Cat 5 (Strava)
I sorted out the issues I had with my bike mounted camera, so I have footage from both races.
The Cat 5 race was largely uneventful for the first 8 of 9 laps. While I figured I probably had a shot in a mass sprint finish, I wanted to see if I could win on a solo flyer on the last lap and decided I would give that a try in this race and try my hand at the sprint in the afternoon race. So I positioned myself to take off soon after crossing the finish line starting the final lap. I jumped hard and got a nice gap with no one on my wheel. I then worked to try to keep a strong steady effort, periodically checking behind to see how the chase was going. My hope was that the field might be a bit slow to react and that if I could put in one good fast lap that might be enough. Unfortunately, that was not going to happen. A couple short minutes in to my break, I get caught by two guys right at the corner before the long finishing straight. I was told later that at least a couple riders in the field recognized me from a previous race and pushed the pace to chase me down. As I got joined, I managed to hang on to the two guys passing me. At that point I was figuring I was done, I had spent a big effort trying a break. I wasn't quite going to give up though and managed to hang on to a few other wheels as our group of three got passed and even found myself in third place with about 100 meters to go. I started to try to make an effort to go by and then gave up as I saw we were being passed on both sides. I ended up in 7th place and a bit frustrated. I knew that a solo break had a low chance of success, but still was a little disappointed. One positive was that my wife and kids came to the race and managed to take a few photos:
Cat 4/5 (Strava)
After going home, resting a bit, having lunch and watching my 9 yr old's soccer game, I returned to race in the afternoon. I was excited to have two teammates doing the same afternoon race, Shannon and Ryan. By the afternoon the wind had picked up quite a lot, with a strong head wind right into the finishing straight. We discussed strategy a little, mostly concluding that breaks didn't seem to be working that day and that we were likely to end up in a mass sprint finish.
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| Ryan and Shannon after the race |
The race proceeded mostly as expected, with things bogging down heavily on each lap as we headed into the wind on the finishing straight. On a couple of laps it seemed like we were crawling along at 10 mph and barely working because no one wanted to be in front working while heading into the wind. It may have been this, or some other aspect of the race that I didn't quite pick up on, but we seemed to keep getting splinter groups of 5-10 riders going off the front. None of those groups really seemed to be working that hard and most of the time we pulled them back without any effort from me or my teammates.
By lap 9 of 10, there was a group of about 8-10 that seemed to have a gap bigger than I was comfortable with. My teammates and a few other teams worked together to start trying to bring the gap down. At about the halfway point, right as I was about to take my turn at the front and pull, my teammate Ryan comes by hard and says "Joe, lets go!". Ryan and I managed to bridge up to the front group right after the one turn, right before the finishing straight. I was a bit surprised that no one else in our chase came with us; apparently we accidentally caught Shannon a bit out after he had just finished a pull at the front.
As we passed the finish line for the final lap, I peeled off a bit to check out our group and confirmed that we had a nice gap that we should be able to hold and the rough size of the group. This was a lesson I learned from a race last weekend where I wasn't nearly as aware of a breakaway size and how big a gap the group had and ended up working too hard. After checking things out, I urged our group to work together, took a pull or two and then tried to sit in the back and rest a bit. By the final corner, I was happy to find myself at the back of the pack right behind Ryan who I was telling to be "patient". From my experience in the earlier race and previous years at this race, I knew it was very easy to go hard to early, blow up and get passed before the finish. As we started up the finishing straight, it seemed slower than I thought we would go; I assume that no one wanted to be the one pulling into the wind. As we got to about 250 meters, I remembered the advice of a willy old road racer who told me that when the group slows down, you should go. So I jumped as hard as I could at 250 meters, got a pretty quick gap and was a bit stunned to find myself alone. I wasn't 100% sure there wasn't someone with me, so I pushed hard to the finish and came across first. My teammate Ryan took fourth overall and was the 2nd Cat 5 racer (the two races were scored separately). As we were doing a cool down lap, we came across the bad news of the day, seeing a few riders getting cleaned up after crashing and realized that our teammate Shannon had been involved in the crash. As crashes go, this one didn't seem terrible, but it is never fun to hit pavement and Shannon came away with some fresh battle wounds.
For some reason my camera split the race into two files which I didn't bother to join when I uploaded them. The second video conveniently captures most of the last lap, which was the most interesting part.
Edits:
Looks like a fellow racer caught some good footage of the end of the Cat 5 race:
