2006 Race Report #11: Elk Grove - crashing
Race Report Elk Grove Masters Challenge, August 13, 2006. 75 degrees, 45 minutes timed. In prep for the $25,000 Pro/Am event later in the day on Sunday I decided to race the short Master’s event earlier in the day – it also happened to have a decent purse of $5000. The race was fairly early for me (9am) and arriving at 8am in the relative cool of the day brought back memories of racing when I was younger – when all our racers were the first of the day – seemingly so that our parents could get back to their yardwork or other activities.
Warming up at 8:30 am I bumped into a number of my Wolverine Sports Club teammates or ex-teammates including Ben and Jamie, Jan and Todd. I felt tired and sluggish for the first half of the race and hung out in the rear of the pack. However about mid-way through the race they rang a bell for a prime sprint and I decided to test out the course and the sprint. I started moving up on the backstretch where the pack was wall to wall and felt like I was playing a video game – much like frogger – anticipate movement and then move into the evacuated space.
In such a manner I moved halfway through the pack and then on the far side of the course made an easy move up to the top 20 riders. As we headed into the last mile, the pace picked up and small packs of riders went shooting up the inside and outside. I picked a promising group and followed it into the last corner and the last 500m. I exited the corner in 3rd and noticed that I didn’t have much draft. As we headed down the final stretch some riders came up the outside and eventually I moved up the inside, only to be blocked near the finish by the leadout man (déjà vu from yesterday) and ended up second.
I drifted back into the pack and when asked by Jamie how it went I used my fingers (still tired) to indicate 2nd or 3rd. He indicated that it was a 3 place prime – that made me happy. The rest of the race proceeded without notable circumstance and with one to go, I began moving up (it was a long course after all…)
As we left the first U-turn, I moved up to top 50, and then into the backstretch I jumped all the way into the front – the pace was quite low. We finally entered the last two straights, the pace picked up significantly and we hummed into the last turn, with the speed falling just shy of the corner. My “spidey senses” tingled: sure enough, even though I was in 6th position in a single file leadout, the lowering pace had created the ultimate “race killer” – a slow entry into the final corner.
At the last second I considered trying to move up on the outside, but I remembered how widely everyone had been coming out of the corner and held my position anxiously. I entered the corner at 25 mph, following the wheel ahead of me, but even as I began to lean, I saw something or rather several “somethings” out of the corner of my eye. It was a full-on charge up the inside, with 4 riders trying to enter the corner together.
Even as I heard the inevitable shouts, and the first of those loud “pops” and the screeching of metal on concrete indicating the first tire being blown and the first bike sliding on bare metal and torsioned tires, I began to throw my body backward, and my bike forward hoping against the odds to “scoot” my bike past the wreckage coming from behind.
Through the corner of my eye, I could feel the inertia of the mayhem tumbling my way. The dominoes began to fall, with the inside, #2, #3, and #4 riders piling on top of one another, limbs and bikes flipping and sliding, their looming presence entering the corner of my eye. Even as I threw my bike forward, I could see the body and bike of the rider behind me sliding toward my rear wheel…
And then, with perfectly predictable precision, my bike began to go sideways – with the mass of the bike and body of the fallen rider plowing into the rear triangle of my bike causing the back end to pass to the right of my adjusting front wheel and I started the “mud track slide” more familiar in dirt bike racing. For a half second I thought I might hang onto it – I was still balanced overtop my increasingly sideways bike, and my inertia was slowing dramatically via the sliding of my tires and the emergency braking I had resorted to. Then my rear wheel clipped the curb and I flopped oddly overtop the bike and slapped shoulder first onto the pavement still attached to my bike, covering my face with my hands to avoid the teeth of the 114 remaining chainrings headed at my face as the riders behind tried to navigate the corner through the pileup.
Eventually the traffic lessened and I grabbed my bike, hopped on, and headed for the finish, only then noticing the “flump, flump, flump” of an out of true wheel – or so I thought. As I finished the 100meter stretch to the wheel pit and mechanics, and climbed off my bike, suddenly my frayed and bubbled rear tire blew loudly like a gunshot, causing the mechanic to wince. “At least you made it here” he said.
As it turned out it was just my tire that was destroyed, not my wheel and they replaced it with a well worn spare so that I could warm down.
