Going out with a bang: Concord and L-A Criteriums

After a season of ups and downs, my time going around in circles is coming to a close as I prepare to enter grad school in the coming weeks.

Last weekend, I capped my season early by racing my 'hometown' Concord Criterium, as well as the nearby Lewiston-Auburn Rotary Criterium. This is another tale of poor to mediocre preparation culminating in surprising results, so lets settle in.

A couple of weeks after Shoe City, I was given some pre-requisite classwork to complete prior to entering my graduate program, a two-year MBA at Clarkson University. The catch: I had until August 3rd to complete five classes worth of assignments, for which most of the syllabi said should take two weeks to complete if I put 3 hours a day into each class. By the time I received this work, I had 15 days to complete all of it. Needless to say, the saddle time took a back seat.

In the four weeks between Shoe City and Concord, I managed to squeeze in nine rides, not typically enough to sustain top performance. Adding to that minimal sleep thanks to trying to crank out school work, I was just killing it at this 'long term race prep' thing.

Rolling in to Concord, I had dropped out of the NHMS training race that Thursday because I felt like I was falling asleep during the race, so wasn't too sure about what was going to happen after a wet morning of volunteering pre-race.

My afternoon 3/4 field wasn't terribly stacked, a few strong riders but things played out mostly as expected. We got off to a good start, Staying together for the first handful of laps until Owen Wright took a flyer off the front and stayed away for a good chunk of the race. A few half-attempts to bring him back were quickly stopped by his teammates, until suddenly he was off the course looking for a helmet.


As it turns out, our breakaway guy had some helmet strap malfunctions and was DQ'd for not having a proper helmet (or something along those lines). Amateur/Pro-tip: If that ever happens to you in a race, yell to someone you know to find you a new helmet, go to the pit, get your new lid and a free lap before the officials yell at you.

Onwards with the rest of the race.

I managed to collect a couple of primes (two of the nearly twenty prizes up for grabs for our field!?), but started to feel it around the midpoint of the race, and started drifting towards the middle of the pack. Kramer saw that I was having a hard time focusing, and kept yelling to me when I drifted too far back or was making stupid moves.

I got the message, and got myself into the top-5 with a few laps to go, and then the rain hit.

Still a little wary of riding in a bunch post-crash, I eased back a little bit so that I could keep things upright for racing the following day. It seemed the rest of the field aside for Tate Kokubo had the same idea, so with roughly two laps to go, he went. And nobody chased.

Tate stayed away for the solo win, and I rolled across in 13th, wet and still looking for points.

The next morning in Lewiston, everything I owned was still wet: shoes, helmet, saddle, gloves. Luckily I had thrown the skinsuit in the wash/dry when I finally got home from Concord. The course was short, only 1k with a punchy climb right before the finish line.

It was a decent sized field for a 4/5 race in northern central Maine, a little over 30 racers, with a handful of power hitters like Donnie Seib, Tate, Mark Carpenter, and Adam York (basically the usual cast of characters from the front of any Cat 4 crit field this year).

We started the race pretty smoothly, trying to gauge the field a little bit, but quickly ramped up the speed to try and crack riders off the back. It worked, sorta.

With this race being run as a more low-key, local crit, the officials weren't too eager to pull dropped or lapped riders. Once we had created our selection, we still had to fight our way through traffic for a majority of the race.

Speaking of the selection: we ended up with a pack of ten riders, and we hammered this race. Mark and I went after every prime, and took home a few gift cards each. But other than when we were trying to kill each other for Dunkins, this may have been the smoothest Cat 4 (3.5) 'breakaway' I've been in. It's almost as if we all should've been in a higher category...

The laps quickly ticked down, and aside from the occasional car driving on course or guy-on-motorized-mountain-bike-riding-backwards-through-an-apex, things were pretty uneventful. We wound up for the sprint going up the final hill, but Mark and Cole Williams got a good, early jump that I couldn't cover in time, and rolled in among the lapped riders for third, just off of Cole's wheel.

With that result, I finally managed to get my Cat 3 upgrade, just in time to call it a season. After that race, I went home and started packing my things for grad school.

All photos from Concord by Connor Koehler, L-A courtesy.

Critting around - Greenfieldx2

As Crit Week descended upon New England, many a racer put aside their regularly scheduled life to commit the better part of the last nine days to race around the northeast (read: Massachusetts and briefly New Hampshire).

I, on the other hand, work in the tourism industry and was unable to afford the luxury of melting this weekend at Longsjo, but I did get soaked at Gran Prix Beverly and the Greenfield Criterium earlier in the week instead.



