Friday evening April 6th Ashton and I made the drive down from Greeley for my first road race in Colorado, the 17th Boulder Roubaix, we got into Boulder around 8pm and stopped at the Idea"lly expensive" Market to get a few things for dinner and breakfast. The Ideal Market was hilarious, it was what you would get if you took Whole Foods, Fresh Market and your local hippie heath food shop and merged them into one dimly lit, unorganized, over priced, pets are welcome, and I'm sure shirts and shoes are optional, kinda grocery store. After acquiring our mineral water, pasta, breakfast and almond milk we headed up into the mountains to have dinner/stay the night with our friends Todd and Liz. We had a blast with Todderick and Lizington, it was cold and windy outside so we spent the evening indoors eating sausage (well, faux sausage for me) and hunting for "well hidden" Easter eggs.
Me being the genies that I am, decided that I needed to work on my bike at 10pm the evening before a race, but I thought to myself...it's just a simple tire change, no problem, go for it...and besides the sealant in my rear tube had begun to congeal and put my rear wheel off balance. With that running through my mind I went to work, putting on a pair of take off Gator Skins and cleaning my drive train....It went something like this, wheel #1 changed tire, the bead proceeded to tear and blow out of the tire...awesome, one tire destroyed and one tube down the drain, good thing I had the original tire on hand. Wheel # 2, my main priority with my rear wheel was simply to get the nasty sealant tube out of it...This also turned into an ordeal, the bead on the new(used) tire held fine however, the tube that I replaced it with did not. I replaced the sealant tube with one of my used tubes that I had checked over, well I guess I didn't check it well enough, it didn't hold air ten minutes. Oh man, I was beginning to get stressed at this point, nine hours until my race starts and I'm fumbling around with tubes and tires instead of getting the rest that I should have been getting, that's when Todd saved the day with some fresh tubes. Wheels being finalized, I laid out my race kit for the morning and we all turned in for bed.
I woke up early, ate my breakfast and enjoyed a little bit of the chilly mountain air out on the patio over looking the valley. I drove out to the race course only to find that getting to the parking area was a big traffic jam. I got parked and rode my bike up to registration, oh I felt like such a newb, I completely forgot to stop at an ATM and get out cash to rent a timing chip, luckily some one standing in line behind me spotted me the extra couple of bucks that I needed to rent my chip. Between the parking delay and the huge crowd at the registration table I just barely managed to get back to my car, get ready and work my way through the two races lining up behind mine. I got to the start line as the referees were finishing up scanning our chips. No warm up, and on the line literally three minutes before the start, now that's how I like to start a season.
The race started and already I was in a bad place, at the back of a field of almost 80 riders, legs were tight and cold and the chilly morning air made every breath burn as my heart rate sky rocketed in response to the initial pace right off of the start line. I just kept thinking damn, we still have thirty five more miles and these guys are already killing it. CAT4 did two laps on a course of roughly 50% hard packed dirt roads and 50% paved country roads, totaling 37 miles with about 1300 feet of climbing.
The first lap was fast and I had to ride through a ditch on the side of the road to avoid a wreck in one of the corners but I held on to my position in the peloton until about 5k from the start/finish. Leading up to the 2nd dirt section of the lap there was a good false flat about a mile from the turn into the dirt, I started to loose ground and soon found myself alone and chasing. I held a good tempo and chased solo through the start/finish trying to regain contact with the main field before they hit the next paved section. As I passed the feed zone I could hear Ashton, Todd and Liz from the side of the road, hearing them there definitely helped moral and so I continued to chase on. I never regained contact and was about half way through my second lap when I was passed by the leaders of the age group racing behind mine and shortly after that, their chase group that followed. Behind them was a group of several riders comprised of both my race and now the one that had just passed me, I was able to hang on to this mixed group. As we came around to the final dirt section I was feeling good on the climbs and entering the last 200 meters was able to come around to the front of the group and finish solid and after 1:42 I finished in 47th place.
All in all I felt good after my first race in Colorado, I was able to keep a good pace and the course was a lot of fun, I feel that my handling skills are becoming one of my strengths and I need to work on my threshold and power output.
http://connect.garmin.com/course/1071763
Tales from Mead Roubaix and the Boulder Crit series soon to come.
Take care and keep the rubber side down,
-Drew
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