Post in which I do the opposite of sandbagging...

...And ride with people clearly faster than me.

I went for a ride this evening with some of the Cat3's from Cambridge, Cary and RMM. The plan was to ride out to Blue Hills and climb the observatory access road. I wont bore you with the details since the ride was pretty uneventful, except for a very Karmic-ly timed flat for Cary, just after he started giving me some sass about riding Tubulars.

But the Hill is a killer. Its nice and long and well wooded, with no car traffic since its a closed service road. If you picture 6 minutes of idyllic climbing then your pretty close, except take out the Idyllic parts because unless your watching it on Versus, in slow motion, Climbing never feels elegant or graceful. There are a couple sections where I was definately maxing out my cassette and still Cary and RMM were gradually getting away.

In fact the only times I beat anyone up the hill are when Mike missed his clip in at the bottom and I got a few seconds lead as we started up.

The point of this post is that getting my butt kicked by a long hill and two cat 3's I think i figured out how to climb. By which i mean, I figured out how I climb. In the lead up to battenkill there are a lot of opinions about tire choice, tubular vs clincher, and gearing. And I decided today that a lot of that is like watching pre-game for the superbowl. People just need to fill time before the big show starts and its easy in biking to over think and over share your overthinking with others when it comes down to gear.

What I figured out today is I need to spin to be able to climb fast. Ive sort of known this from cross, I consistently undergear myself compared to the other cambridge guys. And I placed well at Freddy v Jason with absurdly light 34x14 single speed gearing. Today on the climbing I actually felt best on the last few climbs because i started spinning on the less steep sections, keeping cadence up enough that I could stay in the saddle made a big difference in how fast i got up the hill. On the steep sections when i ran out of bigger cogs i just dont have the power to spend. So im very excited about the 11x28 cassette that came in the mail last week.

So thats what works for me, but im 130 lbs with only 3 months of serious training going for me. So dont take my advice on anything unless you are a secret twin or something.

Maybe there is hope for me as a climber yet?

People keep making themselves my enemies!

I guess I've been lucky in the years ive been racing bikes that I have never actually been involved in a crash while racing. There have been a couple times when people have crashed around me, but ive been able to avoid these "entanglements" myself.

So it was a shock on sunday, at the first race of the year that I found myself out of the race and unable to support the team because of a crash at Marblehead. And a silly crash at that.

I think we all accept a bit of risk when we race, and there were certainly several chances to take yourself out this weekend. A car on the course that could not be cleared before the start, the famous "Marblehead Hairpin", and the rookies who are always part of mixed 4/5 fields. But I was crashed out because of someone being dumb.

CCB fields a number of Juniors and most of them are fast kids. I found myself behind one of them several times in the first half of the race and noticed that his bike was squeaky and he was not a smooth rider. A squeky bike on race day means one of 2 things, either you dont know better and dont care, or you ride too much to keep things clean. If you are on your bike 7 days a week ill forgive a dirty bike that makes some noise, but once i started seeing some of the hard cuts into the field the kid was making I was pretty sure that he was the former and that he was best avoided.

With 4 laps to go we had our first crash of the race when someone finally got sloppy near the car on the course and bounced off it, I found out later this took Gregor out of contention. At the end of the back half of the course my favorite squeaky cervelo found himself in front of me when he decided to cut in on a wheel and cause our second crash of the race. It was a typical crash. Front wheel versus rear wheel, the kid lost his front end and went down at decent speed, turning his bike sideways. A racer who had been moving up to pass us both got caught as he went down and blocked the only room I had to avoid. Being the type of person who keeps things in pretty good and functional shape, if not always perfectly clean, all my bussiness worked well and I got things stopped a couple inches from running the culprit over. But of course people behind me were less aware of what had hapened and ran into me, knocking into the crash. By the time I got up the field was a good bit ahead, but still visible. Pretty quickly i determined that everything was working, but that my shifting had bit of a delay in it, but it was minor. I chashed up, trying to catch the field as they slowed for the hairpin, but soloing into the headwind took too much and I was still by myself as I made the turn. After a hard lap of chasing I started finding wheels from others who had been involved in one of the crashes, and among them Gregor. We rode it in together, finishing the race and beating the dreaded "DNF" that would have otherwise appeared on our "road-results.com" file.

So this kid is now on the list of wheels to avoid, and hopefully give me reason to bark at the next time im in a race with him. Im not injured but I have a sore stiff knee, a bike that needs adjustment, and a carbon tubular that needs to be stripped and trued. I keep thinking of a quote from the book version of "Silence of the lambs" about how Hannibal Lector preffered to "eat the rude", and now i can relate. The only moral I can take from this is Im glad ive been riding the EDGE wheels for the last week and had a pretty good feel for how the respond to heavy braking. If I had just thrown them on for race day im pretty sure I would ran over the kid rather than just falling on top of him.

I also keep thinking of a project that a former roomate kept trying to get going each year, early in the road season. Its a website called ICANTRIDEINAPACK.COM and I think we have our first candidate.