Southington Cross

Having run out of excuses (valid or otherwise), I figured late October was as good a time as any to start my 2006 cycling season. So I got up at 6am today, bummed a ride with a generous Harvard rider, and found myself by 10am lined up at the start of the Men's 4/5 race at the Connecticut Cyclocross Championships in Southington, CT. Conditions were good, having started out a bit cool (36F when we left Boston) but warming up to somewhere in the 50s by the start, with clear skies and little wind. The course was challenging, featuring a number of steep sections that most riders ran but I could just clear on the MTB, as well as an unusually large number of sand pits (3, only one of which was rideable), a stone staircase run up, and an odd complete lack of barriers. The course was 2.5K, which translated into a mere 4 laps for a 30min race. Despite riding hard (HR averaged 180), having no mechanical difficulties (other than a little trouble clipping in because of the sand), and not having made any obvious strategic snafus (other than not training), I found myself early in the fourth lap in the unusual position of having absolutely no one behind me. While it's possible some riders were pulled (I finished lap 3 at ~28min), and others could have DNFed (I saw one rider walking with a bike in one hand and a chain in the other), it is undeniable that I was the last rider on the course.

Hmmm. This isn't quite how I remember cyclocross working.

Next in the queue is Northampton, MA on 11/5.

BTW, anyone planning on coming up to RI for cross nationals? Let me know so I can make plans to come watch, work the feed zone, photodocument, etc.

End of the season

This last Sunday was the Fallen Leaf Road Race out here in southwest Ohio. It's the official end of the road season, and I decided to have one last go of it. The local organizers seem to like overlapping the categories, so I had my choice of either a 4/5 or a 3/4 race. Since I felt pretty strong in the 4/5 I did a couple weeks ago, I opted for the 3/4, just to see what the higher competition is like. The course was an almost totally flat 7 mile loop with the 3/4s scheduled to do 8 laps. Flat sounded good to me.

We got started over an hour late, due as usual to a mixup with the police corner marshalls. As a result, the officials shortened our event from 8 to 6 laps, which also sounded good to me.

Because there weren't any hills to break up the pack, I figured team tactics would be a big part of the race, the same way they are at Ace. That leaves a solo rider like me in a bit of a dilemma. The ideal outcome would be like I had in my last race: I get into a small break with good team representation, and the teams then block for us, making the finish a small group sprint where I tend to do better. The worst would be like happened to Chris and me a couple years ago at the state champs RR, where said break went away without us, and we were left trying unsuccessfully to rally the few independent riders in the pack to fight the teams blocking. At the same time, if in trying to get into The Break, I try to get into every break, I'll wear myself out and probably either miss the real one when it goes or have nothing left for the finish. And if it does come down to a pack finish, I'm definitely going to need some energy in reserve, as I won't have any teammates to bring me up, so I'll have to fight like hell to stay upfront and play off other teams' leadouts. Thus the dilemma of a solo rider.

I started towards the back, as I'd been rolling around the roads when they finally called us to start. I stayed there the first lap, but it wasn't a problem, as the course wasn't technical enough to have much of a slingshot effect on the turns and there weren't any serious attacks anyway. The start of the second lap, a guy near me took off in an attack and I decided to follow. Nothing really came of it, but this started a hard sequence of attacks and counters throughout the 2nd and 3rd lap. I should have been more judicious deciding which attacks to go with, as I tried to get in too many and started to tire. As my legs lost the kick to get away from the pack, I ended up just pulling the pack up to the break, which is really stupid as a solo rider. A couple times I tried to start a break myself, but that didn't work out. I think I chose my moments well -- times when we'd had a lot of counters, meaning the pack was tired and less likely to chase -- but for precisely that reason, no one was interested in joining me, a solo rider of unknown strength. So with both attacks, I ended up being alone for a while before giving up and going back to the pack. Ah well, more stupidity.

At the start of the 4th lap, I decided I needed to stop being stupid and went back to the rear of the bunch. It looked like we were headed towards a pack sprint anyway, as riders were tired and giving up on the attacks. I stayed back there for most of laps 4, 5, and half of the bell lap, and it wasn't a bad place to be. For the bell lap, the largest team went to the front and kept a steady pace up, presumably trying to set up some kind of finishing strategy. This was good, as it strung out the pack, giving me space to move up if I saw a chance. That came about halfway through the last lap, when the team upfront momentarily let off the pace and I jumped from near the back to about 5th in line.

