lemonade, though, because just at the beginning of lap two, at the point where I was like "fuck this, I would be having so much fun if I was just out riding on this course, but I'm having no fun racing on it," I got a rear flat. A razor slice that Stan's really had no chance with. It happened super close to the parking lot, it would have been too easy to just say "well, wasn't meant to be, bye!" Instead I took my time, put in a tube, had a drink, got my shit back together and went for a ride. And I rode pretty fast. Pretty fast indeed. It took about 13 minutes to change the flat and get going, by which point if I wasn't last on the course of everyone in the Cat 1 wave, I was awfully close.
For the next hour, I picked off people one by one, and really had a ball. A couple of pros passed me and I did what I could to ride with them as long as possible, making a few good turns at it a couple of times. A woman from Bike Lane named Sue, which I know because she had people cheering for her all over the course, was giving lessons on how to be a ninja in the tight woods and downhills, and I enjoyed riding with her until a longer power section that suited me arrived.
It's hard to push yourself as hard as you would when you're riding for nothing other than trying not to get last (at which I was successful), so I know I didn't ride as fast as I might have otherwise, but it was a strange way for what was devolving into a shitty day on the bike to turn itself into one of the more fun rides I've had in a long time.
No mtb races on the schedule for a while. Poolesville next weekend.
Mentally, I was just flat at the start. No jitters, no pop, no nothing. Allowed myself to get shuffled around and wound up near the back. It's a self-reinforcing negative cycle when you do that in a start like this - you lose the joust for the line in a bend, dab the brakes, and 3 other guys roll by. Then of course you have to spin back up to speed. The good hole shots I was getting last cross season were the product of a lot of practice, I need to remember that.
Soon enough we were turning onto a gravel road, and I could pass a bunch of guys. A group of three or four was slowly opening a lead, and some number of us were effectively the chase group. At one point my front skewer decided to come loose (Rock Shox forks have WAY too much paint on the drop outs - I thought I was long past this problem, but not), so I had to pull over to fix that and then chase my balls off to get back to the chase group.
Part of the issue with my flatness at the start was just being a little burned out from mountain bike racing. It's a funny thing to have a lot of relative strength in the pedaling part, but glaring weakness in doing an endless series of tight 180* turns on rocks. I'm at the point now where I can do it okay, if I'm riding in a pack of guys from my field I'll typically hold my place just fine, but it's mentally exhausting. It seems like other guys are just having fun with their dogs, where I'm doing things that are outside of my comfort zone and it fries me. It keeps getting better the more I do it, but yesterday's course was really taxing in that regard.
Sometimes life hands you lemonade, though, because just at the beginning of lap two, at the point where I was like "fuck this, I would be having so much fun if I was just out riding on this course, but I'm having no fun racing on it," I got a rear flat. A razor slice that Stan's really had no chance with. It happened super close to the parking lot, it would have been too easy to just say "well, wasn't meant to be, bye!" Instead I took my time, put in a tube, had a drink, got my shit back together and went for a ride. And I rode pretty fast. Pretty fast indeed. It took about 13 minutes to change the flat and get going, by which point if I wasn't last on the course of everyone in the Cat 1 wave, I was awfully close.
For the next hour, I picked off people one by one, and really had a ball. A couple of pros passed me and I did what I could to ride with them as long as possible, making a few good turns at it a couple of times. A woman from Bike Lane named Sue, which I know because she had people cheering for her all over the course, was giving lessons on how to be a ninja in the tight woods and downhills, and I enjoyed riding with her until a longer power section that suited me arrived.
It's hard to push yourself as hard as you would when you're riding for nothing other than trying not to get last (at which I was successful), so I know I didn't ride as fast as I might have otherwise, but it was a strange way for what was devolving into a shitty day on the bike to turn itself into one of the more fun rides I've had in a long time.
No mtb races on the schedule for a while. Poolesville next weekend.
Monday, 29 April 2013
Bike Line Fair Hill Spring
In the great grand scheme of things, to a mountain biker, I'm a roadie. This distinction is immaterial except as it pertains to an email discussion I have with a friend this morning. He said that a lot of the guys he rides with deride Fair Hill as a "roadie" course, a characterization which doesn't bother either of us at all. The thing is, it's not a roadie course. True enough, it has a fast start that's pretty much "go straight, really really hard." Apart from the prologue,though, it's like 90% single track, and fairly tight and twisty stuff at that. So while, yes, Fair Hill has very few things that might make someone crash or have to get off and walk (as opposed to, say, Greenbrier), the critical component to me is the decoupling of power and speed.
