University of Oregon Race Musings: In Which I Learned to Ride in the Rain

I don’t ride in the rain. Hell, back home I won’t even ride when the ground is wet. See, home is the central coast of California, a magical place where it never rains and the temperature rarely drops below 50 or above 80. On the off chance the roads are wet, it’s just not worth going out. Why risk the possibility of crashing or deal with the pain of cleaning my bike? Wet roads=rest days. Case closed.

Hence I’m not exactly thrilled that the road is not only wet, but also consistently getting wetter as I’m sitting on a trainer under a tarp someone outside of Eugene, OR warming up for my first attempt at racing my bike.

Sometimes I’m surprised it took me 26 years to get around to racing—I’ve been riding a bike since I was four. (True statement. Still damn proud of the fact that I went to Kindergarten already knowing how to ride without training wheels. What can I say? I peaked early.) But in undergrad I raced triathlon and then I discovered rugby and for a while nothing could compare with the hard hits and big runs of 80 minutes of sheer insanity.

But I could never leave my bike for long. And I figured, why not? Last chance to race bikes as a collegiate athlete. Seems as good of time as ever to learn. Unfortunately, the weather of the PNW does not align with my requirements of weather that is acceptable for bike riding.

So it is an unhappy Husky that rolled up to the start line with 30 or so other college kids from assorted schools around the PNW. My heart’s beating out a sharp steady tattoo on my chest. The boys on my team expect me to destroy everyone else, the girls on my team just keep talking about how fast the other schools are. I don’t know what to expect. On top of that, my parents are here. 900 miles from home and my parents came up. Why the fuck did it have to be for my first race? God, I want this to be over. 

And we’re off. Roll down a straightaway then a left turn and a decent hill. But we’re still on a neutral roll out, so despite my issues with hills (more on that later), I’m still on the front of the pack when we reach the top. But half the field didn’t. A mile into the ride and we already split the field. OK, I could be down with this.

Another few fast and flat miles sitting on the front but not at the front, then off the main road and, oh, that’s a hill. That’s really a hill. This doesn’t bode well for me. Getting up a hill usually begins with the wheezing. Then the lungs catch fire. Usually I’m breathing so hard that I can’t take time to swallow and thus end up drooling down my chin. Finally, I perform a successful reverse breakaway off the back. There’s a reason my Cat 1 buddies affectionately call me “Little Cav”—and it’s not because I’m a fast sprinter.

Yup, there goes my breathing. Others are starting to side eye me. One asks if I have asthma. I just shake my head without speaking. No breath for that. My legs are churning and I’m passing people and thanking God for my compact cassette and just focusing on keeping my wheel even with Whitman’s and Western’s. Then that’s it. We’ve crested the hill. And “we” has shrunk drastically again—three of us were off the front.

And that was pretty much the end of the race. Western, Whitman, and I were so far ahead that, even though that hill was only half way through the first lap, we never saw anyone else again.  Tackling the hill the second time, we hit what I remembered as the final corner and I jumped to get over the top. Western and Whitman jumped with me, but I had severely misremembered the hill as we were only about halfway up. To my bemused delight, my accidental attack led to Western and me dropping Whitman and finishing the race 1-2. (She beat me on the final sprint.) My dad’s response to all this? “I was shocked to see you with the breakaway after that hill.”

So go me. Great intro to bike racing. Now I just want to go hang with the rest of my team. And yet, somehow I’m supposed to get back on my bike in two hours. This time for the TTT. What kind of masochist came up with collegiate bike race? Three races in 48 hours? Screw that. It’s raining again. I really don’t want to get out of this car. 

But I do. Back on the bike for a 12 mi rolling TTT with a headwind for 2/3 of the course. I pretty much died, but my teammate rocked it and between the two of us we took first by over 3 minutes. The officials didn’t like that. They came over and demanded to know how we achieved such a time. Our brilliant response? “Uh...we pedaled hard?” Once everything was found to be copasetic, the head official told us that after that performance we both needed to upgrade to A’s. Huh, ok. That’s cool. All the points are in the A division even if I do end up getting my ass kicked. And with that, my first day of bike racing is over. Though there’s still more to come.

Sunday. Crit day. The nerves are back. Not about how I’m going to stack up against the others, but whether or not I’m gonna crash. A pack of people with shaky bike handling skills (Mainly referring to myself here as my ability to corner sucks. I have a tendency to “mow the lawn” aka end up off the road and in the grass) going around in circles on wet pavement just seems like a recipe for disaster.

So about 2 minutes in, I decided to see if I could go off the front and take a few people with me for a breakaway. Turns out, yes, I can go off the front, but no, I can’t take anyone else with me as no one else jumped. Which means my 30 minute crit became a 20 min solo TT, before the group finally chased me down for the final few laps.

Ending sprint and my Whitman buddy from the day before beats me across the line for a 1-2 finish. Haven’t decided yet whether I like her cause she kicks ass on the bike or dislike her cause she kicks my ass on the bike. (I maintain that because I ended up with more points thanks to the prems I won when off the front, that I had a better race. Apparently, I am the only one who holds such a view.)

Bring on OSU and Week 2.