So Saturday was my first road race and my goals for this race were to be safe, not finish last, and to learn as much as possible. In that respect, it was a complete success. I didn't crash, I finish 14th in my classification out of 44 riders, and I learned a boat load about racing on the road.
It was a cold morning. It started by leaving the house by 6 a.m. and driving the hour and 20 minutes to the marina on the island. I had some time to prepare before we lined up for the race so I pinned my number on in the car and took my time warming up with the heater on but in retrospect I should have taken my bike out to warm up on the road a bit, but it was so cold and I was nervous about missing my start time so I just stayed in my car. As we lined up to start everybody started shivering so bad that it was hard to listen to the start officials giving final instructions. I was thinking that I was going to wear myself out just by the violent shaking but finally we started and we headed west across the causeway away from the island with a heavy cross wind. As soon as we got going I forgot all about the cold and just thought about the race. Though it stayed cold most of the morning it never bothered me once as we raced. In fact, it was quite nice not getting overheated.
I stayed on the front of the pack at a moderate pace until about mile 4 when a group of 15 to 20 riders attacked hard. I thought for sure we'd all stay together until at least the first few hills, but that was not the case. I tried hard to bridge the gap that formed but with the heavy wind I wasn't able to make it. I was caught in no-mans-land battling the wind by myself and it was still really early in the race. The main pack ended up getting destroyed as people began panicking. I ended up getting with a small group of 3 other guys and we began working together as we made the turn back across the causeway towards the island. We kept a quick pace and ended up dropping one of the guys in our group as we started up the first hill as we hit the island. We had a pretty steady group as we did our three laps of the island, but it quickly became apparent that it would only be me and 1 other guy named Daniel doing most of the work. Nobody would move up the paceline after a pull so we basically said to heck with it and pulled the rest of the group of maybe 6 or 7 guys the rest of the way to the finish.
The finish was an uphill climb for about a mile and after riding hard for so long it was hard to really go for it up the hill. But still I tried and I felt good with the results. I've never to date ridden so hard for so long before but it turned out to be real fun. I really liked the course and I think I'd like to do it again. I had so much fun that I forgot to take any pictures but antelope island is really beautiful by bike. The one complaint most people have are the bugs but it was cold enough Saturday that I don't think I saw any.
My next road race is June 1st and 2nd. It's a stage race with a individual time trial, a criterium, and road race over the 2 days. It's also located near my home on the southwest end of the valley so I should know the roads pretty well. I will be doing some crits in the meantime to try to improve but that race is my next big goal. Also, on a side note, I find out if I made it into lotoja tomorrow. Wish me luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment