Without the customary time trial to occupy our afternoon, we had a lot of time on our hands after the Giro de Rankin road races on Saturday. Ed's rear derailleur cable had broken during the race and he had ridden in with it tied to his saddle or something. I fished it out of his Shimano shifter and found it had been kind of shredded rather than simply broken - probably got out of the little groove and jammed in there somehow. Anyway, we took a little ride over to Indian Cycles to pick up a new cable and ended up hanging around there for a while looking at bikes. Eventually we returned to the hotel, got the bikes fixed and cleaned up a bit, and went out to Macaroni Grill for a big glass of wine and some dinner. Since there was a Starbucks practically across the street, we stopped in there so I could get the Day 1 results that the Chief Ref had sent me and I posted them on the LAMBRA website. It looked like I hadn't been the only one who had flatted that day.
Sunday morning the weather was much improved and after yet another stop at Starbucks I headed over to the Criterium course a little early because I had the big LAMBRA race clock in my car. The masters race was pretty interesting. Countering an early attack, I ended up off the front for a while hoping something good might come of it, but we were reeled in after a couple of laps. It soon because apparent that neither of the bigger teams in the race were likely to let anything get away, so I drifted the back and watched as they battled it out amongst themselves for most of the race. There was one break that looked like it might stick, but sure enough there was a big surge and it was brought back too. So with three or four laps to go I decided it was time for me to go to work. It took a little while to make my way up near the front, even though the pack wasn't particularly large, and as usual, staying up there required a lot of attention as we got close to the bell lap. With a couple of laps to go I saw the Midsouth guys setting up a 4 or 5-rider leadout train and figured my best shot was probably to try and latch onto the end of it behind either Mark or Jaro, either of whom I expected could win. Naturally, I wasn't the only one who noticed that, and so for the last lap or so David Edwards, who is about twice my size, and I battled for the spot. Somewhere around the second-to-last turn he got his handlebars ahead of mine and a moment later one of the leadout guys stood up and basically started the sprint coming into the last turn. I lost about a bike length there and so once I came around the last turn I had to stand on it and go for the finish, which was still a rather long way away by my standards. I wasn't closing, though, and my panic shift into the 12 didn't help either. Although I was able to barely hold off the two guys behind me, I never really got any closer to David, so I had to settle for 4th. Naturally, prizes went only three deep for this stage, and since my flat the day before had pretty much put me out of contention for one of the five omnium places, I was out of luck.
I probably should have gone ahead and entered the Cat. 1/2/3 race later that morning, but the combination of the extra $30 entry fee plus the limited number of places on offer helped me decide to skip it. I guess if I'd won something in the Masters race I probably would have raced again. Anyway, they turned out to have a very small field of only a dozen or so, including Debbie Milne who had won the Women's race, and a couple of the Masters riders. Their race seemed to start out fairly civilized, but around half-way through it kind of blew apart all at once, leaving a 4-rider break off the front, a few riders on the sidelines, and a few riders chasing. The break picked up one lapped rider along the way, but aside from some attacks by Matt Davis and Ben Gabardi, the real excitement was the Pro Bike chase group of James and Debbie Milne. As the laps started counting down to the bell, the break started playing cat and mouse a lot and their speed really dropped. As they came across for the bell lap it looked like the first lap of a matched sprint and they were probably going about 15 mph. Since James and Debbie had been steadily chasing behind them, they suddenly found themselves withing striking distance and the crowd started yelling at James and Debbie to "go, go, go." Woody, who was in the break, told me later that they had no idea anyone was that close, and the thing that gave them away was when the officials rang the bell for them and the guys in the break heard it. Anyway, the sprint finally started and ended up with Ben winning, followed by Matt, Woody and John. It wasn't quite as exciting as the Cat. 4 sprint had been, though. They had to go to the video to sort that one out.
The Cat. 5 criterium ended up with an early break that included both Rolan and Steve who finished in 2nd and 3rd, so that was pretty good and Steven ended up 2nd in the omnium.
All-in-all it was a fun race with good courses. I think it would have been better if the road race had fewer KOM bonuses and if they would move the finish to the top of the KOM hill. I doubt the promoters broke even on this one if they were counting on entry fees to cover a lot of the costs. I was glad I'd gone, though. It was fun.
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