The Hill...

Today was this crit in the little Italy portion of St. Louis. It was a real cool part of town with tons of little mom and pop Italian restaurants and a neighborhood full of houses flying the Italian flag wherever it could be hung. The course itself was 4 corners again with the start and finish being on a downhill, of course this meant the backside of the course was a hill. A bit steeper than the downhill on the start / finish stretch. I don't think the pack ever really went slow or even moderately hard up that climb, or any other part of the course for that matter. I would guess that we had an average speed of somewhere around 30mph for that race. It was just fast, and people were still attacking off the front and getting some good breaks up the road. There was one break that seemed to be sticking at about the halfway point in the race and we had no one in it. After we hit about 3/4's into the race and those guys were still up the road and out of sight. I saw another guy go up the road, who is supposedly a super strong rider in the midwest, to try to bridge across. The announcer gave the guy away as he announced his name and at that point I decided it was time for me to do a little work. I went to the front and pulled for a lap, eventually pulling back this guy trying to bridge up and bringing down the gap to under 20 seconds on the break. Normally I would say good job and drop back into the pack and recover... not so much this time, the pace was already so high that before even riding on the front I was riding several beats under my lactate threshold... So, when I went on the front and brought my heart rate up to the anaerobic threshold, I couldn't really get it back down "just recovering in the pack"... It was pretty much lined out single file for most if not all the race, so recovering from that effort took twice the time. Then I had to get myself back up to the front, that in itself turned out to be a huge setback... Trying to move up a line of 140 riders when it is strung out single file at over 30mph takes a long time... I mean LONG time... I finally made it back up to the front by two laps to go, but had used up so many matches doing so that I couldn't really be much help. Todd went in one final attempt at a breakaway that got caught on the last lap, and I was sitting behind Alex getting ready to launch him to the front. The final time up the climb, I got swarmed, lost Alex and didn't really have the horsepower to get back up to him. That was the end of that... Alex probably ended up in the top 30 while I was about 10 or so back... Today didn't go as well as yesterday. Considering how tough the race was, we all did the best we could with the legs we had... I think tomorrow we will put a little more emphasis on staying towards the front but out of the wind...