At Greenbrier, except if you crash or fall off, your power and speed are closely intertwined for most of the course. The back downhill lets guys with Jedi-flow (tm) make up enormous chunks of time but for most of the course, you are going as fast as you are pedaling hard. At Fair Hill, you predominantly go as fast as you are turning the bike well. The guys who are carving edge to edge are going faster with far less effort than guys who pedal hard but don't flow. In an 8' single track section with 40 or 50 tight-ish to fully tight turns, a good mountain bike guy is going to put minutes on someone who can't corner. That's what I have to say about that.
One big difference from road racing to mountain bikes and cross is that if your legs don't show up right on time in a road event, you can very often just hide until they get right (or don't, which also happens). In a mountain bike or cross race, you give away seconds that you are unlikely to ever get back without tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure. My legs wanted no part of the prologue yesterday, and that cold sucked. Fortunately I tagged onto the second group and rode around with them for a long time. I would guess that the top seven guys were up the trail, and there were about 10 of us. Guys would blow up and drop, guys would bridge from the group behind, it was an interesting and dynamic thing. Much more active position changing and riding among other people for the entire race than you often get.
At the beginning of the third (of 3) laps, I started to get really sloppy. I'm better at turning the bike than I ever have been, for sure, but I still rely too much on legs and powering myself out of scenarios where I haven't ridden the bike as well as others around me. Skill is sort of a perpetually renewable resource, where energy is finite. Ride on skill, you last longer; ride on fitness, and when you blow up it's not pretty. So I spent the first half of the third lap riding atrociously and making myself pay an exponentially increasing price for doing so. As such, I dropped off the group I'd been with before regrouping and getting my shit back together to some degree or another. I finished 15th of 38. Not thrilled about it, not despondent. The more races I do, the better I'll get, and that's kind of that.
Not really sure what the next move is. Iron Hill is Sunday, which is a nice course but super far away and I'm sick of driving and buying gas and putting miles on the car. Turkey Hill is Saturday and team mates are talking about doing that, which could be fun. But also 5 races in 3 weekends, one of them being over half a day long, has me pondering a weekend off.
At Greenbrier, except if you crash or fall off, your power and speed are closely intertwined for most of the course. The back downhill lets guys with Jedi-flow (tm) make up enormous chunks of time but for most of the course, you are going as fast as you are pedaling hard. At Fair Hill, you predominantly go as fast as you are turning the bike well. The guys who are carving edge to edge are going faster with far less effort than guys who pedal hard but don't flow. In an 8' single track section with 40 or 50 tight-ish to fully tight turns, a good mountain bike guy is going to put minutes on someone who can't corner. That's what I have to say about that.
One big difference from road racing to mountain bikes and cross is that if your legs don't show up right on time in a road event, you can very often just hide until they get right (or don't, which also happens). In a mountain bike or cross race, you give away seconds that you are unlikely to ever get back without tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure. My legs wanted no part of the prologue yesterday, and that cold sucked. Fortunately I tagged onto the second group and rode around with them for a long time. I would guess that the top seven guys were up the trail, and there were about 10 of us. Guys would blow up and drop, guys would bridge from the group behind, it was an interesting and dynamic thing. Much more active position changing and riding among other people for the entire race than you often get.
At the beginning of the third (of 3) laps, I started to get really sloppy. I'm better at turning the bike than I ever have been, for sure, but I still rely too much on legs and powering myself out of scenarios where I haven't ridden the bike as well as others around me. Skill is sort of a perpetually renewable resource, where energy is finite. Ride on skill, you last longer; ride on fitness, and when you blow up it's not pretty. So I spent the first half of the third lap riding atrociously and making myself pay an exponentially increasing price for doing so. As such, I dropped off the group I'd been with before regrouping and getting my shit back together to some degree or another. I finished 15th of 38. Not thrilled about it, not despondent. The more races I do, the better I'll get, and that's kind of that.
Not really sure what the next move is. Iron Hill is Sunday, which is a nice course but super far away and I'm sick of driving and buying gas and putting miles on the car. Turkey Hill is Saturday and team mates are talking about doing that, which could be fun. But also 5 races in 3 weekends, one of them being over half a day long, has me pondering a weekend off.
Friday, 26 April 2013
Requiem For A Road
I stole this picture from the internetOh, Dirty Mac. You have been such a faithful servant lo these many years. How many days, divided neatly into 10 and 20 minute segments, have I spent in your loving embrace? How many snot rockets have I paid you for your fealty? The bond between us has been strong, but now it has broken.
