Friday night was my birthday (and the day before that Alex’s), so we went out to dinner with my bro and his girl. For about 4 hours (1st in the bar, then 3 hours eating tiny bits of food off plates and guzzling wine). It was a blast…unfortunate for my race, a little TOO much of a blast, because I woke up with a splitting headache and a serious desire to go back to bed. Thankfully the cat 4 race wasn’t until the afternoon, so I ate something then went back to bed, then ate some more and went back to bed again…what a great morning! I also drank a billion glasses of water, attempting to flush everything out of my system.
The forecast called for thunderstorms, but it was in the mid-70s, 80s and sunny when I got there; clouds were slowly rolling in, but only threatened with a few slight sprinkles here and there. I prerode the first 4 miles and back with some team mates, I was feeling really good and despite still having a headache. There ended up being about 20 people in my category, not too shabby. The course was mostly rolling with a few longer climbs in the middle and a loooooong decent, then a flat, then an evil climb to the finish. We did 2 laps, so we had a chance to spec out the course.
I made all kinds of plans the first lap through, where I wold attack, where I should be towards the front, yadda yadda…and then on that killer climb at the finish line, a couple women started pulling away. I saw it happening, and I was trapped to the white line by a long line of people. 2 of them were from a team in Washington state who had a team mate getting away, it was obvious they were blocking, so I yelled at the girl behind them to go around. She obligingly did, so I got out of the line and started the chase.
We were just hammering like mad on the rollers to catch the group of three, unfortunately 2 of the people in the 7-person chase were on that team, so they kept slowing down and interrupting our rhythm. I wanted to get up there and pull like crazy, but the rollers just killed me. I knew if I took too many strong pulls I would die, and no one seemed willing to work together enough to put together a really fast and efficient pace line. Perhaps a few women didn’t know how to ride a rotating pace line, I don’t know.
We went fast at times, slow at others, but I knew we were going too slow to catch them, given the riders who were in the lead. I figured to myself “well, top 10 at least”. When we hit the final hill, a few of them sprinted to the finsh for 4th place, I just kept pedaling, managed to pass 2 people for an 8th place finish, but MAN was that a tough race. Very fast–20mph average which is fast for the 4’s. It was cool to see a group get away, as that has never managed to be successful in all the races I’ve been in. In this case, they had a couple things working for them: I knew 2 of the riders were super strong, and especially strong in time trials. One had recently completed an Ironman, the other, Beth from Veloce, is crazy strong, certainly beats my ass on a regular basis. I didn’t know anything about the Washington state woman, but given her team’s good tactics (helped that they had the only strong team showing there), I figured she would be a strong rider. That combined with her team’s interrupting-ness and our exhaustion, it played out perfectly.
So what’s the take home here? Be stronger and smarter then everyone else, and have team mates who will work with you. Right.
