2009-02-14 Cantua Creek RR report

feb 14 010 1K to go sign
Originally uploaded by SWoo

I'm writing this more than a week later, so some of the details are already fuzzy. This was the first road race of 2009 that the Velo Girls road team attended in any significant number.

Dana, Emily, Lorri, Vanessa, Yari, and I drove out the night before. We pre-drove the course but didn't have a chance to pre-ride it. It was an out-and-back course of approximately 12 miles each way, mostly flat except for some rolling hills at the very north end (start/finish). W4 were to do two out-and-back laps for a total of about 48 miles.

The W4 field was medium-sized -- maybe 20 or so women. With five of us entering, I think the Velo Girls were the largest team presence in the field. The first lap was reminiscent of Henleyville last year -- very slow. There were a couple of half-hearted attacks, but basically everyone was killing time until the second lap and the final sprint. Only a few women actually pulled at the front, and their pulls would be fairly long, because no matter how much they slowed, everyone else would slow down too. Poor Emily got caught up there for quite awhile during the second lap, which was when the winds picked up too. She worked hard.

My goal for the race had been to stay with the front pack, which wasn't too difficult given the overall slow pace. The north end of the course was gentle hills, which seemed steeper on the way up than on the way down, but I still felt strong at the end of the first lap so wasn't too worried about what it would be like at the end of the second lap.

However, I was very surprised to discover that, at the 1km sign (about where the final climb began), my energy was totally gone. The front group took off (or seemed to), and I had nothing left to give in order to keep up with them. I did manage to pass one or two women who seemed to be having the same problem that I was having. The only thing that kept me going was the desire to not get passed on the way up. After what seemed an eternity, I got to the finish line, using the last bit of oxygen left in my lungs to shout profanity as I crossed it. (Lorri later told me that fines and/or disqualification can be imposed at the officials' discretion -- whoops.)

Emily finished 5th, despite having worked so hard to pull the field around for so many miles. I ended up finishing 8th. Dana was strong and would have definitely beaten me across the line, except that she kissed wheels with Emily just before the 1km sign and fell -- she got up, though, and finished -- even with a seriously out-of-true rear wheel that was rubbing on her brake all the way up. Vanessa finished 11th -- would have been top 10 if the officials had actually disqualified a woman in our field who had hopped onto the Women's 35+ field as they passed us during the first lap. I'm not sure where Yari finished in the overall field, but considering that it was her first race, she'd done really well -- learned a lot about pack dynamics and seemed very comfortable moving around in it. (She had launched an attack near the end of the first lap that she couldn't sustain -- later we joked that she suffered from "premature attack-ulation.")

Anyway, all of the Velo Girls met or at least made significant progress on our goals that we had set for ourselves the night before, and we all had a good time, which certainly counts for something too!

Lessons for me: work on steadiness while eating/drinking (I accidentally overlapped wheels with another woman and hit her rear derailleur while putting my bottle back, bending one of my spokes and putting my wheel slightly out of true); work on endurance and intervals/intensity training.