Beautiful weather, clear skies, warm, 70 degrees.  Spring is here. 

Final weekend of the Greenville/Spartanburg Spring Series 2002.  The road race course this weekend was different than the previous weekend’s Donaldson Center course. This race was held at Walnut Grove, rural countryside, outside Spartanburg.  Beautiful rolling hills, farmland and forest scenery.  The course is a 12-mile loop, and the Cat 5 race would do 3 laps, for a total of 36 miles.  

My friend, Bruce Belden (from skating) was there and raced with us.  The race started around 9am, and there were about 30 riders in the Cat 5 field.  We took off at a brisk, but comfortable pace, and everyone spent the first lap feeling out the competition, and getting to know the course.  It was a great course, with several good-size hills, comparable to some of the tougher hills on the Atlanta group rides.  This was great because it served to thin out the field, unlike the week before at the Donaldson Center, where the course was flat and short.  Last week’s race was a lot of fun, but it proved very frustrating, as the field stayed congested the entire race.  Difficult to maneuver.  With the hills on the Walnut Grove course, the pack strung out, and we had a more realistic race on our hands.  Not to mention more challenging.  This was more like it. 

The first lap went well, and it finished with a long, sustained, moderate-grade uphill climb to the finish.  I climbed it at a comfortable pace and to my surprise, found myself in 2^nd place when we got to the top.  And I thought, “Well, alright!  This is my kind of course!”  Granted, it was still very early in the race, but I hoped that meant I could compete with these guys, climbing-wise.  

Right behind me were about four other guys, including Bruce, and the six of us had a pretty good gap on the peloton.  The first guy said, “I’ll work with you guys if you work with me!”, and we said, “You got it!”, and the break-away was on.  We hammered for quite a while with a rotating pace line, and it felt great.  For a little while.  Unfortunately, though, for me, I wasn’t strong enough to sustain it.  These guys were strong.  Just sitting in, which should have been rest, I was spinning like crazy just to maintain the pace.  Looked at my heart-rate monitor and I was well above threshold.  I still felt great, but I knew it was just a matter of time, and I wasn’t sure how long I could sustain it.  I took my turns pulling, but I didn’t have the strength to accelerate the pace each time it came my turn to pull.  We were rotating the lead guy about every 10 seconds.  Before too long, I felt myself starting to get dropped from the break-away, and I was fighting like crazy just to hang on. And then we hit a huge headwind on the straightaway section on the back side of the loop.  Fortunately for me, but unfortunately for the breakaway, that pretty much shut down the breakaway.  Since the headwind slowed down the pace, I recovered, caught back up, and felt good again.  But then we hit a huge downhill, followed by a huge uphill, and the pack caught us and swallowed us up.  So much for that breakaway.  

Time to revise the strategy.  Since that experience showed me a break-away probably wouldn’t work that day, on that particular course, with that headwind, I decided not to try it again on the next lap.  But rather sit in next time, conserve my energy, and go for an attack up the last hill at the end of the race (well before a sprint would start).  

One cool thing about the race was that a Pro/1/2 guy jumped in, rode alongside us, and gave us pointers.  I guess he just did this for fun, or maybe he had a buddy in our race.  But anyway, he was cool, and gave me a couple good pointers.  “Get tight!” (into the headwind).  “Fight for that wheel!”  Stuff like that. 

So we completed the 2^nd lap and started the 3^rd and final lap…  Like before, at the top of that hill, some riders (4) were off the front.  This time I (gladly) wasn’t with them.  Also like last time, they took off in hopes of breaking away, but I didn’t even worry about it.  I knew it probably wouldn’t work, and figured if it did, I wouldn’t be able to hang with ‘em, so more power to ‘em.  I just sat in and banked on the greater odds that it wouldn’t work.  Sure enough, it didn’t.  Same story as before.  The pack caught them when they hit the huge headwind and subsequent hills.  

Alright, so now an hour and a half later, we’re headed toward the end of the race.  The peloton had dropped about half the field, and there were now about a dozen of us in the lead pack.  Still pushing the pace, it was comparable to the lead pack when pushing it on a group ride.  Like about 25 to 30 mph, I guess.  I was just glad I didn’t get dropped.  We maintained that pace pretty much the entire race, only dipping down to 15 mph into the huge headwind and also up the hills.  I still felt good and thought I was in good shape for the final kick up the hill to the finish.  

Here we go.  Finish line, coming up.  Only 2 more miles and one, long uphill to go…  Bad news.  This was not my day.  I didn’t quite have it.  Turns out all the other guys in the peloton were well rested and ready, too (or just stronger).  As we headed up the last hill to the finish line, the pace elevated, as it invariably does approaching the finish line of any race.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite strong enough to hang on, and slid off the end of the pack.  They dropped me!  I wasn’t far behind.  They were only about 10 feet in front of me, but 10 feet is an eternity when you’re getting dropped and losing the draft.  I was spinning like crazy and sprinting at this point, but just didn’t have the juice to bridge the gap and go for the sprint.  Crossed the finish line at the back of the pack and wound up getting 13^th.  Darn, I was hoping I was stronger than that.  Oh well.   

Final stats:  36 miles, 22 mph average, about 1 hour 40 minutes.  Bruce got 2^nd!  Man, what a great race.  I was totally spent.  What a blast.  Life is good. 

Ride on,
-Bry