A Little Bit of Redemption

Since things didn’t go well on Saturday, I decided to try the Wolf Creek road race on Sunday with the Bull Elk. I expected the turn-out to be low with the Snowbird Hill Climb taking place the day before and the 4/5 category only had around 18 starters. The group was pretty diverse, you had the Bull Elk and a couple of guys from Jans that could have raced cat 3 and done well. That’s to be expected in road race and my goal was to see how long I could stay with the main pack.

The race started with what felt like a quick pace. I don’t understand why a road race feels like a harder start then a mountain bike race. Looking my heart rate I wasn’t riding as hard as Saturday’s mountain bike race but it still felt pretty quick. I managed to stay in the middle of the pack as we turned on to bench creek and the first couple of climbs on bench creek pushed me to the back of the pack. Finally we hit the last descent and turn that would take us back to the highway and chip-seal. As we were coming in to the turn I noticed a rider on my left starting to wobble. I wanted to accelerate and get my wheel past him in case he went down but I had nowhere to go except back or to the right. I though he was going down so I went right. Now I was faced with cornering on the shoulder and some loose gravel. I decided it would be easier to turn in the weeds and did some cross riding on the right of way until I could slow down and get back on the road.

At this point the peloton was 25 feet in front of me and climbing up a small hill. I spent the next 5 minutes pushing my lactic threshold working pack to the pack. After 5 minutes with the pack and just starting to recover from the sprint back to the group I found myself getting tossed off the back again! At this point I decided to save my energy for the climb settled into a nice pace as I prepared to solo the rest of the race.

The climb went well. I had one rider catch me just past Mill Hollow, he had dropped his chain early in the race and he decided to go pretty hard through the first section of the climb. I knew a lot more climbing was ahead of me and decided to ride much more conservative. I found myself staying just within sight of this guy and I was hoping he would crack. As I was getting ready for the last really steep section I got caught by a rider. I was surprised that someone had caught me. He must have spent a lot of energy trying to catch me. I stayed on his wheel as we rounded the last switchback. Having ridden the course many times I knew that from here to the top was a gradual climb and I could turn up the speed to the top. I got around the guy and put on an attack. As I hit the turnaround I had a good 25 feet on the guy and started the fast ride down the hill.

As if the headwind going up the mountain wasn’t enough. It appeared that I had a head wind back to the finish. After about 10 minutes of riding solo I could see the guy behind me starting close the gap on me. I decided to slow the pace and hopefully I could work with this guy until the last couple of hills and drop him again. We started working together as we approached bench creek. On the first climb up bench creek I decided to see how much had left and threw down an attack. He had nothing and continued to push a hard pace to make sure he didn’t catch me the last couple of miles to the finish. I finished around 2:10. I was hoping for closer to 2:00 but 12-15 minutes behind the Bull Elk isn’t a bad result for me. I’m thinking about doing the ULCER this weekend. But we will see how things go this week.