The title pretty much says it all, but I will elaborate further...before I get into my take on the tour of the catskills, Rick did a great write-up on the team site with some pics as well. Obviously the headline was that Jason dominated the race winning both major competition jerseys and the final stage!
Last Friday morning, my teammates and I loaded up a couple cars and headed downstate for the Tour of the Catskills, which consisted of an uphill time trial and two hilly 50+ mile road races (and when they say hilly, they meant it). I only raced the first two days so that I could make it back to Rochester for Erica and Joe's wedding, but my races were more than eventful to say the least.
The course for the TT on Friday was flat for about 15 yards, then took a right turn and went straight up hill for the next 2.2 miles. I had a good warmup and was feeling pretty good beforehand, but didn't have my best race. I might have made a mistake in that I tried to race in a bigger gear than I should have, which led to me fading towards the end (or at least it felt like I faded), but who knows. I ended up around 30th in the TT, which wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, but I definitely got to the finish feeling like I went as hard as I could. Jason ended up in 3rd on the day, which wasn't surprising to any of us. Knowing that the overall was going to come down to climbing and knowing that Jason is more than capable of riding very strong on steep climbs, the team did have a little extra motivation to try to do whatever was possible to help him take the overall win.
Following a great team dinner on Friday night (pic above), we went out the the start of Stage 2, which was a 52 mile road race. The course pretty much consisted of about 20 miles of flats and downhills, followed by one long climb followed by some relatively steep rolling hills, and then a flat 10 mile run-in to the finish. As stated previously on this blog, I'm not a huge fan of going down hills, especially in groups of 80 riders going downhill for 4-5 miles at a time (something I have to get over I guess), but at the tail end of the last decent before the climb, was easily the weirdest (and one of the more dangerous) occurrences I've encountered during a bike race. We are bombing down a hill, going maybe 40 mph, when we turn a corner and there are three horses in the middle of the road. All three horses are completely tweaking out (Rick's post at the team site has a video embedded in it of this) as 80 cyclists attempt to stop before plowing in to them. I ended up going in to a section of grass to avoid a couple guys that were having some trouble stopping, but everyone managed to safely stop (I think). We were at a standstill for a couple minutes while everyone just stared at the horses (still freaking out). Eventually the horses got off the road without further incident.
Then, the aforementioned long climb started, which was a really steep wall for about 200 meters followed by about 4.5 miles of a steady grinding climb. To be honest, I was hoping to climb better than I did and hang with the front group, but I was totally red-lined and just simply couldn't accelerate up to that group. I managed to find a pace I could sustain. Following the climb I was in a group of about 6-7 guys, which multiplied to about 20 by the time we got through all the hills, due to riders catching back up on the descent. Then with about 10 miles to go, my chain dropped off. Tangent - I've probably rode a bike a total of 10,000 miles since starting cycling after college and I never once had my chain fall off until 3 weeks ago. During the Tour De France this year, Andy Schleck famously dropped his chain and lost time to Alberto Contador, and I remember thinking, "how does that even happen?". It's never happened to me and I certainly don't have the best mechanics in the world making sure my bike is good to go EVERYDAY. 3 days after that stage in the Tour, by chain fell off while on a training ride, then it happened again during this race, so maybe I jynxed myself and was just lucky all those years, but anyways...tangent over....Not only did my chain fall off, but it got stuck behind my "chain catcher". So, not only did my chain catcher not catch my chain, but it also prevented me from putting the chain back on. Anyways, I eventually had to pull out an allen wrench and adjust it, which apparently also adjusted my front derailer because once I finally started riding again, I couldn't shift into the big ring. I eventually rode a frustrating 10 miles to the finish as hard as I could and ended up re-passing a few guys. Following the race, I scrambled to get back to my car and drive back to Rochester to make the wedding.
All in all, it was a fun time, although I wish things went differently during the races. It was great to hang out with the guys on the team and great to see Jason come up with the win. He really focussed on this race for the last month or so and made it clear that he was the strongest guy in the race. I am already looking forward to next year's Tour of the Catskills and have some ideas on how to train differently.
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