I was feeling bad for missing yesterday's lunch ride due to a stupid meeting, so when my friend Kevin emailed saying he was going to the Great Park crit I decided to join. Figured I should go check it out on a mellow day when the BRCM crew wasn't tearing it apart. I wanted to see what the corners would be like with my amazing cornering ability.
First lap was super mellow -- I can rail those corners at 18mph. Yee-haw! Going into the first turn on the second lap, things sped up dramatically. I took the corner wide to stay away from people and ended up about 20 feet off the back coming out of it -- the pack was going pretty good now and it hurt a bit to catch back on. Then for the next 50 minutes, that was pretty much the story. I'd get a little better in the turns each lap but would still voluntarily give up position to avoid scaring anyone else. I ended up at the front for a while somehow -- it seemed like everybody else slowed and I just kept going all the way up. One thing that helped a lot was that I was sure to always stay on the leeward side of the pack -- the wind blows straight across from the side, and it made a huge difference to stay out of it.
The pack shrunk each lap, but I never felt like I was in trouble. Did a lot of work coming out of the turns, but that was always the plan. On the second to last lap, at the two 90-degree right turns near the end, I nailed the first one and felt great. I was starting to really get the feel for it and was just following the guy in front of me. Going into the second turn, some dude about 5 riders up lost his shit and slid out -- he took out one or two others. I locked the brakes up and slid right beside them, barely missing them. I didn't look at them -- just stomped on the pedals to try to catch the group. The pack was only about 50 feet up the road, but they were doing 26 and I was doing 6 so it quickly became 300 feet. I tried for a few minutes to get back, but no one else was keeping up with me and I couldn't quite make it. After I passed the finish line and he was ringing the bell, I knew I wasn't going to be able to make it. Bummer.
Before the race, he said that if you got dropped it was cool to cut the course and join up with your group again, just not any other groups. So I decided to cut across the middle and tag on the back of the pack -- I wasn't going to sprint anyway, but doing a lap solo wasn't going to help me learn to corner any better. So I rode across and just went steady on my own, waiting for the pack. Some dude from the group came up on me and asked me to give him a pull. He said he was on a solo break. I figured that I wasn't really supposed to work with him since I was off the back, but I figured fuck it -- any chance to stick one to the sprinters... I gave a good pull for a few minutes into those two 90-degree turns, and then he was off. The pack finally caught me right near the finish so I got a good view of the final sprint.
All in all, a fun ride. Bummed I couldn't finish with the group, but I'm happy that I didn't cause the crash and didn't get caught up in it. The guy was covering up some road rash at the finish, so he seemed all right. Looking forward to heading back there when we have more riders.
Here’s me on the last lap, trying to catch them. I need to work on my pain face…
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