Race number 4 for 2012 is in the history books. The Northwest Arkansas Spring Classic, held in and around Prairie Grove, Arkansas just west of Fayetteville, is a 49 mile road race on a 24 mile rectangular loop. The loop has a few rolling hills and one short punchy little hill about 6 miles from the finish line. It's not a very difficult course with the exception that the wind was blowing pretty hard out of the south, which made the long run in to the finish line a little more challenging.
Saturday morning arrived after an awesome Friday evening out on the town. I experienced The Whitewater Tavern for the first time, which is hard to believe considering I grew up here and the Tavern is something of a gritty, long lived, iconic dive hangout. It wasn't the best preparation for Sundays race, but to be honest, I do enjoy living outside of my life as an aging amateur cyclist. Cycling is such a self absorbed sport that it can gobble you up if you're not careful. And while I love the feeling of being fit, competing and living this lifestyle, I also enjoy having a balanced life, which for me is about putting myself in close proximity to great people and if lucky enough, enjoying an incredible meal with them.
Saturday morning arrives as beautiful a day as there ever has been and Hunter and I go out for a short ride which included some leg opener intervals. Finished up the ride feeling good and it was time to get packed and start loading up the bus. We're starting to get this Rockstar bus figured out. It doesn't take long to get rolling now that everyone knows what has to be done to pack and make sure we're ready to go. The usual suspects were on the bus for this race including Kris French who was absent for Hell's Kitchen when he was racing La Vuelta a Mexico with a bunch of pros that have raced in the big tours in Europe. And since we're on this subject, I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly congratulate Kris on finishing the grueling 8 day stage race. We've all come to expect Kris to win a bunch of the local and regional races and while we're all impressed with his ability to roll across the line in first place, I would have to say I was much more impressed with the fact he finished this international event with no awards or accolades of any type. I know for certain la Vuelta was a tough race for him. His preparation was not ideal and in fact, he didn't even know he was going to race the event until about two weeks before it started when a combine team called him to see if he could join them. So for Kris, this had to have been intimidating knowing it would most likely be the single hardest thing he's ever done. And from talking to him afterwards, at least from a cycling perspective, it was. Kris hung on every day to finish in the middle of the group or just make the time cut by the slightest margin in the big mountain stages. I can tell you from experience, it's not easy to keep pedaling hard when you've been dropped. Bicycle racers live by the notion that if you're not in the pack or in front of it riding away, you're not actually racing anymore. Your mind sees this as a great opportunity to convince you to quit and take a much needed siesta. So for Kris to summon the mental and emotional strength to fight every day for eight days when he could have easily called it quits, that's a huge victory in my mind. I really do believe that participating in difficult sports provides us with a good opportunity to reveal our true character. Not that any one event should define us, hell, we've all failed and performed well below what we know we're capable of. We've given up, had bad attitudes and raced lazy... but every so often, we're faced with a challenge and given an opportunity to show how gritty a survivor we really are, and this Mexican race was Kris'. He passed with flying colors in my book. So congratulations Kris, great work.
Back to our little race on Sunday. After arriving and setting up camp behind the school/staging area for the race, we made dinner and had a relaxing evening watching a movie and getting bikes ready for the next day's race. The next morning arrived after a decent nights sleep and we began our ritual of breakfast, greeting friends and teammates and then getting geared up to race. The day started off warm and promised to get much warmer, which was just fine with me. It was also destined to be yet another windy race with the wind blowing out of the south between 15-20 mph.
It's amazing how quickly two hours can go by when you're prepping for a race. I looked at the clock and realized I had only an hour to get dressed and begin my warm-up, which I had intended to be a brisk one knowing the start was going to be pretty fast. However, by the time I threw my leg over the bike, I was quickly running out of time with only 30 minutes left to turn the pedals before the gun went off.
Photo courtesy of Buster's girlfriend
Jay Hawkins, Buster Brown, Me, Peter "Dark Lord" Erdoes
And the gun did go off (well, actually someone yelled "GO") with a large'ish group of close to 50 masters leaving the school parking lot and rolling out to the neutral start. No sooner had the race gone live than the first attacks started going off the front. One innocuous little break eased up the road and Jay Hawkins and I chased it down in an attempt to keep the group together for a little while longer. We quickly reached the two guys that had rode away and settled in on their wheels to wait for the peloton to come around us. The main group never arrived and I started hearing guys yelling "go, go, go!" I looked back and we had a group of 7 (two of us from OKC Velo.) with a small gap from the main field. The break started rolling and Jay and I looked at each other knowing this wasn't part of plan but also feeling that burning desire to ride and hope we can stay away. But, we had a team plan and this group wasn't going to work. Jay and I rolled through softly a few times knowing we would get caught and not much later, the group arrived.
