Mad Cow Race Report

What a great day for a race in Grand Junction. Clear blue skies and mild weather. Even with such a late start (11AM) we still managed to get to the race with only about a half hour to spare. Fortunately it's a long race and there's not too much need for a warm up because by the time I got all ready there was only 10 minutes before I needed to be on the start line.

The category grouping for the race was odd, to say the least. My group was cat 3, cat 4, and 35+ open. As a cat 4, this was certainly going to be a hard ride. The course starts off with few miles of 1-3% grade climbing before hitting some steeps. We started off at a civil pace, but of course someone had to push the pace and try to split up the group on the first big climb. It was a pretty serious effort, but I stuck with it and stayed with the lead group.

A little while after the long climb me made it to the loop part of the course which we would be doing 3 laps around. It starts out with a long set of rollers with virtually no downhill, then there's a nice long descent and half mile steep hill. After some more "gentle" climbing, you're back at the start of the loop.

The remains of the main field stayed together for the first trip through the rollers and then someone managed to get a large gap on the downhill section. When we hit the rollers at the start of lap 2 he was still away and another attacked to bridge up to him. I was sitting on the back just hanging on for dear life, but I'm surprised the guys on the front let him get away. He was clearly pretty strong, as was obvious by his frequent attempts to form a break on the first lap. He managed to bridge up to the first attacker and then drop him.

Our group wasn't all that fast on the long downhill section, which I found to be surprising. I think it was mostly the fact the nobody wanted to be on the front doing work. I got on the front to try to pick up the pace a bit, but clearly nobody was biting. The next time up the hill we lost a few people and I also got gapped a bit. I buried myself for a while and managed to reattach to the main group. By this time we were down to about 11 people. The last time through the rollers was pretty rough. There were some half hearted attacks, so the pace kept surging. I knew that if I could just keep in contact until the downhill I would have bought myself some more time as I could easily stay with the group in the downhill.

The final time up the steep hill we dropped a few more riders and I got gapped again. This time I couldn't make it back to the group. There was another guy with me and we worked our butts off together trying to reel them back in. We were probably within 20 feet once, and then someone attacked that field. Ugh! There was no way we could do it. One of the guys got popped off the lead group and we at least picked him up. I had been talking to him before the race, and we chatted some more as we rode.

It was nice to be in a small group of 3 on the descent off the mesa. There are some really tight corners, and they had some gravel. All three of us took it pretty conservative and safe. I wasn't going to sprint for the finish, and I told the guy I was chatting with that he should sprint it out with the third guy. He wasn't into it (in some ways it's kind of funny to sprint from something other than the podium). He told me to go for it, so I did. It was kind fun.

In the end, I got 8th place out of somewhere between 30 and 50 people. Anything other than winning this race was a disappointment for me, but it was a pretty good result. I was fighting an uphill battle from the get-go by getting grouped with cat 3's and the 35+ open guys. I'm very happy I was able to hang with obviously stronger racers until the very last efforts. There were a number of times where I really had to bury myself to stay with the group and I was happy that I could do it. In retrospect, I should have pushed harder on that steep hill to keep from getting gapped. I was never quite on my limit up that hill. I guess in my head I was thinking that if I redlined going up I wouldn't be able to hang on afterward.

I can't wait to come back and do the race again next year.