This wasn't exactly anybody's "A" race and nobody felt any real pressure, so we didn't make any complicated plans in our pre-race meeting. Instead we decided to just keep throwing people off the front with the rest keeping control of the main group behind. All the big hitters were up at MERCO so that plan should be pretty straight forward. Our field was only 50 riders, mostly all solo guys other than multiple LaGrangians and StumpGrinders.
...and basically things went according to plan. There was almost always a move off the front and it always had at least one Platinum rider represented.
Adrian was very active as usual.
Zach and I tried our hand. (I don't think he gets much draft from me!)
Cookie worked with CWalk in a number of moves.
Meanwhile, multiple Platinum riders always had control of the group.
Eventually Gary got clear with another rider, and soon Adrian bridged up with four more. Their lead built up to 20-25 seconds thanks to big pulls from Adrian and CWalk. In the end, the LaGrange rider uncorked a speedy sprint for the win and Gary took 2nd. Adrian dropped off and rolled in 7th after a hard day's work, and Cookie and I rounded out the top-10.
Results. Click to see larger version.Chilly temps and spitting rain didn't stop a few hardcore Platinum fans from showing up to heckle... err, cheer us on. Thanks guys!
And finally, thanks again to the UCSB team for promoting a nice race. Those are some damn fine Gauchos... makes me proud to be an alum.
5 comments:
What? No love for the Platinum 4s?
I'm crushed...
Well, when I wrote that last night I didn't know anything about how the cat-4 race unfolded... other than John Echeveste winning. I didn't see it and I didn't have pictures. I actually watched a bit of collegiate womens and mens races, and snapped a few pics of those, but none of them were blog worthy. Anyway, I always flip-flop between writing self-centric race reports versus more general ones. I think you should start your own blog to document your cycling activities, especially all your training-with-power exploits and experiments. I'm sure there's an audience out there for that stuff. Me on the other hand, I don't even have a bike computer anymore.
Luddite.
Ok, let's see now. At least 10 (10 in provided top 32 results)PP riders in a field of 50 mostly solo riders. That's at least 20% of the entire field...and no victory?
BT-
That's a fair question, to which there are several responses... First, if we were a pro team or a pro-wannabe team, then it would be all about the victory and anything else is failure. That's not us. Our optimal strategy could have been to keep it together and let Keith H. close it out, which he's done plenty of times against way faster people than were there Saturday. But how fun is that? We'd rather attack and make people work. Further, Gary (2nd place) had done a hard, hilly 90 miles the day before, with Saturday topping off a near twenty-hour week of serious training.
But mostly the reason is that we all used our little chainrings the whole race... (the pictures were photoshopped to hide that fact.)
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