Weekend at Home

Small Saturday Giro Group

With a bit of a lull in the local racing calendar, I spent a lot of time at home this weekend. Mostly, I was wishing I was at a race somewhere else. For me, the one thing that consistently gets me in shape is a steady diet of weekend races, and even though I'd raced just the weekend before, it felt like it was ages ago. So once the Friday deluge and associated flooding abated, I was more than ready for some weekend training rides. A rider from Bermuda was meeting me at 6 am Saturday to borrow a bike for the Giro, so at least that was something to break up the routine. Unfortunately, it was also the weekend of the Alabama Cycling Classic, aka Sunny King weekend, so a number of local riders were over in Alabama. Some would be kicking ass, but for others it would be mostly a learning experience. Regardless, it was going to take a few of the regular Giro riders out of the mix.  That, however, wasn't the biggest problem for the Saturday Giro Ride. The real problem was the sudden drop in temperature and corresponding increase in wind speed. We had had a couple of weeks of nice spring-like weather, but the cold front that had brought all of the rain had also dropped the temperature. I went out Saturday morning wearing two jerseys and arm-warmers, and was still a little chilly as we rode straight into the 20 mph north wind. I knew a lot of riders were going to skip the Giro because of that. Indeed, we rolled out from Starbucks with maybe a dozen riders. Sarah, the visiting rider, had been with her team in Greenville but had shipped all of her riding stuff back with the team in order to make a quick visit to New Orleans. Luckily, she was able to fit my old Orbea pretty well, and her 38.5 feet weren't too small for my old size 40 shoes. The only thing she was really missing were shorts. She ended up riding the 50+ miles in, basically, gym shorts.

Lance won the Jr. 15-16 race

Saturday's Giro was really a strange one. Aside from the freakishly low turnout and gusting north wind that threatened to blow me right off of the Seabrook bridge, there were other complications. When we turned off of Hayne onto Paris Road and caught the tailwind the pace ramped up dramatically and Sarah was caught off-guard. Going over the I-10 overpass I looked around and saw her off the back, so I eased up to wait for her and to make sure she didn't get killed crossing over the two lanes of interstate traffic on I-610. Once I picked her up we had a really nice steady pace down the service road and Chef Highway. Of course I was expecting to make a U-turn a mile or so before Venetian Isles to pick up the group on its way back. We were only about halfway out, however, when I saw a small group coming toward us and figured it was the 5:45 group. Then, as they went by, I looked over and saw Matt and some of the other guys from our group. They had turned around early. We made a quick u-turn but it was really too late to catch them. David and another rider who had apparently turned around too late caught up to us right away, so at least we had a little group. We took the Bullard short-cut and eventually met back up with the group on Hayne where I discovered that a couple of people, including Taco, had continued on to Venetian Isles.

Palmer Racing's first legit Pro/1 race as
an official Domestic Elite Team 

Anyway, it was a pretty good ride but I was short about ten miles by the time I got home. I spent a lot of time that afternoon and evening watching the live video from the Sunny King criteriums, and was impressed with Lance Abshire who won his 15-16 junior crit and then took 5th in the Cat. 3 criterium that was won by Bryan Mutell. The Cat. 2 crit was interesting but Dustin was stuck at the back basically the whole time. The Pro/1 criterium was pretty interesting. I could occasionally make out a couple of the Palmer guys in the huge pack. A 3-rider break was off the front for a long time until one of them attacked and went off solo. It was a noble effort but he got swallowed up by the pack just a couple of corners before the finish on the last lap thanks to the UHC riders who went to the front for probably ten laps and towed the entire field up to him. After that questionable tactic, the best they did was, I think, 5th.

Sunday's Giro was chilly but otherwise totally different from Saturday's. The turnout was back to normal and the pace was pretty good, so coming home from that one I felt like I'd gotten a good workout. I ended up spending hours in front of the computer later in the day watching the Women's and Men's road races from Alabama. I was mostly impressed with Debbie Milne who made the break in the women's race and ended up 6th. At 46, she was probably twenty years older than most of the other riders in the break. The Men's race turned out to be kind of boring as the Citadel riders really controlled things and most of the coverage was just showing the small breakaway trading pulls. They finished a couple of minutes ahead of what was left of the main pack. The Palmer guys did OK with Andrew in 36th and Ed in 40th, but still something like eight minutes back.