WWU Race Musings: In Which I Learned the Necessity of Carrying Calories

Bellingham was cold. From the second I stripped down to my spandex, removing jeans, warm up pants, a flannel shirt, a hoody, and my North Face jacket, to the second I finally stepped into the shower that night, I was cold. Waiting for my race to start? Cold. Sleeping in the trunk of a car while the boys raced? Cold. Riding the tt? Cold. Cold cold cold cold cold. On the plus side, it wasn’t raining.

Bellingham was weird. From the second I arrived at the course, things progressed differently then I was used to. The two PSU girls in my field approached me and asked if I would be ok racing with the Men’s B field. 1) They are obviously much better with names and faces than I am as I have absolutely no idea who they are, but they picked me out right away. 2) No, no I do not want to race with the Men’s B (wanting to be diplomatic about it however, I said I’d go along with whatever everyone else wanted. Thankfully, my boys backed me up and said no way was I racing with the B’s. We did increase the distance of our race by a lap though.)

Bellingham was hard. Six and a quarter 8-mile laps with a steep climb at the beginning of each lap, a steep climb at the end of each lap, a small rise in the middle of each lap, and one sketchy right hand turn with gravel on the road. Once around wasn’t bad. Twice around was fine. By the third and fourth laps, my legs were really feeling the hills.

Bellingham was surprising. As I’ve said consistently, I’m used to getting dropped on hills. So I was pleased when I stayed with the 5 others on the front when our pack split on the first hill of the first lap, proud when I stayed with the Portland and Whitman riders in the middle when the other two in our pack went off the front on the start of the second lap, and SHOCKED when Portland and I dropped the Whitman girls at the start of the fifth lap AND stayed ahead of them for the rest of the race.

Bellingham was painful. This was my first real road race with the A’s (last week’s double flat didn’t count) and I was not prepared. Portland and I broke away with roughly 15 miles to go. We rotated pulls for a while and aside from some comments about whether I ever actually let my legs spin instead of always pushing a big gear, things were OK (And yes, I am aware I keep too low a cadence most of the time.)  But  things just went downhill fast. Usually, when I climb hills, I stand up and try to push it up the last few yards over the crest. When I tried to do it on this lap, my legs buckled in a mass of painful cramps. I literally could not stand up. Portland was watching me, telling me to sit down, spin up the hill, keep a count in my head. I couldn’t figure out if she was helping me because she was concerned, or because she needed me to keep working with her so we could stay ahead of Whitman. Didn’t matter. As long as she was helping me, I didn’t much care why.

Bellingham was humbling. By the start of the last lap I was having trouble moving in a straight line. My brain was fuzzy, muddled, like I was drunk. “Hey,” Portland’s voice intruded into my haze, “Have you been drinking your water? Do you have any food?” Dumbly I shook my head. I’d eaten everything I’d brought with me (which admittedly wasn’t a lot.) “Put your hand out.” Reflexively, I did as bidden. Next thing I know, a half-eaten bar is being shoved into my hand as Portland gives me her food, telling me to eat it. For the rest of the race, she kept an eye on me, reminding me to drink, talking me up the hills, and basically just making sure I didn’t die. I honestly think I would have ended up passingout in a ditch if it wasn’t for her.

Bellingham was AMAZING. On the final hill of the last full lap, Portland turned to me with a grin, “Hey, we freaking did it!” Exhausted, I retorted, “I play rugby. We just say fuck.” She laughed. “Oh, we’re going to get along fucking fantastically then.”  On the next downhill, Portland took off, trying to drop me before the final push for the line. I found it ego-boosting that she actually thought I had any chance of beating her if it came to a sprint. There was no way I could sprint. I could hardly keep moving my bike forward, let alone sprint. She finally ditched me on the next up hill, but we were so far ahead of the Whitman girls, that I could just stumble to the finish without worrying about being caught. Weaving up the final hill, barely able to push the pedals as I still couldn’t stand up without my legs collapsing, contemplating getting off my bike and walking up the damn hill, I finally crossed the line. I have rarely been as proud of myself as I was during that race (likewise, I have rarely been in as much pain as I was during that race.)

