Rapha Gentleman's Race - Cornwall, CT

Last weekend, Team BT was lucky enough to be invited to Rapha's East Coast Gentleman's race.

The course started in Litchfield, CT and went into MA and NY at points. ~115 miles, somewhere between 9000-12000 feet of climbing (depening on who was counting!), 40% gravel roads. You basically have teams of 6 and you all have to finish together. They stagger the start times of teams based on perceived team strength.

Our squad of gentlemen included myself, Gerald, Brendan and Mikey Green. Our good friends Joe Reynolds and Donny Green were nice enough to ride with us as ringers to round out our group. They ended up being awesome additions, riding strong all day.

BT ended up 3rd behind Eastman and Team Embrocation. However, we had the 2nd fastest time of a team that finished all six dudes. Jonathan Adler got 5 people finishing ahead of us, but were DQ'd for losing a guy.

I have never suffered on a bike they way that I did on Saturday. I had been in Wichita, KS for the past two weeks, riding nothing but flat, straight roads. I got back into Philly at midnight on Friday and was on the road for CT at 4:30am. Not a great start to what would end up being an insanely hard day.

The majority of the climbing was on two endless gravel hills...I'm not sure of the exact distance of each, but the first one took about 45 minutes to get up. 45 minutes of 8-15% grade on gravel. I'm talking going 7mph spinning a 60 cadence in my 39x26. I'm usually totally solid going uphill, but I did not have it this day. I was cramping by mile 40. I actually had to stop for a little bit going up the second big climb, and I'm not too proud to admit that Joe pushed me uphill on at least two separate occasions. These climbs were evil...they just kept going and going and going.

As a cruel joke, they sent us up one last insanely steep, shorter hill about 10 miles from the finish, aptly named Everest Hill road. I had to paperboy it going up. I hit some gravel on the side of the road, both my thighs cramped and I came to a complete stop and tipped over. A lot of the ride was being photographed by Rapha and I was very glad that they didn't catch that!

All of the parts of the ride that didn't suck were some of the best riding ever...I've never been up to that area before and it was beautiful. The roads were great and scenic there were a few long, fast descents with switchbacks that were amazing and so much fun to ride. If you asked me immediately after finishing if I would ever do that ride again, I would have said emphatically "fuck no", but by today I've forgotten how hard it was and how I can't wait to do it again next year!

Big thanks to the folks from Rapha, not only for putting on an awesome event and also for putting us up (not to mention putting up WITH us) for a few nights.

The ride was documented extensively by Rapha with photos and video, and I'll be sure to post links as soon as they hit the web. I apologize for the lack of details in this report, but I spent the entire 7.5 hours in the pain cave and my memories are pretty foggy.

Results:

1: The Eastmans (7hrs 43min)
2: Embrocation 6:40
3:Bicycle Therapy 7:25
4: HUP UNITED 8:15
5: Rapha Racing NYC 8:00
6: Rapha Continental 8:17
7: Geekhouse 9:23
8: Seven 9:38
9: Fifth Street Cross 9:45
10: Independent Fabrication 10:10
11: Bilenky 10:55 (all tandems)
12: Adler *Finished a man down 7:15
13: Pedro's *Finished a man down 7:30
14: BH/Garneu *Finished a man down 7:34

Race Report: Farmersville Road Race 2/3

Tough race on Saturday...8 laps of 6.6 miles...~54 miles total. It was pretty flat, with a lot of long straightaways and then a lot of sections with tight turns.

Out of ~70+ starters, I ended up 14th overall and 4th among Cat 3s.

I had a bad start off the line as well and i spent 6 of the 8 laps in the back 1/3 of the race. I was really hurting on the first couple of laps and wondering why I even do this. There were a bunch of turns and I was sprinting out of the saddle to catch back on after every turn. Seriously, the course was like a giant 9-corner crit.

Once we hit an hour in, you could tell that a lot of the really powerful crit dudes who usually only race for 60 minutes were slowing down. I was moving up little by little and the more I moved up, obviously the less work i was doing.

On the last lap I was moving up on the side just as an attack went off the front...in the confusion, the field strung out a little and cleared the road enough where I was able to catch on to the back of the attack, which put me at fifth wheel or so with 3 miles to go.

There was a United Health Group dude off the front who nobody was interested in chasing. There were a couple of fake attacks, but everybody was interested in racing for 2nd place it seemed.

I messed up a little bit responding to one of the fake attacks just before 1km to go and lost my solid position and ended up on the front. I stayed there a little too long and lost a couple of places when the next attack happened. I was able to catch a wheel going into the last turn, but I was now far enough back that I knew I wasn't going to have a chance to win the field sprint.