The raced progressed as usual with another small break getting up the road, also with an OKC guy, namely Gil Summy. Gil sat in on the break for almost 20 miles until the field brought them back. And no sooner than Gil's break was caught than more attacks started launching one after another into the stiff headwind. We finished the fist 24 mile loop and had just started the second when I realized I had made a big tactical error. I should have been sitting in the top 5 guys when we hit the big crosswind section, but instead, I was caught sleeping about 20 back in the pack when Jay Hawkins attacks and takes two teammates (Peter Erdoes and Les Akins) with him, along with Peter Beland (BMC Walmart) and a few snapple guys. Tyson Foods wasn't represented in the break so I fully expected them to bring the break back.
However, the break starts to make some headway in spite of Tyson's chase efforts. When the break hit the big tailwind section they disappeared up the road. I'm now thinking this could stick and with the guys we had in the break, we were sure to win if they could stay away. Ex National Champion and OKC teammate extraordinaire, Buster Brown, proceeded to control the peloton along with a few of the other OKC guys in the field. I let them do the work until we finished the tailwind section then I moved to the front and stayed there covering attacks and chase efforts for the remainder of the race. Since Tyson Foods wasn't represented and now the Snapple guys were dropped from the break, Tyson did most of the chasing (along with lone Snapple man Steve Auchterlow) and attacking once we hit the last time up the big headwind road. Bruce Dunn put in a hard effort up the steep hill along with one of his teammates, I sat on his wheel thinking we had surely peeled more guys off the pack, which we had, but once we got to the top, Bruce sat up, no doubt frustrated he wasn't getting much help, and this allowed everyone to catch back on, but more importantly, it gave the break a fighting chance to stay away. So far, so good. Our break is still up the road although we can see them and they're getting a little closer after Tyson and Snapple start working again to bring them back.
We begin closing in on the finish and once we could see the 5k to go sign, it was clear the break was going to stay away. It was now time to start thinking about the field sprint and like the master of disaster he is, Buster, all the while resting and simultaneously trash talking to everyone in the field, and two of our other teammates, go to the front and string out the field in the lead-up to the sprint. I positioned myself about 5 riders back with 1k to go knowing I had just enough left in the legs to do a 200 meter sprint into the 20 mph headwind. A couple of guys launched their sprint too far out and had no choice but to go with them... I caught Bruce Dunn's wheel until he sat up and was then on my own chasing the 3 guys in front of me. I rolled across third in the field sprint and 8th on the day.
Since the break finished just in front of us, we quickly rolled up to Peter, Jay and Les and got the scoop on how their group finished up. Les Akins won overall with Peter 2nd and Jay 4th. Peter Beland (BMC Walmart) was 3rd out of the lead group. The Pirates rode perfectly today and we ended up with the result we wanted. Meanwhile, Hunter was back to his cramping ways and had a serious hammy lock-up around mile 46 in the Pro 1,2 race. His race was over, as it should have been, at that point. The damage of continuing to race on for another 26 miles to the finish would have set him back another week in his training, so he did the smart thing and bowed out. I'm sure there were some guys happy to see him gone but Hunter was not too pleased. Kris, still exhausted from racing in Mexico and reeling from Montezuma's revenge, had a non-typical pack finish. Evan, our 15 year old master of the "Pro Look" finished somewhere just outside of 10th place in the Cat 4 race. He was arguably out of his element with a windy course and no difficult climbs. It was still an excellent result and yet another race completed to add to his experience portfolio.
We packed up the bus after splitting our prize money and proceeded to get underway. I had been so busy being social and getting the bus ready, I never managed to get in a shower before we departed. So I decided to work on my newest skill set.... shower taking in a moving motor home. It's not as sexy as learning the art of numchucks, but it does require a high level of strength and stamina to take a shower inside a bus turning left and right navigating small town roads. I managed not to"crash" inside the shower and came out somewhat cleaner than I went in...Win!
While none of us ended up with the personal results we wanted on Sunday, it was still another fantastic weekend spent with great friends and doing something we really love. Oh, and my bike tan is coming along nicely for those of you wondering, and I know some of you have been... and so is my fitness. Now I get to relax for a day before the intervals start up again on Tuesday.
