Back in the Race

STRUNG OUT MASTERS

The LAMBRA/USAC Criterium Championships were Sunday right here in NOLA, and it was already well past time for me to get back into the race. It's hard to believe it's been eleven weeks since my little collarbone incident, but I was quickly reminded when the master's race started yesterday morning. My lack of racing and race-oriented training was both expected and clearly apparent, so I had already developed a very simple 5-point race strategy:

1. Don't crash;
2. Don't get dropped;
3. Don't crash;
4. Don't put you face into the wind no matter what;
5. Don't crash.

Actually, despite my conservative approach to the race I was quite pleased with how I felt. I knew that my biggest limiter for this race would be in the area of recovery time since most of my riding over the past month has been relatively steady base-training stuff. What that meant to me for a criterium was that if I went too far out on a limb chasing a break of just pulling hard for any length of time, I'd be at serious risk of blowing up if another big effort were required right away.

KENNY B. DEMONSTRATES HIS SPACEWALKING SKILLS FOR THE CAT. 4 FIELD.

We had a good-sized field for the masters race and it started out at a fairly civilized pace as the riders familiarized themselves with the course. The 1-mile circuit had two very sharp corners plus a U-turn, which meant at least three hard accelerations per lap. The new turn on the back side was the sharpest, and even near the front you had to brake going into it and stand up coming out of it. Basically, the course was deceptively hard and reasonably technical. In fact, there were a surprising number of crashes, especially on the sharp corner on the back side. As things settled down, I was doing fine trying to stay near the front and out of trouble and feeling good that there didn't seem to be a lot of squirrely riding going on.

The real race didn't begin until about half-way through the 50-minute event when riders were starting to get tired and the responses to the attacks started to falter. Around that time two riders rolled off the front. I looked up and saw that they were Tim Regan from Herring and Mark Graffagnini from Fish House and I immediately knew it was serious. My instinct was to bury myself to try and bridge, but instead I stuck to my game plan. I told anybody who was listening "there goes the race, you'd better get going," but the reaction was slow and disorganized since two of the bigger teams in the race had riders in the break. I dropped back into the pack a bit so I wouldn't be in the way, but it was really too late by then. Not going after that break was hard. At one point on the back side of the course we were going really hard and I dropped my wheel into a long crack and nearly lost it. Close one! Once the break was clearly not going to be caught things settled down a bit, and eventually things started to ramp up for the inevitable pack sprint.

For the last three or four laps I was working on maintaining a good position near the front and I was starting to feel like I had a good shot at the sprint. Indeed, on the last lap I was in a pretty decent position, maybe five or six from the front, as we flew into the sharp corner on the back side. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see some guy coming up the inside way too fast. A quick calculation determined that (a) he would have to violate a number of laws of physics to make the turn from that angle, and (b) our courses were going to intersect at the apex of the turn. So basically I had to go way outside and hit the brakes and of course he had to hit the brakes too. That opened up a huge gap, and I think a couple of 4-letter words issued forth from my mouth as I got up out of the saddle and basically sprinted to try and close the gap. At that point my chances for the sprint went pretty much down the drain, although I did get back into the draft shortly before the last corner. I ended up 10th, getting passed by a couple of guys between the last corner and the finish. Under the circumstances, I was OK with that. Later that evening I checked my computer and was rather surprised to find a maximum speed of nearly 36 mph, which seemed pretty decent considering the course.

At least I didn't suffer the bad luck of some of my teammates. In the women's race Viv crashed and then didn't realize she could get a free lap, so she ended up in a little chase group that ultimately lost a lot of time on the leaders. Then, to add insult to injury, the whole lead group of five or six, in a truly stupid move, turned back onto the course after their finish just as Viv's group was coming around the last corner for its sprint, so she had to slam on the brakes and didn't even get to win that sprint like she should have. They were all lucky there wasn't a big crash and that the CR didn't disqualify the whole bunch of them for gross stupidity. In the Cat. 5 race Ed Novak somehow mistook the bell lap bell for a prime bell and thus completely blew the finish. He might never hear the end of that one! Earlier in that same race John had crashed on the U-turn and ended up with eleven stitches in his chin. In the Cat. 4 race it seemed like Brady worked his butt off the whole race and then something happened on the last lap or two and he finished well back in the sprint.

I have to admit, I did briefly consider entering the Cat. 1/2/3 race, but ultimately decided I'd be pushing my luck and should probably help out with the officiating instead. In that race, three of the Herring guys went off the front, then one dropped back to the pack. Brandon was working his ass off towing the pack and for a really long time they were keeping the gap down to ten seconds or so. Once the break was down to only two, the gap came down a bit and I told someone next to me that if it got any closer Frank Moak would surely attempt to make a solo bridge. I was almost right, except that it was his teammate Tim who made the bridge. Once the three of them were together the gap slowly started to creep up until the pack kind of gave up on the medals, so Herring swept up pretty much everything as the temperatures rose into the upper 90s.