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Saturday, March 21st was the first of 3 practice crits put on by the Great Dane Velo Club. It was my first USCF race of the year, and my first race as a cat 3. It was a cold morning with a strong northwest wind. We started at about 11:00. My teammates in the race were Ben Miller, Ben Neff, and Jeff McFarland. My job in the race was to follow Nate Troia, who is in a hurry to upgrade to cat 2 and would be looking for easy points from these early races, whenever he tried to do anything. Nate's a fast rider, though, and this turns out to be harder than it sounds. A few people went off the front in the first few laps and if Nate chased, so did I. I got into trouble doing this, though.
At some point a bunch of people went off the front. I was still recovering from a previous chase, but Nate took off, so I tried to follow. Jeff had already gotten up ahead, so perhaps I shouldn't have, but I tried and didn't make it. I was in one of those situations where you're ahead of the pack and behind the break and working hard and you don't know wether to keep trying or drop back. I have a tendency to keep pullig 'till I'm almost caught. I ended up back in the pack, though, and recovered enough to try and catch the break again. Why was I trying to catch the break if Jeff was in it? Because Jeff had said he was feeling lousy that day and had been sick, and the break was rather large, I figured he wouldn't be gunning for a top spot, so we'd do better if the gap were closed - oops, Jeff ended up with 2nd despite my efforts. I took off partway up the windy stretch and only succeded in getting some other people up to the lead group and burning myself out. When I fell back into the pack someone else must have made an attempt, because I was pretty much left in the dust.
I was off the back with a group that ended up being four riders. We tried for a few laps to chase. I decided we were going too slow and took off from the other three riders and chased by myself for several laps. I was riding very hard and mostly keeping up with the pack's speed, but not gaining at all. I eventually got caught by those three guys again. We rode around in a rather disorganized way. Three of us took turns pulling, but this sleaze from the Trek team did absoloutely no work the whole time. On the last lap I was thinking "ok, I've been pulling these loosers around for 20 minutes, there's no way they're going to finish ahead of me". I tried to pull away at the start of the last lap but they stuck to my wheel. I stayed ahead all the way up the finishing stretch and sterted sprinting ~100 yards from the finish. I did a really good sprint, but one of the guys and the trek sleaze pulled past me. Oh well.
The strange thing is that I don't feel bad about my performance. Having done all those laps by myself and doing all that pulling I felt pretty strong, especially for that sprint. I don't feel very bad about getting dropped either, just a little dumb. I haven't felt very competitive yet this season. Maybe I'm using up all my stress on school and don't have any left for biking. I also set a new averave HR record for myself: 191 BPM, and (according to my HRM) got above 220 BPM for 20 seconds. My calves were doing some serious cramping towards the end of the race and afterwards they were tremendously stiff and sore.