Friday afternoon I skipped out of work early, loaded up the car and started the drive East to Pensacola for the first, hopefully annual, Pensacola Classic stage race. I was travelling solo this time, battling the unsteady flow of Friday evening traffic. I already knew I'd be hitting Mobile, Alabama right at rush hour. Ordinarily, I prefer to get up at 4 am when I'd have the whole road to myself, but I was hoping to be able to drop off some of the LAMBRA equipment with Ricky when I picked up my packet at Bamboo Willie's down at Pensacola Beach. As it turned out, he wasn't there, so all that stuff would have to stay in the car overnight in the Motel 6 parking lot. At number pick-up the person handling registration handed me a blank release form. Hmmm. Having pre-registered on BikeReg already, I was expecting that they would have the nice pre-printed release form ready for me to sign. I took one glance at the form and handed it back, saying, "This is the wrong form." ---- Blank Stare ---- I explained that she'd given me the one-day form and not the regular form. She didn't know. Bad sign. The next morning I'd hear from a couple of the LAMBRA officials about the problems they'd run into when getting the entries set up for the race. There were many riders for whom they could find no release form, and many others where the rider had just signed the form -- no name, license number, etc. Typical problems for a first-year event.
Saturday morning we had a 50-mile road race on a nice 25-mile course up around Milton. The masters field was a good size, maybe thirty or thirty-five. I really don't know for sure since I still haven't seen any results (it's Sunday morning and I'm sitting in a local Starbucks getting ready to head to the criterium course). This was a fast and aggressive race. Every time I looked up there was another break off the front. For the first lap, the pace rarely dropped below 25, and we were well into the 30s on numerous occasions. There was a lot of horsepower in this group and by the end of the first lap I was starting to seriously doubt that anything was going to be able to stay off the front. Every time a group would get more than about fifteen seconds the pack would accelerate and pull it back. I tentatively decided to save my energy and roll the dice on a pack sprint. The second lap seemed a bit slower than the first, and despite numerous breakaway attempts everything was still together, I think, when we made the final turn a few miles from the uphill finish. I think a couple of guys got away somewhere between there and the finish and they may have made it to the line ahead of the group, but I'm really not sure about that. Anyway, there were still a lot of people left in the pack and most of them were thinking they had a shot at the pack sprint, me included, so things were fairly tense over the final couple of miles as everyone wanted to be near the front but nobody wanted to be on it. There was a fast downhill to a little wooden bridge right at about 400 meters, and then a moderate climb all the way to the finish line. I wasn't positioned too well coming down the downhill, but I was still close enough to the front to do well once the left lane opened up at the 400 meter mark, which we hit at probably around 40 mph. I took a few pedal strokes as the sprint started and reached for the shifter. Disaster! Somehow the chain must have gotten between two cogs and slipped -- and slipped -- and slipped. By the time it finally caught a number of people had gone past me and I was sprinting uphill in something like the 53x13. Shifting again didn't seem like a good idea, so I sprinted it out, passing a few people and lunging for the line along with a few others somewhere between 7th and 10th. I felt good sprinting, but was rather disappointed with the placing. It was my own damned fault, of course. On Friday I'd put on the 12-27 Miche casssette I'd ordered for Six-Gap in order to try it out. The cogs weren't aligned quite the same as on my Campi cassette, so I'd tweaked the derailleur a bit to accommodate. Then, when I put my racing wheel on I'd just turned the adjuster back to where I thought it had been. It seemed fine during most of the race, but obviously it wasn't. Oh, and there was another semi-mechanical issue for this race. I did the whole thing with 60 psi in my rear tire. I'd pumped it up before the start and I guess the valve must not have seated well. On the start line I reached back to check the pressure and I remember thinking, "that seems kind of soft." It was. Good thing I'm not a big guy and that I missed all of the potholes.
Saturday afternoon's 5km time trial along the beach was hot and presented it's own problems, mainly traffic. The early groups had a lot of trouble with slow-moving cars, but by the time I started, an hour and a half later, the police had started turning back a lot of the cars. There was a stiff wind blowing off of the Gulf, but it was a direct crosswind and didn't really seem to have much of an effect. I lined up a few minutes before my start hoping to put in a respectable effort with my feeble little clip-ons amidst a sea of decked-out TT bikes. The first time I looked down at the computer, it read 28 mph. I thought to myself, "that's probably not sustainable," and backed down just a bit to compensate for that little shot of adreneline that I always get at the start of a time trial. The next time I looked at the computer it said "0." What??? Crap. The speedometer had chosen a particularly bad time to go from working to NOT WORKING. I *cannot* time trial without a speedometer. (Some would say I cannot time trial *with* a speedometer, and they wouldn't be too far off.) Anyway, this development really took the wind out of my sails. I slowed down a little bit and even considered just sitting up sparing myself the pain. I didn't, of course. So as I was approaching the turnaround I sat up and pulled the computer head off of the mount and then replaced it. It worked, so at least I had a speedometer for the return trip. I'm not sure if that was good or bad, because some of the numbers I saw there were not encouraging. So the bottom line is that, in addition to being painful as usual, my time trial was also frustrating and disappointing. Oh well, that's bike racing. Dave and I had a nice dinner with Mitch at Flounders where I drowned my sorrows with a couple of pints of beer (and a quart of Gatorade that I drank on the way back to the hotel). A little dehydrated, perhaps?
I don't know what to expect from this morning's criterium. The course looks suspiciously like one we raced on at masters nationals some time back in the 80s. We'll see.
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