I’ve been racing
I ended up signing up for the Vueltas de Mountainair which was held yesterday. I teamed up with 3 other guys from Bike ‘N’ Sport, all fairly new riders. Tom Egelhoff, Oscar Nova, and Saul Gomez. They all have something of the order of 8 races each under their belts. It was a 37 mile course with a total elevation gain of 880 feet – nice and flat. Sadly, my Garmin unit shut down just as I hit “Save” and I didn’t get any performance numbers for myself. Tom finished a few riders behind me and had a time of 1:32:09 with an average of 23.7 mph.
It was an amazingly close race. 38 riders started out and after several were dropped during the first 10 miles, the peloton of about 25 riders remained intact until the very end. Around a dozen challengers flew off the front over the course of the 37 mile route but we caught up quickly each time. With 2 miles remaining I worked my way up to the front of the pack and with a mile to go I sprinted out ahead…for about 30 seconds. I lost count of the number of riders who zoomed by me in the last quarter mile. So many of us hit the finish line all at once that they held us there until they could sort the order out. Relying on honesty about who each rider remembered being behind or in front of, and relying on photos taken by two of the photographers they finally produced a winners list about 15 minutes after the race ended. It looks like I and one other took 18th place. I’m not sure how that was determined. There was one other rider between me and my teammate, Oscar (11th place), but as I said, the majority of the peloton hit the finish line en masse. My other teammate, Wendell Egelhoff, was only 2 riders behind me and yet he ended up at 24th. This seems like the sort of thing that timing chips would solve and has solved for other rides I’ve done. Overall, it was a great experience. I had a tremendous amount of energy all throughout the race. It even felt easier than our Monday and Wednesday social rides. I’m sure I jumped out too soon at the end and ran out of fuel for the final sprint. I’ll definitely be working on that for next year.
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