The second race weekend for Campbell Cycling is upon us and coming off a week of midterms we are excited to get out of the library and back on the road.
As I mentioned before we will be at Duke this weekend for their first annual home road race. Marshall and I will be the only members from our team going to this race as next week is spring break and the other members have “plans”. I expect similar attendance from other teams resulting in a fairly small field of rider. I may be wrong though, I hope I am. Riders from Duke, however have been leading the way in the D field where we reside so I expect them to be at full strength at home.
The weekend will start with an extremely short 14 mile road race on Saturday. This doesn’t bode well for me as I like a more tactical race with a lot of sitting in the peloton and planning the next move. I expect this race will be a full out redline effort the entire race. There is a slight incline stretching from mile 12 to mile 13 according to the elevation profile. I expect this is where the race will be decided with only a mile to the finish after cresting the hill. If we’ve managed to stay with the lead group to this point this will be the time to make a move. However it plays out its gonna really hurt over the last two miles. Luckily the race is short enough that we can really lay it out there for 14 miles and not have burned up all our matches before Sundays event.
Sunday will hold my main event for the weekend in the form of a .6 mile crit. The course consist of 8 turns and I expect will wont be so lucky as last time to not have any wrecks. As you know at NCSU I dnf the crit after some trouble in the early going. Looking back I should have hung in there and tried to ride with the leaders when they came around to lap me just for the experience. Unfortunately at the time I was so disgusted at the misfortune I was just mentally not in the race any more. So in effect this will be my first crit and im really excited to see how I fair. I really didn’t enjoy mountain bike short track that much so I figure crit racing wont be my thing either but never the less Its my main focus this weekend. At the NCSU race one of my biggest problems was trying to recover from the big effort on Saturday and be ready to go Sunday morning. I hope to do a better job this week because even without the mishap on the start line as I began to try and chase back up to the group I could feel in my legs that I just didn’t have what it would have taken to stay with the leaders.
I put in a 26 mile ride Monday at a moderate pace and my legs still felt dead like they did at the end of last week. After taking the day off Tuesday to give them a chance to recover again I did a half of moderate pace on the training mixing in 30 second intervals and felt my legs were getting better. Today I got out for an easy spin to just get keep the legs loose and ready for the weekend and they felt really great on the few accelerations I did make. So I think I should have the legs this week and I plant to really test the waters on Saturday and hammer on Sunday.
I guess you could say this is a B level priority race for me if you like to rank them. Honestly though my training plan isn’t structured well enough to differentiate between races. Using this way of thinking though I have low goals for this week wanting to just get another race under my belt and learn a little more about road racing.
I did hear from John a member of our charter club last year who graduated before we could start racing that he was going to be representing Elon this weekend at the crit since he is seeking his masters there. John still comes out and rides from time to time with us and Im looking forward to finally getting to race with him and even if he is wearing a different colored jersey hes still a member of Campbell Cycling to us.
I also found out this week that we will be adding another race to our schedule with ASU stepping up to host a race in my hometown of Wilkesboro on March 18th and 19th. Needless to say Im very excited by this news . However, this means that after this weekend at Duke I will have a weekend off the have ASU, Wake Forest and 6 Hour of Warrior creek on back to back weekends. Im really looking forward to all the racing but all three of these races are at the top of my priority list for the spring season and performing well three weeks in a row seems like a long shot.
More on this later…Race report next week
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