Race day.

My foray into the road racing scene began on Sunday morning.  After years of training on the road in one capacity or another (usually preparing for mountain bike race-season), I finally got myself to the start line for a legit road race.

My first impression?  I had more fun in my first small town crit than I’ve had in 90% of the mountain races I’ve done (big and small) over the past few years.  That being said, its really really hard to compare the two styles since they are just so different.  Its also pretty hard to top 12/24hr mtn races where you have a team format….any race where you can hang out and drink beer during the race, well that’s just unbeatable.

I had gone out on a limb registering for a race located 3.5 hours from Arlington with a 9am start, so Oksana and I decided to just make a weekend of it so I could avoid the ridiculously early drive on Sunday morning.  Instead we drove down to Virginia beach on Saturday morning, did the “walk on the beach” thing despite the abnormally low temperatures, and basically just hung out all day.  We had some pretty solid seafood at a little grill on the beach Saturday night and then got to bed early in a hotel just 3 miles from the course in Suffolk, VA.  I couldn’t help but feel slightly ridiculous for staying in a hotel for a Cat 5 crit…..but whatever.

I’d like to say that I wasn’t really that nervous, but I woke up before the alarm went off at 6:30 and had some serious butterflies going on.  I suppose if I had a more casual approach to the race and didn’t expect to be at least a little bit competitive, I would have been able to relax.  But for whatever reason, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself and didn’t enjoy my continental breakfast at all.

There were about 30 racers lining up at 9am, and it felt like a good number for how small the course was (about 1/2 mile).  The race was only 45 minutes long, so it felt like the time was flying by.  I had read so many posts on various forums about proper strategy and how to properly conserve energy and so forth, but despite all the info floating around in my head….I somehow found a way to justify chasing down several breakaways even though they were very early on and posted virtually no threat (no primes) on the small flat course.  I was flying around the course with my face in the wind at 28mph and my heart rate absolutely jacked.   Yeah, not so smart.  After the second time sprinting out from the pack and making a spectacle of myself, I decided to play it cool and just hang back.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well the pack was navigating the corners.   Even though the course was small, and there wasn’t much room to setup for the corners, the yo-yo effect was pretty minimal, even when I found myself toward the back.  Most times I looked down at my computer, I was seeing mid 20s - even in the corners - so the pace was decent.

Here are a couple race shots:

The above is a stretch just after the finish where it would thin out a bit before the sharpest turn.

Notice the yellow dudes, they were on one of the teams that had 3-4 guys in the race, among several teams.  Green guy is one of the 5-6 “fat frogs” racers (I gotta say I have to question the seat pack thing in a race, let alone a crit….wtf????)

Here’s another pic of me again, trying to look cool.

So, I watched the laps tick down, and when we were at 4, then 3, then 2, I started to move up behind one of the stronger guys paired up with one of his teammates.

We had already gone around damn near 40 times, so I had the turns really dialed by the time the last few laps started ticking down.  I knew that with the minimal distance between the finish line and the last corner, it was gonna be key to be one of the first through that last turn.

That thinking was my undoing.

Before that last corner, I sprinted around the “Fat Frogs” riders (2 teammates I was drafting on the last lap) and went into the final turn in the lead.  I had this really sweet surge of confidence that came about 11 seconds too soon.  I actually thought to myself “holy shit, I have this thing locked up,” “no way they can carry the same kind of speed I just did through that corner”.

I was wrong.

Here I am about 20 meters from the finish line, you can see the fat frogs guy passing me on my left (I had some pretty shoddy sprint form as well)

I ended up taking 4th.  The fact that 3 guys on local teams caught me at the line was no coincidence.  I both, A) laid off the gas in my moment of self glory and B) had no chance of out sprinting the #2 fat frog that probably had 1/2 the distance in the wind that I did.

Anyway, I learned some pretty huge lessons, and have never been more excited for the next race (this Saturday in Lancaster, PA).  Race report #2 to follow soon thereafter.

So a shit-load of stuff to catch up on.  It turns out that living life can get in the way of blogging.  I’ve pretty much let this baby go for a couple weeks now, so I’ll start by doing a 9 ride post to bring my day to day rides up to date, and then a follow-up post to re-cap Sunday’s race.

The last two weeks were a hodge-podge of rides of varying intensity (mostly pretty chill).  The last posted ride finished on a pretty bummer vibe (something I tried not to dwell on at the time, since its becoming a bit of a dead horse).  The same old story - I was feeling my burned out with my IT band bothering me just as it had in early January, and it definitely got me going on a paranoid streak again.  I knew I had a road race scheduled for the end of March (coming up next weekend), so I decided to just focus on logging some laid back road miles (with a laid-back mtn ride and some light interval work mixed in), and skip the longish +3hr mountain rides.

Here’s a breakdown of the last few rides as succintly as I can recall them:
Rides 78-82 were almost all road rides at night after work, riding the same worn out loop into DC, around Hains Point and up through Georgetown.
Ride 83 “the Dogfish ride”.  This was a great Friday afternoon group trail ride out in Great Falls, that served as a warmup for a long night filled with many pints of 60 minute.  Here’s a pic that gives one a sense of how the night panned out:

feel free to submit a caption…

Rides 84-86 were prepatory rides for my race this past Sunday, blah blah blah….

onto the next post.

Since I didn’t get enough punishment on Saturday, I was bound determined to get in another ride on the Walt Sunday afternoon come hell or high water.  The weather threw a kink into my plans for a locally sourced ride #77, providing lots of precipitation overnight and even some mild snow here in Arlington (a rarity) which obviously thrashed the sensitive over trafficked nearby parks.  So the backup plan for inclement weather was some kind of loop out in GWNF where relatively few folks venture out to ride, and where you can almost always bet that the trail will do more damage to you than you will ever do to it (at least on the ridges anyway).

