I’m a flat-lander. I’ve never lived anywhere with anything other than minor elevation changes. I can go out right now and ride 100 mile with 150′ of “climbing”. No joke. So, I was quite nervous as I drove west to Charlottesville from the coast. By the time I was there nothing seemed flat. Everything was up and down. Those of you who live in the “real” mountains would have got a good chuckle out of it, and told me to go jump in a lake, but I wondered what I was getting myself into. Did I have the right gearing? Should I have put a compact crank on? Based on the advice of people who know the course far better than I, I went with a 12-27 cassette and stuck with my standard crank.
Course was a ~10 mile loop with ~1200′ish feet of climbing per lap. We Cat 5s did 3 laps. We lined up at the staging area and rolled out to the start line 3 miles away. Once we got there we stopped and waited 30 seconds for the start. I neglected to reset my computer… Doh. Oh well, not the end of the world. Off we rolled and within the first mile were headed upward. I went up, some people started sliding back already. That didn’t take long.
Of course what goes up, must also come down. The one definitive thing I learned yesterday is that I’m no descender, at least not in a group of other Cat 5 riders who feel the need to get on their brakes once we edged into the mid 40s. Because of this I hung out off the back of the pack (which got progressively smaller with each lap), allowing my momentum to carry me back into the group at the bottom of the descent. If they got a little gap on me, I was able to close it on the next climb. It turned out that the climbs weren’t too big of a deal. Some people seemed to suffer with them as I chugged my way up, never having to shift off my big ring. Some had issues dropping their chain as they tried to shift big to small mid way up the climb. This caused a few disruptions in the pack but I managed to avoid any issues with them. Somewhere during the 2nd lap someone washed out in a corner and I had to take a brief off road excursion and had to chase back on a little bit, but it wasn’t a big deal.
Going into the 3rd lap I was thinking about how well behaved pretty much everyone was. No big unexpected deviations from lines, reasonable pace most of the time. Something changed the 3rd time around. Maybe half was through the final lap, it looked like there was a move at the front. When that happened, it seemed that someone panicked and caused some issues. Someone (at least one) went down, I had to lean on someone pretty hard to keep from being pushed off the road into the woods (lesson learned from being pushed into a big cone during a crit). And then we had to chase the couple of guys who tried to break off the front. That didn’t last long and the front group was back together.
I was looking to try and go 2.5 – 2 miles from the finish. Someone had other plans. I’d moved up in the group by this point, to watch for anyone else who had similar plans to mine. Something happened with about 2.5 miles to go and all of a sudden someone was sideways and going down. No idea what happened. This definitely brought down a few people, but just as this was happening the guys up front had decided to attack. I avoided the tangle of bikes and chased on to what was now the lead group. Looks like there were 8 guys, and 2 more came with me. We bridged the small gap, but I’d burned a lot doing it.
I was sitting 4th or 5th wheel at one point, but I didn’t have anything left to stand and sprint. At this point, in my 2nd road race, I was just happy to be in the lead group. We had a gap, and I knew I wasn’t going to finish any worse than 11th. Maybe I could have moved up a place or 2 for top 10, but I was pretty toasted from the chase.
I’ll certainly take that result.
