Merco Crit and RR report by Eric Saltzman (45+ 1/2/3)

My wife keeps telling me not to program my GPS while driving. While the rest of the team found the new CCCX course on Saturday, I somehow ended up in Merced riding a criterium with smoke from a barbecue wafting across the course. I figure that bike racing is about suffering so giving up warming up with scenic views of the Monterey Bay for a scenic tour of downtown Merced seemed appropriate.

We did 20 laps on a 1 mile barbell shaped course. The distinguishing feature of the course was the very long finishing straight. It was well over 400 meters from the last corner to the line. The field was relatively small (about 35 riders, 27 of whom finished), but filled with strong crit riders. As a solo rider the race was a game of craps and I had to place my bets carefully. The race ended up playing out in a strange way. My first bet was a loser as I watched what turned out to be the winning break roll up the road on the second lap. No one got organized to chase and it was gone. Morgan Stanley was the biggest team to miss the break and did some chasing, but got no consistent help. I made a couple of efforts to bridge, the first with Andrew Nevitt of MS and Shaun Bagley who had a teammate in the break. His presence doomed our chase effort. The second was a solo effort trying to get to Don Langley and one other rider who were trying to get across to the break. I rode solo in no mans land for two laps, suffered well and then got caught. Don and his cohort came back just after that and it looked like we were settling in to sprint for 3rd. With two laps to go, the field watched Chris Black from MS roll off and he dangled just in front of us for the remainder of the race to hang on for 3rd.

The sprint was tricky because you needed to be in the first few wheels coming out of the last corner, but not open up the sprint too soon. I was positioned well and got second in the sprint behind Shaun for 5th in the race.

After spending a night in Modesto listening to the drunk people in the next room scream at each other all night, (not knowing Tom was going to be in the Hamptons), Jason and I dragged our rears out of bed and headed out to the road race.

One of the plusses and minus of having raced for a long time and having ridden most of the courses in Nor. Cal. more times than I can count, is I have a pretty good sense of how a race will play out. I got out of the car, took one look at the completely still trees and the 80 rider field, and knew that the odds of a break sticking were only slightly better than my odds of winning the lottery and I don't play the lottery The key to success would be doing absolutely nothing for the first 68 of the 72 miles so you could be as fresh as possible for the last time up the hill on Cox Ferry and then hold good position from there to when the sprint opens up on the up hill before the gradual downhill 300 meters to the line.

This is exactly what I did. While Tom was playing chase DIrk and Dirk was getting frustrated because half the field was playing the same game, I was sitting 15 riders back having nice chats with various riders. I averaged 143 watts for the race. Was this boring? If the road weren't like riding on a rumble strip I might have fallen asleep. Was it the best workout I could have gotten? I had a higher TSS for my two hour training ride Wed. morning than for this two hour forty seven minute race and felt a lot more tired when I got off my bike on Wed. Was it the best way to get a result without a large team? Almost certainly. That I could ride 72 miles in 2:47 with so little effort is exactly why the race came down to a field sprint.

On the last lap, I moved up on Cox Ferry, was ahead of the guy who decided that the sand and gravel on the inside of the corner off of Cox Ferry onto Keys must have miraculously disappeared between the second and third lap and took himself out (fortunately, he was the only one that went down), and was holding position pretty well. I knew this was going to be a wild ride to the finish because almost the entire field was pretty fresh and lots of people that are not sprinters decided that today was the day for them to become sprinters. Unfortunately, they would make it to the front of the field, realize it is hard to hold position and then start going backward in a big hurry. The problem was that they got to or near the from just long enough to break the rhythm of the lead out efforts and cause the field to bunch. Lots of guys would have won the race if they could have painter lines on the road between 1K and 400 meters to go. Each guy ended his sprint, sat up, in some cases swerved, and started going backwards.

I was fourth wheel coming into the hill at about 500 meters to go, but had to slow to avoid someone who sprinted past, got half way up the hill and then exploded. I lost a few positions and some momentum and could only manage 8th in the sprint. I was glad to keep the rubber side down. Let's hope for more wind next year.