Weekend Recap

As this is a cycling blog I feel that I owe you all a little more insight into the Tucson Bicycle Classics (TBC), i.e. the stage race I did this past weekend. As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t even sure if I would be able to race, as my road bike was still “missing” on Thursday night and the TBC kicked off on Friday with a three mile time trail. So I was rather stressed out on this Friday morning, trying to figure out where my bike had landed, as it was supposed to be here Thursday… turns out it was here Tuesday but FedEx didn’t leave me a note (I would think they didn’t even try to deliver it to my apartment, as I was home all day Tuesday…) and dropped it off at the office. So I grabbed the bike, pulled it out of the box, threw it in the van and off I was for Tucson.

The first stage was a three mile time trail with a “brutal 5% climb followed by rollers and a 6% grunt to the finish” (yep, that's what it says on the home page). Reading this, I played it a little conservative at the start to have something left for the “grunt” at the end. I still caught two guys who had started ahead of me but it turned out that I didn’t go hard enough anyways. I kept waiting for the climb to kick in but it was more a false flat with 2 (very short) ramps… so I ended up 10^th, 40 second down. I might have done better if I had known the course but having my tt bike here would have helped a bunch. The steep sections were short enough to power over and it was really windy. But reading the description, it didn’t really sound like a tt-bike-course and I didn’t have my tt bike here in Phoenix anyways. So no point dwelling on that issue.

The second stage was an 80 mile road race with, supposedly, “approx 700’ of climbing, including a solid, sustained climb just after the S/F line”… I must have a wrong understanding of “sustainable” or at least I must have missed that part of the course. To make matters worse, it was darn windy again. My main issue was that I didn’t know whom to watch, as it is early in the season and I haven’t raced a lot of those guys here in Arizona; so I decided to watch for the well placed riders on GC… and missed the three-man-break that stuck and stayed away. Well, my mistake but I still tried to get away from the pack with 10 miles to go. I got a gap all right, but not enough, so they reeled me back with 5 k or so to go. Fortunately, I was able to recover and still finished second out of the group, i.e. 5^th for the day. GC position didn’t change, as the three guys from the break were now in front of me but three that had been placed higher in the tt got dropped. At least I got some upgrade points out of it!

Stage three on Sunday was a circuit race on a 5.8 mile course. I had driven over the course on my way back home on Friday and was really looking forward to it as it promised to have some climbing… at least going the direction I drove it. Unfortunately, we raced it the other way round; a nice long, straight descend and no sustained climbing (again!). Why does that always happen to me? The course could have been so much more fun if it had been run the other way round… But oh well, nothing I can do about it. Anyways, it turned out that the racing time of just under two hours was way too short to break up the pack. Nevertheless, two guys managed to get away at the start of the race. There was a time bonus halfway through the race and I had determined to go for the 10 seconds, as everything was pretty close together and those seconds would have put me in 5^th or so. So I attacked hard and nearly caught the couple but not quite. Darn. Sounds familiar? What I’ve been doing all year long so far: close, but not close enough. The end of the race played out similar to Saturday: we had two guys off the front (yeah I know, I should have known, but to my defense, I was blocked in when they went and I hesitated just a little too long) and so I tried my luck with an attack in the last lap. For whatever reason, every time I attacked, I either had EVERYONE react, or no one! Well, so I found myself chasing alone, a couple of seconds in front of the pack and 30 sec behind the lead duo. I nearly secured the third place this time, but got swallowed with 50 meters to go… no comment. Needless to say, I was rather in a bad mood after the race but, after sleeping over it, it might have had something good to it after all: I stayed in 10^th place overall but the guy that won on Sunday moved up and ended up two seconds behind me. Probably, if the pack hadn’t picked it up to chase me down and I would have sat in, those two seconds would have been lost too. So there is always a bright side to everything.

I hope your eyes aren’t sore after this SUPER SHORT post (I promise to post after each stage next time if I can). This coming weekend should be rather fun, as the NMBS is in town and I get to play in the dirt again. The guys at BH gave me one of the mountain bikes to race on. It’s a Pivot Mach 4 and should be great fun (it looks awesome, that’s for sure). For those of you who don’t know: The guys at Pivot actually import BH, so they only do BH road bikes and their own mountain bikes, Pivot. Check it out at http://www.pivotcycles.com/