Race Report:
I’ll start off by saying O’Fallon was expecting record high temperatures and the weather did not disappoint. The high was 98F but I think it got to 102-103. My Garmin got as high as 110F on the road. I have no idea what the heat index was.
The Cat 5 race had 36 registered and 2 no-shows. Furmi (Tom) was also there from Wild Card. I started about a 1/3 of the way back in the pack and stayed there for the neutral start. It picked up pretty quick after the ‘real’ start. I was able to hang on for about 5 miles. I think Furmi lasted 8 or so (IIRC from him telling me after). The hills combined with the heat is what did me in. The pace wasn’t much faster than a normal Wednesday night ride, so all things equal I feel I could have hung with them. Of course, if the temps were lower I’m sure the faster guys would have set a higher pace a dropped me just as quickly.
There were about 3 of us in the group that fell off the back around 5 miles in. Several more fell off around the 8-10mile mark and I started to catch them. I pulled within 30 seconds of Furmi and sat there pretty much the rest of the race. At about 13 miles I caught another guy (can’t remember team) and I sucked his wheel for a bit before I rode around him for a pull. We traded pulls for a while but never really gained on the guys in front of us. A third guy (white t-shirt, tennis shoes, toe-clips) managed to bridge up and sucked our wheels for a good 8 miles. This guy refused to take a pull and eventually rode around us to bridge up with Furmi.
The group of three of us took turns dropping each other but we would always bridge up and recover for a bit before the next guy fell off the back. This continued until about the 2000m to go mark. There was a hill that wasn’t particularly steep but by then I was cooked. I ended up slowing way down and go caught by a guy that was way back and pretty much soloed the whole race. At 500m I decided I was close enough to try and take my position back. Like a rookie I started my attack/sprint too soon. I pulled about 20m on him by the 100m line. He cranked it up and ended up beating me by 0.04 seconds (according to the chip timing).
Final result for me was 33 out of 34. The guy behind me was another 8 minutes back. I finished 17:52 behind the winner (1:26:01.992) who finished in 1:08:09.362. Furmi finished 29th at 1:24:31.551.
The whole experience was a good one. I’m actually pretty happy with my result for my first ever road race and only riding in any competitive manner for a little over 3 months (and only having a bike for a little over 15 months).
Next weekend, Tour of Galena with nearly twice the climbing but luckily the highs are nearly 20F lower and a few miles shorter. After that I’ll be joining the Wednesday and Saturday rides again. I’ve been skipping Wednesday to conserver energy for race day.