The team kept control until the last turn, but as we came into the final 1.5 mile straight to the finish, all hell broke lose. Attack catch counter counter counter, wheels and elbows touching, gaps getting squeezed out, fuck shit hold your line etc etc. I'll bet those kids watching their daddies race learned some new vocabulary. Someone went into my back wheel hard. I couldn't look back, so I don't know what happened, but I didn't hear any crash noises so I guess he kept it upright. I lost my place near the front a couple times but fought back. All this was burning a lot of energy, mine as well as everyone else's. With all this argy-bargy, the final sprint took off a little early at about 300m, since as soon as we could smell the line we wanted out of the fight. The main surge went up the left, but I had to go right, as we were catching the last attacker and I couldn't get around to his left. As it was, I missed him by inches on the righthand margin of the road. So I was in the air for a long sprint, giving whatever I had left. We spun toward the line with me fourth, but with 10m to go one guy caught me, just pushing me into 5th and out of the last money spot.

So that's it, my season's done. Overall, I'm pretty happy, with a 1st, 2nd, 4th and 2 5ths for the year. That guy who caught me at the line pushed me ONE POINT away from the 20 I need for my cat 3 upgrade. Looking back at the race, it might have worked out better to stay passive until the last half lap, leaving just enough extra energy to maybe do something higher in the finish. But on the whole, I'm happy to have held my own with the 3s. And anyway, I find that I have trouble lying low then suddenly turning on for the finish. All my best results, the 1st 2nd and 4th, have come from races where I was agressive throughout. Besides, it's a heck of a lot more fun.

Cheers in NC. I sure hope an Ohio winter doesn't mean a trainer. Ugh.

Humility

Greetings from Beantown,

So I found out the other day that my new roommate's boyfriend holds a pro MTB liscence and races for Independent.

I, on the other hand, was able to doubled my annual milage on the bike in a mere 2 weeks of riding again.

I hate being out of shape. I hate being schooled on group rides by freshmen girls with thighs the size of oak seedlings. I'm also not particularly fond of the fact that Harvard Cycling has all their weekday group rides start at 6:25 am when the typical temperature is about 40 F and only getting colder (I have yet to make one of these) and I am still happily asleep reliving dreams of when I didn't get dropped on every roller. Lucky for me the MTB group ride leaves at 7am and meets up a mere 2min from my apartment. Amazingly the mtb riding's pretty good up here -- and by this I mean the actual trails, not just the fact that the roads bend my rims into interesting new shapes every ride. So I take this as a sign that I'm supposed to hang up the road bike for a while and see what the new england cross season is like.

I hope they'll let me race C's.

NCSU MTB Race Report: A Pirate’s Eye View

So this weekend was a bit of a learning experience. On the twenty mile course at Beaverdam, which Chris and I road with the As, I had a chance to go over a number of thoughts in my head and arrange them for this post. Of course, by the end I was suffering from a massive oxygen debt, so it took me a few days to recall them and make them blog-worthy.

A caveat: for an overall race report, you’re better off with Chris’s post below: my incomplete list makes no attempt at comprehensiveness.

Things I learned at the NCSU race:
1) My training plan sucks. Commuting to class and going on one casual mountain bike ride a week does not a training plan make. Neither does cheap grub and tallboys make for nutrition.

2) I need a training plan. I’m not 22 anymore. Hell, I’m not even in my 20s anymore. I can’t get away with not training, as my (extremely limited) amount of athletic skill will never be able to offset my fat-ass-ness. Those glory days are getting further and further away. And more and more fictitious.

3) Gears are good. Or so I can imagine. My top end was blown from charging up the hills on my SS before I made it a third of the way into the course. Spinning is fun (or so I imagine), and crushing a tall gear is fun, but you can only do the latter for so long before your legs start to cry. And whine. And cramp. Cramping hamstrings are not good.

