|
CHAMPIONSHIP
SEASON
IL DISTRICT ROAD RACE CHAMPIONSHIP The race field was a 30+/40+ combined group. I'm not sure I like this. In addition to the normal race team dynamics, you have 30+ riders bridging to breaks of 40+ riders and animating the field to chase and vise versa. It was confusing with in some cases 30+ riders attempting to bridge to 40+ team mates who were in a break. But, we are in IL not CA so our combined field of masters only totaled less than 60 riders. I do not fault the promoter for combining the fields. At the gun Sparkie jumped off with the early attack, which went from 100 meters into the 51 mile race. He was joined by one more rider and the three of them maintained a gap of up to one minute for the first 20 miles of the race. This was good because it took the pressure off of our team and allowed us to follow wheels. At the end of the first lap, the Proctor boys assembled at the front and drilled the pace to reel in the break. Stone Pony rolled to the front to launch an attack just as the group was caught. Several counters and chases ensued. I was active on this lap but none of my attempts to get a break going were unsuccessful. I was feeling very strong and was able to get separation off the front with other strong riders, but nothing worked. This was curious. I was having difficulty figuring out why but I found photographic evidence, thanks to John Bennett who has a great cycling gallery on smugmug.com. Please review the following two photos.
Some riders are strong and some riders and smart. Some riders, like Stone Pony are both strong and smart. Over the past two seasons the man in the yellow hat has been growing progressively stronger. While he is growing stronger, he is not becoming any smarter. Many seasoned racers have told me The Man in The Yellow Hat is one of the dumbest racers they know. I will leave that up to their discretion but this is what the photographs and personal experience with The Man in The Yellow Hat yield. The Man in The Yellow Hat will see a break up the road that he wants to be in. He will attack the field to get to that break and won't stop until he contacts the break. However, lacking sufficient acceleration to separate himself from the field and bridge to a break solo, he mostly succeeds in pulling the field to the break he is chasing. Much to his surprise and chagrin, he finds the break he was bridging to no longer exists when he gets to it because he has 50 riders on his wheel; which could have been easily observed had he simply bothered to look under his arm while he had his head down burying himself to ride into the break. I am personally sympathetic to this affliction, as I once suffered from it myself. So, largely due to the efforts of The Man in The Yellow Hat, the race stayed together through lap two. At the beginning of lap three, I tried to get away again, joined by Doughty and ZsMACK among others. On my last try, KronsMACK and some of the lickspittlesMACKs snared me. Then, at just the right time, while the sMACKs were recovering from the chase, Stone Pony launched and got away with a clad in generic white. The man in white had zinc oxide slathered on his face, had no handlebar tape and was wearing handball goggles - In other words, a complete Hubbard. As Stone Pony rolled away with the unknown Hubbard, the field decided to relax because surely, that was not a break to chase. The strength of Stone Pony is well known, but who was the Hubbard? As it turns out, the Hubbard is the Missouri state time trial champion, which explains the appearance. Time trailers as we all know are a special breed of strange. More on this later.
THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER The next day, the criterium in downtown Peoria was a combined 30+/40+ field, which once again resulted in 30+ riders chasing 40+ riders from the same team and vise versa. The race stayed together for the first 25 minutes of the 35 minute crit. Allow me to digress as I ask a rhetorical question…Is a 35 minute criterium a worthy race distance in which to decide a state championship event? No break attempts were successful for more than a lap or two until roughly 10 minutes remained to be raced. The race was aggressive and the net effect of so many riders chasing breaks is that the field essentially was welded together by riders doggedly pursuing other riders off the front, team mates or not. I had just been covered by a few of the several sMACKs (16 of them in total) assigned to my wheel when Stone Pony once again seized the opportunity to pounce while the sMACKs were recovering from chasing me. He got away with a 7 rider group that as it turned out was largely made up of non IL 30+ riders. Of the eventual 8 riders, Only HeadsMACK represented the Red and Electric Blue. Stone Pony reported after the race that HeadsMACK did not take a pull and was roundly chided by the other riders in the break until he swore he would not contest the finish. Which was a shame because his team mates were doing their best to 'block like hell' to protect the break up the road which their leader had sworn not to challenge for the win. The 40+ race finished with Stone crossing the line 2nd behind a 30+ rider from Missouri. HeadsMACK rolled in at the back of the break for silver and KronsMACK was the first IL 40+ rider in the bunch gallop behind the break. ZsMACK made a strong last lap attack to win the 30+ state title.
