The Guinness Cycling Team should work out well for me. There are a few Cat 3s and a few Cat 1/2s that race, but not dozens so it will be possible to perform well without competing with a ton of teammates. Through brief encounters I've had with riders on the team I'm looking forward to the season. Last summer when I came down for some Crits, I saw Alex, a Cat 3 rider, do a solo breakaway at the Franz Bakery Crit for the win. And then down in Eugene I had a humorous encounter with a Guinness rider whose pre-hill-climb strategy was to chug a can of red bull - and it worked, he was 40+ seconds faster than me and I was 2nd in the 4/5s. This year, I met Cliff who was the guy who gave me a ride to the Capitol Crit last week. Cliff is a very chill and nice dude who races a lot. On Tuesday I met up with a group from the team for some drinks and it seemed like I would mesh well with the team. And another pro about this team is that it's cool if I still wear the Tacoma Bike jersey in my Washington races. However in Oregon I'll be wearing some white and green.
As for training, this week was a rest week. And it was a rest week where I was resting after coming off of a win streak that I was resenting resting and really wanted to get out and do some sprints. At work I was having trouble focusing because I wanted to race so badly. The weekend could not come soon enough for me.
The weekend finally came and I was excited. I had reserved a Zipcar for the first time and made my way up to the gloomy area by Centralia for the Independence Valley Road Race. On the way I was listening to the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy so I was amped. I got to the race area and it was packed. It was so packed that the only parking spot left was in a huge puddle. I parked there and did a little dance of getting out on the passenger side and tiptoeing on some dry land. After putting together the bike, I barely made it to the start on time.
The race had a big field of 76 riders, however, I only saw a few sprinter threats and was really wondering if some climbers would make or break the day. The race began and I was playing the move up through the field game for a while. The first hill came and it was quite big. The field was going hard up it, but mostly stayed together. On the other side of the range I kept moving up when I could. Finally about 15 miles in I found a hole going up to the front so I attacked and didn't have enough to really go, so the field caught up.
Coming up on the 2nd climb of the big hill I was planning on attacking on the upper part of it, however when that point came, I was already at 188bpm, so I was not in a position to mount an attack. The field seemed to break up a bit and a few of us were trying to paceline away. However, this paceline of ours kept growing in number, so I stopped doing pulls and waited for the next small hill. The next hill came and it was again a big effort for us, but this breakaway field of us stuck together. At this point, I knew it would come down to a field sprint, so I focused on positioning. When the 1k came up I put myself at about 5th and made my sprint at the 200k mark. I flew past the 4 guys in front, but apparently gave a great leadout to the guy who won the race. I placed 2nd and that was fine by me since I have found it hard sometimes on the field sprints. I drove on back to PDX and got some good sleep.
Randy and I after IVRR
Sunday morning I headed out to Hagg Lake with Cliff again. The weather was quite dreary with rain nearly the whole race. The field was much smaller - maybe 25 guys. And the race had a bunch of small hills, but nothing major. There also weren't really any attacks either. I made a few but still felt like I couldn't keep them going. On the 4th lap my front derailleur started having issues and couldn't shift to the big ring. I decided that I would hold onto the pack for the field sprint since I could power up the 200m uphill finish in a big rear gear. However, with about 2k to go the chain randomly shifted up to the big ring. I thought "wow cool. ATTACK!!!" And I did, but again I didn't have enough juice to get away for good. At this point I was debating about downshifting again, but kept it in the big ring for the finish. I was in the 2nd row approaching the 200k and then went. The Banana Belt series leader made a good jump too and powered out for the win and some other guy managed to claim 2nd. Still though, a podium from the field was satisfactory for me.
After this I volunteered as a corner marshal to pay my race fee and hitchhiked with a masters guy back home. Whenever I can on Sundays I go to church and have lately been contemplating whether trying to be better than all these other bicyclists is really showing mercy and being nice and basically doing God's will as opposed to helping dig a well for some poor Malaysian tribe. One of my friends suggested that my rationalization process of saying: "ok I've been working since September on this bicycle racing thing and now I want to stop? I don't think so." might actually be the righteous thing to say. And in this week's message I randomly flipped in a pew Bible to Psalm 107 telling stories of how people desert God but then decide to come back. And the Sermon was about Hosea who I guess invited Israel to come back to God by naming his kids weird names. I'm still unsure about whether this means that this bicycling is the wrong thing, or this message was a warning from straying from my bicycle racing. I'm gambling that it's a warning to not stray away from bicycling so I'm going to keep pressing on.
And with that, it's time to upgrade and go to the next level: Cat 3. At this point, the only way to move up another category is to be good. It's possible in Cat 4 and 5 to simply do a lot of races and then you can upgrade, but in Cat 3, you must earn 30 points to get to the 2s. And then with the 2s you're racing with the 1s and Pros so it is quite hard. But I've proved myself out of the 4s and it's time to see how well I can do at this next level.
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