TheKillerPenguin

So, uh, I finally put my money where my mouth is. Well, almost.

I took 6th out of 50. It's not first, but it's better than I've ever come before. It's also the longest race I've ever done, and the hilliest race I've ever done. And I took 6th. Yay. boo It's not 1st, but 6th aint too bad.

You can see the course profile here- https://home.nycap.rr.com/drakesnorth...%20profile.jpg Anyway, the course was all sorts of awesome. 56miles long. 4200 ft of climbing, a lot of it on packed dirt roads, lots of it at or above 8%. 40mph downhills through the woods on narrow dirt ribbons flanked by gravel. Beautiful scenery. Some spiffy "flat" sections to go all out on. It was a biker's dream. Unless that biker happened to fall on one of the downhills (and some did), then it was more of a nightmare.
But I digress...

The organization was, for the most part, pretty damn good. The course was well marked with spray paint and tons of marshals. Traffic only interfered with us at one point, but it was pretty minor and didn't slow us down too much (pretty damn good for a point to point 56mile rr!). Lots of photographers were around watching me vogue. Registration was a bit of a pain, I stood in line for over a half hour, but it wasn't bad considering 500 racers showed up and this is the second year its been run. One major thing- my group's pace car missed a turn...but I'll get to that in a moment. Other than that, the organizers made it an absolute pleasure to be a participant.

I started the race towards the front, and held it for the first 5-6 miles. The course looped out of town and then back into it, and from there we didn't come back until we finished. Anyway, once we got back into town, we were supposed to turn...and the pacecar didn't turn. us guys in the fron't didn't realize it at first, so we went 400 yards in the wrong direction before we got ourselves turned around and back on the course. I guess 20-30 guys actually made the turn...all the guys in the back of the peloton. The one time I actually position myself right I got screwed over

It was all good though, about a mile after the turn there was a pretty nasty uphill stretch, and I'm a good climber. What was left of the peloton was moving pretty slow and I saw a 2 man break forming at the front, so I threw down like the peloton was rolling backwards and joined them. Too bad for me they were both on the same team and were both stronger than me, so after I realized they weren't going to work with me I let myself drop back since it was early in the race and I didn't want to blow up. Two other guys bridged up to me, and we formed our own little break, and stayed together just about up to the finish. I'd set a decent pace up climbs so that we wouldn't blow ourselves up, one of the others was a great descender so we let him lead downhill, and we all took turns pulling when it was relatively flat. This worked pretty well throughout the race, we were chuggin' along catching tons of riders that were fortunate enough not to follow the pace car. Every once and a while some guys we were passing would join us, but they'd always wind up dropping off the back eventually. It was a truly wicked pace! 22-24 into a really nasty headwind on the flats, 25-30+ when it wasn't blowing directly at us. We just worked well together, and eventually worked our ways up nearly to the leaders. One of the guys threw his chain at one point trying to shift into the little ring, so we soft pedaled until he could catch up. Teamwork- something I've never really been a part of before.

Anyway, At about mile 49 I started to fade...shoulda eaten another goo. The strongest out of us 3 broke away around then, so I bridged up to him and nearly lost my legs doing it. I let him tow me up the final climb and was right on his wheel for the whole thing, but lost him on the final 5 mile descent to the finish. Eventually the other guy that was in our break caught back up to me, and we worked together until we got to about 200 yards out. I started the sprint, and wound up leading him out, but he wasn't strong enough to pass me. Beat him by a wheel!

Here are the stats- 56 miles, 4200ft of climbing, 20.56mph avg. To put it in perspectice, I finished the course a full 6 minutes faster than the winner of the Cat4 race (i'm a cat5). I still didn't take 1st place but I'm sure as hell going to try next weekend!

BTW, Kudos to Velocity- the aerohead rims took the punishment like champs.

bigskymacadam

nice read. congrats on the finish as that is indeed a long race. i know it's not first place, but it's not bad at all. you should still get points for that ...

DrWJODonnell

Nice job and sounds like you had a great time. If it were me, I would likely have tried to stick with the front two as they obviously had an advantage, but likely would not have attacked you until the end. As such, even though they were stronger, you likely would have been guaranteed a third place finish as long as they did not try to shake you too early. Still, sounds like a great race and I had considered partaking in it, but I did not want to deal with the rough stuff. How rough were the roads?

gcl8a

"Here are the stats- 56 miles, 4200ft of climbing, 20.56mph avg. To put it in perspectice, I finished the course a full 6 minutes faster than the winner of the Cat4 race. I still didn't take 1st place but I'm sure as hell going to try next weekend!"



--what category were you? It 's not clear from the (excellent) write-up. Did I miss something?

TheKillerPenguin

If I thought I could have gone at the pace they were holding, I would have stuck with em! I was afraid I'd blow up after 15-20 miles of that. Actually I think we wound up passing them later in the race anyway. The dirt roads really weren't too bad. I was running 23C slicks and had no problems with traction...really the worst thing about them was that they sucked so much power out of you when you're riding on em. pretty easy to find a line on them, and there wasn't that much gravel at all. Just had to be alert.

TheKillerPenguin

whoops, sorry! i'm a cat5, and I was in the under 35 cat5 group.

zimbo

So, just to make sure we're clear. The top six Cat5 finishers were a full 6+ minutes faster than the Cat4 finishers on the same course on the same day? If so, wow, that's pretty cool. You should be stoked about that.

--Steve

TheKillerPenguin

yup, here are the results. The top 4 U35 Cat5 finishers were around 11 minutes faster than the 4's https://www.bikereg.com/Results/2006/...LL-ROUBAIX.asp

TheKillerPenguin

Apparantly there was an error in the Cat4 results. They've been updated, and they were a lot faster than the 5s.

-=(8)=-

Wow !
Way to rEpReZeNtate P-Ded !!


Great stuff !