Back to Natchez

I'd been debating what to do about the LAMBRA Road Championships for a couple of days.  I've never felt like I was really in shape this year, and since, for one reason or another, I'd missed so many races already this year I was actually considering riding the Master 55+/60+ race instead of the 35+/45+ race.  The downside there, aside from the unavoidable acknowledgement that I was actually old enough to be eligible, was that the field would probably be quite small and the distance rather short at a bit over 36 miles.  On the plus side, the chance I'd be dropped was considerably lower.  I was still on the fence about it as I walked out the door late Wednesday night to walk the dogs. A few seconds later I was on the ground holding my sprained ankle and suddenly thinking that maybe that shorter race would be the right choice this year.  I taped the already swelling ankle and went to bed, hoping I hadn't done too much damage.  The next morning it was better, as long as I didn't twist it, so I went out to meet the Thursday ride.  I needed to make sure my recently reassembled shifter was working anyway.  As often happens, the ankle felt just fine while I was riding, although I was careful not to spend any time out of the saddle.  Just to be on the safe side, I turned around early.

The alarm went off early Saturday morning.  I had to get up to Natchez before registration opened to drop off the LAMBRA clock and generator and, if needed, help out with registration.  I would be driving a rental Kia Soul (the one with the commercial featuring giant rats and rap music), which the agency called a minivan, but which is in fact a mini-minivan.  On the plus side, it had satellite radio and audio input, so I had a nice commercial-free drive, arriving as the crew was setting up the huge tents they always have for this race.  The first races started at 9 am, although my 55+/60+ race didn't roll until 2 pm.  I spent some time fixing up the registration/results spreadsheets and eventually plugging in the Junior race results and watching the Cat. 5 and Masters Women's races before pulling the bike out of the car and getting things together for my own race.  As it turned out, we would have a small field of only nine riders.  The 35+/45+ race, which would start a few minutes ahead of us, had twenty.  I'm not really sure why we don't get larger fields for this race.  The course and venue are great, although it is certainly possible that the hills on the first part of the 5-mile loop scare some people away.  This course starts out with a steep but short climb up to a dam.  A mile later there is a fairly long stair-step climb that is steeper at the top than at the bottom.  That's followed by a quick, short downhill and then a short but very steep little climb that seems to get steeper every lap.  We'd be doing seven laps.  Things started out pretty smoothly, but by the time we were halfway through the first lap it was becoming clear that half the field was not going to be doing any work.  I was feeling fairly good and spent quite a bit of time at the front along with a couple of other riders.  I guess it was on the third lap when I came over the steep hill, pulled for a little while, and pulled off to find only one other rider with me.  He came through and said, "It's just you and me, Randy."  I figured I'd work with it and see where it went, knowing that Mike Williams could probably close the gap by himself once.

As hard as the first couple of miles of this loop are, the last few miles are really fun with long sweeping downhill curves, smooth asphalt, and tree-shaded roads.  I took another pull and saw that my breakaway companion was already having trouble.  I backed off a bit so he could catch back up, but a little while later he was off the back again.  I could see the rest of the group just behind, so I finally just put my head down and went for it.  By the end of the lap I was pretty much out of sight with, I think, four laps left to go.  I wasn't too wild about the prospect of a long time trial on this course, but by then I was pretty much committed.  I never had any time checks, so for the rest of the race I didn't really know what might be going on behind me.  From what I heard afterward, Mike initially closed most of the gap but when nobody was willing to share the work he sat up.  This was, of course, all complicated by the fact that there were essentially two races going on at the same time, so the 60+ riders really didn't have much of a reason to chase me.  Anyway, I ended up doing a rather long time trial and finishing quite a few minutes ahead of the rest of the field.

That evening Curtis invited me over to his house where he and Tommy and a number of the Natchez crew who organized the race were cooking dinner over a interesting outdoor grill kind of thing that was basically a cast iron cylinder with one flat side and a fire inside.  It was both fun and delicious, although I was careful to limit myself to a single beer because by then I was seriously considering doing the Cat. 1/2 race the next morning.

Sunday morning, feeling rather sore, I signed up for the Cat. 1/2 race, mainly just for the exercise.  My goal for this race was to stay with the field for at least six of the 14 laps.  Based on past experience, I figured that would be about when they would start attacking the climbs and the effects of my substandard training program would really kick in.  This race turned out to have a field of only nine riders, which did not bode well for me.  On the other hand, most of these guys were smart enough to know that they wouldn't need the whole 72 miles to make something happen.  As a result, the first few laps were pretty smooth.  We were only a couple of laps into the race when Woody, who had been a bit off the front, flatted.  His teammate Frank, who had ridden the masters race the day before, stopped to help pace him back to the pack after the wheel change.  In the meantime, the other teams kept the pace up a bit.  After a couple of miles I started looking back for Woody and Frank, and shortly after we made the right turn at the Natchez State Park entrance, I caught a glimpse of a solitary rider chasing.  Frank had apparently blown up early in the chase and Woody was now on his own. He ended up chasing for a full 5.2 mi. lap before making contact.  So as I'd expected I was starting to struggle a bit on the hills at lap #5, and then around lap 7 there was a surge up over that steep little hill that gapped me and another rider off the back.  After a brief chase I had just made contact when another attack went.  I just sat up at that point and thought, "I don't need this today!"  So the rest of the race, maybe 35 miles or so, was more of a training ride for me.  It was fine, though, because that's exactly what I'd been expecting.  Don't you just love it when a plan comes together like that?

Afterwards I gathered up all my water bottles and walked down to the feed zone to hand up water bottles to teammates and a few other riders in the Cat. 4 and Women's races.  All-in-all, it was a pretty good weekend.  Now I'm thinking about going to the stage race in Pensacola next weekend.