Birmingham Bike Festival Cat 3 Criterium Race Report
Tactically speaking, my pre-race conversation with Jeff Schiller and Mike Aston was short. “What would you guys do if you were me?” The answer: “follow wheels”. Additional conversations in the car ride included attacking the field after a prime, staying close to the front, and staying aero to save the watts. As it turns out, all the advice was extremely useful. At the start line, I was slightly nervous. I was a little behind schedule and I was rushed to get kitted up, fueled up, and warmed up. After a final warm up lap of the course after the Cat 4. Racers finished, I took a mental stock of the teams in the field. Most had 2 or 3 members, but the dominant team was Team O2.
The race began and I did my best to stay near the front. As attacks began, I was quickly absorbed into mid pack and heard Jeff Schiller yelling from the sidelines to move up! “Yes, good idea” I thought “less chance of crashing”. As I moved up through the group, I heard the commissionaire announce a prime for the next lap – 14 minutes into the race. I think it was for some beer, which made me thirsty and reminded me to take a drink to stay hydrated. As the first group of guys sprinted to the line, I decided to take Schiller’s advice and kept the pace high and rolled off the front hard with a rider from Team O2 (Brian Wachlarz) and another rider from Metromint Cycling (Huy Tran) jumping onto my wheel as the rest of the sprinters sat up to recover from the prime attempt. “We’ve got a gap!” I heard from behind, so I kept the power going and dug hard into the next corner. I checked my shoulder, flicked the elbow for my breakaway companions to come through, and looked at the gap. It looked pretty good, and there was a group of another two guys chasing to get on. Wow, 5 guys could work well together and hold a gap! We were joined by the chasers on the next lap, and we kept motoring around the course for a few laps before three were dropped. Huy Tran explained after the race that one of the guys let a gap open on Brian and I and then they couldn’t close it. Huy would later attack the group for a third place finish! A strong finish considering all the work he did in the race.
I checked the lap timer as we rolled through the start/finish. 20 minutes had passed. That’s when it hit me that Brian and I needed to basically do a two man TT for the next 40 min. We agreed to work together as we both knew that no matter the outcome of our sprint, he would be crowned the Michigan Cat 3 State Champion and get the State champ jersey. We alternated pulls, with me being the bigger rider taking a lot of the windy sections while staying as aero and low as possible and him charging up the slight false flat. At one alternation, he told me he has 4 other teammates in the race who will hopefully be helping us by blocking the group! Perfect!
(Here I am not following Jeff's advice to stay aero)
We managed to bring the gap up to 30 seconds. The announcer was cheering for us, every lap we heard Brian’s friends cheering, it was really motivating me to keep going. We can do this! 10 laps to go. 28 second gap. Quick math in my head, I thought there was no way the group was going to take 3 seconds per lap from us. Confidence was building. 5 laps to go. 26 second gap. As Brian pulled through I yelled “Mr. State Champion, this is ours to lose! We can make it!”. We hammered the final laps. As we approached the final turn, I thought I had a bit more punch left in my legs so I opened an early sprint. I did a quick check and saw Brian was behind by a couple of seconds and raised my arms to celebrate. First place. It felt good. Looking at the results, I figured a bit of cat and mouse went on in the main group, as I finished 42 seconds ahead of the pack with Brian 2 seconds behind me. Huy Tran took 3rd place as he solo’d off the front for a 5 second lead. All in all, it was a great race. It sure does pay to take a chance by being aggressive and having a bit of luck on your side!
Special thanks to Jeff Schiller and Mike Aston for the sideline motivational shouting and to my wife for letting me race with the boys while she had to stay at home caring for our 3 week old daughter all day!
Strava File: http://www.strava.com/activities/185005505
Strava Activity Playback: http://labs.strava.com/flyby/viewer/#185005505,1B4FC3E9BQuIywULCesFC4oDBgtvEAYLqjEGC+5SBgtnjAYL7I4GCxi5Bgs=