Big mistake. Huge. Gross tactical error, although I’ll take my beating like a man. At nine this morning, roughly twenty Category 5 riders handed me my ass in a 20-lap criterium in downtown Poughkeepsie.
About a month ago, I raced Category 5 in Prospect Park and did well enough to stay with the main / lead group for the entire seventeen miles. After a year or riding and training, I was happy with that, so I felt good about doing well again today up in Poughkeepsie. I trained hard all week and expected things to go well this morning, yet as I stood on the line waiting for the race organizer to finish his speech, I noticed almost all of the other riders around me not only sporting team kits, but shaved legs as well. Maybe that’s how they roll up here in Putnam County, I thought, eyeballing the Sasquatch-thick fur covering my own legs. Maybe that’s just how these guys roll.
Clearly, I was kidding myself. The race in Poughkeepsie turned out to be a far cry from your standard Prospect Park criterium where the organizers (whoever they are) set up a table on the side of the road and use a bullhorn that needed new batteries in 1985. I’m joking, but apparently in Poughkeepsie, when these Putnam Country organizers roll, they roll big. (If I use the term roll one more time in the course of this update, feel free to slap me right across the face.) Take a look at the Start / Finish line below:
The organizers had an open-sided trailer upon which they sat during the course of the race. They had set up bleachers across the street for spectators. They had porta-a-pottys. They had a hospitality table set up under a tent. Around the mile-long course, they had not only piled hay bales around the poles in each corner, but they zip-tied squares of plywood over all the sewer grates to ensure no one’s wheel got caught up. And you know that orange plastic fencing they use at construction sites? They wrapped the outside of each corner with that stuff to ensure none of us went slamming through any storefronts if we overshot a turn.
I mean, these guys were taking their shit seriously. While warming up, I had to swerve around more than a few street cleaners as they went over every inch of pavement on the course.
As I said, the organization behind this criterium was rather serious, so the team kits, the shaved legs, and the expensive aero rims really should not have surprised me. I shouldn’t have been surprised one bit, but what was I going to do? Myself, I don’t see much point in going to line and thinking anything other than, I’m the baddest motherf*cker out here. If you can get yourself in that mind frame (or something similar), at least you’re going out there with confidence and based on what I saw in my first true criterium, you’re going to need some confidence when negotiating 45-degree corners at 22 MPH surrounded on all sides.
When the whistle blew, the sprinting began. In the space of two laps, I quickly learned how important it is to stay near the front as the pack approaches each turn considering once the first few riders cut through the corner, everyone hammers on the pedals to get the speed up again. With that said, I used the tailwind on the back stretch to jump out of the draft and position myself within the top ten and sat there for the next two or three laps. The accelerations out of the corners were taking their toll on my lungs, as was the headwind on the finish line stretch, although the group seemed to take a breather for a few seconds each time we had the wind behind us so I figured we’d settle in until the last lap or two.
Another gross tactical error. It was around lap six or seven that the pace shot up a few miles-per-hour. Someone must have took the lead and decided to shake things up a bit because until that point, things were tough yet manageable. With my heart rate already up to 185 - 190, the pack just spit me out the back and left me for dead.
How embarrassing.
Actually, a big guy (wearing a team kit, of course) who must have dropped back initially came barreling by a few seconds later. Hopping on his wheel, I proposed we work together to see what we could do, but after two laps of sitting behind He-Man, I told him I was doing everything I could just to stay with him and let him go off on his own.
And that was it. I sat in no-man’s land all by myself for a few laps and the worst part about the rest of the race wasn’t getting lapped. Rather, the worst part about going out and getting dropped on that kind of a course is when people clap and cheer as you’re passing the bleachers. I know they mean well, and encouragement should always be considered a good thing, but I knew that they knew that I had been dropped, and when I get dropped, I’d prefer invisibility. It’s surprising more bikes don’t come equipped with reliable cloaking devices for such situations.
With one lap to go, I rolled up next to a guy who had been dropped before I had been dropped. I was a lap down and he was two laps down, so rather than bust our asses to get over the line, we put the pace on cruise control and chatted for a minute. He had driven up with a friend from Virginia Beach, which struck me as a long-ass ride for a 20-lap race, but he did mention a night out in Manhattan tonight, so who can blame a few southern boys for wanting to hit the Big Apple for an evening?
Changing out of my riding gear, I rode back to the Start / Finish line to (a) check my placing, which was 14th out of 17, and (b) snap off some more pics as the Category 4 riders were getting started.
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P.S. I witnessed another crash this morning, this one fifty feet ahead of me in the middle of a corner. Both of the guys who went down seemed all right as I rode by, but golly, for such light machines, bikes make a hell of a lot of noise when they hit pavement.
P.S.S. And if it wasn’t for those two guys who crashed, I would have finished 16th out of 17.
Again, how embarrassing.
2 comments:
So when are you shaving your legs?
Don't hold your breath. And even if I wanted to (which I don't), I'd need to hire a team of waxing professionals and buy a few gallons of wax to get the job done, so it's never going to happen.
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