OBRA Crit Championships

My legs didn’t feel very good when we got to Gresham. I rolled around, did some high cadence stuff, some easy jumps and some 30-sec efforts, but the pop wasn’t quite there. After my poor 20-min TT test yesterday (270W- a good 30 or 40W lower than what I expected. I had a really easy (too easy?) rest week, so I’ll blame it on that)… I wasn’t that confident in my legs anyway.

The course seemed narrow. The L-shape is cool. I got squeezed onto the grate on the inside of corner 2 in the first couple laps… not nice. I suffered for the first half of the race, probably due to insufficient warmup. The race was fast. I counted the number of times I went over 600W for more than 2 seconds with Find Fast in WKO+… 74. Seventy-four! We did 17 laps (I think?) with 6 corners/lap, which means I had to jump out of nearly three-quarters of the corners. Ouchie.

We averaged 25.8 mph, which is the fastest crit of the season for me. Even the Cascade crit was slower! Despite the high-speed-ness, I didn’t pedal 25% of the time.

The pack dynamics were insane, but I suppose typical. The front was constantly being swarmed. I never saw the front of the race… nor did I really want to. No serious attack ever went. Everyone was pumped for the field sprint.

There was a crazy crash in the last third of the race. Corner 2, someone violently explodes a tube, corrects, high-sides, and goes down. At least two people lock up their wheels behind him. I remember watching a front wheel go into a rear triangle, eek. Dave Aldersebaes was behind all of this and got forced into the curb, avoiding the telephone pole (thank goodness) and landing in a very thorny bush. He got back in a lap later with only cosmetic damage.

I moved to the front with a few laps to go. Instead of towing Cole up with me, I just towed up a dozen random guys. Oops. I was in the top 5 for the last couple laps, drilling it to hold my position and hoping Cole was on my wheel. I didn’t actually check that Cole was on my wheel… not so clever. The sprint started, and I was tired. I realized Cole wasn’t with me and realized that I should sprint. I did. A NRR guy got around me at the end. Fifth place! One more upgrade point!

OBRA shows 21 guys finishing… but we started with over 40. Crazy!

25 minutes, 10.8 mi.
Average speed, 25.8 mph.
Average power, 277W. Normalized power, 298W. Energy, 417kJ.
Peak power, 1117W (at +13:07).

Afterwards we went to Eva’s birthday party. Cole, Brian and I played Velcoball. It was awesome. I drank four sodas and ate too many chips.

Tina the Earthquaker is the OBRA Crit Champion! Awesome!

EDIT: This morning I woke with a Facebook message from Larry: “I’m trying to wait patiently to read how the crit went on your blog, but I’m tired of waiting- how’d it go?” It made me feel pretty good.