Brendan,
Some rules of the breakaway:

1) I second the "try everything" advice too. When you're in a 4-5 man group, usually your best bet is to make that work rather than letting the break dissolve and go back to the field, especially if your nemesis Sven is not represented in the break.

2) If you have two teammates in a break the classic move is one guy attacks, and the second will counterattack just as the chasers are reeling in the first guy (make sure they're dragging you up to your teammate not the other way around).

3) As for the best place to establish a break in PP, there isn't one place that works best. Some say the top of the uphill (starting at the crosswalk), the important thing is really establishing a breakaway with strong guys represented.

4) Don't go solo unless you've got the watts to go solo for a long time, and you like the taste of throw-up.

5) Usually it is better to jump and join a break that is getting established than trying to establish it yourself because then you have a better shot of deciding who is in your break. This might not matter much in the 5s but Kissenas have a reputation for working in breaks, and so people usually like a kissena represented (you don't have to live up to the entirety of that reputation, I think we'd like to have the reputation for being savvy racers rather than hard workers, so work when it works for you and don't when it doesn't).

6) Getting a break established should hurt, because you want to go faster than the rest of the field and get out of sight. So either you're trying to turn yourself inside out to establish the break or just riding along waiting for the field to catch you (not anywhere in between). You can settle into a pace once it is established and set-up your endgame.

7) Have fun, because if you take this and yourself too seriously you'll get a worse reputation as a French shower, than if you're not working in a break.  
 

AVD just sent out the results email:

www.usacycling.org/results/?year=2013&id=1109&info_id=61291

Looks like they didn't catch a bunch of numbers, so I see a few names missing from the results.


Fellow cat5s - Our sprint man "Hi Viz" Brenden is not racing this Sunday.  Who are we supporting this week?

I'll be raging in the 1/2/3 this Sunday.  Anyone joining me?

mugwump said:

I'll be raging in the 1/2/3 this Sunday.  Anyone joining me?

BTW, looking at the results in the 1/2/3 from last week, they have a guy placing 8th whom I passed with two laps remaining.  

So that means top TEN! Nice job JP, muffin moneyz!

BTW, looking at the results in the 1/2/3 from last week, they have a guy placing 8th whom I passed with two laps remaining.  

My girlfriend said they had a six year old (she knows he was six because he announced his age) calling out the lap numbers and often getting them wrong. Otherwise it would've been cute. Someone challenged the finish order in my race.

That poor kid.  It was cute but AVD was running around like Mike the Headless Chicken trying to figure out what lap it was.

Lol - that kid.  Can you imagine that kind of mishegas at one of Charlie's races?

The AVD stories are so ridiculous year after year that if he ever got his shit together I'd actually be disappointed.

@Tito

Exemplary use of the word mishegas.

I'll be there on Sunday JP

Anyone planning on the 3/4 field.
I am trying to decide which field I want to sign up for.

I'm planning in doing the 3/4 after a week off the bike on family vaca.

Sent from my iPhone

I will be at the race officiating this Sunday, so I can't wait to be dealing with AVD and racers yelling at me. I believe Alan Atwood will be doing results so the video should get folks numbers. No manual number counting. Finger's crossed.

Also don't let me catch any of you in the jogger's lane.

tito said:

Lol - that kid.  Can you imagine that kind of mishegas at one of Charlie's races?

this has to be the first use of the word "mishegas" on the KCC board.  ever.  i approve. 

Reg'd for this Sunday's PP race.

Registered for the 3/4

I'm in for the 3/4 as well. 

If the redhook party dosent abduct me ill plan to ride the p-park race Sunday. Not confident ill be more than just present but looking fwd to it.

Any news on this morning's PP race? I had to bail, as I messed up my ankle last night with a hell of a bad sprain. Did not want to test it in a race.

Any PP race reports?

No placings that I saw. There were 2 of us in the 5s unless there were other guys like me racing in plain kits and I didn't recognize.

