Tour of America's Dairyland

Whew, that was such a long race, it's taken me two weeks just to recover to the point where I can blog about it. Following Nature Valley and three days on the farm in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, the ToAD kicked off with an 80-mile road race based out of Blue Mound State Park just west of Madison. The course was a rolling 20-mile loop with some steep, hard kickers (15% or so), one 2-mile climb, and also a few flat crosswind sections. The race started fast and I went in a few moves since we had decided we needed someone in the early break. After a few attacks, it was pretty clear that EVERYBODY wanted to be in the early move and nothing was going to stick for a while. Because of the speed of the race, it was also really hard to be off the front, so it seemed better to sit back for a while and wait for the right time to attack. It also looked like it was going to turn into a race of attrition, because of how many little climbs there were and how hard the course was in general.

The first time over the climb was pretty hard, but I just rode as conservatively as possible right at the front of the group. A small group was off the front but there gap was never very big until the second lap when they started rolling away a bit. The second time up the big climb the pack was splitting up a bit and I made it into the first little group with Tilford and a couple other guys, and just missed the Frank Pipp train as it was leaving the station for the break - he ended up getting across, but the group I was in lost our impetus and got caught by the "pack" again, which at this point was down to about 30 dudes. There were some more little attacks but nothing seemed like a big deal until this other small group rolled off the front. At first I thought it would come back but it had most of the teams that weren't already up the road and alarms started going off in my head when I realized that was probably the move. On the next kicker I attacked - they let me go and I started going across the gap.

I didn't think I was going to make it at first, but luckily they weren't going very hard up the road and I got across the gap pretty quickly. Going up the next kicker we were only 30 seconds or so behind the lead break on the road, but they started motoring and while we were working pretty hard, they started taking out time on us. Over the next flat section a few guys came across from behind, including my teammate Nick so we had two guys in the group, which was good. Over the climb the third time, our group split in half and both Nick and I made the front group with five other guys including Tilford. Nobody was really riding that hard, though, so I just conserved and tried not to ride harder than anyone else. By this time the lead break had put a good amount of time into us and it didn't look like we were going to get back on terms.

Our group stayed together until the flat crosswind section leading into the climb, when Tilford attacked and Nick went with him. I sat on, and while the group was rotating through no one was super motivated to chase while I was sitting on, so those guys rolled away. Going up the climb the last time I started in second or third position and waited for the attacks. Nobody was really attacking but we were started dropping some guys. I was feeling pretty good, so I decided to push the pace a bit and after a while the only guy with me was a Trek-Livestrong kid. I went hard for a couple of minutes and as we got to the flat section and pulled off to let him through. He didn't come through and it looked like he was hurting, so when we hit the finishing climb, I just drilled it from the bottom. After a couple hundred meters I dropped him and I was hurting pretty bad but I figured I had to keep drilling it to make sure he wasn't going to get back on. I guess he cramped up or something, though, because he kinda started screaming, which was pretty awesome.

Anyway I held on for 8th and up the road Nick got 6th, which was a great way to start the series. next up we had:

Fri: Waterloo Crit
Sat: Grafton Crit
Sun: Manitowoc Crit
Mon: Rest Day
Tue: Fond du Lac Road Race
Wed: Fond du Lac Crit
Thurs: Sheboygan Crit
Fri: Greenbush RR
Sat: Downer Avenue Crit
Sun: Waukesha Crit

Relentless! All the crits were 90 min, which is a lot longer than what we're used to in the Northwest, but I actually prefer a little longer crit. It favors a little stronger rider, because it's pretty easy to fake your way through an hour crit, but you actually have to be pretty fit to ride strongly at the end of a 90-minute crit.

It was kind all downhill after the first road race - I ended up placing in the 20's a lot in all the crits, which was really frustrating because I was often right outside the points. Despite the speedweek crit ninja training, I am definitely not a crit ninja just yet. I'm not really sure what I need to do but just like at Nature Valley it's clear I need to be a little more fearless in my bike driving. In the other road races, I had pretty good rides, but couldn't quite throw down when the race exploded at Fond du Lac, and then at Greenbush was a little too conservative in waiting for an explosion that didn't come (because the GC guys were marking each other). At Greenbush, Sam was up the road in a break all day, which was awesome, but none of us were really able to capitalize on it and we should have been more aggressive earlier in the race instead of waiting for the end.

All in all it was a great trip and definitely worth it to do some faster, harder racing. It might have gone on a little long as 10 races in 11 days definitely takes a toll on the body, but with the crits being "only" 90 minutes, it wasn't as crushing as, say, Mt. Hood and Cascade the first years that I did those races. Hopefully doing all that racing consecutively will pay dividends for the other stage races coming up.

After the ToAD, I took a week completely off and am currently in the middle of a block of TT bike work. Our next big objective is Cascade, and with a longer time trial I figured it was time to get re-acquainted with my TT bike. So at the end of last week I went out to the track to do some field testing of my positiong, then I raced a 40k in Oregon last Saturday, and tomorrow I race the WA State TT Champs (another 40k) out in Ellensburg. Up first, however, is the Redmond Derby Days Crit tonight, where I am going to practice my "race blinders" in attempt to actually make myself useful at the end of a crit instead of attacking myself sideways in the first 20 minutes.