The Pursuit of PRO: Eugene Celebration Road Race

Today offered a slight bit of redemption after thinking I completely blew (please excuse the vulgar, yet descriptive language) in the prologue yesterday. When I checked my time at the sign-in today I realize I'd ridden a 12:34 instead of 12:55 in the prologue yesterday. Still quite a ways off my goal, yet it put me in 16th instead of 30th out of 40 or so riders. While I was excited about the result, it meant I actually had to do work the rest of this race. That said, it's still an end-of-the-season stage race and I can't make up the time needed in the time trial tomorrow to pull out a good result. With that in mind, today was my chance to do something.

A little about the course: we were set to do a 19-mile lap three times. Each lap had about 1100ft of climbing which consisted of one smaller hill and one steep one full of switchbacks (see profile below). The only thing that prevented this course from being a purely climber's course was the 5 miles from the summit of the steep climb to the finish, setting the stage of for a bunch finish.

Team O went into the race with good numbers and about 6 different plans, as usual, none of which we followed. I went into the day wanting to do something but all for helping a teammate get up the road. Well, as usual, our plans immediately went to crap. The first two laps were incredibly uneventful. Therapeutic Associates was doing a great job of getting their people off the front and finally managed to spring a guy solo with about 15 miles to go. While it was a ballsy move he faced a few miles of stiff headwind, a ball-busting climb, a harrowing descent and 3 miles of brutal cross winds before that magic chalk line in the road.

I'll skip the boring stuff and just say we caught him about 3/4 of the way up the climb after which the hammer was dropped and the selection was made. I was lucky enough to be in the lead group with our highest-placed teammate and knew I had a decent shot at redeeming my poor prologue. That said, the final 2k was the biggest clusterf*** I have seen on a bike in a long time. It brought me back to the Cat 5 days (yeah, yeah, yeah a whole 5 months ago...). As a group we knew the selection had been made and the group behind us was motivated to not lose time yet no one worked together to stay away. Somehow we managed to stay away and both Pat and I pulled out a top-10 in the sprint but we only put about 5 seconds into the group behind us. Not nearly enough for Pat to improve his GC standing. Oh well, a good stage was had by all and I'm just hoping I can survive the crit and TT tomorrow. GC placing is out of the question but hey, there's primes to be had in the crit and it's great training for cross, right?

A look at today's data:

Distance: 56.07 miles
Average speed: 23.00 mph
Avg HR: 154 BPM
Max HR: 188 BPM
Max speed: 47.97 mph
Climbing: 3377 ft

As a final note, I have some apologies I need to make. I realize these guys will probably never read this and I've already apologized to them but I feel the need to mention it. Zach from Ruckus, I'm sorry for moving out of the paceline at the time I did. I know you were pissed and rightly so. I realize I should have waited for the Recycled Cycles guy to pull through but it just wasn't happening and we needed to keep the pace up. Ok, selfishly, I was trying to conserve energy for the sprint. Recycled Cycles guy--while you should have given just a little burst of speed to pull through I should have waited to come off the line. We moved at the same time and while no contact was made and no one went down, the mess that could have ensued would have been entirely my fault. I behaved like a Cat 5, was selfish and impatient. To both of you, I'm sorry and won't let it happen again.

With that, it's on to the time trial and crit tomorrow. While I say I'm going to soft-pedal the TT I think we all know better than that. We'll just wait and see what happens.

Here's a few pictures from the team house/mansion: