Capital Criterium

Juan, Jeff, Sam and I journeyed up to Olympia, Washington yesterday to race the Capital Criterium. I don't have any racing pictures, but here is a picture of a really weird unicorn cake Sam and I spotted at a cafe near the race course:

Racing in Washington is sort of a pain in the ass. You have to buy a USCF one-day license and pay $10 to rent a number. Its total racket. All of a sudden, a race that originally cost $25 costs $45. Lucky for Sam and I, we got to race one minute for every dollar and got $10 of it back for returning the numbers unharmed.

I liked this course. The front side was a straightaway 500 meter incline. Not really a climb, because we could big ring it, but the grade was high enough that you could use it to make people suffer. It plateaued at the south end and the back and north sides were downhill and technical. Basically...it was like doing one minute intervals with 30 seconds rest at 90% for 45 minutes. Barf-o-licious.

Jeff raced first, in the masters A/B race. Direct quote: "Those are some fast old fuckers." Unfortunately, our fearless leader was pulled early and paid around $2 a minute to race. Not a good value.

Juan went next. From where we could see the course, it looked like he held 2nd-8th wheel the entire race and finished fourth. He'll probably post his race report up here later this week.

Sam and I rode in the Cat 3 race. It was just Cat 3s...a change up from riding down here. Another change was that 80% of the riders belonged to one of three teams. And those teams are coordinated and disciplined. Like Juan, I'll post my longer race report later, but here's the short version.

Since I hadn't put in a hard effort on the bike for 14 days, I spent the first 20 minutes wishing that a meteor would fly out of the sky and put me out of my misery. I watched Sam win a prime and tried to pick up on how the teams were coordinating. All while trying not to get yo-yo-ed off the back. At about 25 minutes, everything started to feel better, both in my legs and in my head, and I was able to really start racing, instead of simply surviving.

It was pretty obvious after 20 minutes who two of the teams wanted to save for the end of the race. The third, I had a pretty good idea, but wasn't 100% positive. There was lots of talking in the pack and there was more than one instance where I wanted to tell someone to quit bossing me around. But I'm trying to behave myself and I was likely breathing too hard to do more than squawk.

It was also obvious that after Sam contested a few primes and I put in some good attacks on the incline that the organized teams tried to start limiting our movement. We kept getting boxed in and/or pinched out on the good cornering lines. It didn't take me long to realize that if the pack stayed intact in the last 2 laps, we were dead meat.

So with three to go, I took a huge flyer off of the front from the base of the climb. And I just kept hammering until the end of the race...standing up on the hill and taking the corners as quickly as possible on the backside. The effort wasn't going to win the race, but I figured that I could throw down enough hurt and shell enough people to give Sam and I some room to move at the end.

This effort was really fucking hard. There was lots of drool and I threw up in my mouth at the end of the race. That is all I have to say about that.

Two women passed me with 1/2 lap to go and I just willed myself to stay on their wheels until the end. Lucky for me, the finish was the steepest part of the incline, and I was able to hold on for third. Sam had room to get herself up to fifth.

So this is what I like about WA races...being the wild cards messing with the organized teams and they have much better schwag for podium finishes. I got a really nice steel water bottle, $20, socks, a t-shirt and some tire levers that look like sex toys.

We stopped for milkshakes on the way home. All in all not a bad race experience.