This damned traffic light SUCKS!!!! The stop sign that preceded it wasn't ideal, but it worked. At worst it was a few seconds of stop time, but usually sort of a Hollywood stop and back on your way, sir. The timing is so heavily weighted to traffic coming off the Clara Barton that you can easily wait two minutes to get through. Before, many drivers would give somewhat inappropriate right of way to cyclists (others would try to kill them, often through regrettable but comprehensible lack of awareness - I HATE THAT BIKE LANE). Now, the drivers coming off of Clara Barton sardine themselves into the backup for the Brickyard stop sign that there is a permanent state of near gridlock, with the corresponding frustrations and utter loss of civility.
I suppose the 20 minute interval can still be done between Seven Locks and the light. It's not that big a deal in the scheme, but it's backwards progress for all. The stop sign worked. The backups at the Brickyard stop are double what they ever were, and the Clara Barton traffic doesn't clear the light, which leaves westbound MacArthur drivers screwed. A bad setup.
Since the board of fare for last night included doing an hour steady as she goes at tempo, and I was clearly going to get hit by a car or die of frustration if I did it at MacArthur (I swam as a kid - it's easy for me to think of going up and down MacArthur as doing laps - I actually used to enjoy it), I crossed myself, said a short prayer and headed to Hains. To get there, I went road bike on tow path. This is an interesting thing to do. I broke all sorts of dipshit-o-meter records last night, riding carbon clinchers on the tow path. It's all in the name of SCIENCE! (seriously, it is - I can not possibly not ride them in any situation) but that doesn't make me feel any less self conscious.
The Point was actually lovely.
Fair Hill on Sunday. I honestly have no idea how that will go, this year with the move to Cat 1 it's just ride as hard as possible and how I do is how I do. That course is fast. It's not a dirt crit, but it's fast. We'll see. This is the first weekend in a few with just one race. Next week same deal.
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Greenbrier
So yesterday happened but today was today. Arrived with plenty of time to do the necessaries and warm up. Legs felt sluggish, which was great because the race starts with a snappy climb. A good but gentle warmup helped set things to tenable.
Unlike last year in Cat 2 when a medium effort at the start put me at the front, staying at the front was hard today. I sucked terribly at the first rock garden, a combo of still getting going and, well, Cat 1's pretty fast. Paid for the lost spots on the first water bar climb, stuck behind guys who went slower than I wanted to. Reattached to the leaders atop the second water bar climb and off to the races. Aric and I were pacing nicely, but he flagged a bit and I knew my chances to avoid dfl meant going hard when the going was hard so I went.
4 laps of that course takes a long time. Highlight was when Dylan (these kids with "d" names are all the rage) who won pro/open passed by (they had a big head start but still, wow) and I did the fast section after water bar climbs holding his wheel. Holy cow, dropped the ever loving shit out of the group behind. I'd thought I had taken that section fast before - HA!
The last lap I really fell off of the leaders. Yesterday's big day finally blew up in my legs and my back was feeling the strain. Basically I just struggled through the last lap on the hairy edge of really blown. The front waved bye-bye, and a few from behind nearly said hello. All told, 7th out of 20 in my first Cat 1 race is groovy. I'd thought I was at risk of getting last but instead I beat some good guys and was nearly competitive with the actual race. Cool. Also I'd guess not many of them put in a big hard race on Saturday.
Another challenging but fun weekend of racing. Next weekend is just one race day, at Fair Hill Spring XC. So much for this being an off year of mtb racing.
Unlike last year in Cat 2 when a medium effort at the start put me at the front, staying at the front was hard today. I sucked terribly at the first rock garden, a combo of still getting going and, well, Cat 1's pretty fast. Paid for the lost spots on the first water bar climb, stuck behind guys who went slower than I wanted to. Reattached to the leaders atop the second water bar climb and off to the races. Aric and I were pacing nicely, but he flagged a bit and I knew my chances to avoid dfl meant going hard when the going was hard so I went.
4 laps of that course takes a long time. Highlight was when Dylan (these kids with "d" names are all the rage) who won pro/open passed by (they had a big head start but still, wow) and I did the fast section after water bar climbs holding his wheel. Holy cow, dropped the ever loving shit out of the group behind. I'd thought I had taken that section fast before - HA!
