Superweek - Blue Island

Race: Blue Island Criterium - Superweek
Length: 35 Miles
Course: Fairly clean roads, just under a mile long standard rectangle, pretty good crowds

Blue Island, the first amatuer race of the 2 week long Superweek series, would unnofficially kick off the true cycling season in Chicago with Superweek, Chicago Crit, Elk Grove, and the state and national championships in a months time.

We arrived at Blue Island with around 40 minutes until the race started. Katie and I got everything together, started walking our stuff to the start/finish line and pop...my front tire began to deflate, not something you want to deal with just before a race (not to mention my tire pump exploded no more than 5 minutes before). A mad scrambled ensued trying to find a pump and anything else needed to change out the tube. Luckily SRAM neutral support had a tent with pumps that I could borrow. Fastest tire change of my life. All this meant was no warm up, but in a 90 minute crit you can hope to warm up during the race.

The race began, I was at the back at the start/finish line and stayed near the back trying to get warm for the race. In retrospect, it may have been too far back as the accordian effect of the crit seemed to start taking its toll more quickly than I would have hoped over the hour and a half. We had a few breaks jump off and quickly get reeled back in until two of our guys, Peter and Jacque, jumped into a new break of around 9 riders.

Having two guys in a break is a massive advantage. In the waning moments you can attack with one and force the rest of the field to chase. As soon as the chase reconnects, the other can attack forcing everyone else again to chase wearing out the field. So needless to say, this was a break the team wanted to see stick.

This reduced my roll significantly. Essentially to let a break go, your team stops pulling altogether because the last thing you want to do is use any of your effort to pull back a break you want to see go. So, you sit back and let everyone else waste their efforts. A nice side-product of this is you typically get fresher, but for whatever reason I was feeling terrible. Maybe it was just a longer crit or I made too many efforts early, but I just felt like hell. In any case, we did such a good job of letting the break go, they lapped us with 1.5 laps to go.

It was incredibly confusing and the last thing you want to do is interfere with the leaders in a sprint, so I took it easy, put in a little effort and simply finished with the pack in 19th. Peter ended up winning the sprint for 1st, so the team was rather happy afterwards.

For whatever reason today was extremely tough, but the more I think about it, the more its because of poor positioning. Starting from the front would have saved me some effort and given me a shot to jump into the break as these days breakaways seem to be more popular than field sprints.

Up Next: Elgin Road Race tomorrow...