Why?
For reasons like this:
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| Banking into the major turn on the Carl Dolan course. I threaded the needle between the "hole" and the "divot" this time. I wouldn't be as lucky or as well-placed to choose my own line very often today. |
That's right. It's RACING SEASON!
Today some friends and I rang in the new season with our inaugural event, the Carl Dolan Memorial Spring Classic, or, as some of the Strava chatter has been calling it, "The Crash Fest." But more on that to come.
The first proper race of the season (and only my 4th and 5th mass start events, let it be known) began with much eager anticipation. I'd been looking forward to testing how the off season and a pretty debilitating surgery would affect my performance. I'm glad to say, at least with respect to my previous performance metrics, that it hasn't very detrimentally. In fact, my fitness and handling skills continue to improve - an encouraging fact, despite an eight-week hiatus.
My sabbatical from fitness was very depressing, but in the end it didn't put me too far behind. I think it came (fortunately) at the pinnacle of the lousy weather, when few but the hardiest souls are consistent with their training in the off months.
The surgery (a ventral hernia) delayed my winter training for approximately two months and was more frustrating than it was debilitating, as I'd anticipated this year as a breakthrough of sorts. I'd determined to become vastly more empirical about my training - which before had been uninformed by any serious understanding of physiology, nutrition, or goal-oriented training. I'd opened up a Training Peaks account and slated a few training plans, bought a set of deep-section carbon wheels for the Time Trial, and even invested in a pricey multisport watch - the Forerunner 910t. (I recently sold a bike and upgraded to the 920xt. For anyone who's on the fence about saving the extra money for the older model, I say go with the 920 - unless you absolutely MUST pinch your pennies. The investment is well worth it if you're diligent about your training.) Lydia and I had even started training together with a circuit routine and pretty stringent core exercises. It felt like I was in the best form of my life. Then - WHAM! Six-to-eight weeks of nothing.
I came back with a vengeance, though. And fortunately my clear bill of health coincided with the launch of Zwift's Beta version. It was still crappy weather out, so the trainer and the computer became my best friends as I gently reengaged the endurance engine while waiting for the weather to break. I soon returned to the pool with a coworker for our bi-weekly lunch laps, and late in March I hit the road again with my first post-surgery run: a fast 10k that was only a minute off my all time best for that distance. To top it off, I'd supplemented my down time with some reading from Joe Friel's Total Heart Rate Training, an absolute must guide to cardiovascular fitness training if you're unable to spring for a power meter. I also have begun flirting with the idea of founding a cycling team with the stated goal of competing and growing cycling in Calvert County. It's an interesting project, and one that I hope pans out. As a part of this plan, I laid out some specific goals for the 2016 season, which include upgrading to Category 4 on the road and cutting specific times off my triathlon margins at specific distances. This way, I thought, I'd at least hit the ground running with some focused training plans cribbed for the season and some measurable goals.
The result was a quick return to decent form - not, certainly, anything like what I'd achieved before the surgery. Too much of the edge got lost, and the toll invasive surgery takes on the body's reserves as it heals itself led to a depletion of the endurance I'd achieved. But it was decent enough. First "ride" back after the surgery was a 30 mile trainer session. My first swim back in the pool was rougher, but I was similarly quick to return to form. (Also, perhaps, a result of some focused reading during my enforced rest period - a book called Swim Smooth - not a very fun read, but it gives some good pointers and images about form and technique. Using these methods I've already shaved a minute off my "easy" pace for the 1,000 yards.)
So that's it in a nutshell to bring us up to today. I had some vague notion of trying to save myself for this race, but my training plan called for an interval run during the week, and I was very unfortunate not to work it into the plan before Saturday morning. For anyone who's interested to know, Zone 5 repeats on hills is definitely not a strategy I'd recommend for resting to prepare for a bike race. But the long term goal is Ironman, so I'm not bothered by the short-term inconvenience of poor placing on the road. If absolutely nothing else, today was great training! You simply can't beat the value of training during an actual competition: the nerves are high, adrenaline is pumping, and everybody wants that moment in the sun - even if the price is the sweat pouring down your face as you hurtle dangerously close to the curb. (I'm not kidding, six or seven guys who likely don't know how to corner at speed effectively short-circuited 3/4 of the peloton several times today because they wanted to make up a spot or two before they got dropped again on the hill!)
Plenty of people had their moment in the spotlight. And unfortunately it wasn't all that glorious. Robbie and I raced today with some ideas for a loose strategy. But - again, unfortunately - those plan are always subject to the intensely unstable conditions of a Category 5 road race. Basically, we had a general plan that went to shit and we both were left to make due as best we could.
Robbie seemed to have the luck today, but he couldn't have performed so well without some solid miles under his belt. He pulled a few tricks that had me grinning in the middle of the bunch - including a late surge up the last hill for a decent finish in the top half of the first race, as well as a long solo pull off the front during the second race, when we were both much depleted.
