Sunday, May 30, 2010

Windy 100 Woodward OK

Early this season I got a flyer at the salty cow race. The flyer was for a race on Memorial day weekend in Woodward OK. The Windy 100. At first it looked like another T-shirt ride type thing till I saw the generous payout. We pretty much decided at that point we would probably attend this race. I never quite understood why the race was scheduled the same weekend as quite a few other big regional races as well as the weird start times the races would be going off.


A group of 4 of us (Jeremy, Rob, Brian, and me) left town around 11:30 AM for our 3:30 crit start time. The course was more like a really tame circuit race than a criterium. Basically 3 long straight 1/2 mile sections with 1 straight with some curves. Pretty much a big square. The weather was hot and it quickly became apparent we wouldn't be starting on time.


The P1/2 crit was pretty uneventful once it got going. Jeremy got off in a break early on with 3 other riders. I think there were 21 riders total for the day and the race payed 10 deep. Jeremy ended up 4th while Brian and I finished just out of the money with 12th and 13th. The masters race was the last race of the day at 7:45 PM, so I decided to give it a go.


Lining up before the race started, I was pretty sure I could win it. Looking back, I raced a little too aggressive early on covering way too many attacks. Okc velo had 5 or 6 riders and the joe's pros guys had 2 I think. Anyhow, the good masters riders don't attack with as much punch, but they know how to hit you when you're a little winded or out of position. 5 riders eventually got away and I won the field sprint for 6th.

The road race on Saturday was supposed to start at 6:30 AM. We were a little worried when it was 10 after 6 and we were just leaving our hotel. After scrambling to the start line, it became obvious that the promoters/officials were nowhere near ready to start the race. They decided to combine the 1/2's and the 3's and after about 45 minutes we were underway. Things were pretty tame for the 1st 5 or 10 miles. We hit the first crosswind section pretty slow, but I knew if we were going faster, it would be trouble if you drifted too far back in the field.

As we started into a long headwind section, I got into a move with Justin Rempel, but it only lasted for a few minutes.Towards the end of the headwind section, a Kenda rider got off the front and opened a substantial gap. The Park Place guys started drilling it and then the guys at the front of the group made a wrong turn. After a quick U-turn, we were heading west again with a pretty good cross wind. We had lost a little more ground to the Kenda rider, so the pace really got fast and the field started to break up. I realized if I didn't get towards the front very quickly, things would soon get much more painful.

I got near the front of what was left of the main field (about 15 riders) and sure enough, there were about 6 guys off the front. At least 3 were Park Place riders. Our chase efforts were a little disorganized as a few guys didn't want to do any work and as soon as we started closing, they would unsuccessfully try to bridge solo. The break was just about as disorganized as the chase group and guys started popping till there were only 2 left in the break.

The chase group stayed around 15 riders as we dropped a few guys here and there. Maybe 3 or 4 riders were cat 3's, 1 of which was doing some work, and a couple of Park Place riders who were just sitting on and blocking. Rob, Jeremy and I were in the chase group and looking back, we did way too much work trying to pull the break in.

With about 6-7 miles to go, I started to bonk. I had plenty of food with me, but it was hard to eat with the way we were riding. I started to eat and got dropped in a tailwind section. I figured I wasn't going to be any good in the sprint, 1st and 2nd were within sight but too far up the road to catch, and Waddel had been sitting in all day and was going to kill it and get 3rd. Plus, no one was as far as I could see behind me, might as well just eat before I fell over.

After about 10 minutes I felt good as new. I could still see the chase group up the road as we weaved back into town. The race finished on the crit course we had raced the night before and as I came through the finish line, nobody was around except the guys who got 1st and 2nd. I sat by the finish line and ate a banana when one of the race officials told me the chase group all took a wrong turn and came through the finish area backwards, so they were doing a 1 lap re-finish on the crit course. 1 of the guys in the chase group actually made the right turn and got 3rd, so they ended up giving me 4th.

Rob got 8th, Jeremy got 11th, and Brian got 20th. This was the first time I have ever done a race where there were as many payout spots as riders in the race, so needless to say, I'm pretty sure as a team, this was our biggest money making weekend to date. The race was a little disorganized, but if they have it again next year, I'm sure we'll come back.






