Another race, another smackdown, another lesson learned. I keep coming back for more though, and I always come back with overzealous, unreasonable expectations. This week's hammer to the head came courtesy of the Master's 35 field at the Quabbin Road Race. A 62 mile hilly loop around the Quabbin Reservoir. Pipe dream of the weekend was that, if I felt good, I would try to spend some time at the front of the group and maybe even try to get in with an early break if one went. I didn't expect to finish with the break, I was really just hoping to see how long I could hang on to it, take a few pulls at the front, blow up, get dropped, and try my best to hang on to the main field for the rest of the race after they swallowed me back up. I keep forgetting just how strong the Masters 35 field is though. Every time I race long road races with long hills I get crucified by these guys. Granted I haven't been at it that long and have a lot to learn. At best, I'm an average Cat 3 with only a few seasons of road racing under my belt going up against Cat 1, 2 and 3 guys who have been racing forever. But what I lack in experience I make up for in hard work and determination. I have a lot of room to improve, and I continue to improve. That is exactly why I continue to ride with the Masters and why I'm OK with getting my ass handed to me in these races.
Forecast called for rain in the afternoon. We had a 9:05 start and we were expecting to miss the rain. Not so lucky though as it was raining and about 42 degrees as we rolled out. With a field of about 60, we had a neutral start, about 3 miles downhill. Absolutely frigging freezing. Once the racing started things warmed up quickly. My legs felt good, everything would go according to plan. I put in a couple efforts and worked my way to the front of group. Once there, positions quickly change as people come up along the outside and I found myself back towards the back end of the group again. I put in another effort on a short climb and worked back into the top 10 positions for a bit and fell back again. It was raining pretty hard and I was having trouble seeing. For some reason, the water comes up from underneath the front of my glasses and covers the inside of the lens. This sucks. Very poor visibility. I think there's something wrong with the shape of my face because other people don't have the same problem with their glasses. Maybe corrective plastic surgery to my cheeks will help? At about 9 or 10 miles in I'm warmed up and feeling strong. I decide it's time to get back to the front of the group just as somebody is surging up the outside of the field. I get on his wheel and follow him up to the front. I'm over 400W staying on his wheel, this is a serious effort. We get to the front and he keeps it pegged with me on his wheel. We're 1-2 at the front of the group and the rest of the field accelerates to get on my wheel. The guy pulls off. I've been over 350W for about a minute and a half at this point and I'm in front, expected to keep pace. I pull through and stay on it for about 10 turns of the pedals and then the group starts to pull through. I look up and we're just coming into a climb. Not too steep, maybe 4-5% grade, but there is absolutely no end in sight to the climb. I immediately sense disaster having just spent 2 minutes well over my threshold and now looking at a climb that is 2 miles long where I know the pace is going to be brutal. I stayed at my absolute limit as long as I could but people kept going by. The effort leading into the climb left me without enough to keep pace. As we came over the top of the climb, which was about 3 miles long, I lost contact with the group. We were 12 miles in. The first thought that went through my head is "there's 50 miles left, it's raining and cold, I won't catch the group again, and it's only 12 miles back to the nice warm truck and a cup of coffee". I hate that voice. It's weak. I turned around to see what other carnage came out of the assault on the last hill. As it turned out I was just the last of the people to be spit off the back of that climb and there were a bunch of riders coming up the hill behind me. 5 of us re-grouped and starting putting in an effort to try to catch back on. The main field was about 200 yards ahead of us at this point. We got into a paceline and buried ourselves to catch up. Unfortunately, it was very disorganized and there was one person, who every time through when it was his pull, would hammer his way off the front of the group with nobody on his wheel effectively blowing our paceline apart until we could catch back up to him and re-group. He would do this over and over again even after others in the group would say "Hey! Stay steady when you pull through so we can work together.". Later on in the race the same guy would add to the idiocy by not only blowing apart any attempt we had on a cohesive chase, but he would also inexplicably attack us on every downhill. It was bizarre..... Back to the story... On downhills we would hammer as fast as we could, and on flatter sections we would work a rotation (though not a very good one, see above), and on uphills it ended up with me in the front setting pace. Every time. I was hurting myself on the climbs, but I had to. I was climbing stronger than everybody else and they were all more than happy to sit in and let me set the pace. On one climb I pulled us to within about 100 yards of the field but on the next descent it was over. They were gone and we would never see them again. We chased our asses off for 10 miles at this point. Chasing is so much harder than riding in the main field. It's just like being in a break, you're a small group of racers trying to go faster than a large group of racers. The difference is that you're in with weaker racers and trying to catch stronger racers, whereas when you're in a break, it's typically the other way around with stronger guys trying to gain ground on slower guys. Regardless, the effort was killer. There were 40 miles left and we were just going to make it as hard a training ride as we could at this point. Every time we would come to another climb we would start to see more recently ejected riders and we would swallow them up into our group. By the time we had 10 miles to go we would absorb about a dozen riders and our field was about 20 strong. Every climb I would set a pace that very few if any in the group would be able to stay with and then they would catch back on during the descents. I knew that as long as I didn't blow up or start cramping that I would finish first amongst the dropped group of masters misfits. It played out just as I expected, there were three climbs in the last 5 miles. In each of the climbs I led the way and chucked a couple more off the back of our group. Starting the final climb, which was about 2 miles into the finish, the group was down to 5 which lasted about a half mile, then two of us, and then just me coming in with a substantial gap on the rest of what was left of our field... This was a small victory for me, being top misfit, but one that I would be happy with for today.
Lesson of the day: I'm not ready to play with the big dogs yet, but if I don't try then I never will be... That said, I probably didn't need to follow that attack as hard as I did early in the race, especially not knowing the course. Had I known a BFO hill was coming, it definitely would have been wiser for me to hang in the pack and try to stay with it since I know I'm not nearly strong enough to keep pace yet with the guys who are going to lead on the long climbs. I definitely would have made it through that particular climb intact under different circumstances. Maybe I would have gotten spit out later, maybe not. I have a lot of tactics to learn and need to keep improving my fitness. I'll get there :) Next up: Sterling.
