Prepping for Nationals

It’s been a very strange week so far. Monday I was totally fried from the weekend’s racing. Yoga felt really good. Steve is so passionate about his yoga, he is constantly learning and training, so our class never gets old or stale as he’s always injecting something new. Sometimes it’s entirely new and sometimes it’s just a new way to look at how we do a pose or a new way to get in or out of a pose. Very stimulating on an intellectual level while the work of it all helps undo all the stress I put on my body on the bike. We did some different twists and I’m still feeling it in my intercostals.

Tuesday thankfully Pierre was willing to spend a couple hours of his birthday giving me a massage. My legs were in pretty decent shape. As always my psoases were problematic. And my back definitely needed some work because of the TT bike, but overall my body’s in pretty good shape and the position on the TT bike isn’t crunching up my neck or anything like that. So all good.

Went to ride with friends I seldom ride with yesterday evening because I just needed to spin the legs to clear the last of the massage out of them. Two flats made the ride take longer than planned, so I was later than planned getting over to Arlington to deliver the Ruby to Gen. She’s a very nice woman, I think she’ll be a real asset to the team in Fitchburg. And the Ruby will get used, which is important. I really considered keeping it as an emergency back-up sort of bike but that’s silly. It’s a great bike and deserves to get used.

So today I’m actually supposed to wake the legs up and do some efforts. Not the monster effort originally scheduled, but some stuff to get everything firing right as I won’t be on the bike again until Sunday. I have the TT bike, since it’s first up in competition next week.

I’ve been attending to some Chief Referee stuff this week as well. Events in August and September are already starting to get their flyers together, etc. I also find myself looking at my rule book to clarify some of the questions that came up over the weekend. There was some poor language in the technical guide (not done intentionally I’m sure) that left folks asking about why they couldn’t do the next stage when they had a mechanical that prevented them from completing the first stage. The rule book is clear where the technical guide wasn’t:

1A30. A stage race is an event with a common entry, run on consecutive days, comprising a sequence of road races (i.e. individual road races, time trials, criteriums), in which the overall results are determined by cumulative time or points. There are normally individual and team competitions. Riders must successfully complete each stage in order to be eligible for the next one.

And there you have it. Didn’t complete Stage 1, no Stage 2. Sorry, them’s the rules and them’s the breaks. But that’s not what the technical guide said….it said that you had to compete in and complete each stage to be eligible for the GC.

What made it confusing was the fact that the promoters did allow non-GC riders to race in 2 of the 3 stages. Personally, I think that if you’re going to let someone just race Stage 3 (and potentially affect the outcome of the stage AND the GC), then you should go ahead and let someone who had mechanical issues prevent them from completing Stage 1 go ahead and race Stages 2 & 3 and simply not be included when figuring the GC. What’s the difference? They were figured into the start times in the first place because they committed and ponied up the money for the Stage Race. Another reason not to allow non-GC riders race single stages.

Catching grief from a variety of folks about my racing of late, which has pretty much sucked. But I also know that these last couple of weeks what’s been in my thoughts is not fear but an unwillingness to risk a big ugly crash that might take me out of Nationals. I’ve spent all winter training with Nats as the goal… no local race is worth jeopardizing that in my book.

I haven’t even started to pack for the week in Louisville. But I’m not the type to pack way ahead. And I’ll need to get all my team kit clean tonight anyway. And I won’t start packing the car until I get home tomorrow night...

Tour of Washington County

Tour of Washington County

I got talked into doing this race…what the hell. But I’m so far off from past years schedules so far as racing goes that it probably wasn’t a very good idea, or maybe it was. Who knows.
Stage One was a rolling road race with one hill that was my undoing. It was visually deceptive – appearing to be shorter and shallower than it turned out to be. So I botched it on the first lap because I didn’t drop to the little chain ring. I got up it, just, but the toll it took on my legs that early in the race was a heavy price to pay the next time through. I had no problem getting back with the field after my error, but the next time through even on the small ring, my legs were trashed. Amanda botched it on that second lap, making the same mistake I did but then adding to her error by trying to change rings and dropping her chain, which caused folks to go down or have to stop and walk to the top of the hill (too steep for a mid-climb restart).

I had to slow way down to get through the mess as the wheel van and the ever annoying Bega who seems to think that it makes him (and his team) cooler to follow the caravan with a car. It doesn’t. This forced me to go around on the wrong side of the road, which didn’t make me happy but I didn’t have a choice, the road was blocked by the vehicles. Then it was a hard ass chase to try to get back to the field and I couldn’t quite stay connected. Every time I got close they seemed to surge ahead. So then it was the suffering off the back thing. Cheryl Osborne and I rode together the rest of the race, praying that they’d send us back early. Some of the cows started racing us, I think I out sprinted them but maybe Elsie caught me at the line. Cheryl starts talking about wanting to own a cow.