I picked a few dudes off on the finishing stretch, but I was kicking myself for losing my spot with 2k to go. I totally had a moment when I panicked and thought to myself 'what am I doing here, I don't belong here, these dudes are all 2s, how did I end up at the front?' and lost concentration long enough to end up in the wind a little too long...so I ended up sprinting for top 20 and not top 10.

Still, i'm psyched on the result. I feel like i've been just riding and not racing in races so far this season, and I was definitely racing at the end yesterday.

Andy picked up a 6th in the Cat 5 race...I'm sure he'll post a race report as well.

What was looming in the distance. Subtitle: Battenkill and it's aftermath. Pt. 1

When you sign up for a race with a five month wait til you're actually on the start line you tend to find yourself thinking about it a lot. It becomes a centerless and uncertain way of thinking and planning for an event . Questions start coming into play that challenge your best laid plans, never mind any actual tangible obstacles such as sickness or injury, those roadblocks swell to the level of the point of abject failures.
Of course, I write of the Tour of Battenkill. As many times I tell myself that the race is a paltry sixty-something mile ride the likes of I've done countless times prior in my riding habits, I think back to previous experiences I've had in the race or one of my team mates is there to co-conspire my tranquility with their own anxieties. The kicker is that this is an ongoing theme for five months. Five months. I am not a man born of complete consistency, nor do I have the desire or attention for too many things too far in the future. My way of going into this is to lay out a decent plan where I might be able to get a bit more caught up in one week following the next and so on until the last few weeks are in sight. When I get troubled or need a little reminder of what's to come, I tend to shift my thoughts to things more insignificant and palpable. One of my favorite reminders being equipment. Let's look at tires, will I want to change my saddle, will these bottle cages eject my belongings as soon as I hit the first dirt section? These thought remind me that the race is coming but give more footing as far as I feel like I am planning the right way more so than the physiological guessing that I can easily get wrapped up in. Will my legs work, am I overdoing this, do I go up hills decent enough?
It's easier for me to quell my team mates' concerns that it is to quiet my own. I tell them it's a not that crazy of a race. I know that it's not, but no one is too assured when I say it. Not even me.
Let's not get too involved in the lead up to the race, at least not the first four months. Suffice to say that I got on the bike a lot, both here in the frigid north east and in sunnier climes of Florida, I got out on some fantastic long rides, I made sure to hit up some dirt roads for good measure. I'll also spare you the details of getting sick and feel like there was never any way I was going to be in good enough shape to race. When you feel like everything you are doing is preparation for something, the sense of purpose in you has a way to exaggerate all fears to an ultimate finality.
With a month to go all nagging questions have to be stifled. Again I typically turn towards preparing equipment. The basement becomes a whirl of work, glue and grease. After riding through the thaw here much needs attention. Bottom brackets come out, get cleaned and re-installed. Oh good, that creaking is gone. Race wheels get pulled out from the bags and inspected, new tubulars get stretched and prepped. I search around all my parts and wonder why I have so many used cassettes lying around and if they'll work with my chain. Nope, they sure don't. Time to buy an new chain and cassette. (Do I throw out the used ones? No way. Damned if I know why I don't.)

The day to glue new tires is a fun one for me. I like the process, I truly do. The way I feel about it is like this: If I'm going to glue one set of wheels, I'd might as well glue a few more. The process becomes that much bigger and demands more efficiency. Total like. A team mate drops a set of wheels he wants glued and now I've got a party on my hands. On a nice day I like to do this outside on the patio. It looks like this:
A miniature service course. With all mechanic duties finished, the last part of the wait time is to be filled with travel arrangements, finding pretty much the entire accumulation of apparel and accessory you might have given the unpredictability of the weather up in the northern reaches of eastern New York, and the finishing touches of training to ready one's self for the upcoming task. That'll be part two. Soon.

Union Grove 2/3 Race Report....

After getting split from the main field in the crosswinds at the Philly Phlyer, I was down in the dumps. I finished the race, but off the back. I felt like I’d forgotten how to keep a wheel in front of me, and when I rode the Drives the following Tuesday, my fears were compounded when I kept letting gaps open in front of me and was having a tough time closing them back up.

I had a long, easy ride to NYC on my calendar for the weekend, but with Battenkill looming a mere 2.5 weeks away, I felt like I wanted to get some more racing in my legs.

I saw the Union Grove 2/3 race on BikeReg, and asked if anyone else wanted to get some racing in over the weekend. Willem signed up before I had even made up my mind to race and then Gerald was enlisted after some gentle arm-twisting.

For some reason, the idea of doing a 2/3 race terrified me. As a recently upgraded 3, I had cut my teeth on 4/5 and 4 races, doing only the occasional 3/4. Doing an elite race conjured up images of Dominique Rollin lapping the 1/2/3 field at Greentree in 2008 without breaking a sweat, or the Rite Aid boys dropping the hammer from the whistle at Lower Providence that same year, shedding 75% of the field in the first three laps.

