Home Course Advantage - 2019 Concord Crit

Well hot damn, that was a good one.

There is so much to say about how this race went, and I'm not sure I'll even hit it all here.


I'll lead off with paraphrasing what I said in an instagram post earlier this week. This season hasn't gone quite how I had hoped it would. With a limited race calendar and lackluster training, paired with planning for life in Northern NY, my head hasn't totally been there in races. Saturday was different. It was my last race day of the 2019 calendar, on my home course, where I got my very first criterium win back in 2016.


I lined up for the Cat 3/4 race in my older Sunapee Racing kit, intending on using this race as a hard warmup for the 1/2/3 race later in the day, and maybe to pad mine and my teammates pockets by going prime hunting. Going in, I didn't really have a plan for how the race should play out. Kramer did, Alec and Sean played along with Kramer, but I didn't. My plan was to play it by ear, knowing that the way I had come in to the race I could either go for primes or podium, but not both.


Well, early on I decided that I wanted to make sure we got some money out of our race. The first prime was early enough that I felt confident that I could go, collect the prime, and have enough time to recover for the finish as long as I didn't get caught up in a breakaway.





Well I got the prime without any contest, but nobody was bringing me back.


I didn't want to be in a breakaway this early, and certainly was not looking to stay away solo for too long this early. I dialed back my effort, putting on a show sitting up to stretch and drink, hoping to bait someone into chasing me down, but the pack was content with letting me dangle. 

Suns out, tongue's out?

So I dialed back my effort, settling in to a comfortable pace, and chilled out until the pack caught up to me two-and-a-half laps later.

 From here, my idea was to just pack-surf near the front until the closing laps and go for a bunch sprint, confident that Kramer and Alec could bring any attacks back. And for the most part, this plan worked. The race was pretty uneventful from then on.







Until right about here.




Derin, the Minuteman rider in the pink socks, launched an attack out of that corner with ~6 laps to go to collect the final prime. Like with me earlier, we were fine with letting him dangle for a couple of laps thinking that even a disorganized 3/4 field winding up for a sprint could bring back a lone rider. 



We were wrong. 




I launched a counter-attack to try and bring Derin back with 3 to go, and was quickly joined by a couple of my northern VT racing buddies Zach and Pat. Pat took a couple of deep pulls with his diesel engine before popping with a lap-and-a-half to go, and Zach and I traded off pulls until he dropped going up the climb to the roundabout on the final lap. By this point, we had put about 8 seconds into the field, and had clawed our way to within two seconds of the leader.





I managed to come over the top of Derin at the height of the course on the final lap, and dug deep to put a gap between us going into the chicane. 


I opened up a sprint going into the final corner just for insurance, and with ~150m to go, I knew that I had it locked. 


Taking home the win at my team's home race, with teammates in the field, on course, and in the announcing booth, in such a decisive fashion, was more than I could've imagined capping off my 2019 season. Hearing from the team at the post-race BBQ, the closing laps were some of the most exciting racing they've seen, and to have the flames atop the podium was icing on the cake. (I also lined up for the 1/2/3 race, but lasted 42 minutes before I realized I didn't want to be lapped a second time)


 As with last year, I am on my way back to Clarkson University, but this time in a *slightly* new role. In July, I was promoted to Interim Head Cross Country and Nordic Ski Coach, and will be taking charge of the teams starting in a couple of weeks when preseason begins!


Surviving the Thunderdome - Exeter Classic 2019

Well that was a time.


If you've been following me since last season, I finally got my Cat 3 upgrade after my final race of the 2018 season at Lewiston, and have been jumping into a handful of races so far this year to get back into racing. I trained my way through a couple of ECCC races in Pennsylvania this April, raced at Scarborough a little bit, and my usual NHMS training races, but my "real" racing has been lacking.

Having placed 8th at the Cat 3 Nutmeg State Games Crit in June and crashing out of contention on the last lap of Longsjo on Sunday, I wasn't sure how lining up for my first P/1/2/3 race at Exeter was gonna go. I had a pre-race plan of maybe going for a couple of primes, but it became clear very early on that there was no way I was going to contest anything tonight.




Exeter is one of those races that most of New England cycling dreams about. It's one of only a handful (2) twilight criteriums left on the circuit, always brings out national-caliber racers, and pays quite well if you are lucky.

It's a very punchy circuit, with fast, tight corners and an uphill sprint at the end preceded by a windy descent littered with manhole covers. All packed into a lap that is less than a mile. Oof.

The race started off, well, pretty much like this:
In the first 45 seconds of the race we were already up over 27 miles per hour down the first straightaway, on what was the slowest lap of the race. I didn't get a great start, but quickly figured out that my place in this field was about 65-70 wheels deep. I found it pretty easy to wheel-surf that far back, and the accordion effect wasn't nearly as bad as I had anticipated. The pack quickly settled into our race pace of 95-100 seconds a lap (28-29 mph) and my new goals were to just not get in the way and to not get dropped.