Off the back in the road race, but almost done.....
When I got home, I decided to go for a swim in the backyard pool. I got my swimming trunks, and found my Assos sock that had been missing since last summer. Coatney got them for me on my birthday last year and I only got to wear them once or twice, so I was pretty stoked to find it!



What a lucky day! The big Tulsa Tough race is this weekend, so we're pretty excited.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Criterium state championship race



All I heard about in the week leading up to this race was how dangerous the course in Sand Springs was. I've never raced here before and I must admit I was a little concerned, but in the end, it was no big deal. The course definitely had some rough sections, but part of crit racing is finding the smooth lines. Pretty short course, maybe a little over a kilometer?


Just getting started. It was a semi-hot and humid day. I tried to start with my core as cool as possible by putting on wet, ice cold base layer just before we started. It seemed to work ok for most of the race. I seem to really struggle the hotter the weather gets and today was no different.



I felt ok for the first part of the race, but at around 15 minutes in, I broke a spoke and killed it trying to stay in the group to get back around to the wheel pit. The only real downfall to our Storck bikes is the rear entry dropouts. Not fun to try to get a wheel out and back in quickly.


Once I got back into the group the first lap was a preeme lap, so very fast, and I'm not sure if I had too much air in the tire of my spare wheel or the tire was really old, but it would not grip coming out of the corners. I started getting gaped a little and was only able to stay connected to the field for a few more laps.


I just rode solo TT style the rest of the race to get some good heat acclimation.


Not a very good race weekend, but I did like the course.







Saturday, May 15, 2010

OKC TT Series and other random stuff

The last of the OKC Velo series went off today. It was a little wet out, but the winds were light. With the good conditions and my legs feeling 100% after being tired most of the week, I thought I had a good shot at a fast time. I had planned on using Big John's wheels, but once again, his start time was too close to mine so his wheels were unavailable. Les Akins had an extra set of wheels that he was willing to let me use. I gladly accepted his offer and it made all the difference(thanks Les!)
My bike with Big Johns wheels. Les had a zipp disc rear with a Hed 90mm front.
I set a new personal best with a 17:34. Good enough for 2nd on the day and 2nd overall for the series in the mens cat 123 class!
I've got a few other photos I never got a chance to post on here. This is in Ardmore OK on our way to the Matrix crit in Dallas.
Hanging out in the shop. Andy is wearing a suit, but was moving too fast to be in focus. Andy tried out his new TT bike today and first time out ran a 17:49! Off in the background is Marty who dominated the Eddy Merckx class with a 1st place overall.
One of many snow rides this past winter on the cyclocross bike. Lake Hefner
On the way to a foggy Mt. Scott with the team in February
My cyclocross bike on top of Mt. Scott. This was my do it all bike this winter.
Jeremy and Judson on our last time up the mountain.

Looking down after the fog lifted up a little.

Brandon with a genuine smile after getting his surprise wedding gift in the mail. Super sweet custom BOB trailer wheel w/Chris King hub.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Joe Martin Stage Race

So there we were, maybe 27 miles into the second stage 110 mile road race. The bad luck for the day started fast and early. Little did we know, it was about to get a LOT worse! Before I finish, I'll start at the beginning. Our 5 man team headed up to Fayettville Arkansas Thursday morning for the Joe Martin 4 day stage race. The race was definitely a big one for everyone on the team as well as I think it's the first time any of us had raced an epic 4 day CAT 1/2 stage race.

Anyway, I'm sure all the guys on the team had a certain goal or position they wanted to finish. My goal was to try to survive, finish all the stages without getting time cut, be consistent, work for any teamates high in the GC, and just go out and compete and have a good time in general.

So the first day was pretty uneventful. 2.5 mile uphill time trial. Our times were ok, but not quite what we were looking for. Out of the 107 riders entered, our times ranged from 47th to 99th. I was mildly concerned about the next 2 road races. The longest road race I had personally done prior to the Joe Martin was 85 miles, so doing 110 and 92 mile road races back to back would surely make for some kind of adventure. I felt like we were all prepared to ride that far since we had been doing great with our weekend long rides, but still, anything can happen during a race.

Back to our crazy bad luck day.

We decided to park near the finish line and ride the 3 miles to where the race started. On the way over, Jeremy noticed his rear derailleur wasn't shifting right. His daughter had knocked his bike over in the hotel room and bent his derailleur hanger in slightly, so Jeremy went to the Sram neutral support to get it looked at when we got to the start area. The mechanic attempted to straighten the hanger with an allen wrench, but ended up breaking it off. The stress started with scrambling to get one of the neutral loaner bikes set up for Jeremy. They got his pedals swapped and seat height set just in time for the race start.