I have been told that my writing is becoming more and more rants against Masters racers. As a Masters racer, I have been told that this borders on self loathing. So, I am changing my tone. Rather than devoting whole contributions to lambasting and criticizing masters and the way they race, I have decided to open a new section in the (Feed)Zone. This new section will be as regular a feature as warranted. I will point out some of the completely foolish things I observe grown men who should know better doing while operating in a testosterone fueled, hypoxia addled fog while racing their bikes. I will name names when I can, otherwise I will attempt identification by team name or bicycle brand. Here goes…. OVER THE LINE! The IL District Road Race was operated under a race long centerline rule. This is a rule with which we are all familiar. Any rider advancing his position to the left of the centerline is to be relegated or disqualified. This rule is in place for rider safety, not to limit mobility. There exists implied understanding that oncoming traffic travels to the left side of the centerline on a two lane highway. Earlier in the day, a young woman was killed when an accident forced her across the line into oncoming traffic. It was a horrific confluence of circumstances and timing. Despite this, a rider over the age of 40 (he was wearing a yellow bib number) on the Velo Force cycling team voluntarily chose to cross into the lane of on coming traffic to launch an attack against the combined 30+/40+ field with roughly 4 miles remaining in the race. Big deal you say, it happens all the time. Ahhh, but kids, this presumably mature adult over the age of 40 gainfully enough employed to provide the means to purchase an expensive bicycle and a vehicle large enough to travel with that expensive bicycle made his attack going UPHILL in a section where any oncoming traffic was hidden by the terrain! Eerily, the attack was within meters of where the previous fatal accident occurred. No more need be said. NATZ Perhaps I should file the following under the Masters Doing Stoopid Things section. Below are the top twenty positions from the Masters National Time Trial Championships as cut and pasted from cyclingnews.com. I will note that the course was originally scheduled to be 30k and was actually 24k, per the circumstance beyond USA Cycling's control.
Below is an email I received from my brother citing a rocket scientist- literal not figurative - with whom he rides. If you open the link in the e mail, you will find an exhaustive list of which tires are fast and which tires are slow. This list was compiled through extensive research done in controlled laboratory environments by very learned men.
Thurlow, if you're reading this, please launder and mail the jersey to me, because clearly, according to science, I should have beaten you; I was just riding the wrong tires. Unless of course you were using tires that are slower than the tires I was using; or tires that are theoretically costing you less than 1.5 seconds per kilometer than the fastest tires on the list, which is the time loss I experienced, or at least not faster than the mid range tire in this study (Dugast Speed Silk (22) Tubular), in which case, you may keep the jersey as you were subject to the same or greater rolling resistance deficiencies that I was. You can get my address from Truesport. If you have questions or would like to otherwise dispute the validity of my claim on the jersey, please contact my brother or the esteemed TnA. You can find them on the Thursday a.m. ride in Santa Barbara, CA. They both ride really nice bikes with fast tires. Anyway, by being a non believer of science - a Luddite, a flat earther, a global warming skeptic, I managed only a silver medal in the TT.
The TT course, as it turns out was not as bad as I had previously imagined. In my last post, I had criticized USA Cycling for not being able to come up with a better alternative. But if this was the best they could do, they did manage to make the best of a bad situation. Essentially the course was a two lane highway with a well paved shoulder divided into four lanes by orange cones. The start took riders out onto an entrance ramp with a turn around and out onto the main part of the course down the right shoulder of highway 219. The first turn around was marked by about a billion orange cones, which was confusing as I wasn't sure which cone I was supposed to turn around, so I blew through them all and actually made my turn around about 20 feet past the real turn point. The next section was about 5k long to the next return point then back up to the next turn point before finally hitting the 6k or so finishing stretch opposite the first lane. Essentially it was like riding on the 4 fingers of your hand, or for those of you in Kentucky with 6 fingers, 4 of the 5 fingers. The terrain was either up a 3-4% grade or down that same grade for 5k to 6k stretches. The start was downhill, then up to the turnaround and the finish was all uphill for the final kilometer. If you're into stats, my max speed was 38mph and my average speed was 29mph.
THE ROAD RACE Climbing, steep, technical, tough, fast descents with potential thunderstorms. I likely won't do well. I'll let you know how it goes next time. I've run out of room.
|
