Sometimes Wise, Sometimes Otherwise
Thanks to Nikki for being such a gracious host this past weekend and for taking awesome photos like the one below!
Thanks to Seegs for the wheels when my tubies went flat, thanks to Mike for the hand-up, but no thanks to that dude dropping a bottle right in front of me!
GRE, part deux this afternoon. Will karma spoil my greed to improve only one section and take the other two down with it? Maybe this is a bad idea…
This was a fun race today. Very windy, 1-mile, 8-turn course with strongish field of fifty going for 90 minutes and the IL jersey.
Last year, I was an idiot here and attacked like someone possessed for an hour, but I never got farther than no-man’s-land and then was dropped in the end. This year, especially with no teammates toeing the line with me, I was smarter staying put for the first half-hour. Of course, it was only part-smarts; it was also part-needing to get used to that brutal wind knocking me all over the place (Stinger 60s + 130-something-pound me + huge gusts = SQUIRREL!) and part-just not being quite as fast too.
Anyway, chases and bridges looked good and something was definitely brewing in the middle third of the race. I got active and gave a few gos with groups, but ISCorp, Nova, and ABD (the biggest teams there today) were doing great jobs interrupting chase groups with their men in the break. So nothing really definitive went…until something weird happened.
Maybe it was the feeding that they opened up for a short window on the backside that put things out of whack—gaps definitely opened more in the windy section because of people reaching for bottles—or maybe the wind was just so strong it really took its toll, but either way the pack started splinter at 60-70 minutes in. I found myself at the wrong end and missed out on the first ten guys. On the one hand, it was frustrating. On the other, tactics became really simple at that point: Every man for himself, just ride like hell. And that’s what I did.
Things kept breaking up the rest of the day. As I understand, the break finished with two out of the original three, then there were ten or so guys, then there was my group, and then people scattered all over.
Not my best race, but quite a good time, actually. Fun to go hard and have a crit play out a bit differently than normal. I just kind of went really hard the second half until I came in at 24th. Ok. Cool. Fun.
Not a lot to say about this actually. Felt really terrible since Fox River Grove last weekend so I didn’t make Tuesday’s Tour of America’s Dairyland Road Race, which I really wanted to hit. Finally started feeling better later in the week though so I made it up to this one. I had actually done the course a few times before in collegiate racing. It’s not difficult enough to break up a tired field, two stages from the end of the Tour, nor one of this size. Knowing that was probably for the better though.
I spent much of May killing myself to get in breaks in Wisconsin—and a couple times I actually made it!—but then I would get dropped so hard by Matt Busche or Brandt or Jordan Roessingh or something that I had trouble even reintegrating the field and would DNF. Here, I promised myself to do nothing stupid or crazy aggressive/out of my reach the first half of the race. Mission accomplished. Just hung out at the back for like five of eight laps. Then I went to the front at the critical points of the course in Laps 6 and 7, feeling like there was something brewing.
Alas, nothing doing. It came down to a field sprint pretty much. I gave it all I could over the short, steep kicker 300m from the line, but never even made it into the top ten places over the top of that and got smoked even more on the downhill to the line. Ended up 32nd. Not spectacular, but at least it wasn’t spectacularly bad like last weekend! Looking forward to the IL state crit in Proctor tomorrow now! And it was great seeing familiar faces yesterday—Koeneman from the hometown, Lang way back from collegiate nats ‘05, Isaac back with a new scar. Thanks for the encouraging words too, guys. It’s been a rough year so far, but I’m learning to at least enjoy myself again, and maybe I can even net some results in some smaller races yet too.
We waited a long time for summer but now it’s surely here! Check out the new, more distinct tan lines. ;) Full report on the Dairyland road race tommorrow. It was fine. Not spectacular, but not spectacularly awful. So that’s a step up from last week!