The race was going to be 11 laps of a 4.6-mile circuit. We didn’t really talk strategy on the drive out to Amish country, we talked survival. We figured that we’d hang for as long as we could, and would consider it a success if we were still in the main field with 5 laps to go.

We got to the race, and there were two French-Canadian riders with international licenses signing in ahead of us. Their licenses said Cat 1 and their tan lies said that they had probably been doing a lot of training/racing someplace other than Montreal. They told the promoters that they were Cat 2 in the U.S. Willem shot me a knowing glance…we were outclassed. Totally fucked. We’d be lucky to make it through the first lap without getting spit out the back.

We lined up and tried to keep things light, chatting with a few friendlies from TriStateVelo about cross and drinking (Team BT’s two favorite subjects.) Looking around, lining up for a 2/3 race was a lot different than a lower category race. Now I know that looks can be deceiving on the starting line of an amateur bike race, but our starting group was a goober-free zone. There wasn’t a helmet mirror or hairy leg in sight. We took our position where we thought we belonged…towards the back.

The starting whistle blew and off we went. Of course it took me two tries to get clipped in. I looked up, expecting to see the field a half-mile down the road already. Nope, they were still there and I caught right on.

A funny thing happened as we started the second lap. I felt good. I was riding well and I felt comfortable within the group. The speed was high, but the race was smooth. It was a lot different than even the 3/4 races I’d done…everybody seemed comfortable riding really close to each other, nobody slammed their brakes going into turns and there was a lot less of the hot-headed in-race verbal instruction that is all too common in the lower categories.

The course was pretty fast…only a few corners and a few power climbs. Nothing really hard enough to cause a big selection, but enough technical sections to keep it from being a straight-up drag race. There were a couple of straightaways through wide-open farmland where positioning within the pack was key to avoid crosswinds.

As the race went on, I felt more and more comfortable and even moved up and spent some time up at the front. Gerald never met a break he didn’t want to try to get in, so he tried his hardest to get away, to no avail. As the “Laps to Go” sign ticked down, I kept waiting for someone to drop the hammer and outclass us and out us as the soft posers that we came into the race feeling like we were.

It never happened. I kept feeling better and better and started feeling more like I was racing than just trying to hang on.

I wish that I could conclude this report by saying that Willem and I formed a leadout train for Gerald on the last lap, putting him in perfect position for a sprint victory.

Unfortunately, this isn’t that kind of story.

A couple of guys stayed off the front to win. Another small group chasing those guys got in a few seconds before the main pack.

However, we all finished with the main pack. Gerald rolled in first at 17^th, I wasn’t far behind at 35^th and Willem ended up 54^th after getting caught behind a guy who broke his chain.

If you are a numbers person, it was a pretty unimpressive result for Team BT. Nobody in the money, and aside from a few of Gerald’s attacks, we didn’t really animate the race or try to play all of our cards.

However, considering the fact that we were hoping to simply survive half the race, we considered it a wild success, and we celebrated immediately afterward in true Team BT fashion with some cold Lion’s Head Lights and peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches.

We do this for fun, and any time you finish the race with the rubber side up in a better position than you thought possible, it’s time to celebrate.

Now on to Battenkill!

Philly Phlyer, View from the back

The first race for most of us this season who didn't go to the FL training camp was the collegiate race The Philly Phlyer that also has a 3/4 category. This was a short circuit race of four laps on the west side of Farmount park.
There was much talk of strategy before the race, Jack had done really well last year so everyone wanted to see his murder face cross the line first this year. So the plan was to have most of the team try to start a break, then bring Jack up to that break, then block. Just in case this didn't work Brendan and I were to sit in the whole race saving our selves for the final sprint.

A total of eight teammates lined up at the start, which is a big turn out for any team. The weather was perfect, it was in the 70's and I was worried that I had already gotten too much sun, but the wind was starting to pick up as the race went off.
I assumed my roll and stuck to the wheels infront of me like glue. The group made its way down from memorial hall on to West River Drive and it was easy to see that this was going to be a scary race. Everyone was twitchy, and many riders hadn't ridden in a group for several months. On the first climb there was a crash that nearly took out Jack. As the race went on I could see red and black jerseys go up the road, over and over attacking the field either trying to start a break away or bridge up the an existing one.


As the last lap came up I decided it was time to move to the front or be trapped in the back for ever. My legs felt fresh and I hopped behind Mike Green as we jockeyed for position up front, Brendan and Gerry were also in the mix. Gerry had earlier been part of a breakaway with 3 other strong riders but he had fallen off. By the last lap they where too far up the road and wouldn't be brought back. On the last trip up west river drive Mikey went on a flyer and tried to bridge up the the brake away, putting out a huge effort and staying away from the pack for the whole straight flat stretch but he got caught on the hill.

