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

On the other side of the V-Boards

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone a winter without suiting up to compete almost every week. As far back as I can remember, winter weekends have always been spent either running gates, chasing jumping meets, or generally cruising around the northeast race circuits. This winter was no different, except for this time I wasn’t the one doing the racing.

My first winter of full-time coaching was a big learning experience. Jumping from the EISA to the USCSA level opened my eyes to what the other side of collegiate racing is like: wide ranges of attitudes and abilities, teams ranging from the lone Marlboro and WPI skiers to UVM and Clarkson rolling up with 20+ athletes every weekend, and a much more laid-back race organization that values effort over results and ritual.

That last bit is what took the most getting used to. Having raced EISA and USSA, we always took it as SOP to have fully marked courses, a maze of fencing and V-Boards in the stadium, and race officials around every corner. At this level, teams run their own races, each one with their own standards (though technically under the same rules as USSA and FIS). It wasn’t uncommon this season to have athletes warming up backwards on course, something that the next level would’ve been a disqualifiable offense.

The other big change for me this year was how race-days went from a preparation standpoint. With 24 skiers almost every weekend, classic races were very much a race to get skis prepped in time for everyone's start. The skiers were more than willing to help, but at a point it gets to be too much when eight or ten people are testing waxes and they all say different waxes work (or worse, the same wax works for one person but doesn’t for the next).

That being said, my biggest fear this season was not being taken seriously by the athletes, but as it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. everyone on the team was more than helpful with anything I asked of them, including driving personal vehicles through horrid lake-effect snow storms to deliver equipment on less than an hours notice. While the team captains were my primary source of team information, my real brain-trust this season have been the sophomore and junior classes, who have been more than open with me, expressing concerns and changes they’d like to see in the coming years.

The team was very accepting of me as a new (young) coach, to the point where many were looking to me for personalized training plans to supplement/augment the ones provided by the head coach. A majority of them have even asked me to step in as the head coach next year after the current one retires at the end of the season (We’ll see guys, we’ll see).

So far this season has exceeded my expectations immensely, and I can’t wait to see how it concludes. Yesterday, we arrived in Jackson Hole for the USCSA National Championships, which start for us on Tuesday.