I can do that;
I’ve done a couple of the Local Tuesday night crits (cat 1/2/3 “a” pack”. Whereas I used to be one of the guys in front, launching attacks, chasing attacks down and crossing the finish toward the front as well, now whenever I made my way toward to front and spent second or two in the wind I could feel I was about to burn out, and ended up receding into the pack in order to attempt to recover a little for the rest of the rack and mount a lame sprint which only resulted in a mid-pack kind of finish on both occasions.

The third race was a Roubaix-style race which would have been 3 22-mile laps though rolling terrain with 4-mile stretch of Gravel. The pack was a 1/2/3 pack with cat-3s scored separately. That is how many races in my area are done. Often the pack splits with most of the Cat-1/2 types ending up on the front end of the split and the 3s in the chase group. About all a Cat-3 often has to do is manage to hang on to the lead group in the splint and often he’ll end up on the podium because all the others who made the split were cat 1 or 2 racers.

In accordance with the prophecy, the pack started to split several miles into the first lap and by the time I realized that nobody was going to try and organize any kind of chase, there was probably about a 150-foot gap. I took off to bridge in hopes someone would follow me and we could work together to catch the lead group. Nobody was on my wheel, however, and I ended up bridging alone. I was fairly proud of myself for catching back on, but once we got to the gravel, we hit some deep patches and things got squirrelly so I left the rider in front of me a little more space so we wouldn’t take each other out. When things smoothed out, I just didn’t have the juice left in my legs after that bridge to catch back on.

I dropped back to the second group with all my fellow cat-3s. I stuck with them for a while, and about halfway through the second lap when I had finished my first bottle, I reached down for my second and realized it wasn’t there and must have dropped somewhere in the gravel and potholes I had ridden through. I opted not to finish the last 30 miles without water… my first DNF since my first year of racing. I’d like to say it was the bottle-cage’s fault, but the truth is that if I didn’t already know I was fading and likely to get dropped from the second pack, I probably would have suffered through some dehydration to finish the race.
I think the big difference in my fitness is my lack of ability to recover. It seems my matchbook only houses one match this year.