roadcx.net

Andrea and I are on the way down to Rouge Roubaix now.  Team car is right behind us heading down to the course.  We will not have a huge contingent at the race (1/2/3 race will just be Bryant, Will, and myself), the rest are racing solo (although John will be racing 40+ masters with Andrea’s women’s field).  The start list for this year promises to be at least as hard core as last year when a relentless tempo by Metro VW strung out the field to and through the first gravel.

Last year, I fell off 5 miles or so into the gravel 2-wheel drifting in a corner and losing contact.  Ended up in a chase group and was going well in when I was forced on a bad line in the 2nd gravel and went down.  I recovered and managed to catch back some, but still ended up 24th overall in the A-race (1st cat 3).

This year, the Cat 3 has a separate prize list with a $500 check for the top spot, so I expect it will be a bit harder to repeat.  You might be wondering why I didn’t upgrade based on that, but if you look at the rest of my season, I was a category 3 racer with okay to good results.  I have no qualms about trying to defend my Cat 3 win this year.  I should get the results to put together my upgrade to Cat 2 later this spring, I just don’t have it yet.

I feel pretty good, but I not going as well as I was last year at this time due to work travel (China twice in a month!) and generally bad weather this winter.  That is okay, since the season is still young..  It will just take me pulling out something out of the air to make it happen again at Rouge this year.

Here are is a small album of a few random shots that I took in China last week.  Most are in Shanghai, some on the road to Huai’an, and back in Shanghai at the radio tower in the Bund.  No captions, just sort it out….

I will add more to this gallery once back home, Wordpress is being a bastard in corrupting while uploading.  :@

[Gallery deleted, see next post]

Andrea’s new hat was right in its element at the Log Cabin restaurant in Hurricane Mills.

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I love so much about this email. FedEx is an international company and instead of doing FedEx.ng or whatever, they use throwaway email accounts from Brazil and a reply to address from China. If you pick up the phone you will be racking up the minutes to Nigeria.
I really love how Gmail chooses to let this one slide (2nd in a week) past the normally perfect spam filters.

I really have no idea what of this list I will race other than probably the Memphis one, the GP of CX in Louisville, Hoss of Cross, and probably a bunch of the Nashville series…but here is the list of what is pretty reasonable from Memphis.

• 9/26-27: Beat the Freak #1/#2 (Fayetteville, TN)
• 10/3-4: Cross the Way #1/#2 (Madison, TN)
• 10/11: Have a Hart CX classic (Nashville, TN)
• 10/17-18: Beat the Freak #3/#4 (Fayetteville, TN)
• 10/24-25: Beat the Freak #5/#6 (Fayetteville, TN)
• 10/24-25: Derby City Cup (Louisville, KY)
• 10/31-11/1: Cross the Way #3/#4 (Antioch, TN)
• 11/7-8: Hoss of Cross #1/#2 (McEwan, TN)
• 11/15: Outdoors, Inc MidSouth CX Championship (Memphis, TN)
• 11/21: Cross A Nooga #1/#2 (Chattanooga, TN)
• 12/5-6: Cross the Way #5/#6 (Nashville, TN)
• 12/19-20: Cross A Nooga #3/#4 (Chattanooga, TN)
• 1/2-3: Columbia #1/#2 (Columbia, TN)
• 1/16-17: Columbia #3/#4 (Columbia, TN)
• 1/23-24: Cross the Way #7/#8 (Donelson, TN)
• 1/30-31: TN State Championships (JC, TN)
• 2/20-21: Cross the Way (Madison, TN)

Billy Dee is back… The one from 20 years ago….

This year the Tour de Louisiane started out with the road race in the morning. Last night I wasn’t feeling so great and only could eat part of our late dinner at Acme Oyster House. I ended up eating a PB&J bagel before I turned in and just hoped that I would feel better in the morning. This morning, the sleep helped, but I knew I was not quite 100%… but the road race started at 9am, so there was no time to complain.

