A missed opportunity

Saturday, 25 August, was the MN state road race championship. While not a course that I would be projected to do particularly well on (I'm more into the long, hard climbs, not the little rollers), I was nonetheless hoping to build upon my 10th place finish at Square Lake and finish top-10 again. As I expected, the course was not particularly selective. There were a couple of hills that were tough, but mostly those were "sprint hills", i.e. the kind of hill that you can sprint up since it's not that steep or long, and when you get to the top you generally have good recovery. The first 2 laps were pretty quiet. I spent a lot of time at the front (not always on the front, but sometimes) generally out of trouble and out of the mild wind. I did chase down an attempted break, so that was fun. Birchwood had 8 guys in the field. We were by far the largest group, but bad planning, communication (pre- and during the race) and our inability to get everyone to the front prevented us from controlling the race. As it turned out, after the 2nd lap 1/2 of our guys dropped out so we only had 4 and one of those had dropped a chain and was cramping, so he wasn't any help. Still, going into the feed zone, which presented the only significant hill on the course, we had 3 in the group of 25 or so out of 41 who were still together. We did, apparently, drop some guys off of the back of the field, but going from 41 to 25 isn't much of a selection. All was well for me going up the hill, in fact I was somewhat soft-pedaling it, when I felt a thud on me left. I managed to stay upright, but it felt like I dropped an anchor. Apparently the guy on my left had started to go over, hit my rear brake with his hand and knocked the pad out of position. That caused me to feel like, well, my brake was being clamped on. So I had to get off of the bike, check to make sure everything was OK, fix the brake, and then get back on to chase. I lost about 30-40 seconds. Up the hill in the feed zone, at the bottom of which was a hard left turn, so I wouldn't even have the downhill to gain any ground back. Needless to say I chased, chased and chased until I was about 15 seconds back, but I was starting to lose it and eventually cracked after about 5 miles of chasing. I thought that I was going to be riding the last 10 miles home by myself, but I managed to catch up to 2 other guys who got dropped and rode with them, actually "sprinting" around them at the end to roll into 26th. What a crappy finish, when I should have been much farther up there.

The guy who hit me? He actually didn't go over, but managed to put a foot down and stay upright. He stayed with the pack until the finish and rolled in for 6th. After the race he found me and came up to me with his finger all bloody and asked if he could have his finger back. Ha ha. Can I have my fucking race back? If I had dropped because I was weak, OK, so be it, I can deal with that. But losing out because of a mechanical caused by someone else just doesn't sit well with me. In any case, I stayed upright and wasn't hurt at all in the race, so there's that.

Road racing season is now done in the Northland, so it's time to relax and recover for a bit until I convince myself to do cross.

Oh wait - what about the bike? Is it OK from the crash? More on that to come...