Next up: A ten hour drive to Montana and Week 5

Central Washington Race Musings: In Which I Learned What Happens WhenYou Flat (Here's a Hint--You Don't Win)

Things I learned from my first race with the A’s

1.       Racing with 5 people with way different from racing with 25 people
2.       The A’s neutral roll out is faster than the average speed of the B’s race
3.       The A’s also take racing way more seriously than the B’s
4.       Being able to sustain a 5 minute acceleration is vital
5.       Getting not 1, but 2 flats kills my race and puts me in a surly mindset for the rest of the day
6.       My nemesis from Whitman jumped to the A’s with me

So my first race with the A’s didn’t go how I would have liked and as I result of flats ended up doing the last 20 miles or so as a solo tt. (Our field split into three groups and I was with my nemesis and another Whitman girl in the second group, when my back tire went flat. Waited for the wheel car, saw the two girls in the third group go by, got a new wheel on and worked my ass off to catch up to those two. Then the back tire went flat. Again.)

After being a general pain in the ass for the rest of the afternoon, skipping the ttt, and driving back to Seattle early (race was just in Ellensburg, so we didn’t all homestay), I managed to get my thick head into a place where I was ready to race the crit on Sunday. 

You know what Ellensburg is well known for? Being really fracking windy. And hell if it wasn’t living up to that expectation during our crit. I’m nervous again. I don’t want to get lapped. Even though this is all of the third crit I’ve ever raced (and yesterday I got an inkling of how much faster my competition was), my pride cried out that I not get dropped. I’m a stubborn jackass like that.

This crit is fast, flat, and non-technical. The wind makes it so that on the back half, I’m barely pushing the pedals and still hitting 27-28 mph. Two left hand turns later and WHAM! Every time we rounded the corner into the side wind, the paceline would shift over to the very edge of the road.

“Oh hey, they’re totally guttering me. That’s cool. I’ve never seen anyone actually do this before.” 5 LAPS LATER…”No wait, guttering is not cool. In fact it sucks. Please let me draft off you again?”

(For the uninitiated, “guttering” is a tactic used in racing when there’s a side wind. Cyclists get a big benefit from drafting (or letting the guy in front of them block the wind.) so when there’s a side wind, you want to position yourself to the side of the guy in front, instead of straight behind him. Smart cyclists will move all the way to the edge of the road in a side wind so if you try and draft of them, you end up in the gutter. Hence the name of the term.)

I pretty much kept getting yo-yo’d off the back only to catch the wheel of one of the three Whitman girls and let them pull me back to the main pack (and by main pack, I mean 4 people.) so when the crit was half over and I still hadn’t been dropped yet, my stubbornness kicked into overdrive and I became determined to finish the race with the pack. (I should note that while I may have avoided getting completely dropped, I definitely did not take a single pull on the front and was comparatively doing less work than the rest of the field that was rotating pulls.)

Fun thing about crits (and by fun thing, I mean extremely painful thing) is that scattered throughout the race are “prem” laps where the race official rings a bell signaling that whoever wins the next lap gets a prize (in collegiate, it goes 4 deep, but all you win are more points.) In the A’s I quickly discovered prem laps mean mad dash sprints for the line while I invariably went off the back and had to work my way back on.

And that’s exactly what happened for the first 5 prems in our crit. On the last prem however, one of the PSU riders wasn’t sprinting as fast as she had the previous laps, and I was sitting close enough to her wheel that I decided, “fuck it” and went for the prem, stealing the 1 point from PSU.

Inside I was doing an internal happy dance. You have no idea how ridiculously proud of that one point I was. Portland must have noticed because as she passed me I heard, “Hey Washington, you can pull too you know!”

Aw, hell. I did not want any attention on myself. I was just trying to survive the race without embarrassing myself. If I had a tail, it would have been tucked between my legs. Unconsciously, I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head—trying to make myself as small as possible as I situated myself at the back of the pack once more. Hoping to go back to being invisible. Inwardly though, I was still smirking a bit. (I’d picked up on a bit of rivalry between some of my teammates and some of the Portland kids—we were fighting it out for first place in the team division—so I wasn’t too upset about pissing her off.)

