Tulsa Tough Blue Dome District

Wow what a race! I had no idea how short this race lap really was going to be but we were around this thing fast! The field here was completely full with over 100 riders. I was wondering why they closed it at 100, once the race started I could see.

Eric and I got a really good spot on the course just after the final turn and about 120 meters from the start/finish. The course was a figure 8 with no real elevation to speak of. The wind was really non existent as well. I got a good warm up in really just getting my legs moving as the temp didn't require you to get the body really warm. I started to pull up to the start finish and wanted to take one lap around the course to see what it was all about and put on my gloves. When I cam back around everyone had already lined up.......CRAP! I hate starting at the back, and when there are 100 guys, and those guys are fast, and the course is small and tight, things can suck. So I just prepared myself for three to four laps of just hammering and making up ground. It turned out moving up was not a problem, I think a lot of guys were scared so there was a lot of room between riders to move around and up. I used the turns to make up a lot of ground and hold up my speed. I also quickly learned where I would be able to move later in the race. By the 4th lap I was up in the top 10 and just worked to hold in that area. There were a couple of times that I allowed myself to get swallowed in swarms and I tried a few other things to keep that from happening. They worked really well and for the rest of the race I had no problem staying where I wanted to be.

There were a few hard crashes in the race, only one was in a corner and it was only because the rider was turning at too high a speed and I would guess too high a tire pressure. I sort of have been railing on this for a while now to anyone that will listen but people just don't seem to get it. High tire pressure will not make you go faster, and you will have a harder time in the corners. If you are laying on the ground, you are not moving at all. But over and over guys are telling me they are running 110-120 psi in their tires. Not only is this dangerous to that rider but the other riders that he, or she, is going to take out when they slide out in a turn. It is really just the idea that more is better, well it's not! There are actually article out there where Pro Tour mechanics will say what they are putting in their riders tires, none are over 100 psi, and for a lot of races they are much, much lower. The really funny thing is hearing ex mountain bikers who will ride with super high psi, these guys know all about pressure but whatever.

Okay so the biggest crash of the night took out the back half of the field, it was crazy coming around to the pit to see all these guys waiting to go. The last crash was on the last lap with 3 turns to go. A guy took a flyer and washed out in the turn. As always the guys behind him grabbed a bunch of break, instead of just continuing their turns, and washed out with him. That meant I and a few others had to wind our way through and jump back on the gas. I was sitting 4th wheel chasing the 3rd place rider, with him about 10-15 feet in front of me. First place had about 20+ feet in front of the 2nd and 3rd place riders. My power meter showed I had 2 jumps over 1000 watts in the last two straightaways before the start finish, this is too much for me to have a sprint left and I lost 2 spots in that last 200 meters. It was still a good finish but I wasn't too happy about losing those places. Just one more thing to learn from, and I have to be happy I did not get in any of those crashes.

Speaking of crashes, there were a ton of them in all the races last night. My teammate Eric had a pretty bad one where I thought he had broken his collar bone. Luckily the x-rays were negative, we just had to spend a bunch of time in the ER. He is going to be super sore, but at least he will be back racing sooner than later.

We are racing again in a few hours on an L shaped course. I am sure it will be very similar to last night, so I will be trying my best to be at the front. I will let you know how it goes.

These are just the top 33 riders, there were a few more pages.

Saturday's course, Bradley Village Crit

Cool photo of Murphy coming through, he is number 299

 

 

Eric's helmet. He still had a pretty big bump on his head, but imagine if he didn't have this thing on.

 

 

Going to the 2013 Tulsa Tough

As I type Eric and I are driving down to Tulsa to race in this year's Tulsa Tough. Roy and Murphy are on their way from the STL to race tonight as well. None of us have ever done this race series but we have been hearing about it for years and it is just one of those races you have to do if you are from this area I think. The race is three days long with the last day sounding like one of the more famous races. It has a climb on it called Cry Baby Hill. In the video you can see it looks like one hell of a party! I love races like this where people get so excited and rowdy. The energy just fills you up and you can push yourself harder than you could without.

