Uwe in earlier Masters 30+ race.
Lee between Marek (LOT) and Tim (Swanson) in cat 3 race.
Cat 3 & Cat 123 - Lee Heaton
A surprisingly small crowd of no more than thirty racers lined up for the Cat 3 race. The weather was great, albeit a bit windy so perhaps the racing at Whitnall Park the day before had thinned out the field?
Representing Team Get A Grip were Jon Tenney and myself.
JT was in feisty spirits with the effects of an extended warm-up clearly evident. While I was still trying to clip in Jon had shot away with a Hayes (?) rider before the first corner on lap one. Those two drilled it and stayed away for a good ten minutes before being slowly reeled in. In time honored tradition' once the catch was made, the pace slowed to a funereal crawl, even more so on the finishing straight as everybody did their best to force another body to the front to do the work into a wind gusty enough to blow the registration tent over. If bikes were equipped with reverse gears I can confidently state that certain "racers" would have been engaging them with gusto at this point.
Enough was enough. It was time to give it some beans. I launched into the headwind stretch and after a few hard strokes looked around to see Marc Moeller on my shoulder and daylight between him and the chase. We worked it well together trading pulls for half a dozen laps, even slowing a bit to let more firepower in the not insubstantial shape of Clif Bar's Jason Mindeman bridge (which turned out to be a mistake as he got popped the moment he caught us) but "the pack were not letting us get away" or put another way, we were too slow / fat / untalented to ride away from them.
Once caught, JT decided he needed yet more face time into the wind and off he went again. This time, in a heroic effort, he rode solo and maintained a 100m gap until 2 laps to go. Had this been a TdF stage Jon would have been lauded as the most combative rider, earned a case of champagne for the team from his sponsors and won over the hearts of bored housewives countrywide. As it was it was just left to a few listless girlfriends and Al Stern to applaud Jon's effort.
As the race wound down to the inevitable group sprint, it was the usual suspects coming off the last corner. I got bumped, pushed wide lost two spots and was passed by a suddenly rejuvenated Mindeman, showing an impressive turn of speed, to pip me on the line. Where was that energy when we needed it in the break?
All in all it was a good day for GAG with the green & black off the front in one form or another for 95% of the race. I finished 5th & Jon in the pack.
Jon, Uwe (9th place in the earlier Masters 30+ race) and myself then lined up for the even smaller 1,2,3 field. Against my better judgment I joined an attack on lap one initiated by a very strong and suspiciously tanned young rider who hammered round at 30+ with me clinging desperately to his wheel and hoping he would just slow a little bit as I was suffering from partial blindness, nausea and blood was leaking from my ears. Needless to say it wasn't long before he rode my panting, aging self off his wheel. My memory is a bit shaky owing to the near coma inducing effort but I believe I lasted about five laps before the aforementioned wunderkind disappeared into the distance never to be seen again.
After engaging one of those reverse gears I was disparaging earlier I was unceremoniously swept up by the group and it was all I could do to hold on to the back while my vitals returned to something like normal.
With around three to go it was Uwe's turn to make a move and he slid off the front of what was left of the shattered field, closely followed by Kevin Stephens from Swanson. It was a slick move and they held a gap through to the finish. Uwe got 5th. I finished twenty seconds back in 6th. Jon was somewhere further back reveling in the glory of his epic attacking in the race before and perhaps reflecting on why we choose to spend weekends suffering on a bike until you want to vomit instead of lying on a hammock, sipping mint juleps and listening to Django Reinhardt records...
LH.
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