my weekly race log

is that for the refs to get u for yellow line?

for riders behind u to cuss u out?

i think it is yellow line, yes. last week had mid of the back too.

raced my first criterium today--20x1 mile loop. averaged around 24 mph and maxed out at 36 mph on the flats!

i had second wheel coming up on the final lap. managed to get pinned in the pack and decided it's not worth my well-being to sprint for 10th so i must have placed somewhere in the top 20 pack finish. the hills are where i belong.

cutty serious question do you like the movie "breaking away"?

cuz i love it but didnt that kid hit like 60 mph on the interstate or something? seemed kinda impossible to me

American Flyers is the fucking shit tho.

he was drafting on a truck, it's possible

speed record not drafting

record drafting

love that cog:

http://www.canosoarus.com/08LSRbicycle/Bicycle%20Images/Doug%20138Bk.JPG

love those jeans.

OMG wear cycle clips srsly, that is a fatality waiting to happen.

thats some iconic shit

since thats not actually john howard as i assumed, i'll revoke "iconic" and replace with "v. cool"

American Flyers is the fucking shit tho.

-- wilter, Sunday, May 18, 2008 10:40 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

yeah i saw a few minutes of this the other night on tv, it looks awesome

INTRODUCING:

THE AMERICAN NATIONAL TEAM!!!

THE SOVIET NATIONAL TEAM, FEATURING OLYMPIC GOLD METALIST SERGEI OLBRAKOV!!!

AND FINALLY, THE 7-11 TEAM!!

wow i always thot af sucked. i really like breaking away tho, i guess because it was not about bike racing, but showed how loving to race a bike can make you really mental

oh yeah, and the beard lolz at russian guy in af!

respect to steve tesich tho for getting two bike race movies produced

i forgot to mention that the 7-11 team is not only not the scrappy underdogs we're all pulling for but in fact their main rivals & the bad guys

underdogs were like dave's chop shop team or something

http://www.velocityresults.net/images/810.jpg

5th place in lou maltese memorial road race (#114)

22nd in union vale 3/4 road race :(

check the finishing climb elevation in this PDF:

http://www.pawlingcycle.com/UnionVale_Road-Race_2008.pdf

fitchburg-longsjo classic stage race this week. 4 DAYS.

http://www.longsjo.com/Longsjo_Home.html

congrats on the 5th spot. That's a superb pic, I love those reverse-bullet-time finishing line shots.

i get that as 1.5 miles at 8-9%. ouch. given the length, itd probly be easy to go out too hard on that finale.

plus racing a climb is so much more intense than just riding one. half the time coming down from finish i'd be like- "i dont even remember this"

srsly it was soul crushing. hurt lockering. i was pedaling and not moving anywhere. some guys were just frozen at the base of the climb, screaming.

this is after 56.5 miles of pretty intense racing

Hey Cutty, in that photo, who came 2nd??

(congrats btw!)

yellow/blue came in 1st and 2nd

2 upgrade points away from cat 3-dom

because of best all around rider and team competition my team had me remain a 4 until i had well over req'd 25 points- i think i was in the 60s by late july. association has wisely discontinued this competition in 4s. even more ridiculous thing was i finished second to a teammate!

time trial - 7th place
road race - 15th place
circuit race - 20th place
criterium - 10th place

8th overall in the GC

currently ranked 11th in the country and 3rd in new york state. putting my cat 3 upgrade in today, let's see if it works.

plz easy. good racing.

This is fantastic, cutty. I've just been reading about Paul Kimmage's amateur riding career prior to turning pro in France and it gives me some idea of what your races must be like (though the bit about checking each other's shorts for actual syringes full of drugs is presumably a little outdated).

i was gonna ask about that - do tons of dudes dope? and what does '11th in the country' mean (i mean obv its awesome but 11th amongst whom?)

beware obsessive masters guys in midlife crisis who are doctors or are tight with doctors

i never heard of anyone doping in mid level amateurs. if you have to dope to reach elite amateur, or even domestic pro imo, you should really really rethink yr life at a fundamental level.

it means out of all the cat 4s in the US, i am ranked 11th:

https://www.usacycling.org/rankings/?org=USCF&sex=M&disc=RR&cat=04

you should all read tim krabbe's "the rider" for a dose of the amateur cycling mind!

