Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Iris Stagner Memorial Stage Race

It was a cold morning. The kind of morning where we had to use the old vest under the jersey trick that we learned a year ago to the day. Before I get ahead of myself again, let me back pedal to the start of it all. I'm not sure what it is, but historically, every time we've done this race, really weird things tend to happen. Maybe it's the Crazy Water or maybe it's the fact that it's an early season race and everybody seems to be all jacked up with enthusiasm and ready to race vigor.

The craziness started for me before we even left town. Around 6 months ago, I went to the dentist for a toothache that would come and go. The dentist said I needed to get another root canal, but I've been putting it off because it hasn't been an issue. Well, a couple of weeks before the race, it started to become an issue. I made an appointment to get it done, but it would be after the race, so I was just going to have to grin and bare it for the weekend. I'm not trying to make it an excuse as it didn't affect my racing, it just made me kind of grumpy the rest of the time. Anyway, Rob, Brian and me left the shop after I got off work. Long story short, we had car problems, had to swap cars mid trip and didn't get to the hotel til around midnight.

We had to get up pretty early on Saturday for the first stage criterium. It was a cold morning as I stated in the beginning. I told the guys I might go a little hard early on, but just to warm up. So we started and by the time we got to the top of the big hill, I was on the front. I looked back and 3 other guys and myself had already established a gap. A couple of laps in, we had a decent break established. Garrett Grow from Tulsa bridged up somewhere around this time, and then we gradually started to put time on the field. A couple of guys were not working much, and a rider from Austin managed to slip away from our group. He had a few seconds on us, and I'm guessing somewhere around lap 6 or 7 we came up on a guy going a lap down.

I'm not sure what the guy was thinking, but we came up on him on the last two corners and I was on the front of our group. I yelled at the guy that we were passing. He basically tried to keep his speed and sort of get out of the way, but in the last corner, he took a bad line and lost it and went down right into my line. I had nowhere to go and slid into the barrier. The barriers look like those cement highway lane divider things, but they're plastic and very heavy. What I thought was going to happen was I would just kind of slide to a stop into it. I remember seeing my bike flying in the air and thinking my bike is going over the barrier. Then I realized I was flying over it also.

I pretty much landed flat on my back and it knocked the wind out of me. I was sort of trying to walk it off, but I was making that groaning exhale noise that you make when you get the wind knocked out of you. The corner marshals were trying to get me to sit down and asking if I needed an ambulance. All I could do was nod no. I put my chain back on my bike and started to head over to the pits. My seat popped loose somehow. I've never seen that happen before. I guess the rail popped out of the clamp? We got everything good to go, and I got to go back out in the same position in the break. The only downfall was the guy off the front benefited from the mishap and now had about 15 seconds on our group.

There was a preem lap for bonus points midway through the race for 3 places. I got 2nd giving me 3 bonus points. I thought we might catch the guy off the front, but it stayed pretty steady the whole race. A couple of guys tried to bridge around 3 laps to go, but we held them off. Garrett attacked in the right place on the course on the last lap, so he got 2nd and I got 3rd in the crit. All the guys on the team finished in the top 25 giving us some good team points.

Historically I've never done well in the stage 2 time trial. This year I was determined to improve. I improved my time by a couple of minutes and ended up 13th which I was ok with. The best news was that Rob won the TT!  So going into the final stage, I was sitting 3rd in the overall GC and Rob was 1 point behind in 4th. There is also a team competition that pays 3 deep and we were sitting solidly in 3rd. In reality, I think this is where things took a weird turn for the worst.

I think we were all pretty sleep deprived as we had to get up even earlier for Sundays road race. The weather ended up a lot warmer so that was nice.

As a team, I don't remember a time when we've been in this good of a position before and in hindsight, we didn't know how to deal with it effectively. Basically there was a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda type things that happened and in the end we missed out on the team competition by 1 point which was pretty frustrating. Rob and I also dropped from 3 and 4 to 7th and 8th, still in the money, but not where we should have been.

There are still a lot of positives to the weekend. It was still our best result at this race and we learned a lot and took a major step forward in actually winning this thing at some point.


Very early on

The new kits look good!

Maybe starting our 2nd lap?


 Thanks to Biff Stephens, Lee McDaniel, and A. Stephens for taking the cool photos.

A cool video breakdown of the weekend from DNA

The cat 3 guys on the team did really well by sealing the deal and winning their team competition. Next race for me is March 9th and 10th near Tulsa.