As we hit the last climb up to Memorial Hall I knew I had to attack on the hill because I wasn't gong to be able to out sprint the field. I went off the front of the field and was the first to top the hill. I was passed in the traffic circle, then as my legs and lungs screamed I was passed a couple more times on the final straight to the finish line. I crossed at 7th place with Brendan close behind at 18th, Gerry 23rd. Jack unfortunately was caught out in the wind a few times, and most of the other teammates burnt themselves out earlier in the race working for the team.
All and all, it was a great start to the season. It was a perfect day and a really fun race. Racing is always better when its in your back yard.
Cheers.

When you test the limits of your mind and body, sometimes shit happens.

With Philadelphia and much of the Eastern Seaboard blanketed with record-breaking snowfall, indoor riding has been the only option. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indoor training forces oneself to make the most of each mind-numbing, minute-watching training session. You ride with purpose and a plan instead of just accumulating junk miles. And, since there seems to be a built in timer which regulates how long one can endure on an indoor trainer—somewhere between 1½-2 hours—recovery (whether planned or accidental) gets its well-deserved attention.

Yesterday was the first time since February 4th I was able to ride my bike outside. That’s seventeen days! Team Bicycle Therapy (minus Willem) planned to meet up and ride the Rockhill WaWa training race—a 2 lap circuit around the Radnor Hunt Club. *Note* rides are often identified from where they depart, usually little or no other significance whatsoever. Take the Bulldog Ride for example: it meets at a statue of a bulldog. Where it goes…I have no idea.

It was a beautiful warm and cloudless day (anything over 40ºF is considered warm these days). The sun was shining bright, which was accentuated by the sparkle of the lingering snow. Team Bicycle Therapy, in full livery, rode double paceline down West River Drive at a casual pace. Everyone had a chance to chat and catch-up on man gossip. It was good to be all together again.

Our team arrived at Rockhill WaWa first. Mischa used the opportunity to give us a secret pep-talk about race tactics and offered up some suggestions. He encouraged us to try something…anything. We are always thankful for his wisdom and guidance.

Riders streamed in from all directions. Though I didn’t know many of the attendees by name, it was still like a reunion, a homecoming of sorts. Pleasantries and hugs were shared by many. Once the group 40 or so was established and settled, we were on our way. The mood was excited and jubilant. Everyone was happy to be playing outside, once again amongst friends.

We made our way to the race course. The 20ish miles in between allowed everyone to stretch their legs and find a comfortable spot in the group. For others, it was a chance to test their legs with short-lived attacks. People looked strong. Everyone’s indoor training has paid off, and it showed.

We all gathered at the start line of the circuit, fully warmed. We paused momentarily for the demarcation of the finishing line. Again, we were off. People were feisty from the start, launching attacks. Most were brought back quickly, but near the end of the first lap there were two riders 100m off the front, daring someone to chase. Coming out of the last corner, Dan L. and I were on the front of the group. I figured I could open a gap while the pack braked into the more-than-90ºcorner. I let off the brakes and jumped on the pedals. I chased hard for a couple kilometers, but couldn’t manage to bridge up to the leading duo. I sat up and waited to get reeled in by the group. This was my something. It was a good go, but not good enough.

I made a tactical error as I was re-absorbed into the peloton. Instead of moving to the far left of the road where I should’ve been, I was on the right—the drive side (a.k.a. the fast lane). As the accelerating group began to pass, I was caught in the gutter with nowhere to go. I squeezed back in line about five or so wheels back, with legs still tingling from the effort. I filed in behind a rider who in the cycling world would be described as a “Clydesdale”, a 200+ pounder. The draft my Clyde provided me was amazing. I was practically sucked right along in a vacuum. Minimal effort was needed to keep pace. I was almost fully recovered.

There is, however, one downside I can think of when riding behind someone that large: Gravity. (One could argue that gravity has been a nuisance ever since that infamous apple landed on Sir Isaac Newton’s head). As the pack rolled along a flattish part of the course, gravity was the least of my concerns, it didn’t even exist. But, when the road tipped upwards, gravity let its awesome presence be known and exerted a tremendous force upon the hefty man ahead of me. To counteract the downward pull, Clyde stepped up on the pedals to supply the drivetrain with more gravity-defying power. This unintentionally caused his rear wheel to shoot back at me faster than my lactic acid addled brain could react to avoid. Before I knew it, my front wheel was overlapped with his rear wheel. Our rubber tires joined and buzzed an awful buzz, which seemed to signal the pack, like a drone to the hive, of the impending danger. 99 times out of 100 this can only result in one thing: road rash. While there is a glimmer of hope, sadly to say, I was not in the lucky percentile. I was on the ground skidding in the gutter out of control.

Helmet Cam Video From Swamp Classic Cat 3 Race...

You can see Dan and Gerry mixing it up a little bit.

I definitely agree with the music choice.