Monday Morning Fuzz

Warm, dry, reddened face from forgetting sunscreen for a couple hours. Eyesight slightly bleary. Stuffy nose and chest tightness from inhaling lots of air filled with lots of spring pollen. Eyelids of sand. Slightly chapped lips. Tight, worked quads. Yup, it was a good, hard race yesterday, and I have a bad case of Monday Morning Fuzz.

In fact, it was *two* good, hard races yesterday. The Binghamton Circuit Race is held on a 1.6 mile loop, with big sweeping corners and a sprinters' uphill and a gently flowing downhill. It's a real power rider course. Which means I suffered.

The first race of the day was the 4/5 race, and I'd guess there were about 60 guys or so. The field felt fairly safe, but everybody was jumpy. Any breaks that got 100 meters on the pack were jumped on right away. Each time up the climb, I noticed the watt meter settling into the 500s, and I wondered how many of those matches I'd have to burn. I spun the pedals fast to try and lighten the load on the muscles to save it for the final sprint.

I had three teammates with me. One was hanging on pretty well, but then popped off the back a few laps before the finish. The other two are pretty strong guys right now, and we were working for a nice leadout into the sprint up the final hill to the finish. Fine plan, but we started way too early, and in the wrong order. On the back stretch, we found ourselves on the front of the itchy pack. I was second in line, and my first teammate started cranking up the speed. My other teammate behind me was yelling, "Here they come! Go now!" I glanced over my shoulder to see not a charging line of riders I expected, but just everyone gathering on our wheels, waiting for the base of the climb to start their sprints.

"Easy! Ease up! Not yet!" I yelled back. My legs were beginning to burn and we were still half a K from the finish.

"Here they come! Go now!" from behind me. Arrrgh!

So our first leadout man cranked it up a notch, then another. As we hit the bottom of the climb, he was gapping me and I was shot. "Go! Go!" I yelled to my teammates, then simply tried to ride as fast and as straight as I could to avoid a pileup on my rear wheel as the charging pack came flowing around me like a damn broke.

Our first guy popped half way up, and our third guy in effect became the leadout for the entire peloton. Needless to say, we didn't place well.

After the race, I sat on the tailgate of the station wagon by myself munching some of Saturday night's leftover cornbread, sucking down my Endurox R4 mix, and thinking that this sport of cycling is one damn hard sport, I wasn't in the shape I'd hoped to be in, and that maybe I'd rather be home putting together our new lawn mower and cutting some grass or painting a bathroom or something. The average speed for the 4/5 race had been just over 25 mph, and the multiple spikes of high wattage had toasted me. The matches in my current book are pretty short.

After a spin down and a good stretch, I reluctantly signed up for the last race of the day, a 3/4/5 combined field. I'm glad I did. In that field of about 35 racers, we had five teammates, picking up a couple of our cat 3 guys. The pace was fairly sedate for a few laps, with a couple of ill-fated breaks trying their luck. Another solo break went up the road, and it was one of our cat 4s, the leadout guy from the first race. The rest of us played policeman and diligently covered everyone who turned the pace up. For eight or nine laps, our guy sat out front with a decent lead, and we just worked behind, sitting in and breaking the rythym and morale of any riders thinking of bridging up. It's amazing that one can slow the pace so much just by not contributing. We didn't physically try to block anyone of course, but just having three guys continually sucking wheels really wears on the mind.

With very few laps to go, our solo break broke, and came back into the folds of the peloton. Short any true sprinters, we didn't organize any real leadout for the sprint, but we all picked our own positions. Funilly enough, we all did far better than we did in the first race, with a 4th, 5th, 9th, and I was in an unofficial 13th. Not all that bad for a bunch of non-sprinters, I figure.

The fun of teamwork and reasonable sprint for this time of the season for me helped to renew my racing desire, and my mind turned to recovering today and then the hard training days to come.

After downloading the PT info at home in the evening, I was amazed by the peaks and valleys in wattage during the race. I expected to see extended peaks on the climb, troughs on the downhill, etc. Instead, there are spikes all over the place, and until I looked at speed, it was hard to tell where the effort on the hill came each lap. What an interesting sport it is that requires lots of endurance, but punctuates events with frequent bursts of high power output. No wonder it's so hard. (And fun, I suppose.)

At the end of the day, I was home and joined Sue in the flower garden where she'd been all day yanking weeds. I put together the new mower and fired it up and took a recovery spin around and around and around the lawn, thankful that we'd opted for one that was self-propelled.

See you on the road.