But let me try to narrate things a bit more chronologically.
Our first race was slated to go off at 845 and was entirely Cat 5. They gave us a quick preview lap and then sent us away at around 850. We took the first lap pretty smoothly, although it felt fast and nervous. I expect that's because for many of us it was the first race of the season and we hadn't many group rides to offset the attempts to maintain fitness indoors. Translation: Cat 5s can pedal their asses off but can't handle for anything - especially early in the season. Things started to heat up around the midway point, around mile 9 of the 18 mile course (4 laps into a 9 lap loop). But it wasn't anything too major - just a perceptible increase in speed on the backstretch. I knew things weren't looking promising when we started to approach the corner in the backfield (pictured above) at speed and then slowed dramatically into the corner.
The classic accordion effect was in force: too many twitchy riders with too little experience at speed bottlenecking into too little space on the corner led to the inevitable collapse and extension of the line. If you were gritty enough to pull through on the back straight heading into the corner, you could take your own line at speed, gap the field, and be in a good position to set up your sprint for the line after the hill - assuming you still had the gas to go for a sprint after the hill. Too frequently on the finishing stretch, which rises considerably in the last kilometer, the reverse of the accordion was true. As the leaders would slow, the long, snaking line of the peloton would collapse and nearly collide with its own head. It meant a line like this
would collapse into a bunch like this.
The resultant bleeding off of speed would produce some slow going up the hill unless you dropped a few gears and spun on a faster person's wheel. And it was definitely ill advised to be on the front as you reached the 500 meter mark. The hill itself doesn't level off until rather after 200 meters, so if you're on the front before then you're hauling other people who'll scoot past you when it evens out. I would like to say I was clever enough to avoid this tactical faux pas, but the truth was that I had to spin like a villain to hold a few back wheels, and springing around for better placing was out of the question in most cases. I did it a few times, but that was only a viable plan when I didn't have to drop the hammer after the major turn, ramping it up to 175+ bpm just to get into a decent spot on the climb. Most of the time, I made it to the climb in the group and didn't have to worry about getting spat out the back, but only if I was diligent about setting up for the corner well in advance.
And that raises an important question about bike racing as a general thing and Cat 5 racing in particular. Generally, you'd like the strongest and most skilled guys to win. Even at the professional level, I don't think this is the case. The Road is the great equalizer, and she doesn't care about your fitness or your $9,000 carbon fiber machine or the new aero kit you splurged for. So much can happen that's far beyond a rider's control: flats, unscheduled breakaways, crashes. To a large extent it's a matter of due preparation both prior to and during the race. You have to create the conditions for Fate to smile on you, and you have to be ready to pounce when she does.
But this poetical axiom is complicated and confused in amateur racing, and especially in any race featuring Category 5 riders. Complicated by the unreliability of your fellow riders - after all, how often do you ride with these fellows? How much experience do you know they have? In most cases, not much.) Confused by your own inexperience reading the race and others' abortive tactics - most of the time there's no real strategy in effect; riders come, pedal their buttocks off, and wind up blasting into and through one another - often literally - and the dream of winning is often little more than a vague hope.
Now, I certainly don't want to devalue anybody's achievements in the sport, especially other amateurs, for whom racing is a rarity rather than a vocation. (We look forward to it like a holiday season, remember.) But actual winning in these conditions is as often just as much a function of other people's errors as it is your own skill. You can be placed perfectly in the group in 4th or 5th place - and if you have an ally ahead who knows you're there, you can be especially secure in the leadout. But then, some knucklehead - with total disregard to the laws of physics, an utter disregard for the dictates of safety, and a supreme unconcern for anything resembling etiquette of the road - will zoom up the inside at speed, cut the corner too close, and slew toward the outside. The result is a wholesale dumping of speed by anyone who was unfortunate enough to be setting up a skillful maneuver at pace. Visually from within the bunch, this resembles a giant, invisible hand casually brushing sand away:
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| Recovering after the apex of the corner. Note how the group is sprawled all over the road from left to right. In a well-executed corner taken at speed, riders bring themselves through the apex of the turn while banking smoothly and maintaining a stable line. Here, there's not a line per se, just a gaggle of riders trying to recover lost speed as they splay over the road. |
riders spread along the outer reaches of the forsaken trajectory like so many motes of dust. Then we have to sprint to catch onto the lead group, which without malice has taken advantage of our un-friend's tactical naiveté.
But that's bike racing. Such are the vicissitudes of the sport that it could happen at any level, really. In fact, something similar happened during the Cat 3-4 race immediately preceding the Cat 4-5 race. So it's not a foregone conclusion that riders will be safer in the higher categories simply because there're higher categories. The circumstances of the crash were unclear, but it seemed that contact occurred between several riders going hard to overtake the leaders during the final straight up the hill - that section where the field telescopes together again after reaching speeds of 40+ mph. Apparently, one poor soul had a protruding collarbone. Now I don't know if this was the case, but he definitely had to be taken away by ambulance. And what sucks is that he wouldn't be the last.
