Wells Ave A Race, 3/21

The 2010 road season kicked off yesterday at Wells Ave for many of the Boston area cyclists that hadn’t ventured to Charge Pond or beyond already. It was a beautiful day for March, sunny and 50F although a bit windy. Abnormal 70 degree temps on Saturday actually made this feel chilly for a lot of us. It’s amazing how quickly we can forget that Wells Ave races in March can be snowed out. 50 and sun should be incredible in March.

Saturday was super nice and I logged 90 miles with 5 hours or so saddle time. I’m sure any serious cyclist that had his or her way did the same. 70 and sun in March is like having a second Christmas. This first Wells Ave of 2010 would be raced on a lot of tired legs.

Ken and I met up in the morning to ride down to the race. A year ago at this time Ken was racing the C’s and today we were both doing the A’s. Big jump for one year.

We got there way too early and watched the B’s race. In the meantime a few teammates showed up, Joe, Peter, and Justin. No one wanted to warm up. Riding around in the gusty wind felt awful and no one was really dressed properly. Lots of bare legs. It felt like an eternity sitting around and shivering while waiting for the B’s to finish.

The A race had somewhere around 75 starters. ~12 rows, ~6 people per row was my count. Embrocation and Svelte seemed to have the most presence. With so few people doing any real warmup I was hoping for gentlemen’s start with a few relatively gentle first laps. I lined up in the mid-back but a few early attacks strung it out quickly. Instead of moving up right away I sat in to get my legs moving again.

Each acceleration made my legs feel like lead. It might have been yesterday’s miles, the fact that it’s March, or maybe just that I’ve been away from racing for way too long. Whatever the cause, it was a good feeling and it was good to be back in the peloton.

Today’s approach was much different than my norm. I like to go after primes and open up sprints because it’s what I’m good at and it’s fun. That approach involves a lot of recovering so I can open up big efforts when the time comes. It’s good training if I’m riding for myself but it’s not as helpful to my team. It also won’t do me much good if every race finishes up the road like they tend to in the P12’s. Instead I’m working on my ability to get into and stay in the right moves.

Unfortunately for my race reports, this new approach makes it much harder to remember details about the race. There are very few specifics I can remember about this race. When I didn’t see any apple on any jersey’s near the front I did my best to get up there. Instead of sprinting after primes I rested as much as possible to jump on any counters.

Nothing seemed to be getting away. In fact I don’t think anyone stayed away for more than 2, maybe 3 laps. The few moves that I ended up in dissolved before it was even my turn to pull through. Shapiro was on fire and seemed to be getting in every move.

With 6 or 7 to go I nearly popped myself off the back trying to bridge up to a split in the field. It was happening one wheel in front of me, and I hesitated just a moment too long hoping that the wheel I was on would close it up. By the time I finally reacted the gap was 30 meters or so, just enough to torch my legs. If the peloton weren’t 6 miles long I probably would have been popped out the back.

At 3 to go I was finally recovered but further back in the bunch than I’d been all day. The pace was picking up and it looked like it would be impossible to get a decent finish. By the last lap I was able to move up a decent amount without expanding too much energy, enough to sprint for it anyways, maybe 20 or 30 wheels deep. With half a lap to go I found my way onto a familiar wheel, Scott Glowa. He’s a good sprinter so I figured he’d be my best shot at this point for getting a ride to the finish. I held his wheel through turns 3 and 4, and he opened it up early on an inside lane as soon as we hit the straight. That’s a long way to sprint so I stayed seated and pedaled as hard as possible to hold his wheel. We were overtaking a pretty thick mass with 200m to go when someone jumped into our lane. It got a bit tight but we backed off and that was that. I counted roughly 20 racers or so in front of me on the line, not that it mattered much by that point.

My Powertap shut off while we were waiting to start and I missed the first 2 or 3 laps. I had the average speed at ~26.5mph with my average power at 238W and normalized around 265W. Looking back at past seasons that AP is a bit higher than usual, but the NP is typical for March. This is compared to the B race though, so the duration is for 15 or 20 minutes longer. The AP was probably higher because I was riding to get in breaks and that the average speed was 1 or 2 mph faster. It’ll be good to practice cranking out the killer jewels in the upcoming races.

In case there’s any cyclists out there looking for information about ulcerative colitis and bike racing (I know I was at one point), I’d be happy to talk about my experience. I think it can be a real roller coaster ride and I found it difficult to get answers to the questions I had. Just leave a comment here if you want to get in touch with me.