For the most part, my race was uneventful, hopping from wheel to wheel as riders were dropping off in front of me and clawing myself back up to the ever-shrinking peloton. It was a bizarre feeling being so far back in a bunch, though. I believe that this race was the largest field that I had ever started in, and usually for me, being "in the pack" is somewhere still in the top-25, and being more than 10 seconds behind the leaders usually meant that I was dropped and losing ground.



As mentioned earlier, my plan of trying to contest primes was quickly abandoned, and I let the big
guns handle things at the front.

As the laps ticked by (all 35 of them), I began feeling more and more comfortable taking some of the tighter corners in a group, figuring out braking and acceleration points that worked rather well, and trying to just hold on as well as I could from my position. Then, with 2 to go, this happened:

(Jump to 55:40, Paul Davis video)




That crash splintered the field enough for me to jump from the mid-50's into the low-30's with a lap and a half to go.

Coming into the second-to-last corner, some shenanigans happened in the lead bunch that caused another crash, sending a NE Devo rider over the curb just ahead of me, and from there anyone who wasn't still vying for the win had their fates sealed. The final split happened, and the rest of us had only to cross the line. 

My grupetto crossed the line 12 seconds behind the winner, and I was second to Tate in our "sprint" which was good enough for 23rd out of 92 starters. Afterwards, I felt surprisingly good about that finish. Usually I'm not super pleased with finishing outside of the top-10, but knowing the caliber of the race and how ridiculously hard it was, I'll take a top 25.



All photos from Katie Busick Photography

Clarkson XC does Nationals

What a crazy weekend. Two weeks ago, we had no idea that we would be spending the last weekend before Thanksgiving somewhere other than Clarkson, let alone spending it in Wisconsin at the NCAA DIII National XC Championships. Coming off a career and program best placing at Regionals, Abbie Sullivan qualified for the big show as the top-ranked individual in the Atlantic region, and the top runner from the Liberty League Conference. It was a wild ride there in many ways, with three NCAA Champs rookies making the trip.
Marc Messer photo

After a warm-hearted and chilly-weathered send-off from the team, we faced logistical setback after setback en-route to Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Our airport was about to get hit with a 10” snowstorm as we were supposed to depart, and our first flight was delayed to the point of us being automatically rebooked from our connection to a new flight Friday morning. We scrambled as soon as we could make contact to try and move rental cars around, preparing to make the 2.5-hour drive from Chicago to Oshkosh. As luck would have it, our connection was also delayed just enough for us to sprint through O'Hare terminal 3 and join the boarding line. Except we had already been rebooked. The standby passengers that got bumped from the flight were less than pleased, but hey, we made it. Then that flight spent 45 minutes on the deicing pad, pushing our arrival time back from 10pm to almost midnight. Oh yeah, and we were in a new time zone, so really it was more like 1am. We finally rolled into our hotel at around 12:30, 11 hours after we left Clarkson, and only 4 hours earlier than if we had just driven. *shrug*


We took the next morning to sleep off our travel hangover, rolling down to our hotel breakfast at around 930. From there we planned how are we going to kill the hours before we would be able to officially check in and run the course.

If you’ve ever been to Oshkosh (and you're not from WI), it was probably either for D3XC nationals or the Oshkosh Air Festival. Other than that, there's not a whole lot going on. So we moseyed on over to the EAA museum for a few hours, checking out planes and stuff before the coaches meeting.



Abbie went solo to the course after dropping me and Allott off downtown, and we quickly found our North Country neighbors SLU at the meeting. At least we could follow someone who’d been here before.

Later that night was the NCAA Awards banquet, where we managed to snag a table with other individual runners: one from our hotel (via UC Santa Cruz), and another we found out was sharing a start box with Abbie (via Suffolk). The dinner was good, there were awards, speeches, and lots of denim.


The next morning was a little different race morning than we were all used to. No team, no bus, no team tent, no parents. Just our small travel party, a rental car, our bags, and the short drive to the golf course. And boy was there a crowd for this one.



 I sometimes forget that XC fans are the most physically active fans in any sport.

Marc Messer photo

When the women started, we had no idea what to expect. Abbie had done well at regionals, mixing it up with a top-ranked team. We forgot that now there were 31 other teams that were all similar, plus another 50+ individuals. But it didn't matter, Clarkson was represented at nationals, and it was a great way to cap off the season.
Marc Messer photo

Abbie finished 121/279, ten seconds out of the top-100, twenty from top-75.

Our trip wound down with some nice meals around Oshkosh, and the flights back weren't nearly as eventful as the ones out. At least for us. I hope the Oberlin Women's team made their flights out of O'Hare.

There's so much more about this event that can't feasibly be written down, more than just a "You had to be there" type of story. The people we met, the things we saw, stuff that just can't be given justice written down.

You had to be there, and hopefully next year, I can tell you that again.