Blue Hills Classic

Much better race this week, all things considered. After coming off one of my worst days ever on a bike I went into this past week with a new level of focus. Last Sunday I signed up for a couple races, the Blue Hills Classic and the Mt Sunapee Road Race, both in May. The Blue Hills Classic was held today, it's 6 times around a 7.2 mile rolling loop with a 1 mile climb and a hilltop finish. To be honest, I didn't really know what to expect. In the past week I did three really tough training rides. Tuesday was 3x10 minute threshold intervals, Wednesday was hill intervals, and Friday was 5x8min threshold intervals. If you've never done long threshold intervals on a bike and want to know what it feels like then do burpees. 10 minute threshold intervals are like doing as many burpees as you can in 10 minutes without ever stopping. The 5x8min interval session on Friday was stupid. I should have stopped at 3. Most people I talked to say I shouldn't have ridden that hard at all 2 days before a race, but like I said before, I'm not shooting to win races here, I'm just trying to get in race shape and put in some really hard efforts to set me up for later in the season. Friday's ride strained my left quad and I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to race at all on Sunday. But Michele fixed me up Saturday with a great leg massage and loosened it up to the point that I was willing to give it a shot this morning. Still tight, but I knew it would be OK for 43 miles. Just didn't know how hard I'd be able to go.

The Blue Hills Classic doesn't have a Pro/1/2 field, it only has master's categories. This means that all the super strong guys that are 35+ that would typically ride in the Pro/1/2 field, like Mark McCormack who is about 3 years removed from a US Pro National Championship, ride with the master's group and basically destroy the rest of us. The race started out with about 60 in the field and the pace went up right away. Average pace for the race was 25.4 MPH which is a pretty blistering pace considering there's a 1 mile hill that had to be climbed 6 times. Every time an attack would go off the front, the pace would go up and the attack would be reeled back in. Nothing was getting away today. Every time McCormack or any of the other big guys would make a move at the front they were marked and the whole pack would respond. The hill was the only chance for anybody to try to get away, but it wasn't steep enough or long enough to string the group out as much as the attackers would have liked. I was finding myself hanging with the group really well today, feeling much stronger than I anticipated. I would crest the hill every time with the top half of the field with my heart rate around 95% but I was recovering really quickly. It was pretty exciting. Still, I was waiting for the one major attack that I wasn't going to be able to hang onto. But every attack that came I was able to respond and hang in there. At one point in the 4th lap I hit a hole at about 35mph and my handlebars dropped about an inch. This sucks for two reasons. First, now you're hunched over and spread out over the bike in a much more unnatural position than you want to be in. Second, you know that if you hit another hole while leaning on the bars that they're going to drop much further, probably enough to make the bike unrideable. I was super careful to not hit any more holes like that the rest of the way.

Once I hung with the field through the first four laps, recovering from max efforts as quickly as I was, I started feeling pretty confident that I would finish with the field. Several riders were dropping off on every lap at this point and the field was getting smaller. We got into the 6th and final lap and the pace went up again. There were two major attacks before we got to the final climb, both of which I marked and stayed right towards the front of the group. We got into the climb and I put everything into it. I was side by side with guys that I felt were much stronger than me, but I wasn't getting dropped. It was an all-out effort. I came across the line with the main field, right around 20th (haven't seen the results yet). It was a much better finish than I had thought I would get coming into the day. It puts the rest of my season into a new perspective because I know that I'm racing against guys who are already in race shape and I'm just getting going.. This has the potential to be a really good year :)

best,

kevin