Gregflier

I did my first crit yesterday and had a ball. Over the last two weeks I have been reading everything I could here and other places trying to figure out if I was ready or would just pose a hazard. I have only had a road bike for about 5 month's and have spent most of my training time (~75 miles /week) solo training for a sprint triathlon because the group rides in my area are about 45 minutes away. I had maybe 12 group rides and usually tried to keep a little extra distance because I didn't want to make the other guys nervous since I'm a noob.

Fortunately for me the local crit in Roanoke VA is very low key and limited to 35 bikes. We had about 20 in the 4/5 race. I spent a while (30 minutes) riding around the race course (0.4m parking lot) and getting used to the tighter turns and figuring out lines that worked.

I was pretty nervous at the start and intimidated by the guys in great shape with team kits, but there were also guys with old aluminum bikes like mine and reflectors and seatbags which made me feel a little better. The first lap or two was surprisingly slow, but then the speed ramped up a bit and I had to work very hard to stay with the main group. Trying to keep up with the acceleration out of the tightest corner was VERY hard and I had real doubts about being able to keep up with the group. I kept waiting for the pace to increase at the end, but I didn't notice it. I feel I could have passed a few on the last lap, but the guys in front of me didn't seem to be sprinting and I was happy to just not do anything dumb in my first race.

I ended up on the tail end of the lead group and 9th overall, there were a few off the front of that group who may have lapped the field. Average speed was 23.2mph and max was 28.5 according to my gps. My best solo effort had been about 22mph in a 20k triathlon bike leg a few month's ago.

I don't think my lines were as smooth as some of the others and I wasn't comfortable keeping as small of a gap around me as a lot of the group seemed to be....Everybody was friendly and seemingly accepting of my noobness. I didn't scare myself, didn't get yelled at, and feel I learned a lot about racing and group riding.

Thanks for all the great posts on this site that helped me start to learn about bikes.
Greg

waterrockets 

Congrats on the first crit. Keep 'em coming.

umd

ridethecliche

Nice!

Now do more 'race oriented' group rides to get more comfortable in a pack.

mattm

Sounds like a successful first crit!

(and thank you for not posting a "should I race?" thread before you raced)

mkadam68

Congrats on your adventure. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Now, HTFU! For the past 2-3 years, I have been driving 45-mins one-way to the Saturday group training ride, and usually 45-60 mins to a Sunday race. Every week Jan--Sep. (Granted, this year, I did move closer, so now the Sat ride is only 25-mins away, but still...)

Just my $0.02.

enjoi07

i get to ride 10 min. to one of the best group rides in socal. just throwin that out there.

mkadam68

Which one do you do? I'm usually at Montrose on Saturdays.

enjoi07

fiesta island WORLDS! whoo