Tour of the Valley of the Sun

Well this weekend I participated in my first true road race and stage race. The race put on by the White Mountain Cycling club here in AZ consisted of 3 stages - a 22km TT, a 41 mile road race, and a 25 lap criterium.

The first stage - the 22 km TT took place early Friday morning in a tiny little town called Buckeye Arizona, about 50 miles west of Phoenix. In an attempt to avoid having to get up at 4:00 in the morning to get there on Friday morning tired and stiff, we decided to head up to Phoenix the night before and grab a hotel room on the edge of town so we could get a good nights sleep. My race number was 719 and my start time was 9:27:30.

We arrived at the race site at around 8:20 am - after a 25 minute detour to starbucks !! Thank god for GPS. When we got there there were already several hundred of cyclists set up along the cross street from the start line setting up their bikes and warming up on trainers and rollers. It was an amazing and indimadating specticle. Most of the riders were on state of the art carbon bikes, and dressed in prefectly matching team uniforms. A little intimidating to a guy doing his first bike race and wearing a mismatched uniform with NO logos. YIKES !! Think I may be out of my league here !!

Nervous and scared about racing on my TT bike for the first time since my accident 4 months ago, I quickly got changed and began to warm up ASAP. I managed to get about 25 minutes in on the trainer between running to the porta potty and jumping off to get something I forgot or thought i needed (like gels - which i carried in my back pocket but never in a million years risked taking my hands off the handle bars to try and get out of my back pocket).

I arrived at the start line about 10 minutes early to ensure I didn't miss my start. As I stood in line watching each successive rider go off in 30 second intervals I began to feel a little better as many of the riders were also doing thier first road race.

As I lifted my bike up onto the start ramp, I kept reminding myself to start easy and build into the race. Unsure how hard to go on such a short ride with no run to follow, I started off focusing on keeping my cadence high and turning over the pedals at around 100 RPM. My legs felt great. With a slight tailwind and only a slight incline on the way out, by mile 2 I was flying and already reeling in the riders ahead of me. By the turn around I had caught 4 riders and was feeling good. I made the turn for home, looked up the road at the rider about 500m ahead, put my head down and dropped the hammer. Unfortunately it was a lot tougher catching riders on the way home and managed to just pass my 7th rider about 500m from the finish line. I crossed the line in 35:43 - 7th in my division and 1:30 behind the winner. And as usual, after finishing and checking the results an hour later, I wondered if I could have gone a minute faster if I knew I would win ... sure I could have... but as the old saying goes, if I could have, I would have. Regardless, I was happy with my results.

The next day was the road race which took place a little closer to home in Casa Grande - about an hour and a half from home. We left home shortly after 5:00 am and arrived at the race site around 6:30 am. Even before the sun was up - and it was FREEZING !! In fact it was soo cold, despite having plenty of time, I bypassed the warmup on the trainer to sit shivering in the SUV with the heat on full blast.