Here we go, race #2. Two races in the same morning, not a bad way to kick off the season. This one was the open category 4 race (as apposed to the 35 and older category 4 I did earlier). One thing about Colorado, there are a LOT of CAT4 racers… Another 60+ were lined up for this race – in the middle of March.

For some reason, this race was a LOT different than the earlier one. Not as hard or aggressive, we stayed in a pretty tight bunch almost all the time. I never really even saw the front of the race, I guess I was a little tired and content to hang out in the rear and just use the race as extra training and practice.

Things started heating up with about 5 laps to go. One thing that makes this course interesting was a 30mph corner at the bottom of a gradual downslope. I was riding along tucked in the group when I heard the beginnings of that all-too familiar sound. Metal-rubber-asphalt-flesh. If you’ve ever startled (or been startled by) a rattlesnake, you know what I mean when I say that you interpret that sound as danger faster than an eye can blink. Same with a crash in the middle of a bike race – the sound reaches you at Mach 1, but your brain processes it at Mach 3. DANGER!! It happened, some dude touched wheels with another guy, grabbed his brakes, and came across my teammate’s (Jay) wheel. I was right behind Jay and missed the carnage by a whisker, feeling quite proud of myself for staying upright by going off-road through the weeds while the other guys went arse-over-elbow along the asphalt.

There was no way I would be catching back on the race this late in the game, so I swung around and helped Jay get back on his bike. He was bloodied up a bit, and trashed both brake/shift levers on his NEW bike ($400 – ouch!). I thought he would just pack it in, but no – off he goes riding single-speed style. Cool.

The pack caught us and we hopped back in (since this was a ‘training’ series, that was allowed). We were not allowed to take part in the final sprint, though. The next two laps went by pretty quickly, no one was off the front. It was going to come down to a big ol’ sprint finish. Yee-haw. Not. Instead of swinging off to the side and coasting across the line, yours truly starts winding it up (like a DOPE). Oh yeah, smelling that finish line! Please…

Let me explain my line of thinking. I rationalized sprinting based on a couple of factors. 1 – I had been lapped because of a crash, I hadn’t been dropped. 2 – I wasn’t sprinting for the win, just using it as a chance to practice. Well, in a totally straight, closed road sprint (should have been safe). I crashed hard. Two guys right in front of me started leaning on each other. I should have immediately shut my sprint down, but it looked like they were going to pull out of it. Yeah, right – this ain’t the pros. BAM! They both hit the deck. The pile of bodies and bikes was too high to hop, and my front wheel was already surrounded. Nowhere to go but down. At the last millisecond, before I T-boned the pile, I bailed. I did NOT want to hit and flip, so I landed on my right butt-cheek at 28 miles per hour. Ohhh, man. I do not recommend that to anyone. That was some unbelievable pain for the first 60 seconds or so. I really thought I had done some major damage – as the right side of me ground to a stop, while the left side continued toward the finish line. I am happy to say, I’m still in one piece and everything is as it should be. One guy broke his collar bone, another broke a finger. It’s a good thing I was in so much pain or I might have broken some more of their bones – I was torqued! I’m very glad my damage wasn’t worse. As if it wasn’t enough, as I was sitting on the ground cleching my jaw and squeezing my eyes shut to manage the pain, the biggest guy on our team (230?) came walking up and stepped on the tip of my finger with his cleated shoe. OUCH!!

So, I trashed a brand new pair of $hort$, and lost a bunch of skin sprinting for something like 30th place. Dumb.

Another credit towards my degree at the School of Hard Knocks.

First race of the year… Heck, first real mass-start road event in about 8 years. Man, time flies. This was an early spring series that was a good place to go and test the legs – see if all that time spent sweating in the basement all winter did any good.

This race wasn’t a priority performance-wise, so I didn’t really have a plan for tapering my training or trying to peak for it at all. I just wanted to get some good training out of it, dust off the cobwebs, and hopefully see that I was in good standing fitness-wise compared to the rest of the guys. I just returned from a business trip a couple of days ago – where I spent a lot of time swimming and running on the treadmill in order to make up for lost time on the bike. It was the first running of any kind I’ve done in quite a while – my legs were SORE. On Wednesday, I had a hard workout scheduled on the bike but I had to bail only 1/4 of the way through. My legs were just too spent to get my heart rate up at all. Not the best way to go into a race weekend for sure… Anyway, as hard as it was to stay off the bike (during good weather, even!), I took 2 days completely off leading into the weekend. It turned out to be a good move.

I got to the race plenty early. I was curious to see the course and wanted plenty of time to warm up. The course was actually a Colorado State Patrol driving range on top of South Table Mountain near Golden. It was pretty cool because it was a totally closed loop of about a mile and a half. No cars to deal with, and we could take up the whole road. The first half of the loop was downhill, then climbed back up to the finish line.

