Upon finishing a race and getting to the bus one of the first things I do is text my wife the words "not dead" to let her know I'm still upright and with a pulse. It's a tongue-and-cheek response on my part given dying is obviously a pretty extreme outcome but as a casual observer of bike racing Kristen looks at even the most normal parts of my job, such as riding tightly in a pack, as death defying. As a results, these texts were something she requested years back so she could have peace of mind.
Most guys on the team in relationships go through this same ritual. Oddly enough, it's a habit we all came to independently or perhaps, more appropriately, our partners came to. Honestly, I can't blame them; cycling is a dangerous sport. Even a helicopter filming the race from hundreds of feet in the air can capture this. When you're up close or even in it, it doesn't look better. There are many parts of this job I don't bother writing home about; the people who care for my well being are best kept in the dark. I'm doing them a favor, really.
In keeping with this muted tradition, I limited to my response to how the race this Sunday went to one word; "hectic." It's a fair description; albeit limited. The race was windy. The peloton were nervous. The pavement, at times, terrible. None of this is really unique for the first race of the season, honestly. Most guys (including myself) are still finding their pack legs and adjusting from riding mostly solo for the previous four months to being subjected to the will and pace of the peloton. It can be a harsh shift for some, easy for others. I definitely fall into the former category.
The Clasica de Almeria is, more often than not, a sprinters race. Most of the climbs come in the first half of the 183 kilometer (~113miles for you non-metric folk) course before the peloton returns to flat riding along the coast back to the beach resort town of Almeria. With a fair bit of wind whipping about, it only heightened the aforementioned "first race of the year" nerves floating about the peloton.
Our plan for the day was to set up our new Dutch sprinter, Arvid de Kleijn, for the finish. As a very much non-sprinter, my role was to simply help Arvid and the main group of our fast guys as best I could before things started going warp speed in the final kilometers. On days like today I sometimes struggle to find a way to be useful but do my best to follows the guys and provide shelter from the wind or a bottle when asked. For the most part though, they're able to take care of themselves.
About seventy kilometers in, an unfortunately timed bike change and then crash in quick succession that would see Arvid out of the race. All this went down just as Bike Exchange started turning the screws on the final climb and after waiting for Arvid post-bike change/pre-crash, I found myself in no mans land among the cars and behind even the groupetto. When news came over the radio that Arvid was out I had a bit of a "bite the leather strap" chase through the caravan, both up and downhill, in order to catch the main group of already dropped riders. At this point, I thought my day was done but Cofidis gave our group new life when they drilled it to bring their sprinter back to the front. It's always somewhat strange to return to the main peloton, knackered from a hard chase, only to find guys casually chatting or stopping to pee. This contrast was only briefly dwelled on; I was just happy to be back.
From this point, we still had over sixty kilometers to go and, given the current headwind, the peloton slowed. While a mellower pace is always welcomed, the truth is it only reduces the runway for the peloton to burn off their remaining potential energy. You know that whole thing about "red sky in the morning, sailors take warning?" Well, a similarly applicable phrase in bike racing could be "slow pace in the middle of the race, this finish is about to get bananas;" and it did.
Our plan B was to now try and set up Colin Joyce for the finish. Having seen the run in from years past we knew a critical point would be crosswind highway section starting at around eighteen kilometers to go. In typical European fashion, the city streets leading to the highway on-ramp were littered with roundabouts and, in the entrance of one, the peloton compressed leaving many us of having to abruptly find our brakes. These sort of "brake check" moments happen all the time in races and generally nothing comes of them other than a few choice words shouted in various languages. In this particular instance though my luck ran out. As my pace slowed to a near stop I felt a rider from behind bump into me and from there my rear wheel locked up. Fortunately I didn't go down and was able to unclip but the issue was I couldn't pull my bike free from that of the rider behind. The mechanical snag came from this rider's front brake rotor being jammed between my derailleur and cassette. Both of us had to get off our bikes and work to untangle the mess before resuming but by this point the highway was only a few kilometers away. Riding in the cars (again) I did manage to make contact just before the on-ramp but found myself nearly dead last.
As it turned out, this was a great spot for spectating the race but an absolutely terrible one for racing it. The moment we entered the on-ramp the rear half of the peloton started to echelon, myself included. While riding at what felt like warp speed my eyes could focus only on the wheel in front of me and the sound of the emergency lane dust and debris kicked up from it. My concentration was broken only to swerve away from a pole erected to separate the main lanes of highway traffic from the exit off-ramp. It was a close call and the fact nobody crashed into it is amazing; bike racing is full of small miracles like that.
Even while sitting in the gutter I could see the field slowly losing guys in groups of three to four. Some would come back and try to join our group in chasing, others just coasted and watched us pass. It was also at this time that the number of crashes started piling up. A harbinger of these incidents would generally start with a team car blitzing by before we came upon the group of unfortunate souls. Some just had minor road rash. Other injuries looked worse. At dinner, one of the Bora riders was bandaged up so much his arm and hand took on the appearance of a Halloween mummy costume; pretty sure the stains weren't red food coloring, though. Hopefully everyone who went down heals up quick.
At about 10km to go two Bingoal riders sat up and decided chasing was pointless. The riders who kept chasing wound up finishing two minutes down and in no better than eightieth place or something like that. The call to lay down arms was appreciated by many, if not most, riders in the group. In these sort of situations where there's clearly no hope of coming back, most guys only keep chasing because everyone else is; cyclists can be lemmings like that sometimes. Fortunately I had a teammate, Nate Brown, to chat with as we rolled in. As is often the case when these races are over, we each told the story of our day, sometimes taking liberties with the truth for dramatic effect. This sort of storytelling is kept up amongst all the guys even when dinner rolls around; a cathartic release from the immense stimulus overload experienced over the previous four and a half hours. Upon getting to the finish it's nice to see nobody else was caught up in any crashes. In the end, Colin rolled twentieth which is respectable result given the caliber of sprinters he was up against. Many of the guys who beat him were in my group earlier when Cofidis brought up back from the dead and, who knows, on a different day he could very well have been higher up. That's bike racing though.
When I get back to the bus I'm greeted by a text from my wife; "how'd the race go?" You already know the response to that one.
Thanks for reading,
E
P.S. The Rally Cycling Virtual Team Launch will be tomorrow, February 17th at 12pm CDT. I encourage all of you to set a reminder and tune in. The creative team at Rally Cycling has put a lot of time into this and I for one am very interested to see how it turns out.
