By Nick Frye
This weekend at the Joe Martin stage race around Fayetteville, Arkansas, I came across many new race situations, and some familiar situations but in new contexts. Many scenarios are ubiquitous in cycling like chaotic feed zones with bottles skidding across the pavement or when you’re on the front with your team drilling the pace to string out the field. Worse yet, when the field is strung out, and you’re alternating between coasting at thirty-five miles per hour and stomping on your biggest gear to grab the last wheel again.
In Fayetteville I found myself in each of those scenarios–probably many times each, in fact. Notably however, was the latter. Being the last guy hanging onto the tail of the field, panting like a black labrador on a hot July day is never a good time. At the tail of the field, you put in just as hard of an effort as the leaders but not to pull the field around the course, its just to stay in the race. This is a frustrating fact that grows with the amount of time you’re stuck at the rear. Sitting up and peering over the helmets of the field on a downhill section of the course, you can see riders, seemingly a mile away, slingshotting off the front trying to make a break. You find yourself wondering ‘how/why?’ while throwing down your best sprint just to no longer be the last rider, but third from last. As the laps count down and even after you pass two or three riders every lap while trying to move up in the field, you peek under your arm to see you’re somehow still the last rider in the field–somehow you are. Its impossible, you convince yourself: you just moved up two wheels just last lap all in vain.
Tail-gunning a fast crit is racing purgatory where racers wait to be washed of their sinful mistake of getting stuck in the back in the first place. You’re storming around the course putting in hard efforts and working tactfully as if you’re still racing, but you’re a ghost who hasn’t yet realized it. Once you come to that realization, it’s not an issue of if you’ll get dropped, but when.
Deciding whether you should pull yourself or when to pull is as difficult as timing an attack. Either way, you need to decide what your intentions are: the admirable one, is just to ‘stretch the legs out,’ and put in the efforts to hang just for the workout and to improve your fitness. Most crits around Wisconsin cost around thirty bucks; that’s an expensive workout. Might as well have signed up for a charity ride and got a free swag bag and water bottle. I’m not a licensed coach or sports physiologist, but this argument simply doesn’t need quantification or science: the reason the tail-gunner doesn’t drop out is pride.
Nobody likes getting dropped from a crit, even if it’s known as the fastest and hardest. A mechanical or flat is a godsend when you’re tail-gunning, because it’s not your fault you couldn’t finish. Deus ex machina. Pseudo-physiological reasons are weak too: the popular ‘coming down from a cold,’ or ‘my legs felt like rubbish,’ work like calling in sick to work. The only person you need to convince is yourself, but that excuse should only pass your internal ‘B.S. detector’ if there are days when you feel great and race well. Otherwise, you’re just a bad racer.
Racing–that is, the entire package of training, affiliation with a club/team, race weekends, etc.– is all about fun. Or should be. That is to say I don’t hate doing microburst workouts or even the notion of power meters and ‘TSS’ (Training Stress Scores); it all falls into the calculus of cycling. I think of racing as a maximization problem: how do I maximize the fun I have racing, controlling opportunity costs, money, time and effort? Too little training, and you don’t even see the benefits. Too much, and you experience diminishing returns and burn out in February in your living room on your trainer watching ‘The Expendables.’ But it’s not a simple curve at which there is an optimal point of time and money spent on racing. The economics of cycling are multi-facted and dynamic with too many inputs and invisible effects–health, potential risk of injury from racing or even training, opportunity cost of the next best alternative, the unknown-unknowns! Learning about yourself mentally and physiologically is essential for obvious performance reasons. More importantly, knowing yourself is essential to help answer the question of why you shave your legs, why you own your $7,000 bike,and make payments on your $3,000 car, why you leave your loved ones to do the thing you supposedly love every weekend.
The answer to that question will likely never satisfy a true skeptic, but that doesn’t matter. Shaved legs are not more aerodynamic, and using a beard-trimmer rather than a razor enables you to clean out road rash just as well–those arguments are moot. But the ability to answer to yourself ‘why?’–why race, why train, why the SSL version or why drive three hours for an hour race– with confidence is what matters. When you find yourself asking ‘why’ when chasing the pack, all that matters is that you believe your answer, and that you execute it with grace. It doesn’t matter if your fellow pack-fill friends don’t believe that your legs are cached from your workouts that week, or whether or not your rear tire is running low–as long as that excuse doesn’t chase you around like a ghost of your shame.
On Sunday in Fayetteville I raced for 30 minutes of what was likely the hardest racing in my life. Unfortunately the crit lasted 50 minutes. When a gap opened in front of me going 30 mph uphill, I knew that was the end of my race. I found another piece of debris like myself that was shed from the meteor of a field screaming around the course and we finished three more laps before getting pulled. My new friend I was riding with, Jeff, told me that his average power for those 30 minutes was 365 watts, with an even higher ‘normalized’ power. For a 145 lb. amateur rider, that’s incredibly high. I don’t know if that number is even entirely accurate or representative for me since Jeff had effectively raced a different race being a slightly larger guy, and having not put in the exact same efforts I did; I didn’t care. The number struck me as big, and I had no business in that race anymore: the reason I stuck with it as long as I did was to make it half-way through to have technically completed the 4 day stage race that it was part of.
I finished the stage race in 57th place, over 26 minutes behind the leader. Over 100 racers started, and only 66 finished. I had arguably two of my hardest days on the bike ever, traveled over 1,500 miles, slept in a shady motel and taken nearly a week away from work and friends for that race. I can say with complete confidence that I didn’t regret a minute of it and would do it again if I had the choice.