As for our own, purely Cat 5 race, we closed things out - thankfully - without incident. Here's a clip of the closing run as I approach the hill:
You can see Robbie in the florescent yellow sleeves gunning it up the hill. I thought I might join him, but I hesitated for that split second which can cost the race. I'd had to pull hard to close a gap that formed as we began the last lap. The unfortunate collapse and extension of the peloton during the heavy corner led to my exclusion from the select group who controlled the front leading into the last lap.
It went down like this: Approaching the big corner, we accordion-ed out, and I had to push a massive gear to regain the main bunch. I managed to do so just as it broached the hill at about the 1k mark from the line. But whereas before the line collapsed, this time it stayed fairly open. Lines were moving up and down the sides until about the final lap, where it appeared things calmed down. Actually what happened was that some of the front guys lost steam, slowed at or about the line, allowing a bunch of people to move up on the outside. By this point, I'd tied my boat to the inside line and got hemmed in behind a few people who were heaving pretty heavily. When a sliver of space opened up moving into the backfield, I took it. But at cost: my recovery was limited during this cat and mouse segment, and I reached the last long pull still in high Zone 4. In the video, I can see where the decoupling from the lead group started: there was a moment where the pace appeared to subside at the line. I relented for the briefest of moments, but it was enough to lose valuable momentum. By the time I noted the shift in dynamics, a fellow moved in on my left and closed that avenue to me.
I paid for it in the final standings, coming home 32nd out of 58. But for the first race of the season, I wasn't displeased at all!
Here's a copy of the race footage for the Cat 5 race.
I think the major lesson to be learned here, at least for me from the video, is that I wasn't as comfortable close on the wheels as I need to be in order to save energy. I think for most of the race I was working with at least half a length of space between my front wheel and whomever I was attempting to draft. This leads to increased workload and added chances of missing the crucial moment of acceleration. But really, that's what the video's for: helping with some objective, empirical feedback for analysis. We'll see if I can't make it into better performance the next go round.
As for the Cat 4/5 race, it would prove a dismal affair by comparison. Things like this near miss:
And this crash on the first lap:
Made for a palpably nervous race. It was almost a foregone conclusion, I felt, as they staged us at the start line only to wait for approximately 15 minutes while they cleared the course of a serious crash in the 4/3 race. In addition to being poor physical preparation (after about 5 minutes, any of the benefits of a diligent warmup dissipate as the body seeks recovery heart rate), it gave us all time to speculate on the crash without any serious information.
I'm sure the race officials meant well, but when they started the race with a "We don't mean to lecture anybody, but this is how it happened" speech I think they unwittingly helped us imprint crashing as a conceptual certainty. You could feel the nervousness on the first lap and throughout the whole race.
Somebody went down without any apparent cause on the very first lap in the big corner. (The picture above with the red arrow, pointing to the hapless soul standing in the hottest zone of the race!) A little later on, another guy went down on the left on the outside of the big corner.
At first I thought this guy was forced outside by the inexorable mass of the twitchy peloton taking the corner too wide, but I don't think that's conclusive from the video. It seems just as likely that he got too anxious about rejoining the line as he geared up and simply wrenched his front wheel out from under himself. He'd come out of the turn and wasn't banking like I first thought.
The race concluded with this catastrophe, and seriously diminished the satisfaction of the day:
If you look closely you can see one of the participants in the crash in mid-flight as he tosses his fiber all over the road.
Up close it looked more painful:
As I passed, guys were moaning and cursing their luck. Only one of the crew here got up as I passed. But what was especially curious was this guy, who I guess decided to express his solidarity with the fallen brethren and introduce himself to the asphalt about twenty yards up the road.
So it was an unhappy race for most of us, who sensed - perhaps intuitively - that the ride would be dangerous from the gun. But in hindsight, there were a few near misses - including some which I haven't shown - that helped me lose "The Edge" as Cougar called it in Top Gun. But lost isn't accurate. I discarded the edge, and happily so in this instance, since the goal was just to finish and keep to my plans for upgrading to Cat 4.
Crashes notwithstanding, I think the same overall critique of my first race applies to the second race: I left too much room open on the wheels and couldn't react in time when the important moves ensued. For instance, in this shot, Robbie and this speed demon aced past me and Big Mac to salvage their placing in the final stretch.
But I hesitated when I saw Big Mac begin to drift over in an attempt to catch their wheel, and I derailed myself by bleeding off speed which I couldn't recover in order to catch the back of the pack.
Lessons learned, I suppose.
Until next time, here's the whole Cat 4/5 race for any who's interested. Enjoy!
