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