I will be racing the cat 3 races this weekend, Eric and Murph are going to be in the 1/2 and Roy will do some Masters racing along with a 3 race. He waited to long and the race filled up before he could get into all the 3s races. Lesson learned. This race has something pretty interesting going on for it. They will be airing the Pro/1 races over live streaming at VeloNews.com, that is pretty sweet if you ask me! At Glencoe this year they had some cameras set up around the course for a big screen they had at the start finish, I am not sure if they were live streaming too but I don't think it will be hard for them to make that jump in the future. I think that way more can be done in the area of video and race coverage, even at the amateur level. With the explosion of Go Pro cameras and others like it I don't think it will be long before you see whole races from within the pack. Pretty awesome if you ask me.

My team is pretty busy racing all over the Midwest this weekend. We have guys going to the River City Classic in Evansville, IN; the Tour of Galena in Galena, IL; Tulsa Tough in Tulsa, OK; and we are also hosting a mountain bike race back in St Louis The Lost Valley Luau. I love that there is all this racing going on.  I know that it takes a lot of time to do all this stuff, but what would I be doing otherwise? Probably sitting on the couch getting fat, doesn't sound too appealing.

2013 Glencoe Grand Prix

I love the Glencoe Grand Prix, it has been my favorite course since I first raced it 3 years ago and was dropped. That didn't matter to me, it is a great course in an amazing neighborhood, and put on by an awesome group of people. For the first few years I raced it, Glencoe was the IL state crit championships, this meant that I was always working for a teammate. Last year the race really started to get interesting as they put the cat 2s and 3s together in the state championship. The team was able to put Mark in the right spot and he took at state jersey for us. This year the state championship was moved to a new race, this left me with the opportunity to go for the win. Unfortunately Missouri moved their state road race championship to the same weekend. So the rest of my team was staying home to get ready for that.

I had planned on running up to Glencoe and then hauling ass back to Rolla to help the team at Hellbender. Ended up that most of my guys decided to do the masters race and the only other 3 wasn't a Missouri guy. I also SUCK at the Hellbender road race so I decided to miss it this year.

Glencoe has been growing in popularity for the last few years, and over that time the staging before the race has gotten tougher and tougher. You have to line up almost 30 min before the race to get a good starting position. This year they decided to go with a procedure which ended up being pretty good for me. I signed up pretty late so I was worried I would be staged pretty far back, but they did it by your national ranking compared to the other racers. This put me in the 21st spot, not bad.

The "trick" with this race is you CAN NOT be far back, and by far I mean more that 20 riders back. The course is so technical and narrow that if you are, you are doing way more work and it will be very hard to be there at the end. The start was hard and fast and I lost a good number of spots going into the first turn. So much for my good starting spot. For the first few laps every turn was a sprint, and there were a good number of crashes early. Luckily for me I was not caught behind any of them or even better, in them. Finally after a few laps I was able to move into a good spot making things a bit easier. Sammy's racing was really doing their best to make the race hard on the rest of us. They were sending riders off again and again. I am really not sure why they were not able to make a break work as I have always thought that this would be a great course to make one happen. I was trying to keep an eye open for a good attempt to get with a good break, but I was either never near enough to go with an attempt, or they guys I was watching never went.

With 5 laps to get things started to settle down a lot and the breaks ceased. Everyone was starting to think about the sprint finish. The job was not to try and hold a good spot for the sprint. This has been my weakness in my racing. I have been trying to get this part right but just not there yet. So at Glencoe I was trying some new things and they were working too. Then I screwed it up and let a rider get underneath me in a turn with 1 turn to go. He ended up pushing me all the way to the curb, not that he did it on purpose, just happened with the speed we were doing. I was riding in the crease of the curb and had to scrub some speed. So then I had to do a big jump just to get back into the lead group. So instead of opening my sprint up and getting a good spot going into the last turn I was just getting back to where I was. That also meant that I had wasted a lot of energy for my final sprint. I ended up 14th out of the 100 riders that started. Not a bad result at all, just think I could have done a little better. Not won, but been top 10 I think. That's okay though, I think things are really starting to come around for me on the bike. I have a few more weeks till my goal for the year and I still am doing Tulsa Tough this weekend, which will be another really good test for my fitness.

All in all a good weekend. I got to see my parents, and my nephew. Had a really good race and had a great time watching the Pro race at Glencoe. Thank god I am not at that level.....yet.