South Shore Cyclery Classic 7/14/11

Yesterday I raced in my first Superweek race of the year. I had planned to start my Superweek Stint at the Geneva Grand Prix in Geneva, IL on 7/9/11. However, as luck would have it I was severely undertrained during June and then managed to strain my knee as I began to ramp up my training miles a couple weeks before the Geneva race. Bummer, eh?

That meant that yesterday's race in the South Shore Cyclery Classic was my first race since April. That's a long stint of too little riding and too little training, especially since this is supposed to be my summer of freedom before starting M2 year next year at MCW. I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Anyhow, back to racing. I was happy to be back and ready to ride after dealing with a couple weeks of knee pain, but knew that I wasn't about to be competing for the podium. This is an important thing to figure out as close to the beginning of the race as possible. Sometimes it takes a few laps to know, but I knew it before I lined up so I set my goals accordingly. There were no primes to try for so I decided that I would try to instigate a breakaway close to the finish. I didn't entirely expect to be able to stay with a breakaway given my lack of miles in the past month but I figured it would be a good test and it would be more interesting than just sitting in the pack and going for a glorified group ride.

As I lined up, I met Ben Stengel of Team Emery's Third Coast Lifecyclists. I've read his race reports a few times while he was riding at ToAD and thought he'd be a good fella to try and align myself with after reading about his attacking style. We set out for 18 laps (19.06 miles) and after about 5 laps I found myself talking with him towards the back of the field discussing an opportune moment to make a break. He had already conferred with a few other riders and told me they were considering an attempt around 5 or 6 laps to go. I thought that sounded good and offered to help get away with them even if I couldn't stick it out all the way to the finish.

6 laps to go as we approached the start/finish line and the pace had just slowed after a surge had been brought back. I told Ben as we passed the line that if the pace was still a little sluggish on the back side of our 1 mile lap that I would hit out hard from the group to try and start a break.

That's exactly what I did, and I did it with all I had. I took off with a full bore sprint to corner #3 on the course. I glanced back and saw the whole pack spreading out across the road as they all sprinted in pursuit. I still had a gap as I made my way to corner #4 and one rider from MACK Racing bridged to me as we were coming out of the corner into the finishing straight. He took a pull and a third rider joined us crossing the start finish line. We weren't the most organized yet and I tried to figure out how to slot back into the line and recover a little bit. We rounded corner #1 and I found myself fighting to grab the wheel of a rider from Flatlandia cycling team. By the time we got back around and out of corner #2 I was back on the front and running out of steam. I pulled off and tried to hold my speed as I now had 3 breakaway compatriots, but I had been redlining for the whole lap and in the wind for about 75%. I decided to drop back to the pack, but as they came charging through in pursuit of the break I was too gassed to hang on there as well. That meant it was 4.5 laps of trying to make it to the Finish Line solo.

I kept my pace above 21 mph for most of my solo trip to the line, but never made any gains on the pack. In the end, the three other breakaway riders stayed away for the win with Tristan from MACK Racing taking it at the line while the other two rounded out the podium. I finished dead last. Yep, dead last. However, I've never had so much fun losing in my entire life. It was great. A few more training miles and I could have stayed with that breakaway (okay maybe double the training miles, but still...).

On the bright side I was able to break away from a hard charging pack and hold out around 30 MPH for almost half a mile before being joined by any other riders. AND I set a new Max HR for myself... 203! Crazy, eh?

In hindsight there were only 19 of us who finished so it might have been a better idea to stay in the pack since the prize money paid out to the top 15 finishers...but what fun would that have been? Oh well. That's bike racing!