Attleboro Criterium, cat3/4

Attleboro is a great race to follow up Longsjo with. The course isn’t very difficult but its unique 1km layout keeps things interesting. I can hop in the race after a week off the bike and have a good time. It’s also close to Boston so I don’t need to dedicate the whole weekend to it. Win!

Ken and I drove down together in plenty of time for the 3 race. He was racing the 4 race which was scheduled for immediately after the 3’s. The p123’s were racing when we got there and it was scorching hot. Humidity was the real killer. Big Jim had a heat stroke and was taken away on a stretcher.

Shortly before we went off the sky turned black and we had thunder and lightning and a whole lot of rain. Our 3 race was combined with the 4’s. Sweet! I went from having no teammates to an out of uniform ally.

Being a combined field I thought there was a good chance that some sort of split or break could sneak away pretty early on. There were 26x 3’s, and 40x 4’s. As usual a lot of people lined up earlier than I wanted so I ended up on the back row. I wanted to be at the front for the first few laps. Sprinter Della Casa has a sweet ninja move where you line up 10 or 20 feet off the back, then watch for people to clip in quickly and move up with them. Boy that worked well. The inside lane moved up like a rocket so I followed it and was in ~20^th by turn 2.

Glowa (Svelte) seemed possessed to make a break work from the gun. It was tiring just watching him go. He hung out there about 5 or 10 seconds up the road for much of the first half of the race. I think he might have traded break mates a few times but it stayed under control. Threshold was keeping the pace relatively steady and Green Line was driving it for the primes.

We cornered very timidly for the first 10 laps or so. The pavement was soaked and there were plenty of cracks and potholes to make for a rough transition around the corners. Our cornering speed picked up as we started getting more confident and then the crashing started. I cannot even believe how many crashes there were, especially on turn 2. People weren’t hitting each other or anything, just losing traction mid-turn and going down. I got to see several of these crashes up close and couldn’t tell for the life of me what was causing them. Braking mid turn? Bad tires? Cracks in the pavement? There was an annoyingly high amount of dive bombing going on but I don’t think that was the cause.

Whatever the cause, I started racing like a girly man. I’m still hurting from my 2 crashes at Longsjo and really didn’t want to crash again. I was cornering like a moron and before long I was tailgunning. 20 feet off the back seemed like the best place to be. I thought it was OK for a little while because Threshold seemed content to let the break dangle just up the road.

Sometime shortly after the mid-way prime everything came back together. Then a group of 5 including GLV, Threshold, Fortini, and 2 others got a gap. It wasn’t huge, but I freaked. With 40 racers left in the field, GLV and Threshold must’ve accounted for 10 of them. Also, the race was being scored as separate 3 and 4 races which made for an unusual racing dynamic. It was unclear if this break contained any cat4’s, but if it didn’t, what incentive did the 4’s have to chase? There would be no one left to chase it down.

Glowa was still in the field and I was relieved at first when I realized that. He was dominant in the first half of the race and would probably make for good help in the chase. But he attacked in a bridge attempt (which caused a lot of panic) and hit the deck on some of the turn 2 wet pavement. Darn.

I went to the front to see if I could pull things back some and maybe encourage some chasing. I didn’t think I could bridge it. At first I could see the break going into turn 2 as we came up the little riser. Despite some tiring efforts, the gap didn’t seem to budge. The break must’ve been flying.

I think the wet corners may have slowed the chase a little. It was at least a thousand times nicer cornering in the front and not having to worry about braking or dive bombing or any of that foolishness. The trouble was that we would try and keep the pace up through the corners but gaps would open and we would slow down. No good.

Near the end of the race I lost all sense of time. I got into a rhythm of pull, recover, pull , recover and stopped paying attention to lap cards. After pulling off the front one lap I was gasping for air when I heard it announced that we had 3 to go. Because I’m really good at math I thought gee, it’s like 1km per lap, which means we have like 3 or 4 minutes left! I gotta recover!

So I sit in for a lap and lose all sorts of positions. Only like half the starters were still with us and with 2 to go I was on the very back. Geez. I was able to move up to mid way in the group on the little riser but I was hurting.

The bell rings and we’re at 1 to go. I’m half way back on the inside lane looking for an opportunity to move up again on the riser. Ken (Comp Racing) attacks, and everyone responds because it’s the last lap. The pace is too fast and I can’t go anywhere.

We were fortunate that the pavement dried up a lot in the last couple of laps. We went around the corners at good speed with minimal braking for a change. I think Ken may have gotten a gap coming out of turn 2 because I didn’t notice anyone off the front on turn 1. He corners well.

I thought about trying to advance coming down the hill but we were strung out and I was way too far back to get even into the top 10. I also didn’t want to risk dive bombing turn 3 at speeds approaching 40. I saw Ken come around the corner first with a good 30m gap.

Turns out we hit the turn too fast as it was and there was more crashing including the guy directly in front of me. I forget if he washed out or bumped someone else because all the crashes have blurred together for me. I just remember having to turn very tight and that my front tire was about an inch from his head. Yikes.

That crash basically split the bunch in two and I sprinted against some other guy, just off the back of the lead group of ~10. Ken held on to his flyer move to take 5^th overall and 2^nd for the cat4s. Apparently someone in the break crashed out during a last lap attack so only 4 people finished up the road, one of which was a 4. I finished 10/26 for the 3’s.