Sunday turned out to be a perfect example of why you should often ignore the voice of reason that chimes in with sentiments like: “its gonna be cold and wet out there,” “you’re gonna be all by yourself,” “it’d be a lot easier to just watch some episodes of the Wire on demand this afternoon,” etc.  I pretty much heard all those things, and the voice got even louder when I found out that nobody was on board with my plan and I’d be going solo or not at all.

Man was it worth it though.  I got a really late start and had to abort my plan B to ride out at Wolf Gap and instead settle for plan C at the more familiar Elizabeth Furnace area.  Being bored with the normal EF loop, I decided to go with the “figure eight of hate” that Ian and I had taken a liking to last year.   The ride was top-notch and even more entertaining than normal.  I had a great time and thanked myself for not listening to the siren call of the couch.

I snapped a few trail pictures below, so you can see how much more adventurous the conditions were than the normal summer route presents.  The ridge was absolutely demanding as hell.  Some parts were nice and fluffy, where I found myself riding the powdery snow and leaves, but other parts were an icy rocky pain in the ass.  At times I felt like a rockstar clearing stuff I had no business clearing, but other times I felt incredibly humbled by the most modest of snow cover - forced to dismount on cake technical sections.  The extra vertical involved in climbing up to Woodstock tower didn’t help my energy levels while making my way back on the icy ridge either.

As you can see below, some of the trail was prime.  Winter or not, the trails felt great.  A few soft spots on the fireroads, but all in all, a great loop considering the precipitation the days prior.

I substituted the $300 Sidi insoles (on display the day before) for a pair of $2 chemical packs that I remembered were in my glove-box, placed there years ago as a standard component to my upstate NY winter riding kit.  They were a sweet hedge against the pain of a booty-less ride.

So after 3 hours of slogging around GWNF, I was thoroughly beat up, and incredibly satisfied with my new favorite bike.  Ok, thats the last gratuitous Walt Works praise I’ll work in for awhile.

Coming up this week: more snow rides!

Ok, a slightly longer post to bring things up to date.

Instead of recapping a largely non-bike-related vacation on here, I’ll simply offer up a couple bike relevant things I noticed over in Spain.  First of all, Madrid appeared to be an extremely non-bike-friendly European city (at least on the surface anyway).  I’ve often assumed that all European cities were by default more bike-friendly than comparable U.S. cities, but Madrid was surprisingly pedestrian/auto-centric.  It seemed like there were fast moving roads for cars, and then lots and lots of crowded pedestrian zones, but nothing in-between that lead me to believe that Madrid would be a good city to get around via bike.  This is also evident in the extremely small number of cyclists observed.  I’m not really exaggerating when I say that I probably could have counted the number of cyclists I saw on just a couple hands.  Keep in mind, this is coming from somebody who scrutinizes every rider he glances at - so I’m not exaggerating when I saw that there were hardly any cyclists to be seen.  Granted, it was February, but it was nonetheless 50-60 degrees almost every day we were there…

Barcelona on the other hand, seemed to be a bit more bike-oriented.  They had the same bike-rental setup that DC instituted last year (only they actually use theirs).

Here’s a shot of one of their racks.  They look almost exactly like those here in DC.

As most folks know, the downside to any vacation is the return to normalcy (i.e. not being able to guzzle wine on a daily basis).  That being said, this past week was a good transition from vacation time back to the real world - made possible with the help of multiple booze fueled group rides.  Hooray!

Take for example the first ride back (Ride #74), which was my second outing on the Walt and my 3rd mtb ride in as many months.  Ironically it was a night ride on the very same trails that my last Surly ride took place on - out in Great Falls near the Maguire house (also the site of multiple post-ride Dogfish Head pints).   I bet we barely rode an hour before downing three times as many alcohol calories than we burned on the ride - nice.

Then there was ride 76 (ride 75 was a boring road ride where I struggled with the wind on Friday night) which involved a huge group of us meeting out at Gambril on Saturday morning.  The ride would be my first real test of the new Walt Works build.  The first couple rides were on really easy terrain with few technical challenges, but Saturday was a wake up call.  The bike was simply awesome.  I didn’t feel anywhere close to as beat up as I did with the Surly.  The ride quality was far tighter, and simply more compliant than the Karate Monkey could ever dream of being.  I wish I could say that I was tearing it up out there on the new rig hammering up the hills, but in reality my lungs were burning pretty bad 90% of the way.  Despite the off-setting pleasure of riding a new bike, my body took about 50 minutes to warm up and feel reasonably fit.  Being that we only rode for a little more than an hour, it was far too late to really enjoy it 100%.  It was however, a great jolt back into the game.  I finished the ride knowing that I’d be back out there on a daily basis riding hard again….its just too fun not to.  It was exactly what I needed to stoke the fire.

All that fire stoking necessitated some refreshment….and lacking a home bar serving up fresh DFH, our comrade Johnny B was kind enough to have some bottles of 90 minute on hand for some parking lot refueling.  Here’s a shot of CJ and Jimmy (Jimmy is the one with the most pimped-out 29er singlespeed you’ll ever see (custom Ti Blacksheep w/ I9 wheels, vintage Cook cranks, etc.)….mounted on the back of his TT no less).  You obviously can’t tell in the pic, but Jimmy was also pimped out with the Sidi Toaster insoles for our ride.  Hot Damn!