The last lap I really fell off of the leaders. Yesterday's big day finally blew up in my legs and my back was feeling the strain. Basically I just struggled through the last lap on the hairy edge of really blown. The front waved bye-bye, and a few from behind nearly said hello. All told, 7th out of 20 in my first Cat 1 race is groovy. I'd thought I was at risk of getting last but instead I beat some good guys and was nearly competitive with the actual race. Cool. Also I'd guess not many of them put in a big hard race on Saturday.
Another challenging but fun weekend of racing. Next weekend is just one race day, at Fair Hill Spring XC. So much for this being an off year of mtb racing.
Saturday, 20 April 2013
Mistake
What do you do the day before your first Cat 1 mountain bike race? Why you go to All American Road Race, nee Murad, and race your balls off for 62 miles.
At the conclusion of the first lap, I would have summarized the proceedings to date with the blanket statement "absolutely every bad thing that anyone's ever said about Cat 3 racing." It SUCKED. Lap 2 wasn't much better but a guy was off the front. I don't remember all of the particulars but I bridged, and we wound up with 6 guys. It was a good early break, we stayed out for most of a lap, and that helped get things going. This guy Dustin was in the break, and let me tell you - whatever stories you've heard are true. Of the 6 guys in the break, a few seemed to be going pretty deep into "holy shit please make it stop" mode, and another guy and I were working hard but in control. Dustin could have been reading a book. For all I know, he was.
The next sort of hour or so was a study in Dustin going back off the front, and various responses to that. At one point the field got very very slow. NCVC was doing a tremendous job of the 7 Chinese Brothers act, one of them was always there to disrupt the generally extremely lackadaisical attempts to create an actual race out of things. At one point I figured "fuck it, if they are going to be that good at shutting things down, all I have to do is get ahead of them and do a TT for sort of an improbably long time and I'm golden." That didn't work. Then we caught Dustin, and I wound up on the good side of a split, but it was too many dudes, and then there was much attacking and quite honestly I was going a bit too hard to really remember much
The last time Dustin went I threw hatred and fury to get to him before it was too late, got a nice distance off the front at great personal expense, and knew that I'd missed the boat. My move inspired much pedaling from the field though, some of it quite vigorous. This brought Dustin back within range, whereupon Sam from DVR got across. Mon dieu! Then there was a period of much going fast, and we got within range (mostly) of the two of them, and Paul pulled through me and was going rather harder than anyone else seemed to want to go, so being in a position to soft pedal a gap open for him, I expressed my desire that he should go. And he did. And someone said "no way can he get across that alone" and I laughed.
The three of them stayed away for a long long long time, until 3 other brave and much better rested souls went across. We made the decision not to go with them, as when Nate prepared to respond to the move, no word of a lie 15 asses went into the air ready to sprint so I convinced Nate that it was a better gamble if we let them go. I never would have thought they'd actually make it but make it they did and James Studebaker, who has the distinction of passing me faster than anyone ever has in a cross race, won. Huzzah! The field then sprinted for the minor placings.
That's definitely the hardest I've ever ridden to earn the official classification of pack fodder. Was I in the top 20? Who knows. It was a good effort by the team.
Shocker that it is to say, a really fun and challenging bike race. I'm bringing back watt geek stuff here. For reference I weigh 165. Geek out:
2:34 total time
An even 24mph average speed
232 watts average
289 watts normalized
1196 watts max
144 bpm avg hr
171 bpm max hr (I have a crazy low heart rate)
Off to Greenbrier tomorrow. Hoping to pull some miracle out of my ass.
At the conclusion of the first lap, I would have summarized the proceedings to date with the blanket statement "absolutely every bad thing that anyone's ever said about Cat 3 racing." It SUCKED. Lap 2 wasn't much better but a guy was off the front. I don't remember all of the particulars but I bridged, and we wound up with 6 guys. It was a good early break, we stayed out for most of a lap, and that helped get things going. This guy Dustin was in the break, and let me tell you - whatever stories you've heard are true. Of the 6 guys in the break, a few seemed to be going pretty deep into "holy shit please make it stop" mode, and another guy and I were working hard but in control. Dustin could have been reading a book. For all I know, he was.