5s were packed with crca guys. A bunch of nyu and rockstar and manpower as well. Thankfully noone too squirrely, but I think some random nyu guy kept yelling at everyone to pull harder without doing jack shit himself. A few lame small break attempts, one of which I was in but noone wanted to work so all petered out. Group sprint and Sven kept his leaders jersey. I improved over last week a tiny bit, probably 11 or 12? Doesn't matter I suppose but I felt stronger, just don't have that pop yet...or ever. Wah wah...

Saw a couple of kissenas in p123, maybe 4. Noone in masters that I saw.

Shit, just got word that Chris Pedersen who was with me in the 5s got caught up in a crash that I didn't realize happened.  Hope you heal quickly, buddy.

Another one?? Lots of banged up KCC guys this weekend. Hope you're ok @Chris..

That's sucks! Chris how you doing?

On the third lap, someone ran over a cone and the cone went in the middle of the pack.  Three people went over their handle bars in front of me and I ran right into them.  Right when I hit the ground, I turned around just in time to put my hands in front of my face as someone's front tire went right into me.  He flew off the bike and it was just a total shit show.  My left knee and neck are hurting.  Icing them now and hoping that this pain is temporary.  On the race in general, it was a weird race.  As David mentioned, there were some young college kids yelling at the front pack to pull harder and faster.  Everyone was trying to be in the front of the pack because there were some very erratic riders in the pack.   Hope to be back on the bike soon.

That really sucks guys. I wish everyone who crashed a speedy recovery and it reminds me of a video i saw a while back about crashing... http://youtu.be/oHGfzeH6Qg4

Dan's story above was the icing on the cake of total lameness.  

I think it's worth having a little compare/contrast teaching moment here. Last time at PP, Kissena had 2 guys in the top 10. This week, mostly bubkus. What gives?

Both this week and the previous lend credence to the value of true team racing. (Don't worry, I'm not going to drone on about finish line leadouts...I'm going to give that topic a rest). Some of you folks may be saying to yourselves, "well, the reason why we did well last week is that we had Mike Garrigan and Mike Perlberg and those dudes are dragon slayers."

Well, yes and no. Yes, in that having more guys on a team opens up possibilities. No, in that to assume that just because you have a couple of strong guys, they can succeed on their own without the help of a team is just not right.

There are several illustrative posts written about last week's race. They are worth re-reading. When you enter a race, with arguably one of the top 15 strongest guys in the field (JP), and you have a healthy group of teammates around you who are also easily top 10 or top 5 strength wise (Perlberg and Garrigan respectively), then you've got at least 3 legit podium contendors, weapons with whom to chase after, and or initiate breaks.

You may recall, that Mike Garrigan's winning move came after a 3 lap breakaway where JP and a few others were pounding it out. And while the field is chasing hard, Garrigan, Perlberg, Vlad, and the entire Kissena team doesn't have to do a damn lick of work to bring the move back. That doesn't mean surfing the front of the field is necessarily easy on the legs/lungs. However, this is time when you are recovering somewhat and getting ready for the counter.

The JP move comes back, the field relaxes, because they are tired from chasing, then Garrigan and a few other opportunists get away for what looks like a winning move. But wait, there are attempts to bridge up, dangerous ones too. Good thing Perlberg was there to cover that move. If we didn't have a teammate up the road, Perlberg's parts certainly would have been the cylinder necessary to bridge the gap. But he knew that Garrigan could win from the group ahead, so he shut it down. And they never made it across.

This week, with just Vlad and Rene, who are both hammer-monsters in their own right, Kissena had just 3 guys to try and make something happen. Woulda, coulda, shoulda...but the winning move that slipped away from JP, might not have gotten away, if he didn't have to cover 150-ish moves earlier. If he had a few more matches, maybe he hangs tough, instead of slipping back to the pack. Same with Vlad and Rene. If we had 6 strong-enough guys, that effectively halves the workload for any individual. And that is big. Because it's the difference in being able to hang onto the winning move when they put the hammer down and getting dropped.

For me, the real moral of this story is that your teammates make a big difference in how a race unfolds. And if we want to be successful in local races, we need more than 3 guys racing.