My Crit Half-Week started last Sunday at 3:30am, when my wake-up call for Greenfield came.

After my three hour drive, during which I saw seven deer, five raccoons, a dead possum, and a couple of squirrels, I arrived at the race. Two-and-a-half hours early. Ski racing for years put me into the mindset that you have to (plan to) show up multiple hours before your start for race prep, ski and wax testing, and a proper warmup. In cycling, that just equals a lot of standing and sitting around.

Eventually, it was time for my first race of the day. Oh yes, I was doubling up races today. First up was the Cat 3/4, which proved to be quite the stem-chewer. Granted, I was the cause of that chewing, but I digress.

The race started off, well, fast. After only a couple of laps, I found myself off the front with a rider from NCC. We were pushing the pace, but working together really well to try and stay away, arguably better than I've worked with my own training partners sometimes. For nearly thirty laps we yo-yoed off the front, collecting primes along the way while eluding the field. At our peak we had just over ten seconds on the field over the 1/2 mile course.


But alas, all things must come to an end, and with ~5 laps to go, we were reeled in for good. We knew it was coming, and with a rolling handshake, we were absorbed by the peloton. At this point, it was every man for themselves.

Coming into one to go, the bunch was running fast, and it got the better of someone who had a mechanical going through turn-2 on the last lap, backing up everyone behind them. I was one of those unlucky few, and had to lock up my brakes and start from a near-standstill with a quarter mile left to race.

That little mishap wasn't the greatest for my sprint position, but I managed to recover enough spots going through turns three and four to be able to sprint for eighth place.

Now the waiting happens. I had a little over two hours between the end of my 3/4 race and the start of the 4/5 race, and no idea what to do. Sit and wait? Eat lunch? Ride around? A little of each? Well time got away from me and number four was the answer. I had a quick couple of bites of my bacon and peanut-butter bagel, shook out the legs for a couple of laps before the start, and took my place in the field.
This time we tried to take things a little slower to start, with Donnie Seib and I trading off singing bars of "I'll Make a Man Out of You" for the first couple of laps. But soon enough, the pack got tired of our singing, and found that the only way to shut us up was to pick up the pace.



This race, rather than trying to go off the front to safety, I tried my best to stick in the front of the pack and work off of others instead of drilling it myself, and for the most part, my plan worked. I sat in the top-ten for most of the race, trading pulls and throwing myself out to pull back wannabe breakaways.


In time, I decided I wanted some swag, so my race plan turned to prime hunting. The organizers put a ton of merch on the line for each prime, and with each field having (at least) four primes, some fun was to be had. Gift cards, $80 pens, waffles, socks, mugs, I managed to win 5/8 primes between my two races, and three in the 4/5 race.

By doing so, though, I did not put myself in a good place to contest any sort of final sprint. I had been attacking for primes all race, and going into two-to-go I was still sitting towards the front of the pack as everyone was winding up behind me. Long story short, I got swamped from behind and had to settle sprinting for eighth. Again.

And that was day 1.

One last shot - Senior Seasons Ahead

Well, here it is. Three years after I first moved into my double in Ryan Hall, I am slowly settling into the townhouse life on the other end of campus. It's been an interesting three years, ever learning how to be both a student and an athlete at the same time, and a large part of that learning happens when there is no school.


Summer break is the time when many students go off and work so that they can afford to come back to school, others do summer research, while some try to think nothing of the coming school year until it's time to start. As an athlete, I was thrown into all three camps: working at a camp to make enough money to get by for a few months of unemployment while I train and compete this fall and winter, research myself to find out how to not overwork myself both mentally and physically, all while trying to not think about the fact that these will be my last seasons as a college athlete.


A large portion of my time this year has been spent sitting on a bike. There's just something about it that makes me feel more free than my ski or running training. From central NH, it's hard to run or ski somewhere that leaves you with both a great workout and a feeling of having taken an adventure. On the bike, I have been able to test my limits and see how fast, far, and how long I can go for, taking me on some pretty cool adventures.


It is on these where I am able to really absorb what is going on in life. Decisions that need some time, I have found, are best made on the bike. Thinking about what is going to happen this year was a big one, like determining what my senior project is going to look like, how to best avoid my injuries (didn't work, already injured), and how to try and lead both the Men's Cross Country and Nordic teams this year. 

Whatever the case, the work has been put in, most of the decisions have been made, and all I can do is keep up and hope for the best over the next few months.