The next sort of hour or so was a study in Dustin going back off the front, and various responses to that. At one point the field got very very slow. NCVC was doing a tremendous job of the 7 Chinese Brothers act, one of them was always there to disrupt the generally extremely lackadaisical attempts to create an actual race out of things. At one point I figured "fuck it, if they are going to be that good at shutting things down, all I have to do is get ahead of them and do a TT for sort of an improbably long time and I'm golden." That didn't work. Then we caught Dustin, and I wound up on the good side of a split, but it was too many dudes, and then there was much attacking and quite honestly I was going a bit too hard to really remember much
The last time Dustin went I threw hatred and fury to get to him before it was too late, got a nice distance off the front at great personal expense, and knew that I'd missed the boat. My move inspired much pedaling from the field though, some of it quite vigorous. This brought Dustin back within range, whereupon Sam from DVR got across. Mon dieu! Then there was a period of much going fast, and we got within range (mostly) of the two of them, and Paul pulled through me and was going rather harder than anyone else seemed to want to go, so being in a position to soft pedal a gap open for him, I expressed my desire that he should go. And he did. And someone said "no way can he get across that alone" and I laughed.
The three of them stayed away for a long long long time, until 3 other brave and much better rested souls went across. We made the decision not to go with them, as when Nate prepared to respond to the move, no word of a lie 15 asses went into the air ready to sprint so I convinced Nate that it was a better gamble if we let them go. I never would have thought they'd actually make it but make it they did and James Studebaker, who has the distinction of passing me faster than anyone ever has in a cross race, won. Huzzah! The field then sprinted for the minor placings.
That's definitely the hardest I've ever ridden to earn the official classification of pack fodder. Was I in the top 20? Who knows. It was a good effort by the team.
Shocker that it is to say, a really fun and challenging bike race. I'm bringing back watt geek stuff here. For reference I weigh 165. Geek out:
2:34 total time
An even 24mph average speed
232 watts average
289 watts normalized
1196 watts max
144 bpm avg hr
171 bpm max hr (I have a crazy low heart rate)
Off to Greenbrier tomorrow. Hoping to pull some miracle out of my ass.
Monday, 15 April 2013
Dolan
With the rough equivalent of 7 cross races ridden on Saturday in my legs, I hit the 123 for the final nails in the coffin. Although I'd raced the thing in SC a while ago, this felt like my first road race for the year, even more so when people kept asking me "so do you even know how to ride bikes with these skinny tires anymore?" Thanks, people.
I hate the pre-start time. Mulling around anxiously, desperately wanting to get the race underway since I'm totally calm once the race starts but something of a mess before it. An ambulance on course attending to a crash victim from the prior race never helps. From what I heard it is a case of broken collarbone. Get well soon, guy.
Finally the race starts and it's not slow but not bad. The field was kind of small at around 50 guys, which really just meant adjusting the number of guys that should be in front of you if you wanted to not be the tail gunner. The first half of the race was just getting into the flow and feeling things out. A couple of times I felt stretched a little thin but my legs started to wake back up.
There was this cool ultra-inside line on the bottom turn, which saved a ton of energy when it was available, and no one else was taking it. You had to make sure that no one was on your right hip as you did it so you wouldn't chop that guy, and you wanted your front wheel comfortably behind the guy leading you so he wouldn't inadvertently chop you. But when it set up correctly, you got to carry massive speed and not do the big swoop out to the far side like everyone else. Point and coast, and pick up a few spots in line, rather than pedal and maintain your spot.
The hill was hardest by far when the speed was variable. We had a few laps where it got real slow and then a jump came, and man that hurt. Then we had a couple of laps where the pace just stayed right on throughout, and those were way way easier even though they were faster. My legs really opened up after two of those in a row. At that point we were a little more than halfway done, and there was a 3 man break about 30 seconds up the road. We got to the bottom of the hill with a full head of steam, I mean freaking rolling, but as soon as we started going up, the fan started to spread. "What the hell," I thought, and hit it fairly hard. I'm not delusional, I know that I was allowed to go. With DC Velo, Kelly, and Harley in the break (at the time I thought it was Harley and 2 DC Velo), I was kind of sort of thinking maybe the race behind would get a little neutralized and I could get some breathing room, but really I just kind of wanted to give the dice a roll and see what came up. I looked back once and saw that the gap was surprisingly big, borderline huge, and throttled back a little bit to a high cruising speed, right around threshold.
Super Dave and Dave Fuentes came across and we started rotating but then there was a DC Velo guy who was sitting on us and another guy who either couldn't or wouldn't work and that was that and that was the most exciting part of the story. It was just about at the 1k line that we got hoovered up by the field, so nearly a one lap long thing.
