These are the word's my coach gave to me last week, and honestly they are the only things getting me through the bike racing on the weekend right now. He told me "this all extra what you do on the weekend, just have fun". It seems simple enough, but honestly if I didn't have this huge cyclo cross dream for this year and just wanted to build my fitness for the fall, I think I might be a little depressed with my road racing results lately. I have desperately been trying to find really challenging tough courses with big fields. But the challenging parts of the course somehow become insignificant, especially when a climb that lasts for about 20 minutes of each lap which is 45 minutes of 4 laps in total (ok way too many numbers, but I'm the math geek of the house, that's like almost 50 % of the race). Anyways back to the point. Two of these frigin climbs were neutralized. The second time there was a split and I had a little gap on the girls behind and we got neutralized as the men's field was going by. First of all don't neutralize a field when we are going hard up a climb, second of all don't neutralize the field 4 minutes before the first guy comes by and then they all come by in bits and pieces. Yep, we waited and all the girls struggling could ride up to us and collect there energy.
So this was this weekends race at Bear Mountain. There was a pretty big field to start with, maybe 50 or 60 women. But the group did not start to split until the 3rd and 4th time up the climb. And each time there would only be a few of us at the top and then the larger pack would catch us in the next half of the lap through the downhill sections working really hard. I can only say that this would of not happened if there had been a 3rd and 4th time of going hard up the hill (like in the first two laps). Needless to say there was a big pack at the finish and it was slightly downhill and we were going over 60 k an hour. I was planning on attacking the last 5 k but I didn't have any teammates in the large pack to back up my suicide moves. Because of this I was waiting for two attacks to go and then I was going to counter. Yep, women's racing, this never happened it was just stupid easy to the finish, and then I panicked about being boxed in and tried to make my way near the front. Oops, I was on the front with 1 K to go and it was way too early and I screwed up any attempt of finishing in the top 10 in the group.
In hindsight, I think I should start falling back to my old habits, make people suffer and sacrifice a bit of myself to make the racing harder. I should of attacked in the last 5 k, but half heartily, and then done it again, and then again.
My only positive notes are that my climbing legs back. I have always thought to myself that I was more of a climber, but last year I had some struggles at some hilly races. My bike feels awesome climbing this year and my set up seems to be a lot better. Add my new sponsorship from Reynolds (a set of DV46 cross wheels with a road tubular glued on them) and my new SRM compact crank and I feel like I am floating up hills. I just want to find a race to use all this, maybe this can happen this weekend at the Niagara Classic.
NCE
No comments:
Post a Comment