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.