Transition Time

This was one of those 'double Giro Ride' weekends for me. There was a 40 km Time Trial just a few hours away on Saturday that I might have, should have, ridden, but excuses were sufficiently plentiful to keep me at home. Leaving The Wife without a car to fend for herself after spending three days working a conference downtown probably wouldn't have been nice. Nonetheless, the weekend Giro Rides really seemed to highlight the fact that the local racing community is entering that transition time between 'mostly training' to 'mostly racing.'



Saturday morning was warm, and with a nice humid South wind the Giro Ride felt different, and not just because we were missing some of the stronger riders who were doing the Time Trial up in Jackson. With sweat dripping down my forehead and dripping into my glasses it was really starting to feel like summer. I rode back uptown into the wind with Kenny and Bain, logging a respectable 70 miles or so, and spent the next few hours pouring over Rouge-Roubaix results. You see, various problems and miscommunications resulted in some serious problems when it came to scoring the race for the various classes and categories. Thanks to three of our LAMBRA officials, the USCF member database, the Results & Rankings database, and the USAC club membership listings, and a few educated guesses, I finally pieced together most of the data I needed to make a first cut at the results breakdowns. I really hate it when it takes this long to get results done. Having raced for many years when you usually never saw the complete results, and were lucky if the official was able to place the top ten, I always have a sense of urgency when it comes to getting race results posted. It's Sunday night right now and they're not quite there yet. I've given the masters riders the rest of the week to let me know if they intended to be scored in their categories instead of age groups. I expect there will be a few of the Cat. 1/2/3 masters who wanted their points to go toward their Cat. 1/2/3 rankings instead of their masters rankings.



So Sunday morning it was quite a bit cooler but still rather great riding weather when I headed out in the dark for the lakefront. The group was fairly big for a Sunday, and by the time we finally started rolling up to speed on Hayne Blvd. it was clear that a number of the guys were shifting into race mode. A handful of riders split off the front and the gap started growing quickly. Alarms started to sound. Red flags. All that stuff. I saw Brady start coming around on the right and got on his wheel. Soon Brady, Dave and I were in full-on chase mode, battling a rather significant crosswind and making just the slightest bit of progress. Brady was taking some huge pulls, and then as we approached the turn onto Paris Road he suddenly dropped off. I looked over at Dave and said "We're done..." We eased up just a bit and soon Brady was back and we were back up to speed, this time riding directly into a tough headwind. It looked like we were at least holding our own, but I can't say we were gaining ground. We chased hard all the way down to Chef Highway, picking up a couple of guys who'd been dropped out of the lead group along the way. By the time we were on Chef we had five or six riders in the group and we were struggling to hold 23 mph in the wind. The lead group was still in sight, but they were a good minute up the road, so it was all just for the exercise.



After the turnaround we all regrouped and the pace stayed slow for a while. I was talking to Robin about it and told him I was pretty sure that with the tailwind we would be up to 35 mph by the end. I was close. It was more like 37. After the Goodyear Sign sprint, in which Bain motored past Mike at probably 38-39 mph, I thought it might ease up, but it didn't really. Like I said, the group is making the transition into racing season mode, which means that the fast sections, while not necessarily a lot faster, are definitely getting longer, and the slow sections are getting a whole lot shorter. Anyway, I stopped taking pulls for a while on the service road to try and recover a bit. It was really a good training weekend, I think, and the rest of the day was just spectacular, weather-wise. I even relented and spent a couple of hours at the Zoo since it was earth fest weekend there.