At the Beach

I'd been looking forward to the Pensacola Classic Stage Race with a mix of excitement and trepidation.  The extensive pre-event promotion, generous prizelist, and attractive destination promised a good turnout, even for a late-season race.  I figured it would be a good race.  I also figured I'd get may ass kicked.  So naturally I signed up.  After a flurry of emails and text messages I was all set up to drive up with Tim, stay at the luxurious Holiday Inn, right on the beach, with a voucher from BP picking up the hotel tab.  So Friday afternoon I headed home from work a little early, put the racing wheels with their pink Michelin Pro Race 3s on the bike, cleaned off a week's worth of dirt, lubed the chain and waited for Tim to pick me up.  Our timing was going to be pretty tight.  The trip GPS was estimating our arrival for 9:05.  Packet pick-up ended at 9:00.  As we approached Pensacola, the estimated arrival time started dropping. We arrived about ten minutes before they closed down for the night, just in time to pickup our numbers and timing chips and put our names into the door prize jar for a chance to win a Specialized Tarmac.  Then we headed for our room and the minute we walked in the door Tim's phone rang.  It was the organizer calling to tell him he'd won the bike!  Sweet.

I was riding the combined 35+/45+ race, and Saturday morning offered a 50 mile road race on a pretty good 25 mile course with one long climb about two-thirds of the way around.  Unlike the previous year, the finish wasn't right after a nice little climb, but was pretty much a flat drag race - a last-minute change that was made when the folks who controlled the original start location decided they needed a pile of cash from the promoter.  The race started off a little slower than it had the year before, but there were still a few attacks and short-lived breaks.  Everything was together when we hit the one really tactically significant climb, and as I'd expected, or perhaps feared, Donald Davis attacked hard at about the mid-point.  Things got strung out immediately and although I was able to stay in the mix, I didn't think that I needed to go full-bore.  After all, there were a lot of people in the pack and no other big hills nearby, so I thought that surely there would be a chase once we got over the top and the break would get pulled back in a few minutes.  Well, I was wrong.  Up at the top of the climb, which was more like a false flat, a group suddenly came together and the gap just kind of exploded.  The rest of the group didn't really respond.  This was not good.  Before we knew it the gap had gone up to about 30 seconds.  A couple of teams had guys in the break, so that took a number of people out of the chase.  Eventually the break, which had seven riders in it, got out of sight.  At one point I got into a small break that I thought might at least stay away from the pack, but after a few miles it was pulled back and the stage was set for a sprint for 8th place overall, which meant nothing since all of the stage bonuses were in the break anyway.  Even so, you would have thought we were sprinting for the world championship the way riders started crowding the front from about three miles out.  There was definitely some needlessly dangerous riding going on and I couldn't get close enough to the front to have a good shot at the line without doing something stupid.  Since I had no faith whatsoever in the officials giving pack time to everyone (they can never resist when there's chip timing) I sprinted anyway, coming in somewhere around 7th or 8th in the pack which put me in 8th in the 45+ race.  Oh well.  On the plus side, I didn't feel like the road race had taken much out of me.

The afternoon time trial was just a few miles down the beach road from the hotel, and the start times had been posted to the event website, so I carefully figured out when I should leave in order to get in a nice warmup without having to hang around in the sun very long before my start. I knew something was wrong by the time I was halfway there, because by then I should have seen riders coming toward me.  It turned out they were running 35 minutes late.  So much for my plan.  There were no road race results at the time trial, or on the website, and of course the posted start list was now off by about 35 minutes.  The one-way time trial had a fairly good tailwind, which I knew would favor the real TT fanatics, among whom I am not.  I did a nice steady time trial at about 85% effort, maintaining a reasonable 27 mph, which would have been more like 25 mph without the tailwind.  My 30-second man passed me about four kilometers into the five kilometer TT.  That evening we met up at Flounders where I was somewhat embarrassed to find that my legs weren't the least bit sore.  I guess I really need to start taking these time trial things more seriously. 

So I stayed up until 10:30 or so Saturday hoping to see the TT and GC results, but no luck.  The next morning the GC standings were supposed to be posted, but if you tried to go to the website from a smartphone you got redirected to some photography site instead.  There was never a results posting that showed stage times, finish bonuses, at GC all in the same place.  It would have been virtually impossible to protest anything.  Anyway, we headed out to the criterium course where the masters were scheduled to start at 11:00.  We arrived in time to see the Women's race in which Debbie Milne and Allie Hurst spent much of the time off the front.  The rest of the Cat. 1-3 women's field, which included NOBC riders Vivian and Angie got a little split up but were still very much in the race until the last five laps or so.  Debbie attacked hard at one point, opening a 10-second gap on Allie, but withing a lap or so Allie had pulled it back and things were set for a 2-rider sprint.  Unfortunately there was some confusion about the finish lap - perhaps they heard the bell for a pack prime and thought it was their bell lap, or perhaps the bell they heard after that sprint was the bell for some lapped riders, but anyway they ended up sprinting twice with Allie taking both of them.

Things were running about half an hour late, but apparently they shortened the race before mine, which meant that I didn't get the warmup I had been planning for.  At the start I totally flubbed clipping in and spent the next couple of laps trying to move up to a more comfortable position.  Aside from some rider rolling off the front who was apparently one of the Cat. 1/2/3 riders who the officials had allowed to race with us (really??), most of the race was fast but not exceptionally so.  Since my GC possibilities were pretty much in the dumpster because of my time trial, I was just hoping for a sprint finish and a decent shot at the line.  With four laps to go things started to get kind of crazy.  The pace at the front wasn't fast enough to string things out enough, so there was a lot of sketchy riding as things got bunched up.  At one point some big guy tried to repeatedly push me out of his way with his hand on my hip.  Seriously?  Anyway, a little attack with at the bell finally strung it out a little bit, but I couldn't get as close to the front as I'd have liked before the last couple of turns and probably came around the last corner around 10th wheel and ultimately finishing around 7th or 8th, which was 4th in the 45+.  It was at least some small consolation for an otherwise unimpressive weekend performance.

So afterward I peeled off my wet skinsuit, changed, and headed off with my camera to watch the Cat. 1/2/3 race that was already underway.  I took a few photos and then suddenly remembered I'd forgotten to return my chip, so I had to go back to the car, cut it off, and turn it in behind the officials' stand.  Then I decided to go take some photos at one of the corners on the back side of the course.  As I started walking in that direction I heard someone calling my name.  I looked back and it was a police officer.  He said that one of my friends had crashed.  I rushed over to the corner where there was now a fire truck and found Tim sitting on the sidewalk leaning on a brick wall and holding a bandage to the side of his head.  I asked the fireman if he had answered all of the questions correctly, and, satisfied that he didn't have a concussion, asked him what had happened.  It sounded like a rider ahead of him had hit the manhole in that corner, which lifted his rear wheel and caused him to slide out. Tim had no choice but to try and go around on the outside, but after hopping the curb onto the sidewalk he ran out of room, brushed along a brick wall, and then slammed sideways into a brick column, putting a pretty good gash in his ear and causing a fair amount of collateral damage to arms and ankles.  He had dislocated a finger but popped it back into place before I arrived.  Anyway, we got him cleaned up and headed for home shortly after the race ended.  I think we were somewhere in Alabama when the bleeding finally stopped.  So I ended up coming in 9th in the 45+ race, although I really have no idea exactly how that was calculated.  It was really a pretty well put-together race and the only real issue, as far as I was concerned, was with the results posting.  I put a few photos up at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjw5K5kr.