It was exciting to be lined up at the start with over 50 riders and have about 10 of those as teammates. After some instruction, we started off down the hill and hit the first corner all packed in a tight bunch doing about 30mph. In the corner, I felt another rider’s handlebar pressing into my upper-left thigh. I thought there was going to be big trouble, but I stuck to my line and it all worked out. That was sketchy!! I also made a mental note to not only pre-ride the course, but pre-ride the corners at race pace to get a feel for the speed and the best line to take. I had spent most of my warmup on my trainer in the parking lot and only got to do one lap of the course before we started. I was pretty happy with my warmup, though. I used to be scared to go very hard in the warmup thinking I would use up all of my energy before I needed it, but am finding that I do a lot better after I’ve already done several hard efforts.

I found the racing to be pretty agressive. Attack after attack for the first 20-25 minutes, but nothing stuck. I was feeling ok and when I found myself second wheel nearing the top of the climb I LAUNCHED. It was a beauty of an attack, perfectly timed. I immediately dove around the guy in front of me so anyone chasing would have that much more of an obstacle to get around. Turned out to be the only clean break of the day. I stayed out for a while, hoping that I would look back and see a small group of 2 or 3 coming up to join me. Not so. Every time I looked back I could only see the huge pack of riders bearing down on me. I really wanted to cause some sort of split in the race, but think it was just too early. Everyone was still fresh. The last thing I wanted to have happen was to bury myself out in front alone (unless I could see a wall of SEAR jerseys on the front…), get caught, then spit out the back. I eased up and rejoined the group. I had been riding pretty actively in the front for the whole race, but decided to take shelter and recover for the next couple of laps.

With two laps to go, I started moving up through the field again. On the final climb, things were pretty packed, but I just kept at it. I kind of resigned myself to just finishing with the pack and calling it good since I had another race coming up an hour later. Once things got cranking on the last climb, though, I started to realize I was passing people like crazy. Then I thought, go for it!! I really started stomping on the pedals up the hill and was going well, I had it all planned out – I took the tightest line possible through the last corner only to have someone come from the outside and drop right in front of me – forcing me to jam on the brakes. Dang! I wound it back up again, and was still passing people, but the line came too soon. I was 6th. I felt like I could have contested the win had it not been for that corner, you can see on the graph I downloaded from my bike computer where I went from 32mph to 25 in an instant, then climbed back up to 32 for the finish.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda….

The grand finale. Time trial showdown on Leyden Road. 12.7 miles, 1,000 feet of climbing, and lots of WIND. I drove the course in the morning and was feeling pretty confident about my chances (almost too confident, as usual). We would be starting at one minute intervals, and I would be going last. I was glad to be in that position.

Start your engines…

The first three miles went over some rolling terrain before hitting highway 93 and heading north towards Boulder. That’s where we’d tackle a 2-mile climb. I was secretly hoping to catch Paul before the climb and then just be able sit up and keep him at a certain distance. HA, HA – good one! I did manage to pull 20 seconds out of him by the start of the climb, but it was rough going into the huge headwind and it was costing me. I really need to get better about sticking to a reasonable plan rather than just lighting the fuse and holding on for the ride.

By my best estimate (I was able to time him when he would pass a sign or shadow on the road), Paul took 10 seconds back from me by the top of the climb. At this point the wind was just huge. You couldn’t keep any sort of momentum or rythmn. That all changed as soon as we hit the corner at the top and had a 4.5 mile straight road descent with a tailwind. I was holding 50mph for long stretches and was closing the gap – down to 30 seconds at the bottom. From there we had another 3-4 miles straight into the wind to the finish line. I thought I would accellerate right off the bat and get the gap closed down for good, but nothing doing. It was still 30 seconds up until the last half-mile or so. I was suffering pretty badly at that point. Paul switched on the afterburners and took almost all of the time back. I crossed the line with the win – by 3 seconds!!

The finish!

I was really happy to have won. It felt great. I got lucky, though. I really didn’t ride the type of race I should have, and it was a good lesson for me. I can’t afford to get too cocky and blow it. My mind is a lot more optimistic than my legs sometimes…

On the way back to basecamp, we stopped at a school and did some handlebar/elbow/shoulder/head bumping while riding alongside each other on the grass. This was a drill designed to get us comfortable taking hits and dishing them out. I had read about doing this kind of thing, but kind of had the attitude that I was well beyond that sort of stuff. I approached our activity with the open-mind concept, though, and was really amazed by how cool it turned out to be. Especially when I got to see the guys I was riding with loosen up and really start to get a feel for knocking around and rubbing tires.

One final lunch, then it was award ceremony time. Paul took the trophy for the 3k TT win on Friday. I got trophies for Saturday’s hill climb, and today’s 20k TT, plus the overall classification. Paul and Eric got medals for 2nd and 3rd in the overall. I felt a little sheepish getting called up to the front three times in a row, but I’ve been working/training really hard up to this point so decided to roll with it and really soak it in. Coach Mike was very cool about giving everyone an award for something, so no one walked out empty handed. Justin got a sweet t-shirt from one of Mike’s training camps. On the back it had one of those yellow highway signs that you see with a picture of a truck pointed downhill and something about a % grade. This one had a biker instead and said such-and-such training camp, where grades really matter! Very cool!!

And so ends our training camp. Never before in all my years of riding have I trained consistently through the winter. This year I have been very dedicated and it is paying off already. I can’t wait for the season to begin!

My own little trophy paceline.

One for each pocket…