Retrospective: Spring Training

While many of my friends are busy racing up north, I have a training weekend, trying to get my legs back under me in time for late-spring stage racing, so it's a nice opportunity to think back on some of my spring training and racing fun.

Tour de Tuscaloosa:  In the third weekend of March, this was a two-race combo with a fast downtown crit on Saturday and the Alabama State Road Race Championship on Sunday.  I met up with Warren and David, visiting T-town from New York City, and we decided to value the training more than the results.

Spent the first lap trying to clip in...

The eventual winner, in his last cat 3 race.

In hindsight, that was just the right decision--the series of hard efforts in the crit gave me a really valuable workout, and our strategy of going from the gun put David in a serious break for most of the road race.  In the end, while I wasn't in the break, the efforts required to put him there, then block, and then suck the winner's wheel as long as I could while he tried to break the elastic was a serious training day. We didn't end up with awesome placings, but I did end up discovering Birmingham's feral pig population, hunting for early Easter eggs, and hanging out with some of Birmingham's friendliest and most hospitable cyclists.

Birmingkill (Birth of a Blog):  The week after this, Warren was still in Birmingham, and he invited me back over for a Saturday training ride.  Warren's Birmingham friend Brian put together for us a route that simulated or surpassed Battenkill's climbing.  This was an important day for a number of reasons:  it was one of my first hard, real hot-weather rides; Warren dropped me on all the longer climbs, and I became that guy who yells incoherent things when the effort level of a climb passes a certain point.  Shut up and climb, I used to think to myself when I heard those guys on rides, and now all I could think was Aaaaarghhhh ffffuhhhhh shhhheeee...!  This was a good thing for me.  At one point, as the road turned up yet again, I thought, I should step off the bike and start a blog.  Thanks, Warren, and you--you're welcome.



Fouche Gap (All About Multitasking):  The week after this was a multi-purpose weekend; I was not planning on racing, and the only way I was making the long drive over to Rome was if I were getting a race, a family visit, and also bringing this little monster to visit her summer vacation digs:

I Can Haz Skewer?

This was the week before Battenkill,and I felt pretty good about my fitness; I was a bit worried about racing and endangering my body or equipment with so little time to repair before the Big Race.  My goal for this race would be to simply Follow the Plan.  And that strategy would be to sit in and conserve--it was almost 80 miles long--and stay as fresh as possible for the 1.1 mile finishing climb.  In the end result, I almost stayed on plan.  I hung out in the pack as breaks of 2-3 riders left and were reeled back in in the first 2/3 of the race.  At various points I remember congratulating myself as I hung on the wheel of a very big Krystal rider.  Mid-race, though, I drifted back in the pack to take care of some multitasking business (one cannot, after all, expect to climb well at the end of a race while carrying extra weight up the hill, and especially not when one's bladder is already full at mid-race).

The Day I Tried to Live Piss My Shorts:  While back there soaking my shorts and destroying someone's front spokes with my rear derailleur (note to self--avoid the back of a southern cat 3 pack), the big rider who had so generously drafted me went off the front, along with another, and by the time I worked my way back up to the front, the two teams represented in the break were blocking.  Two other riders had also gone, and the moto kept telling us that all four were together and increasing their gap.  So I went back to plan and decided to sit in.  In the last lap, a rider from Savannah began to attack aggressively, and a small number of teamless riders began to work together, but the two teams represented in the winning break were fairly effective at disrupting the rotation.  With fifteen minutes to go, my hamstrings both cramped catastrophically.  I went from cruising easily at the front to shooting backward through the pack.

Oh Well:  Deeply discouraged, I figured I'd just climb for a mid-pack finish.  I might have blown the plan, worked too hard.  As the road turned up, I could see the pack spreading across the road, big guys losing momentum and a small group of smaller riders getting energetic.  I put in 20-30 seconds of hard effort to get into contact with this group, hoping to just hang on.  I couldn't tell where we were in the race--the road twisted enough that we might have been mid-pack, we might have been last.  I couldn't tell at all.  I just kept grinding.  It wasn't long before we passed a handwritten 500m sign.  Someone yelled "third is right in front of you!" but of course, I did not believe them.  I put another dig in, spinning as hard as I could, and found the wheels of some riders climbing harder.  We were all over the road.  There was always someone right in front of me; all I knew was that I wanted one more place on the climb.   At 200 meters to go, I saw a small guy with his jersey open.  I ground it out.  He didn't look so good.  I clicked my right shifter twice--eased the hammer back and pulled the trigger; I jumped him and sprinted to the line.

Still Trying.

Why I Heart Short Climbs:  I felt good about my effort, but I didn't know until later that I had climbed to the front of the pack, taking 5th, and only missing 3rd and 4th by 7 and 10 seconds...that spectator was right.  I'm not sure if I could have shaved any more seconds off my climb, but I definitely believe we could have done a few more minutes of work earlier in the race and caught those two.  The winners were well in front, but that's okay--ultimately, the best part of this race was that I stayed on plan; I didn't mean to cramp up, but in the final analysis, the balance of sitting in, chasing, and recovering to climb was about as good as I could have planned.