Going into the 5 lap, 80 mile road race, I knew I needed to start off conservatively and see if I could get myself right during the race. This was all well and good, but the attacks started almost immediately off the starting line with a small split off of riders. That was pulled back and there was probably another one of those (or two) before a larger group moved off the front… and was never seen again. The break had representatives from several of the teams in the 40 man field so the chase was never really that serious. Fortunately, the amount of attacks were also few given my condition.

By the time we finished, the temperature was approaching 90F, but the humidity was pretty high making it feel worse. At the last minute, I opted for the 4th bottle. It was good because I drank all of it and part of a bottle that Andrea was able to hand-off on the last lap (after her race was done).

In the end, there was 4 or 5 riders that put serious time into the field (5-10 minutes?) and a few more between the leaders and the field. The sprint for 9th (or whatever place) was sort of half-hearted at first, but picked up when Brooks (Mercy) jumped early and got reactions from the front of the pack. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so nimble and had to bridge back up to the back of the group, bringing the field with me… I don’t even want to hazard a guess, but if I had to, I was probably about 15th in that sprint, maybe 25th overall? In any case, we all were “same time”. All of us were many, many minutes out of the race. With only a 3 mile TT and a criterium to go, the top 8 or 9 are pretty much set, the rest of us will battle for the remaining 6 paying spots (15 deep).

After the RR, Andrea and I drove back to Covington and started to track down closed restaurants (bad leads in the Garmin and in Google Maps) in downtown Covington… In the end, we drove back and ate at Silicy’s italian buffet near the hotel (think CiCi’s). By the time we got there, the concept of a buffet worked well, since we were both pretty hungry by then. What remains to be seen is how it will work for our short TT this evening…

This morning, the rain stayed away and for the most part no break stayed away for long. I ended up finishing with the main field with a solo rider off the front by a little bit and a small group of riders just ahead of the main field.

This morning, I found out looking at the results from Friday night that I was one of only 3 category 3 riders to finish with the field in the crit. My placing was a bit worse than I estimated, and at this point I even forgot what they placed me as (I want to say 45th).

This evening will be the key event to dictate my final G.C. placing (assuming I don’t get dropped in the circuit race). The time trial historically, despite being only 4 miles long pretty much sets the G.C. ranking at the end since for most part, most of the riders finish with the same time in the crit, road race, and the circuit race.

He will be missed.

Today was our club’s race (Smith & Nephew / Marx & Bensdorf Gran Prix). As usual, I raced Cat 3, but today was joined by the entire contigent of Cat 3’s for Memphis Velo (Aaron, Bryan, David, Jarrett, and John). The road race had a better turn out that in years past…with about 30 starting the race. During the course of the race, there we a few attacks during the first and part of the second lap, but none stuck. I attacked the corner-hill on the long-course connector and got a good sized gap for a 2 miles or so… a group of 6 caught me, but I had overdone it so I couldn’t hang. I had to drop back to the pack and everyone was collected after a mile or so. The effort put me in the back to rest for a while, so I missed the key break which occurred not too long after.

Initially we didn’t chase very hard (or at all), which in retrospect we should have done that work to pull back the break. Later on the third lap, we did do some pulls on the front, but the damage was done, we were now racing for 5th. About 1/2 mile from the finish we were moving along at pretty good clip jammed across the road 4-5 wide when there was some commotion on the right side of the field…. the chain reaction took out about 8 riders including David and Aaron. Bryan and I managed to get through on the left side and finished up probably 11th & 13th in the road race. I know it was a bit of a shock to both Bryan and I when we saw (and in his case felt) riders go down and our placings reflect this break in concentration.

—

In the afternoon, the CD Smith Rd time trial was held. The forecast rain stayed away, which was good given the narrow two-lane road turn-around that is part of the course. I self-timed an 8:40-8:42 (official time was 8:40) which is somewhat better than the 9:18 that I ran last year. My TT placing was 10th of the 28 cat3’s.

Here are some photos Mark Allen took of me:

[at about 100 feet] [and after 3.7 miles]