11 out of 3,500+ sounds pretty impressive to me! How does the points system work?

no colorado, no legitimacy :)

i never heard of anyone doping in mid level amateurs. if you have to dope to reach elite amateur, or even domestic pro imo, you should really really rethink yr life at a fundamental level.

-- Hunt3r

yeah i was asking because i know even in HS & low-level college tons of kids (thinking football + baseball mostly here) get pretty deep into that sorta stuff even though they have nothing to gain from it career-wise because hey, they want to win & the pros do it

points are based on results and the weight of the races (how many riders in the field, length of the course, etc)

hey cutty, this might be an impossible question, but how quickly do you think you'd have completed today's Tour de France time trial?

ha, no idea. minutes less for sure. all i can say is some people in the pro/1/2 field had worse times than me at fitchburg...

awesome work cutty. :-D

MAN, I WLD HAVE DEF BEAT VALVERDE'S TIME!............ON FIXED GEAR, WITH ONE FLAT TIRE.

IM JUST SAYIN

tour of the hilltowns:

http://www.nohobikeclub.org/2007_profile.pdf

race number was 420 again.

coming out of that first climb massive climb, the field was completely shattered and there were 9 of us. we quickly formed up a pace line and started working pretty efficiently, echelon style.

after about a half-hour we were caught by 10 or so riders who were chasing since the climb. not a peep from the rest of the field, really. it got a little disorganized.

coming into that last climb, someone attacked (i learned later he was an ex-pro hockey player) and i jumped on his wheel right away because it looked right. a couple of minutes later someone was on my wheel... and everyone else was gone. we stayed away all the way up the last climb.

the guy who attacked was huge and obviously was going to have a nice sprint. the other guy was smaller than me. as we're chatting away i find out it's hockey players first cat 4 race. well then that means he really hasn't had a chance to learn how to time a sprint right, does he? he came into the last turn to finish line first, i accelerated out of his draft the second he stood up and hammered my way to victory.

it was my first cat 4 WIN and now a cat 3 is me! yesssssss

that is badass, i fucking hate hockey players

how do you manage to keep drawing 420???

i would like to thank jah but i think it has do with my last name starting with a CU which generally will put me in that area if they are distributing numbers alphabetically.

hockey player i outsprinted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinrich

You rock cutty.

do they even have hockey in england? it's a sport where big guys beat each other up with sticks.

great!

raced the boulder cx cat 35+. 9 deg F at start, but warmed up to 8 deg by the finish. it was dicey as fuck: off-camber ruts, frozen beach sand chicanes, and compacted parking lot ice. i finished...last! but i finished. not too bummed, after i went down suddenly (and hard) about 1/3 off the way through, it was just skills practice, with later interruptions by riders from an earlier start lapping me. i've not been lapped since about 1995, so i'd forgotten- once that starts, it's just endless pull-overs to stay out of the way. ran tubeless at 34/32 ish, would have been much better lower i think.

Sounds horrible, tbh. I would hate to be cycling, never mind off road racing, in those temperatures.

fun, but i think i got last again >:| when i arrived it was mid 20s, but bright sun with rapid warming. the race course went from sticky hard ice to slick wet ice as we went along, so of course i crashed again in one of the chicanes. i tried a little harder at the start, so i wasn't all the way at the back, and was mostly able to hold that spot, til i went down. need to ice my left knee and hip now.

Thinking of doing this in september:

http://www.digdeepsports.com/coloradodirt.html
http://www.digdeepsports.com/coloradodirt/registrationinfo.html
http://www.digdeepsports.com/coloradodirt/racecourse.html

if gentlemantises are in the hood, interested, and wish to join, i may try to cobble together 6. The wildcard is weather- fraser, co in september could be a high of 65 degrees. or a whiteout. and man, that route is NOWHERE at 9000-10,500 ft elevation.

