Rocky Racing

On Thursday I was thinking I'd be driving up to Shreveport alone.  By Friday evening there were two bikes on the roof and three bodies, about thirteen wheels, another bike and five or six bags stuffed into the Volvo headed Northwest. With Matt and Mark for company the drive went smoothly and we rolled into the LaQuinta around 10 pm I guess.  On tap for the weekend was the annual Rocky Mount weekend.  This year it was presented as an Omnium starting with a road race on a new 31-mile loop that incorporated the traditional Rocky Mount climb.  The finish, however, was a good twelve or thirteen miles farther down the road this year. To make things interesting, we had USADA on hand this year as part of the new RaceClean program. I was surprised that they kept such a low profile, testing only riders from the Cat. 1/2/3 road race.

I was racing the 55+ race, while Mark would be doing the 40+ and Matt the Cat. 4.  We would all be doing two laps of the nice rolling North Louisiana course.  The 55+ Road Race had a surprisingly good turnout, which is why I had decided to ride in my age-appropriate group instead of the 40+ race.  For the most part, the first lap and most of the second lap were pretty tame.  I was in it as much for the workout as for the result, but on one of the first climbs I must have aggravated whatever I pulled in my left ribcage area a few weeks ago.  It was hurting whenever I'd have to breathe heavily, so I slipped to the back for quite a while until it settled down.  The race didn't seem to really start until we hit the Rocky Mount climb on the last lap, and although there wasn't really an attack there, it was fast enough to drop a number of riders.  Across the top, the front group looked back, saw the gap, and put the hammer down, and for the next nine or ten miles the pace stayed pretty fast with mostly everyone taking pulls.  Then, with a few miles to go, the cooperation disintegrated.  I hate when that happens.  I found myself spending a lot of time on the front trying to keep the pace from getting embarrassing (this stuff shows up on Strava, you know!), but wasn't getting much help other than one or two brief attacks.  With about two miles to go I eased off hoping someone would pull through.  I wasn't expecting much, but 20 mph would have been nice.  Instead, everyone behind me started freewheeling.  I looked down at the speedometer, then over at the guy coasting next to me and said, "Twelve miles per hour?  Really?"  Still no response.  I ramped it back up to 20 and finally there was some sign of life, followed by an attack that was chased down and then a lull back down to 15 mph.  By then we were at about the 1 km sign and the sprint pretty much started soon thereafter.  We topped out at only about 35 mph on the flat road across the dam with me coming in second.  Afterward I learned that both Mark and Matt had also come in second in their races.  Three 2nd places in the same car.  Damn.  I wonder who was driving the 1st place car.

A couple of hours later there was a 3.2 mi. TT starting at the finish line and going backwards on the RR course.  It was pretty flat but by then there was a significant quartering headwind.  One of the race volunteers had kind of messed up my TT start time spreadsheet and, pressed for time, the officials just posted the start list in order of RR finish, showing stopwatch start times with a handwritten note about a 10-minute offset.  Lots of us, include I, got the math all wrong on that, which meant we were expecting our starts to be 20 minutes later than they actually were.  I think I got about 5 minutes of warmup, and lots of people missed their starts. As usual I struggled through the TT with an unremarkable 25.5 mph average speed, dropping me down to about 5th on GC.  Situation normal.

So as usual the criterium were on Sunday on a nice course around a community college.  Well, the course was nice for most, but not really ideal for me.  There was one section with three turns in quick succession, which I like, but after that was a long, long gently curve about a quarter of a mile long.  The 55+ race started at the ungodly hour of 7:30 am, but on the plus side, it was still nice and cool. The race itself wasn't too much unlike the road race, except that the first lap started out fairly fast with an average speed of 26.5 mph.  A few riders were shelled, but things settled down to an average of more like 24 after a while and somehow we ended up with only four riders in the lead group.  I did a ton of work trying to keep the pace from getting too embarrassing, although my legs were a bit sore from Saturday's efforts.  Once again, the pace dropped down to practically a standstill, which is to say 18 mph on the last lap with maybe 500 meters to go.  Go figure.  So I jumped early, with the rather predictable result that I was passed by two riders.  The 3rd place moved me up to 3rd for the Omnium, so I took  home enough cash to cover my entry fee and lunch at Subway.  Later in the day I pulled out a $20 and entered the Cat. 1/2/3 criterium, mainly for the exercise, with the intention of sitting on the back as long as possible. 

Well, that didn't last long.  The race started fast with the first three laps averaging around 27 mph, which wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been sitting on the tail end of the whip.  As it was, I'd come coasting and braking into the tight turns, dropping down to 20 mph, and then have to sprint all-out up to 31 mph to stay in the draft as the accordion closed back down.  I had neither the warmup nor the legs for an hour of intervals and neither did Stanley on whose wheel I was riding and who had already ridden the 55+ and 40+ races that day.  On the fast part of the 3rd lap Stanley blew, a gap opened, and there was no way I was going to be able to close it into a headwind, so for the next five or six laps I just rode steadily until I was lapped.  Now you would think I would know better than to get right back onto the tail end of the paceline, but at that point I didn't want to risk screwing up the race for the riders in contention by maybe getting in over my head closer to the front.  A few laps later Ben dropped to the back obviously pretty well blown after working hard for his teammates.  I was on his wheel when he blew and again there was no way I was going to bridge up to the pack.  Fortunately I soon found myself with a couple of other riders, so we were able to recover a bit and ride steady until we were *again* lapped by the field (I was glad the officials didn't pull us since I obviously needed the training!).  By then I think there was a break off the front or about to get off the front and it didn't seem quite as difficult to hang onto the tail end of the group, so I ended up rolling in at the back after the pack sprint started.

Meanwhile, in the other races, Mark won the Cat. 4 criterium handily, moving up to 2nd for the Omnium, and in the Cat. 4 criterium Matt finished 2nd which put him in 3rd for the Omnium.  He had originally planned to skip the TT and Crit, so he had done the TT Merckx style and finished out of the omnium points for that stage.  All-in-all a reasonably successful weekend for the three of us.