Mississippi Gran Prix 2013

If there's such a thing as a LAMBRA classic, the annual Mississippi Gran Prix stage race is one.  The event's main promoter, even if he generally refuses to acknowledge the role, was one of the key organizers of its predecessor, the Natchez Classic stage race that started back in the early 80s.  As the DS of the Herring Gas team, Frank always works hard to attract a competitive field for the Cat. 1/2/3 race.  With fairly generous prizes for both stage placings and GC, it is usually one of the best attended events in the area.  Around here, that means something in excess of 200 riders.  For reasons I cannot fathom, the turnout for the Master 40+ race was rather thin this year, attracting only 21 riders.  Granted, most of those 21 were quite capable, but the lack of depth certainly had some effect on the road and circuit races.

Saturday's weather was nearly perfect by most standards, which is to say that it started out a little chilly by mine.  The Masters road race seemed a bit on the slow side to me this year.  We were doing two laps of a long 27-mile loop that was unchallenging for the first ten miles before getting into another ten mile section that was hillier and presented a few opportunities.  I was not really quite in shape for this race, but figured I'd be able to at least stay with the main group.  Early in the first lap a 2-rider break that included one rider from Midsouth Masters and one from Acadiana.  Of the 21-rider field, that took 7 MSM and 3 Acadiana riders out of the picture, chasing-wise.  So despite the fact that the break wasn't going all that fast, the pack seemed uninterested and their gap went out to at least a minute or more.  Donald Davis was riding without teammates and wasn't quite willing to fall for the trap, and a number of other riders were probably keying off of him, so the gap went out disturbingly quickly.  After a while Mark (who had crashed last weekend and was riding with four stitches in his elbow, among other injuries) and I went to the front and started working to keep the gap within reason. Ordinarily I wouldn't have given that break much of a chance, but with such a large percentage of the pack not willing to chase, it might have gotten out of hand.  At one point I rolled off the front pretty much by accident and decided to just keep going in hopes that it would inject a little more urgency into the rest of the group.  I guess I hung out there 30 or 40 seconds off the front for a few miles before one of the riders finally got to the front and pulled them up to me, so I guess it was somewhat successful.  Eventually we caught that break, and a couple of miles later another 2-man break rolled off the front with the same configuration and of course the same result.  I guess their gap was well over a minute as we started the second lap.  All this time I was thinking that we were going so slow we were bound to get caught by the Cat. 3/4 field of 61 riders that had started a mere 5 minutes behind us.  Sure enough, a few miles in their small break went past us and a few minutes later the motorefs neutralized us so the field could pass.  This was a bit of chaos, of course, since the masters weren't too thrilled about putting on the brakes with a breakaway off the front.  Right after we were passed by the 3/4 field, our own pace picked up a lot as Donald and some others caught sight of that 2-man break up the road.  Now we came up on the back of the 3/4 field and had to stream past them on the left. Naturally they weren't willing to slow down too much because they were in the process of chasing down their own breakaway.  Somewhere around the long climb 10 miles into the loop we caught the 2-rider break and then, of course, the 3/4 pack caught back up to us.  This time the masters slowed down to let the 3/4s past, but in the confusion a number of 3/4 riders got stuck behind the masters as they bunched up and weren't able to get back to their own group which was now in full chase mode.  Yeah, they got screwed.

So I guess we were about halfway through the second lap where there are a number of steep little hills when the attacks started.  After one particularly painful one that I just barely survived, I knew the group had split without even having to look back.  This resulted in a 6-rider break that included Donald Davis, Jerry Simon, Bennie Flores, Tim Doiron, Kevin Landry, and myself.  Almost every team in the race was represented.  I was pretty happy to have made the split and hoping that this group would work together smoothly, at least until the last mile or two, to extend the time gap because I knew I'd be giving up 30-40 seconds in the afternoon time trial to pretty much all of them.  Unfortunately, it was anything but smooth paceline.  There were lots of surges where the group would come apart, then we would get a little rotation going again, then a couple of people would skip pulls -- you get the picture.  With a few miles left to go the attacks started, mostly courtesy of Jerry who seemed to be in good form.  Tim and I were struggling a bit with the attacks, and when the sprint started I was all the way at the back and came across in 5th place.  On the plus side, we had put nearly three minutes on the pack, a gap that even my notoriously poor time trialing ability would not be able to completely erase.

The TT that evening went as I'd expected.  From the start I wound it up to about 25 mph and decided to back off and hold it there because I knew there was a significant little climb coming up.  That strategy worked pretty well in that I was able to go over that hill without going completely anaerobic, which is more than I can say about the next hill.  Anyway, I managed to do an even worse time than last year but thanks to having been in the break dropped down to only 6th.

Around 1 am on Sunday I was awakened by the sound of rain and thunder.  The forecast had been looking pretty bad and unfortunately it would prove to have been right on the money.  The first of the Circuit Races that had been scheduled for 7 am were pushed back to 8 am, but even so it was still raining and cold.  I watched the first few shortened races go off in the rain rather dreading the moment when I'd have to pull off the warm clothes and step out into the rain wearing lycra.  Our race was shortened by one lap, from four to three, as the officials tried to make up for the lost hour earlier in the morning, and by the time we started around 10:30 or so the rain had eased up considerably.  Still, I rolled out wearing arm-warmers since I had gotten pretty chilled.  The Circuit Race turned out to be kind of like the Road Race had been.  I knew that Midsouth was planning on sending one of their riders who hadn't made Saturday's break off the front, knowing that the top six riders on GC would probably let him go as long as the gap didn't go over a couple of minutes. The first rider to try it got pulled back, but then around the start of the last lap Jay went without much of a challenge.  With only around six miles left, there wasn't much of a chance he could get enough of a gap to threaten the leaders (although it was entirely possible he could threaten my 6th place).  Things finally started to ramp up along the rough section a few miles from the finish and at one point I was seriously at risk of being dropped in the crosswind.  It all came back together, though, and I started looking forward to the nice uphill sprint to the finish line.  My legs were feeling pretty good and I was in a good spot with about a mile to go when I felt my rear tire go squishy and then almost immediately bottom out. I quietly cursed my bad luck and raised my hand as I dropped back along the right side of the road.  A wheel change at this point could easily erase my time gap on 7th place, but one can only ride on a flat clincher so long before it comes completely off the wheel and locks up, or you crash.  Wes, who was driving the follow car came up and said he didn't have any wheels for me (they had been in a wheel bag because of the rain and so he hadn't put them in the car).  I was still just a few bike lengths off the back of the pack at that point and we were only half a kilo from the finish, so I decided to go ahead and  ride the rim in to the finish and hope for the best.  Fortunately everything stayed in place, and although it was a difficult slog up the finish hill I lost only 40 second or so on the pack, and later the officials gave me pack time anyway since the mishap had happened within the final 3 km.  So I was happy to have salvaged 6th place and done some fun racing, but pretty disappointed to have missed out on that sprint after having been looking forward to it for the whole race!