Getting back on the steaming freight train was a little interesting and challenging. It took two real big efforts, one to get in and one to keep going over the top of the hill and through the start/finish. Once that was done, all was cool until 1 to go. I have no idea what happened, maybe the pictures shed a little light. The Kelly towards the right of the picture pulls out of his pedal? I am right behind him with Greg Abbott (white sleeves, black bowling ball helmet, behind the right most DC Velo) in there somewhere too.
Then Greg and I (silver helmet and grey armwarmers) have to lock it up to avoid. I think I was actually skidding when this picture got taken.
This put me in the BACK of the bus just as things were really starting to roll. I got back on, but too far back in the line and when the early sprint at the hill started, guys in front of me started pulling the plug, so not too much you can do there and I rolled across the line.
Congrats to DJ and DC Velo for a great win, thanks to DC Velo for a great event and congrats on 20 years of having it. Did they have clipless pedals then?
Takeaway from the race is that I'm in pretty good shape, and if you're in the race, race the race. Don't get intimidated and be content to just roll in the field and do nothing. Get after it.
Awesome weekend, but man I'm kind of sore now.
Thank you to Daniel Meaurio for taking and posting some great photos.
I hate the pre-start time. Mulling around anxiously, desperately wanting to get the race underway since I'm totally calm once the race starts but something of a mess before it. An ambulance on course attending to a crash victim from the prior race never helps. From what I heard it is a case of broken collarbone. Get well soon, guy.
Finally the race starts and it's not slow but not bad. The field was kind of small at around 50 guys, which really just meant adjusting the number of guys that should be in front of you if you wanted to not be the tail gunner. The first half of the race was just getting into the flow and feeling things out. A couple of times I felt stretched a little thin but my legs started to wake back up.
There was this cool ultra-inside line on the bottom turn, which saved a ton of energy when it was available, and no one else was taking it. You had to make sure that no one was on your right hip as you did it so you wouldn't chop that guy, and you wanted your front wheel comfortably behind the guy leading you so he wouldn't inadvertently chop you. But when it set up correctly, you got to carry massive speed and not do the big swoop out to the far side like everyone else. Point and coast, and pick up a few spots in line, rather than pedal and maintain your spot.
The hill was hardest by far when the speed was variable. We had a few laps where it got real slow and then a jump came, and man that hurt. Then we had a couple of laps where the pace just stayed right on throughout, and those were way way easier even though they were faster. My legs really opened up after two of those in a row. At that point we were a little more than halfway done, and there was a 3 man break about 30 seconds up the road. We got to the bottom of the hill with a full head of steam, I mean freaking rolling, but as soon as we started going up, the fan started to spread. "What the hell," I thought, and hit it fairly hard. I'm not delusional, I know that I was allowed to go. With DC Velo, Kelly, and Harley in the break (at the time I thought it was Harley and 2 DC Velo), I was kind of sort of thinking maybe the race behind would get a little neutralized and I could get some breathing room, but really I just kind of wanted to give the dice a roll and see what came up. I looked back once and saw that the gap was surprisingly big, borderline huge, and throttled back a little bit to a high cruising speed, right around threshold.
Super Dave and Dave Fuentes came across and we started rotating but then there was a DC Velo guy who was sitting on us and another guy who either couldn't or wouldn't work and that was that and that was the most exciting part of the story. It was just about at the 1k line that we got hoovered up by the field, so nearly a one lap long thing.
Getting back on the steaming freight train was a little interesting and challenging. It took two real big efforts, one to get in and one to keep going over the top of the hill and through the start/finish. Once that was done, all was cool until 1 to go. I have no idea what happened, maybe the pictures shed a little light. The Kelly towards the right of the picture pulls out of his pedal? I am right behind him with Greg Abbott (white sleeves, black bowling ball helmet, behind the right most DC Velo) in there somewhere too.
Then Greg and I (silver helmet and grey armwarmers) have to lock it up to avoid. I think I was actually skidding when this picture got taken.
This put me in the BACK of the bus just as things were really starting to roll. I got back on, but too far back in the line and when the early sprint at the hill started, guys in front of me started pulling the plug, so not too much you can do there and I rolled across the line.
Congrats to DJ and DC Velo for a great win, thanks to DC Velo for a great event and congrats on 20 years of having it. Did they have clipless pedals then?
Takeaway from the race is that I'm in pretty good shape, and if you're in the race, race the race. Don't get intimidated and be content to just roll in the field and do nothing. Get after it.
Awesome weekend, but man I'm kind of sore now.
Thank you to Daniel Meaurio for taking and posting some great photos.
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