Once we got underway, Jeremy says something weird is going on with the loaner bike. Its pulling hard to one side and doing weird stuff under braking. The decision was made to just ride it out and try to get used to it for the rest of the race. Somewhere around 25 miles in, we were doing around 25-30 MPH down a straight downhill road when either someone touched wheels or had a blowout. I was sitting maybe 2/3 back in the field on the right side of the road. Up ahead on the left side of the road, guys just started wadding up with bikes and bodies flying all over the place. The wreck quickly spread across the road into my line. Somehow I made it through without crashing. I had to do some cyclocross/Lightning McQueen style maneuvers off in the grass, but got back to the main field without too much trouble.

I looked around to see how many of my teamates made it through. I saw Brad towards the front of the field and a few minutes later, Rob and Jeremy bridged up, but Parks was nowhere to be seen. So there we were, about 27 miles in, 1 rider MIA, another on a jacked up bike, when at this point Rob is having his own problems. His rear shift lever is letting the chain drop to the smaller cogs in the back, but won't shift back up. I tried to mess with it while we were riding by jiggling it thinking it might have a stuck pawl or something, but the lever just got stuck pointing inwards. As Rob moved the lever back down, it literally broke off in his hand. Not good.

If ever there was a road race where you needed a full range of gears, this was the one. We had climbed somewhere around 1000 ft. so far, but still had about 5000 ft. left in the race. Our Storck bikes have an adjusting barrel just behind the head tube, so Rob was able to thread it all the way out and get his chain in the 14t cog at least. Other than that, he just leaned down and pulled directly on his shift cable if he needed lower gears. I tried to shadow Rob in case he needed a push on some of the bigger hills, but he needed no assistance. With the robust gear he had to use while standing, he was getting up the hills pretty fast.

Brian caught back on at one point. He was involved in the big wreck as another riders chainring slashed his front tire open. After a slow wheel change, he pretty much burned all his matches motor pacing back to the field, only to catch the group just as we were hitting a large climb. He lost contact and decided to get a nice long scenic ride in finishing off the rest of the race without any drafting assistance. The big selecting factor of the race would come around mile 75. The Mt. Gaylor 9.2 mile climb.

My legs felt ok all day. As soon as we started up the big climb, riders started popping. I was probably sitting in around 50th place when I couldn't hold the wheel in front of me any longer. I looked behind me to see if anyone was coming around, but there was nobody as far as I could see. I knew Rob was in the group ahead of me and pretty sure Jeremy and Brad were somewhere behind me. I was pretty bummed out at first, but then I see a couple of riders coming up be hind me. We started working together, picked up another couple of riders, and after about 10 minutes of chasing, caught the group that Rob was in of about 20 riders.

We caught more and more stragglers on the way to the top of Mt. Gaylor and as we crested the top, somewhere there's a photo of Rob pulling about 40 guys while holding his rear shift cable. The last 25 miles was a twisty, slightly downhill run back into Fayettteville. We caught even more guys on the way, but about 25 stayed away in the lead group with our chase group finishing 8:49 back. Jeremy and Brad finished in a group 7-10 minutes behind us, but for whatever reason eventually got scored 50 minutes behind the leaders. The results got changed 3 or 4 times with the first result saying they finished in the top 10, then they were time cut, then they were back in.....etc.....etc

We didn't race the 3rd stage on Saturday until 3:00pm, so that gave us some time to get the bikes repaired and hopefully the results straightened out. Judson was able to pick up a derailleur hanger from Bike one Friday afternoon for Jeremy. $25.00 for a used hanger seemed a little steep to me. One of the mounting screws from the old hanger was damaged as well, so I had to rig it up a little to make it work.(note to self: always bring a spare hanger to races) Rob got a brand new Sram shifter installed at no charge from the Sram neutral support, but at the cost of lots of running/waiting around and a restless night.

Saturday we started with 4 team riders as Brian had been time cut on Friday. Saturday would be a 92 mile road race. 11 miles out to a 23 mile loop that we hit 3 times, then 11 miles back. The hardest part was about a 1/2 mile climb with the last 1/4 mile being pretty steep. We dropped a few riders each time we got over the big hill and unfortunately, Brad was one of them. Some guy stayed off the front solo all day long, but the field caught him with about 2 miles to go in the race. Jeremy, Rob and I all finished in the main group.

