my brief review of the 5s.

not a great deal to report the first ten miles. the first couple of moderate climbs i keep in mind the start-at-front-and-fade-to-back strategy and employ it reasonably well.  feeling good.  and then the first big climb, at around mile 11.5 (i forget its name, but let's call it motherfucking hill). i stupidly let a gap open and by the time we get to the descent i am in the worst possible place: behind the lead pack, but away from the chase pack.

i try and muster the effort to chase but cannot do it.  and then, like a knight in shining white, blue and orange armor, i see ros coming up behind.  we mutter something to each other, though given that we were both slobbering like dobermans, i wasn't sure what it was.  i took it be "let's chase".  so we give chase, pick up a couple of guys and in fact get pretty close to catching the break.  but it wasn't to be.

we then spent 30 or so miles working as a small group, trying to keep the pace high.  things fracture a little on the climbs but we pull back together.  as we progress we drop a guy and then, slowly, start to pass others from the main break.  this feels good.

15 miles to go, for a reason i am not sure, i get dropped by our little group.  fuck.  there's no way i want to ride the end alone, and so i put in possibly the hardest few minutes of my life and catch back on.  i avoid being sick, just. 

the last big climb, we fracture again but this time don't come back cleanly.  end up TTing the last few miles and come in at around 3:23. 

see ros at the finish line and then floris follows shortly thereafter.  proceed to drink chocolate milk, lots of it.  fall in love with chocolate milk. 

damn that was hard.  i thought WDC's thing was brutal for me last week (and it was!), but i basically did the same course at battenkill at nearly 3mph avg faster.

despite the pain however, that was a hell of a lot of fun. looking forward to 2014 already.

Well, I suppose I should write a race report.

It was colder than it ought to be in mid-April and hard to know how to dress. I dressed lighter than I wanted to, and that turned out to be right. By race’s end I was gloveless and bare armed.

After staging up too far back because of a final nervous old man pee-pee stop followed by the worst clip-in anyone has ever seen, I found myself near the back of the pack. So, I moved up bit by bit when I could. About a mile before the bridge dudes were acting like if you weren’t top ten through the covered bridge your race was over. While its true that it helps to come out of the bridge near the front, I think that piece of tactical advice has gotten a bit over-hyped. Bumping, forcing into small spaces, riding in the dirt off the side of the road, egregious yellow line violations on an open highway, etc. and the race had barely started. Seemed a bit unnecessary.

So, the race was obviously nervy and I just decided I’d try to be a cool customer. By Juniper I was up near the team (Hubbs, Joe, and John M. - Vlad had crashed out) and on the way up Juniper I spun right by dozens of guys and found myself near the front of the race, where I wanted to be, with a good chunk of the field broken off.

Alas, just when we should have been keeping the pressure on over the top to officially thin the herd, we were stopped due to a big crash at the bottom of the descent ahead of us. So, we stood there for five minutes and the race came back together. 

The rest of the race was actually pretty easy. Some moves went but didn’t last long. The dirt was packed and not nearly as difficult to manage as last year. And the Ronde Van Millbrook tune up last week helped a ton – there wasn’t any terrain nearly as technically difficult as what William made us do.  

Oh, and a word about yellow line violations: I don’t get why officials threaten to enforce it with such gusto at the start of the race, and during, and then they never do. The rule was totally disregarded the whole race and although the moto was all “I’m gonna start taking numbers!” as far as I know no one was penalized. I spent a lot of time in the middle and (when I need to move up) on the right, being that there were, you know, trucks in the other lane sometimes.

Also a word about potholes: you’d think by the time one becomes a cat 3 one might understand that it is not safer to swerve around every bump and pothole. You can ride over them occasionally. This is apparently not the case. 

I was a friendly racer. At one point I gave Alexei Zakharov from FGX a nice arm sling over the top of a hill. Later, when Joe needed to slot in near the front  to get out of the wind, Alexei was all “come on in!” See how that works?

A second neutralization and some hectic mixing of fields slowed us down again, and all this madness meant that by the time we hit meeting house everybody with any fitness at all was still there, and the field was still pretty big approaching Stage road. 

I felt fantastic up Stage and I started passing guys left and right (including Keith who was not in our field, who was like “You gotta do it now, Ryan!” 

I hammered the shit out of Stage and crested it first wheel, hoping to knock off some dead wood. We did, but it wasn’t enough.

Still, I was at the front (third wheel) with 5k to go - not a bad situation. At that point I wanted to work for Joe; he’s a better sprinter than I am. But he told me he was cramping so I figured I’d try my luck.

With about 3k to go there was some confusion and mixing of fields and I tried a sneaky  “roll off the front move” during the confusion hoping maybe I could catch them napping. But, that failed quickly. So, I tucked back in and waited for the field sprint. 

I did a good job staying top 10 but I got swarmed after the turn. Tried to surf wheels for a top 10 during the final run up, but there were just too many. I came 24th. 

So, it was a little frustrating because I felt like a million bucks during that race and you don’t think Battenkill will end in a 35 man field sprint. As good as I felt, I’d have liked to try my luck sprinting in a group of 10-15 climber types as I thought would happen. Not sure what Joe or I could’ve done differently to make the situation at the end better. Nothing was getting away unless a group of really strong guys all got organized, but that wasn’t happening. I guess sometimes races don’t work out the way we want them to.

A lotta climber types who I expected to be major players ended up out of the first group; Richard Scudney and Alexei in particular.

Anyway, I think it bodes well for the rest of the season’s big races; I’m really looking forward to going out and battling with the good 3 squad we have right now.

And it was a super fun weekend with Jeff W., Ros, and me and all our respective women folk staying in a great house together and riding in the Roazen family van. 

Jules said:

Vlad's crash at 4:20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG5df3omafc

Jules said:

@battenkill: 2014 Tour of the Battenkill to May? Yes! May 3-4, 2014. Registration opens in November.

Jeffrey White said:

@battenkill: 2014 Tour of the Battenkill to May? Yes! May 3-4, 2014. Registration opens in November.

I hate this.