Mississippi Gran Prix weekend

I rushed home from work early on Friday afternoon, threw some stuff into my bag, clamped the bike to the roof and took off to run a couple of errands before hitting the road for Brookhaven Mississippi for the annual Mississippi Gran Prix stage race.  A couple of minutes later I realized I'd forgotten my clip-on aero bars for the time trial and briefly considered the pointlessness of returning home for them.  I wasn't too far from home, though, so I backtracked to pick them up, and then suffered through school zones and early rush hour traffic before finally turning onto the relative calm of I-55 North.  It was only a 2-hour drive, and I wasn't racing until Saturday, but I wanted to help officiate the evening criterium for the Cat. 1/2/3 race and pick up my race numbers.  Surprisingly I arrived in plenty of time, enough in fact to run over to the local store and buy a broom to sweep a corner that looked a little sandy.  The race went off pretty well, and despite the darkness and incompatibility between the flicker rate of the lighting and the finish line camera, Ricky got everyone placed fairly quickly. Afterward I met up with a number of the club riders for a quick dinner at the little Italian place near the course.

Saturday morning Chris and I drove out to the road race course, about half an hour to the north. Although my back was feeling a lot better, I was still on Aleve, not really in shape, and going into this race with practically zero confidence.  This would be the first race of my 42nd or 43rd racing season and I was a little worried that my lower back would seize up the first time I tried to climb a hill.  I was also a little worried that I'd just flat out get dropped.  Basically, I was not feeling too sharp.  Fortunately, the race started out without too many fireworks and I soon realized that my back was not going to be that big of an issue.  In fact, I ended up spending a fair amount of time in the wind on the first lap of the three-lap 57-mile race.  Probably too much. A rider from the Acadiana team went off the front early and fortunately there were enough other riders to keep the other five Acadiana guys from controlling things too much.  The rest of us kept him hanging out there at about fifteen or thirty seconds for all of the first lap and much of the second lap until he was finally back in the smallish 17-rider field. A crash on the first lap had taken a couple of riders out of the mix.

About halfway around the loop on the second lap a gap opened up on a little climb when Mark and I were, frankly, way too far back.  Whoever was behind the gap never reacted and we hesitated for a moment thinking it might not be serious.  It was.  When they got to the top of the climb, one of them looked back, saw the gap, and someone up there put the hammer down. By the time we could do anything about it, it was really too late considering the fact that much of the group's horsepower was up the road in a 4-man break. Mark and I were practically the only ones without someone in the break, and neither of us would be able to motor across the rapidly expanding chasm. So now we were racing for 5th place, which didn't really do much for my already diminished level of enthusiasm.  With seven or eight miles to go the other Acadiana riders in our group started taking turns attacking.  I was already feeling pretty dead, so Mark had to cover almost all of them himself, which of course was their plan since he is a strong sprinter.  In the end, one of the Acadiana guys nipped Mark for 5th, while I struggled across the line in a disappointing 8th place.  I shouldn't really have been disappointed considering the circumstances, but, yeah, I kinda was.  I really had no sprint in my legs at all. We went over to Broma's Deli for lunch and then once I got the results and TT start list I uploaded those to the LAMBRA website.  That evening was the 3-mile TT that I've done a number of times before.  I was completely uninterested, however.  Given sufficient motivation I can usually scratch out a respectable TT even with the now commonplace TT bike and aero wheelset, but with four riders already uncatchable on GC and the knowledge that I'd probably lose time to three or four other riders in the TT, I just could not come up with a reason to suffer.  I would say I went out at about a 75% effort level, and even so I found myself wheezing for air within the first mile.  The combination of spring pollen and the exceptionally dry air were really playing havoc on my lungs.  When I got to the 1km to go mark I figured I may as well drop it down into a bigger gear and put in some effort.  The last 500 meters is uphill and I was too lazy to even shift to an appropriate gear, so I just trudged up it in a 53x13 or something.  It must have looked comical.  I think my cadence dropped to about 50.  Predictably, my time was 14th out of 15.  On the other hand, my legs and back felt fine!   The TT had almost been interrupted when some local redneck drove by and yelled at the officials about how it was a public road and we were blocking it off.  Naturally he called the sheriff's office and a little while later a deputy came by saying that they didn't know anything about the race.  The promoter, who was also warming up for his TT, explained that he had made all of the appropriate arrangements with the Sheriff, who had apparently forgotten to let the rest of his staff know about it. We had dinner at a local Chinese/Japanese place and then I waited for the CR to send me the official results which I got posted to the website around 10 pm.

The Sunday criterium is always fun for me because I like the course.  Mostly.  The one thing about this course that always kills me is the screaming fast downhill that comes right before a steep but short climb up to the finish.  For some reason I am always at my limit on the downhill whenever there is any pressure on at the front.  Anyway, Mark was in 5th place by a few seconds following the TT, with no hope of moving up since the break in the Road Race had put those four riders up by a good five minutes. As long as the guy behind him on GC didn't get any significant time bonuses, Mark would be safe.  Complicating things, however, was the fact that this race offers stage prizes in addition to GC prizes, and a decent placing for me would have at least salvaged something for the weekend.  For the most part, the race was not too fast.  A few of the riders were on the defense, I guess, so nothing was able to get very far.  There was a hot spot bonus at the mid-way point of this 60-minute race, which of course was what a number of riders were waiting for.  The bonuses ended up going to riders who had been in the RR break, so basically Mark was safe, but the sprint had strung things out considerably.  As the front group started to come back together I started telling them to keep the pace rolling because a few riders were off the back.  That effort got the front group down to 7 or 8 riders.  As we got closer to the final laps the tension increased and there were a couple of brief attacks that resulted in a little slow-down at the start of the last lap.  Then things started to bunch up on the back side a bit.  I was contemplating jumping just before the last turn that leads into the long downhill about 500m before the finish, but just as I got to the decision point for that Mark did exactly what I'd been thinking, attacking hard just to my right.  I was already to the right of most of the riders, although three or four were ahead of me to the left.  As soon as Mark jumped I soft-pedaled so that the rider to my left couldn't go with him.  The ones ahead of me, however, did react, although they were forced to kind of go the long way around the turn. I, of course, was immediately gapped as everyone hammered down the downhill at 38 mph.  I was absolutely going as hard as I could but wasn't making up much ground.  Mark got passed just before the finish and I rolled across in 6th place.  Surprisingly, that moved me up to 7th on GC.

So I came back home feeling a mixture of relief and frustration.  It hadn't been too bad of a race for me, and was in fact considerably better than I'd been expecting earlier in the week.  Even so, missing that break in the road race was really frustrating since I knew it was partly my own fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was also feeling kind of disappointed with the fact that I just didn't have any power in my legs for the sprints.  Sometimes, even though you fully expect things to go a certain way you're still a little disappointed when they actually do.

Our women's team was missing one of its riders because of an injury earlier in the week, and it looked like they had a pretty good race.  Mignon was only able to pull out a 10th place in the road race, which was a little surprising, but on the other hand Sherri hung in there for the criterium, which was her first.  Alison had a small crash in the road race and headed home after that, so they were really two riders short for the weekend.