A race report from earlier this year that did not get posted previously.
This weekend (March 17/18) was of course the Philly Phlyer extravaganza. I wound up doing the full slate: The open TTT and the 3/4 circuit and crit. In each I pretty much just rolled in at the back of the main group: 8/17 in the TTT, 44/90 in the circuit, and 23/52 in the crit.
On the one hand that’s somewhat ho-hum. On the other, I double checked my training log this morning and have definitively not been working out since Labor Day, so those are much better outcomes than I could have reasonably asked for. Even better, it’s the middle of March and I’ve already done more road races than all of last year.
Most importantly though was that the weekend went amazingly. Charles Rumford (Drexel/QCW) and Glenn Eck (Temple) did a fantastic job arranging the venues, coordinating everyone, all the endless thankless tasks that go into promoting not just a race, but three great and affordable races right downtown. You really could not have asked for a more smoothly run weekend of racing.
TTT
Tim, Brett H, Chat, Blake, Ryan Shank, and I all signed up for the TTT. Yes, it’s a 4-person TTT, but Drexel Cycling does not respect your lamestream rules and regulations. We’ve been talking about this for months now but, per tradition, not actually preparing, so I was surprised by how smooth it went. Fortunately we beat the Peanut Butter Human Zoom monkey girls, to whom we’d been talking a lot of smack, thus preserving our manhood, albeit just barely. Physical near catastrophe was also just barely averted several times as Houser attempted to get fancy with the handoffs. Strategically, Tim’s harder, longer pulls eventually lead to him taking the final one and I was able to pip him at the line for the critical intra-team victory.
Circuit
Having not been riding, I wasn’t planning on doing the circuit race despite yet more smack talk. In the end though the sun was shining, the temperatures way up, and I couldn’t resist that beautiful course.
My only real disappointment was that, despite all that smack talk, I was hoping to help protect Victoria Hanks (PBCO/HZ). She’s probably stronger than me, but I think male/female power-to-weight imbalances make that course tough for women in men’s fields, and I expected her to struggle a bit in the endgame climbs. In the event though, I was in too defensive a posture myself to process the situation and respond appropriately when she did finally slip back (and wound up coming in just behind the main field). It’s a testament to what a mental game cycling is and how much discipline real strategy takes that I fully anticipated exactly what happened, saw it happening, had a plan for that circumstance, had reserves I would have happily burned to execute that plan, but completely blew it simply by being too much on the bubble myself to be thinking strategically and process the situation.
One thing I did do well was effectively employ all of my different muscles, forms, and cross-training. Not having been working out, I really don’t have any strength right now, but my cardio is still solid. Also having a decently stable and efficient high cadence spin, the first couple times up Ford Rd I just sat and spun in a very easy gear, burning my cardio rather than my strength. The third lap that wasn’t fast enough and I needed more speed, but leveraged all my running to stand the whole climb and really basically run up the climb at a pretty high standing cadence. Together that meant it wasn’t until the final climb (keeping in mind between the TTT and Intro races I’d already done 4 laps before the start of the race) that I had to really dig into my limited cycling strength reserves to ride up in a somewhat more traditional mix of seated and standing hard digging to stay in over the last hump. This is one of the ways a lot of cross-training among road, MTB, and running, as well as explicitly working on different styles of riding, has really helped me, giving me many different options and reserves.
Crit
I was especially not planning on doing the crit, instead figuring on announcing and foregoing all the many risks of a pretty choppy course. Ironically, what put me over the top to jump in was that Tony Eberhardt, coach of the UNH team whom I like a lot, said he was going to do it. He wound up breaking a clavicle on a fluke pothole crash.
One thing I did well here was to ride my own race and not panic. Given the many surface challenges of the course and that I’m not at the moment strong enough physically or mentally to fight for front pack positioning or a win anyway, I made a pretty conscious decision to tailgate more loosely than is best and give people lots of room in the two particularly risky corners. This risked wasting fair amounts of energy having to catch up each time. However, I would have space to avoid the many anticipated crashes. The only reason this would work was because I looked at the course and figured: (1) If I fell behind I’d be able to make up ground comparatively easily on the two uphill stretches; (2) More importantly: They were hard corners. The group would slow down a lot, as it did. By hanging loose in the approaches and following my own curve, I gave myself space to avoid crashes, and ultimately didn’t expend that much extra energy because I was smoothing over the hard rubberbanding of the group. In the end I really only had to dig hard once to reattach after a clump ahead of me dropped on a prime lap, and pretty easily hung in there for the end.