------------------------------------------------ Fast forward for a moment – Saturday, August 26th, 2006 and I’m heading out for a 50 mile training ride in the rain – out and back to Janesville. It was dry, but threatening as I started, but not long after the air turned to mist, then drizzle, then light rain, and then a steady downpour that did not let up until I returned home almost 3 hours later.
So, why did I do it? Why did I ride in the rain? I hate the rain for some reason. I’m a racer, not a trainer. Generally speaking I don’t “get off” on training – I don’t, generally speaking even really enjoy training – rather it is a necessarily evil to prep for racing, and a necessary balancing factor in a busy personal and professional life full of unpredictable stresses.
I’m not an endurance athlete, and I’ve never seemed to have had much of the “control” over my body that more traditional distance athletes seem to enjoy over theirs. My body is a somewhat unwilling participant – grudgingly providing a rather inconsistent level of fitness that seems to vary according to its own whim, and a somewhat more predictable reserve of short term speed and power to be drawn on assuming I find myself in a position to use it.
But Saturday just happened to be one of those magic times where, despite seemingly adverse conditions, my body decided it was ready to ride. So after an initial hour of warmup I suddenly found my legs to be smoothly turning circles, my seat feeling comfortable, my breathing regular, my pulse steady at about 150 beats per minute, and my speed steady at about 22 mph – despite the rooster tails of water thrown off by the standing puddles on the road.
Lance would have said, “no chain man – no chain…” I assume that this feeling is something endurance athletes feel all the time – I’m lucky to have it a couple times a year… I marveled at the “scratching their heads” expressions portrayed by the farmers I passed along the way and enjoyed the cleansing effect of the incessant downpour on the roads, my bike and even my skin as all the silt, tar, and exhaust were removed from the road, my bike frame and my mind.
Life became squeaky clean. During the last hour I had an analytically detached sense of glycogen depletion (better known as “bonking”) occurring as I could feel the lethargic muscle responses to my mental demands, and the occasional disassociation from reality where the normal real time monitoring of road noise, direction, and balance were replaced by gaps of blank space – of “nothing.”
These momentary “grey-outs” were followed by quick “snaps” of compressed processing shunting all the visceral feedback into a “spike of time” leaving my brain “startled” with the updated reality. Sometimes the snap of sensory overload would trigger a minor “fight or flight” synaptic reaction releasing adrenaline and resulting in momentary vertigo. This would then be followed by a return to reality until the next “greyout.”.
Ride, rain, pedal, think… greyness… “Ah! Almost off the road”. Jolt of adrenaline, return to status quo – ride, rain, pedal, think… “Car headlights – move right!” and so on… All of this occurred with no pain, and little anxiety. I knew that I was running out of muscle fuel and I also knew that my body was responding imperfectly, but I was somewhat pre-emptive in my ability to predict the symptoms and was still able to keep on pace and force my body to comply and I experienced a clear sense of flow for the latter 2 hours of the ride before coasting back into my driveway, parking my bike, and heading in for a snack of everything in the fridge that was edible, and a nice long hot shower.
In contrast, there are days where even though “fresh” and rested, with proper training and perfect conditions, I’m just completely unable to produce significant power, and the relative levels of pain, and just plain awkwardness are incredibly frustrating. Heavy, irregular breathing, sloppy pedaling, with my feet squeaking in the pedals, knees mis-aligned, “pedaling squares”, tense back – one might swear that it was a completely different bike – or more aptly, a different body pedaling it.
Once, years ago, at a practice race at the Ciaccaro Club in Windsor Canada, I had forgotten to eat and experienced an in-race bonk scenario second to none. My “greyout” phases started becoming 1/10th seconds and then ½ seconds and then nearly a second. At one point I overlapped the wheel in front of me and almost went down. A little later, and I just plain forgot to turn and wound up on the grass. I ended up pulling out of a race with only 2 laps to go because I could no longer see any color other than yellow and I was losing awareness for seconds at a time.
My memory of what came next is vague, but I have a vague sense of shame as I’m quite certain that I wandered the sidelines of the race dragging my bike asking if anyone had “a cracker, a fig Newton – any food at all?” This all culminated in the worst food binge in history – I spent over $13.00 at Taco Bell AND ATE IT ALL. I believe that this was about 16 items. I do remember clearly sitting in my car, with my belly hitting the steering wheel, realizing I couldn’t possibly drive. I then slept fitfully in the parking lot for a couple of hours before finally heading across the border toward home.