Bicycle racing is hard, but not just for me – that’s what I learned yesterday at the Silverton Road Race.
Most of the Cat 4 Men Mt View Cycles team that did the Cherry Blossom Stage Race in May will be doing the Mt Hood Cycling Classic at the beginning of June. Six of us went Silverton as a sort of reality check. Mt Hood is going to be hard – as hard as it gets for Cat 4 road racers, and we needed this opportunity to get our heads straight. Also, it is super cool for a small town like Hood River to be able to rally such a large group to race together – in all there were close to a dozen of us at Silverton and I wanted to support that.
The race went well for me, but wasn’t without some challenges. Masters races are usually open category, and category races are usually open age group. This was the first time that I recall seeing a race for Cat 3-5 Masters, and I saw it as a great opportunity to see what Cat 3 guys my age are doing – they usually race in the open category masters races.
It is helpful for me to relate issues in bicycle racing to something similar in car racing. I learned some very valuable tools several years ago when one of the guys racing a Spec Miata from the Seattle area, Garth Stein, arranged for 20 of us to do a two day racing “clinic” at Pacific Raceways. The primary instructors were Don Kitch who is one of the best communicators I’ve ever known, and Ross Bentley the author of the awesome “Speed Secrets” series of race driving books.
Ross made a point that for lack of a better term (or because he may have used it) that I still refer to as the rule about your “happy place”. The context, in that case, was that if you get into the race car to go out in the rain, for example, and you are fearful of the challenges presented by the adverse conditions – you are, as they say, doomed… Well, I always had liked racing in the rain – mostly because my results were often spectacular. Racing in the rain is my happy place, but others are often concerned, anxious or terrified and this helps to make my life inside a miserable, wet race car quite pleasant (no crisis wasted, you might say). Coincidentally (or maybe not so much), Garth is now a world renowned novelist for his book “The Art of Racing in the Rain”.
I consciously sought and found my happy place yesterday on the bicycle to work my way through a challenge that could have ended my day. I had ridden the first two laps of the 17 mile course mid pack, conserving energy and focusing on the challenge of being mid pack and not getting caught up in a crash (Masters are much more comfortable to ride around than Cat 4 teenagers, by the way – go figure…). At the beginning of the 3rd lap there was an attempt to bridge a recent attack and I found myself feeling quite good and at the front of the main field. The bridge attempt really wasn’t, and we settled back down only for me to realize that I was going to cramp.
My left leg, all of it, was starting to tighten up – and not just a little bit. I slid back, dropped a couple of gears and started spinning. More Hammer Gel, more Cytomax, spin, spin, spin. But, my legs did feel pretty good and I knew if I could work through this that I could be a factor at the finish – that made me happy and motivated me to keep going. Not to try, but to do.
There were some accelerations and riders in front of me continued to be gapped, but I always had enough to make the jump. This was new for me – I am usually functioning in survival mode. I was pushed off the road by a rider that had cramped and swerved as he lost the use of one side of his lower body – I was again able to accelerate back to the group. Another racer cramped on one of the last little bumps and I heard the sound of bike tipping over with its rider still clipped in, and still more racers faded.
The fact was, that as much as I was being challenged by my cramping (which had now moved to both calves, in addition to my left hamstring), everybody else was going through the same. I was in survival mode, but happy to be there. As the uphill sprint to the line started, I was poorly positioned but still able to accelerate past 3 or 4 riders. I had survived near the front with the Cat 3 guys – not such a bad day!!!
I do believe I can climb and my next happy place is as a sprinter.