Sunday was the final stage. A 60 minute super technical, hilly criterium. Surprisingly, all of us felt pretty good. I prepared myself mentally of how tired my legs were going to feel before the crit, but it wasn't how I thought is was going to be. We got 1 quick lap to check out the course when we arrived. Lots more turns added to the course I had done before. Anyway, it didn't seem to gnarly until we saw groups of pros skinned up getting free laps. Word was going around that turn 11 was pretty sketchy. As we're staging up our race the head official tells us "you can't win the race on turn 11 but you can lose the race there".

I had a good starting position but blew it by not being able to get clipped in. I was sitting about 30th or so going into turn 11. I took it pretty easy. They even had orange stripes painted on the road letting you know which line not to take, but some guy decided he was going to rail it and pass me in the danger zone. He crashed right in front of me causing me to slow down a bit and I ended up getting gaped off the group. Long story short, I got into a group of about 10 riders and we just chased the whole race. We made it to 5 laps to go and got pulled. I don't think we would have gotten lapped, but maybe made the scoring hard if the leaders caught us at the finish?
Jeremy was in the group I was in and Rob was in a chase group just behind the leaders. Overall in the general classification standings, Rob got 26th, I got 46th, and Jeremy got 51st. I'm sure that Rob and Jeremy would have done better had they not had the mechanical problems on Friday. All in all I think everyone was happy to survive, plus there's no way to get that kind of racing experience and form building training stress other than to do an event like this.
The following Monday my legs still felt good, but by Tuesday and the rest of the week for that matter, pretty rotten.
There's tons of details and stories I left out, but there's not room here for all of that. The last of 3 OKC Velo TT's is this weekend, plus races every weekend from now till the end of June I think.

Monday, May 3, 2010

2 TT's and 2 crits

The last half of April was packed with racing, all of it good in one way or another. Race 3 of 4 in the Wednesday series was another time trial. The course was shortened a little to deal with the traffic, so instead of 8.2 miles, the course was 7.9 miles. Big John let me borrow his rear disc wheel and 808 front wheel. The set up was fast as I ran a 17:07, which was good enough for second place. Once again, the team took the top 3 spots. This would lock us into the top 3 spots overall in the race series.



The second of the 3 OKC Velo time trial series was on the 24th. I had originally planned on using Big John's wheels again, but his start time was only 10 minutes or so ahead of me giving us not enough time to swap. Rob was the first rider to start, so he got back a few minutes before I started and let me borrow his rear wheel with covers. I ran my best time ever with a 17:40, which is also the time Rob ran, so we tied for 2nd, 3 seconds behind 1st.



The next day, Brian Parks and I went down to Dallas for day 2 of the Matrix criterium. The course was tight and technical, and the racing was VERY fast. It would have been smart to go down to Dallas right after the TT on Saturday and race then as well. It took about 20 minutes on Sunday to get comfortable racing a criterium at that speed and intensity. I made it for 60 of the 90 minutes before I got dropped and pulled shortly thereafter. The courses were the same both days so I think if I had raced Sat. it would have definitely helped to be more prepared for Sunday. Anyhow, I got some good experience for the bigger crits coming up in this area.

Thursday the 28th was the last race of the April CORS. Criterium at the Edmond fire training facility. Jeremy, Rob and I had the top 3 points locked up so, if we could somehow get Brian Parks a win for the day, it would give him 4th overall in the series. We came up with a plan and for the most part executed it perfectly. Jeremy and me hit it pretty hard early to "tenderize" the field while Rob and Brian sat in and took it easy. Right about the point where the 3rd attack started to fizzle, Rob and Brian punched it and were gone the rest of the race. Jeremy and I policed the main field blocking, covering anything that tried to bridge, and just being disruptive to any organized chasing efforts. We let a couple of guys dangle in no mans land and I got the field sprint for the final points spot while Brian and Rob took 1st and 2nd for the day.
Our plan worked and we ended up with the top 4 spots in the April series. I think tactically, this was out best effort of the season so far!

This weekend is the big Joe Martin stage race. All 5 of us are going and looking forward to some epic racing in Arkansas.