4) Suspension is good. Or so I can imagine. Yeah, I had a shock on my front fork this year (no more rigid, at least for now), but by halfway my lower back was screaming out in pain, even over the prescription-strength dose of Advil I took before the race. This might also have something to do with my lack of a training plan and a jello-like core, but bounce in the back would definitely help.

5) Chris is in shape. The bastard didn’t even seem to be breathing hard when he passed me. Bastard.

6) Annie is happy. When I passed her on the South loop (which she’d never before ridden) she was stopped with a mechanical. I’ve never seen anyone happier about being broken down in the middle of a long race. I was able to help her out, and was able to keep smiling until the pain set back in to my legs (which was about 100 yards, by the way).

7) I still can’t eat GUs while I ride. As Chris mentioned below, I had to stop to down a GU, unfortunately right in front of the only spectators on the course. I got a little smack talk from the NCState fans – something about Duke Lacrosse, I think. OK, we might deserve that.

8) Trees can break your fall. If, for instance, you are out of control and nose-wheelie-ing down a hill, I recommend jumping off, grabbing the nearest sapling, and then riding that down to the ground. You’ll still be all adrenaline-y, but at least you won’t have hit said tree head-on.

9) Skin is good. You should try to end the race with as much of your own as possible. Donations to the trail, while kinda cool, will sting like hell in the shower.

10) That was still kinda fun.

I’m sure I’ll think of other things as more brain cells come back online. For the time being, who wants to do an epic ride this weekend?

NCSU MTB Race Report

It’s on. By which I mean the collegiate mountain bike season within a one-hour drive. Our hosts: NC State. Our venue: Beaver Dam. Ourselves: Annie “The Anniemal”, Pirate, and myself. Our challenge: The As.

Annie got things rolling with her first mtb race (possibly first mtb ride) after shoulder surgery. As a double shoulder surgery participant, it’s tough to get back out into the offroad after losing so much shoulder strength--even for someone who never had great shoulder strength. The women’s field was small, but determined. Annie set off on the hard uphill start with a cheerful disposition and a conservative pace. She encountered some unwanted obstacles. The course is tricky: it’s constantly up-and-down and you need to carry momentum from the downhill dips to make it up the uphill kicks. If you haven’t ridden the course before, it’s kind of an unsettling thing to bomb into an unknown gully. And then, there were mechanical problems. When Pirate passed Annie on the trail, he saw her saddle pointed straight up. That’s just not an appropriate way for a lady to ride a bicycle. It sounded rough, but Ms. Annie was a trooper and surely rocked many points for braving the As.

Prior to the men’s As start, four or six of the dozen or so fellows compared single speed bikes and strategies. Pirate proudly rocked his Gary Fisher 29” Rig and I was glad people didn’t make fun of my homemade rear derailleur chain-tensioner and my 8 year old fork, that was leaking oil. We had quite a casual time with the bearded men of West Virginia and the numerous men of NC State. We had a nice little starting parade, single-file on the single track. No room for passing, but no one was trying to tear things up too quickly. We should have had a nice home-field advantage, especially considering Beaver Dam is closer to Duke than it is to Raleigh. NCSU’s venerable Big Daddy Kane hadn’t even ridden at Beaver Damn before. Pirate got a nice start and I got caught behind some gapped dudes. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow details--not that I could even remember them. I will say my two memorable moves were (1) passing two riders doing a little cyclocross run-up in the rock garden and (2) flipping over my handlebars after a long nose-wheelie on this one section I always crash on (there are these two small logs (or roots) that would be easy to ride over except for the fact that they are spaced at the exact distance as my wheelbase so that, sure, your front wheel clears the first log just fine, but at the exact moment it reaches the second log, your rear wheel reaches the first log, so both of your wheels just stop and you can’t pop your front wheel up or nothing (I’m still not sure why this causes me to front-endo, which I’ve actually done here before)). The main take-home message is this: twenty miles at Beaver Damn are too many miles. For racing, at least. It’s like two and a half hours, with few places to recover or to eat. Pirate said he actually had to stop between laps on the Outer Loop to eat a gel. Nothing stops the Pirate. NOTHING! On the other hand, it’s a fun course. I think I ended up 6th and the Pirate was 9th.