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Latest news
29 February 2004
Report by: Barry Campbell
It was a cold, grey day, threatening rain all morning, but broken by brief glimpses of sun,
which really did nothing but complicate the choice of sunglass lenses. Ben in particular was
worried, and waited until the last moment to choose the darker ones. We had five riders in
the Cat 4/5 race: myself, Ben, Nick, J, and Brendan. Shawn was planning to ride in the Cat
3 race. The team jerseys showed up as promised, just before the race, and, upon inspection,
were completely wrong. We had little choice at this point, so we wore them anyway. As long
as you didn’t know any better, and didn’t look too close, they were fine. Besides, it gave
us something we didn’t really care about to absorb the damage from any early season crashing
we were going to do.
After a bit of chaos, we all managed to warm up at least a little, then realized we needed
to shag it over to the start line. We left Tim, Derik and Nicole to clean up the mess, and
ran for it. We missed most of the rules discussion, mostly because nobody would shut up long
enough to listen. The race started off pretty much on time, and the pace was promptly driven
up, probably by the Cat 4s at the front. After the first mile, Ben looked down and
commented, “Why are we going 32 miles an hour?” The pace never really slowed much after that,
other than up some of the hills. This being all of our first experience with road racing, we
discovered the accordion phenomenon of nervous Cat 5 riders. It rapidly became apparent that
it really wasn’t worth sprinting out of the corners to catch the pack again, unless you had a
lane to move up, since they’d be slowing down for no reason soon enough that you’d catch them
anyway. Annoying, to say the least.
Brendan spent most of his time in the front third of the pack, which is obviously where all
of us should have been. Nick, J, Ben and I drifted around some, and waited for the formation
to break up a little so we could move up, but it never really happened. Toward the end of
the second lap, I had no idea where anyone but Brendan was, and didn’t really want to look
around for them. As we came up the hill toward the finish straight, I got dropped off the
peloton, and crossed the start/finish about 150 yards back. I sucked it up and caught them
after about a mile, but was too wasted to stay in. I got dropped twice more, caught them
twice more, then finally got dropped for good about two miles from the end. I shut it down
when I thought I was actually going to throw up and spun back to the finish. I ended up a
minute or two behind the pack, which wasn’t too bad. J ambled to the finish, looking and
sounding like he could have gone much faster, a few minutes after me. Nick blew up on the
way back around the second lap, and eased in a few minutes later. Ben had shifter trouble
and abandoned somewhere in the second lap. So four finishers out of five starters, not bad
for the debut of the bunny team. The Cat 3s fared slightly worse, as Shawn was under the
weather and decided not to start.
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