With a couple of laps to go, one of the Whitman girls went off the front and the rest of the back just let her go. Eventually, WSU started a chase, but with no help from PSU, Whitman kept her lead and won on a breakaway.

In the pack sprint, I dug deep, called up my last reserves and channeled my best inner Cavendish to take 5^th by a couple of inches.  

What a fantastically fun crit. There’s something immensely satisfying about going toe to toe with the big dogs and surviving.

Bring on Montana and Week 4

Oregon State University Musings: In Which I Learned How to Avoid Crashing in a Crit

“Well this sucks,” my brain repeated endlessly. At every corner or hill, I kept attacking in hopes of splitting the pack (since it worked so well for me last week) but the hills weren’t long enough and with no teammates on the front, I had no one to work with to sustain an attack. No one wanted to work with me and form a break. And I pulling way more than I wanted to. Apparently, the field had learned from last week and was gonna try and force Western, Whitman, and me to pull them all the way to the line. 

Finally on the final climb to the line, the three of us jumped and finished 1-2-3 (I obviously took 3^rd as I still can’t climb.) I was frustrated. I didn’t like the way the race had gone (it wasn’t even a race for 90%. As no one else wanted to pull and I wasn’t gonna exhaust myself on the front, the average pace was pretty damn slow.) I didn’t like that I was still racing B’s (after pretty much demanding that I upgrade last week, the official changed his mind saying he didn’t know if I could compete at the level of the A’s.) And I didn’t like that I couldn’t do anything useful on a hill.

I suppose that’s the nice thing about collegiate, if you don’t like how one race ended up, you have two more races to try and fix things (though it makes for an extremely tiring race weekend.) So a few wet hours later (it started raining again to my eternal consternation) and back on the bike for the TTT, then onto the crit on Sunday.

Crits take place in one of two locations: in industrial sections/business parks or on campus. This one was in the latter category, weaving through the streets and parking lots of OSU. It was also a bit more technical than the last one with more corners, including a particularly sharp corner after the first straight away. After a 2 hour delay due to illegal parked cars in the middle of our course, racing finally started.

Whitman and I rotated on the front—neither or us willing to let the other get away. There were 20 or so other girls out there that day, in my mind, this was a race purely between the two of us. Though neither of us sustained a breakaway, our speed was enough to split the pack in two and we slowly started gaining on the back half of the pack.

We caught them right at the one sharp corner and that’s when Whitman made her move, accelerating around the corner and using the slower pack to block the rest of us from chasing. Being the stubborn bastard that I am (and lacking in the common sense to realize that this might be a bad idea), I hammered to get back onto her wheel and, in trying to squeeze by the slower girls, ended up taking the corner way too sharply and way too quickly for my bike handing skills.

Oh shit. Back wheel came off the ground. Then the front wheel. Fuck fuck fuck. No rubber on the road is a bad place to be. I jerked my handlebars away from the corner and corrected my precariously tipping bike, but placed myself on a path that took my directly in front of the following riders. Shit. Why weren’t my feet clipped in anymore? When did they come out? While my mind was sorta busy trying to avoid what could end up being a rather painful situation, a loud voice in my head was more concerned over the fact that we were at 5 to go, so if I crashed, I didn’t get a free lap and my race was done.

Jamming my cleats back into the clips, I narrowly avoided not only the curb on the other side of the road, but also all the other racers. My heart was racing so fast, I couldn’t distinguish individual beats anymore, so filled with adrenaline and the rush of avoiding disaster.

So I used the adrenaline to my advantage and drilled it back to the front, until once again, it was Whitman and me sprinting hard for the line and the win.

And once again, I find myself chasing Whitman’s wheel as she crossed first. Yeah, she’s definitely my nemesis. 

Last week with the B’s as I get to upgrade next week. Maybe I can ditch Whitman when I jump to the A’s.

On to Central and Week III.

(Side Note: Check out Whitman Cycling's Race Report to see another perspective on my unsustainable attacks during the RR.)