It was hot – the course has absolutely no shade on it! Another lap down, only three more times up that frigging hill. Cheryl gets up it faster than me, but I do down the other side faster.
Next thing we know there’s Robin on the other side of the course – riding back…quitting! So we yell at her to turn around and finish with us. We slow down and wait for her to suck it up and ride with us. So then it’s a threesome, working our way through the course. Up that damn hill again and there’s Michele, turning off the course to watch. Oh no, misery loves company, get out here and finish with us!

Happily we get the news that we’re going to be finished a lap early…such happy news. Cheryl speaks up and says that since I saved them one at a time I should be the first of us to cross the finish line. I’m feeling totally wiped out by this point. “If I can get up the last hills, sure.” I manage to find it in me to do as they wish and get up the finish hill ahead of Robin, just barely.
Then comes the debacle of the results…round one. I did my best to try to control the influx of stuff getting to Lew. And I’m happy that I’m not actually officiating this thing…little did I know how much worse it would get by the end of stage 3. An error got through that we never got off the results our out of the GC. Turns out the culprit short-cutted a course at some race last fall, so we now have her pegged…she can join the lady who took the subway during the NYC Marathon and the woman I read about who swapped timing chips with her husband so ‘she’ could qualify for Boston Marathon. I don’t get what people get out of doing stuff like that.
Cooled down with Lesley then helped sort out the results some more and finally got outta there. We found a nice place across the street from the hotel – Benny’s pub. I got a salad, sweet potato fries and a Loose Canon on draft. Then we went over to the hotel checked in, brought in what we had to, took showers and chilled. Ended up taking a late afternoon nap.

We walked next door to Barefoot Bernie’s for dinner. There was a table of folks from Artemis already seated and a table of officials. Lesley stopped at the Artemis table while I went over to chat briefly with Kevin and company. We both ordered crab cake sandwiches. Lesley subbed in a baked potato for the fries while I opted for the sautéed mushrooms.

Then it was back to the room for the evening. As time went along, I had an increasing level of pain in my right leg. First it was just down around my heel and ankle as happens sometimes when I’ve really been ripping up on the pedals – usually because of hills. Same thing happened at Christiana last year, except last year the pain was immediate and cleared as the evening went along. This was the opposite, coming up many hours after the race was done and getting worse until I hurt all the way up to my hip. Made for a bad night’s sleep – took forever to get to where fatigue overcame pain.

Up and out to the TT on Sunday morning. I wasn’t feeling particularly great for the previous day’s race and the bad night’s sleep. I knew Janet Olney (an excellent time trialist) was starting 30seconds behind me so my plan was to try to hold her off as long as I could and then minimize how much time she put into me after she passed me. I was happy with the end result even though I only just squeaked into the GC points for that stage. Made me really wish that the full Boonsboro course TT were happening later this season. But the group was really competitive and my time relative to others wasn’t what I’d hoped for. Bike felt good even if I didn’t. I was sweating like a pig, like I always do in that helmet, and my nose was running like crazy…sweat and snot everywhere…lovely. Not!

Back to the hotel for showers and a little something to eat. But not enough. I should have had more somewhere, but didn’t really feel like eating. Debated a lot about doing the crit, wasn’t sure I wanted to but the more I tried to talk myself out of it the more I knew I needed to do it. The pace was set hard at the start by women who didn’t do the TT…since I’d started with my gas tank empty, it didn’t take long to toss me off the field. I didn’t mind when Lew told me I was done. So I got a fresh bottle of water, sat down next to Dave Brown and family and watched the rest of the race.

A break happened with most teams represented and then in a truly awesome move, Janelle did a solo bridge up to the break. It was classic, text book. So that put Kenda into control the chase mode along with C3, CycleLife, Hub, HumanZoom, and Artemis. Then Sonja rode away from the break at 8 to go. It was an awesome move. Between passbys of the race, I chatted with Brigham about the course and where he should be coming out of the final turn. I commiserated with Andreas who went down in the final turn of the bell lap of his crit – lots of road rash, but worse still it meant he missed winning the GC by a couple of points!

It took until 3:15 to get out the women’s results in a way that made reasonable sense. There were erroneous bib numbers and people missing initially. Finally though we called it done. By then it was almost time for the Cat 4s to race, so I hung around with Christina and Sonja and Jen Chang (whose oatmeal craisin cookies were totally awesome!) watching Brigham and Lance race. They both raced well, always in excellent position (something I really should do more often myself!) throughout the race. Jorge got a gap on the field late in the race – by then the field was a lot smaller. But he must have misread the lap count and thought the race was over because he seemed to sit up coming into the bell lap…. So when they came out of the final turn, he’d been swallowed up by the field. Brigham was right there, third wheel and he went with a good wheel, but couldn’t get around that guy… official results show that Steven Kendall nipped him at the line. But even 3rd place was enough to get Brigham the GC win.

It was a good day, a good weekend and I think that if they do the race next year it’ll be better with some of the kinks worked out of it all. Hopefully they’ll listen to us and not allow non-GC people to race with GC people. There’s a lot about cycling that is unfair, no need for the promoters to make it even more unfair.

