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.