I pinned on a number and raced for the first time since my heart attack (sept 11, 2013) in a road race down in Baja California, Mexico. The course was 2 laps of a fantastic route that started and finished in the wine-growing hills inland of Ensenada. I signed up on a whim after a couple who my Fiancee and I ride with (and who are 10 years younger than us!) mentioned they were doing it. There was a masters field (40+) that I qualified for, but I raced "segundo fuerza" (roughly equivalent to USA Cat 3/4) because it did two laps, and the masters only did one. My fiancee and her friend raced the elite women's field, and my buddy raced in the Pro/Elite men's field. The course started off with rollers and a long descent toward the coast. A break of 3 went away from the gun, and I moved up easily through the field and led the peloton over the last big-ring rise before the descent. At the bottom of the descent, a guy carried some momentum and looked like he was attempting to bridge to the leaders so I grabbed his wheel along with another dude, and the three of us made it up to the front three in about a minute of chasing. The third guy we brought with us was a teammate of a guy in the break, so I took real short pulls and made sure to let the two know we expected them to work harder. We got about a minute up on the main field by the time we hit the climb. I hung in with them well for about 8 minutes, but hit my limit and had to let them roll away. About a minute later the peloton blew by me like I was sitting still. By the top of the climb they were long out of view. I used a couple of cars (the course was open to traffic) to draft up to a group of stragglers (which felt pro as hell) but by the time we crossed the line to start the second lap we had no hope. I pulled out so I could give bottles to the women (who started behind me) and to my friend (who started before me, but would be doing 3 laps). Fiancee's friend finished 4th in the women, and her husband finished 7th in the Elite field, which contained the National Champion of Mexico and some local pros.

That course is completely gorgeous and a great race course, the organization was top notch, the riders fast and friendly, and the vibe was very familial in general. Also it started in front of a winery housed in a Bond Villain lair. It felt so great to pedal hard in a group again. Next time I'll probably race Master's, but I'll definately be back.

https://app.strava.com/activities/272708627

https://instagram.com/p/0jeA4FuyUV/?taken-by=tylertfb

Nice! I never really thought about what considerations racing in Mexico would entail before- traffic safety, licensing, insurance, general logistics. Any worries or is it NBD?

Not really a race but I signed up for http://www.toddandnedfondo.com/index.php in Durango in Sept. It's been a long time since I rode down there. Need to blow cobwebs off mtb and start riding it regularly.

Totally envious over here, sounds totally exhilarating. Nice job on the break.

Traffic was really a non-issue. Most of the route was on roads that serviced remote farm areas, and being a Sunday monring, it was dead out there. The parts that were on larger roads were also lightly traffiked (again, sunday morning), and there were many vehicles related to the race (mostly relatives going around to vantage points to take pictures of their racers) and as such were going plenty slow. This is how I as able to draft cars, one was some kind of offical vehicle, and the other two were going to feed zones to hand up bottles or something. I can't remember any cars actually passing the field at all. At the start/finish line there was an ambulance, and another was circling the field, and there were posted police at the main corners. My mom's side of the family owns a pair of houses on the beach down there, about a 20 minute drive from the race start, so I went down the day before and spent the night, which made getting there a breeze. My friend who races the elite field has a Mexican racing license, which is awesome. It is nicely laminated and has his photo and a watermark on it. Way better than the USA cycling license! For the rest of the fields, it seems like it's self-selected, especially if you're a gringo. I just walked up and registered and they really deriuidn't ask me anything. The racing fee (which was 200 pesos, about $13!!!!) came with some kind of accident insurance coverage, but I didn't look that closely.

All in all it was a very friendly, family vibe. Kind of reminds me of the vibe at the Velodrome, where it is very competitive, but everybody knows each other, so there is a high level of mutual respect and camaraderie. This race was #3 out of a yearly series of six races on the same course. They also have a criterium series around the new convention center in Rosarito Beach, and a couple of crits in downtown Tijuana that I plan on hitting up. A fantastic scene, overall.

What's the normal situation in the USA with road racing then? In Britain (unless it's a really major event) you're on the open road, usually on a circuit somewhere between 5 and 15 miles. The roads aren't closed to traffic, but there are marshalls (or police, in some areas) who can hold up the traffic for a minute or so as you approach junctions. So you always have to worry about oncoming traffic.

Doing this "race" this weekend, Tecate to Ensenada (Baja California, MX). It's probably going to be hot as hell at the beginning.

http://www.bajabikerace.com/