Time is at a premium so the blogging has slowed dramatically…so rather than back up, I’m just going to get to this past weekend and not worry about trying to write about the big officiating weekend other than to say I survived it all and while it was all good, I’m glad to be done with officiating for a while.

On to the races. First back-to-back race weekend of the season for me. I’m way late starting this year and it feels really strange, but that’s how things go and for me there’s a lot more to life than bike racing.

Just to put a little perspective on things for the weekend, we start with Wednesday of last week. I went to see Neil – my totally awesome chiropractor early so I could get across the river before the traffic got bad. Then I killed a little time before meeting up with Susan and Pierre. We rode over to the W&OD where we met up with Jeff & Kay on the tandem, Cat and Tania. We headed West for a 4-hour ride. I was fearful of this ride. With my schedule what it has been and is, I’ve been doing 90-minute or 2-hour trainings. 4 hours is a big jump in time on the bike. I started out ok but got my head in a bad place fairly quickly once we exited the trail and started hitting the roads in Loudon County. Pierre came back for me and talked me out of turning back then talked me out of the bad place. After that I was good for a while up until we got beyond the 2hour mark. Then my legs wanted to know where the hell the car was, ‘cause it was time to be done. Another rough patch that lasted about 15 minutes or so that Pierre worked with me to get through. Then the legs-like-sand feeling went away and we picked it up and got back to the others once more. When I ran out of juice to do any more Z4 at the 4 hour mark I didn’t fight it. We were on the trail and getting close to the end, so I just put away the big ring and took it easy on me for the last 20 minutes. Mostly I did ok though. I did almost all the climbs in the big ring – 53x21 seemed to serve me quite well for the most part. I think that for me on shorter climbs like those relying on my power works better than relying on my leg speed. I did my best to stay seated as much as possible, as that’s always best for climbing. In the end it turned out to be the longest ride I’ve done in over 2 years as I have a tendency to do 3-3.5 and call it enough.

Took it easy with Z2 on the TT bike Thursday to start getting used to the new saddle – put an Adamo on to see if it’ll relieve the discomfort. Friday night I had two bikes to get ready so I called the hot walks between the metro station and the office enough for the day and spent the evening setting things up for the crit on Saturday and the TT on Sunday. Plus I had to pack the officiating kit to deliver to the Crit on Saturday as well. So I took the Sable, not ready to beat up the Milan like that.

Travel went ok except for having to go into town and come back out because of construction around the WW Bridge. That was enough to delay my getting to the race a little bit. But it took no time for us to get the finish line set up, etc. Then it was time for me to get ready. I got in a few warm up laps and some time on the trainer. It was very humid, foggy at the start of the day. When the sun came out and burned off the fog it got hot fast! Even with a race at 9:30am, it was nasty. But I survived the heat and the race. It was a fairly fast race – average was 23 and we didn’t slow down too many times. CycleLife and Artemis were definitely there to race. We were a small squad – me, CK, Anna, Tania and Cat. Tania’s crank came off part way through the race. I was mostly hanging on for dear life – seemed to have enough in me to stay with the main group and go with every response to attacks but not anything more. I did wind up a good sprint – hitting just under 34mph at the finish. Almost rear ended Anna cause she sat up just past the finish line and I was still carrying a lot of speed… Cat and I went out on the trail with Tania and Amy (NCVC) for a “cool down” ride post race. Don’t know if it was on the race course or on the trail, but the HRM recorded 107 as max temperature for the morning. Then it was time to get home, eat, shower and get ready to head down to Chesapeake for Sunday’s TT.

Happily Aldona was set to drive so I got to chill out and rest my legs some during the drive. We made pretty good time. Had dinner at Joe’s Crab Shack – not bad for a chain seafood place. Then we picked up some organic breakfast burritos made with egg whites and turkey sausage for the morning (our room had a small fridge, coffee maker and microwave in it). Didn’t sleep all that well but that’s the way life goes. Since I sleep alone in a quiet space it’s always hard for me to get a good night’s sleep when sharing a room with someone. I wonder if Aldona knows that she sometimes calls out in her sleep….

Hunger woke me at 4am. Never got back to sleep. 6am and it was already 80 degrees. Warmed up some, but didn’t have much energy and the heat was really bothering me. HR did not want to elevate. 2nd TT in a row where I’ve had trouble getting my head in the game. Raced but didn’t have a good race. Knew I was going slow, couldn’t get my HR up even when I could get my speed up. New saddle has shifted my position – I’m sitting way forward in competition. End result is that my triceps started screaming at me. I sucked it up as best I could but not one of my better efforts. HRM says it was 92! In the end about 1mph slower than a year ago. Ok so it was 20 degrees cooler last year and I was able to get my HR up but still I’m now struggling with a sense of being slow and not going to be ready for Nationals. Of course I wasn’t DFL and I almost caught Ruth Stornetta – she started 2 minutes ahead of me and finished 2 seconds ahead of me – but yesterday’s result is a far cry from last year’s 2nd to BJ by a couple of seconds. Gotta put it behind me and get my head ready for Church Creek this coming Saturday.