The Nature Valley Grand Prix kicked off with a 9.7 kilometer time trial. The course was pretty sweet and the only bad spot was a nasty little chicane that has some of the worst pavement I’ve ever seen. Not like a few bad potholes, but like the deeply dimpled surface of the devil’s golfball. During the warm-up laps the day before I was taking it pretty fast in the extensions, but they coned it off because riders were coming both ways and their line wasn’t as good as my line, but more on that later.
The course was mostly flat and followed the river out to a sharp turn-around in a parking lot, then came back past the start, over a small roller and through a series of turns that put you onto a short winding climb to the finish. Normally hills and I don’t get along so well, but it turned out the grade was shallow enough that I actually had a pretty good ride.
The morning was cold and wet with intermittent rain, and I was pretty out of it from the 5:30 wakeup call, so I have to give a few shoutouts to some people who turned my head around. 1st, to Tyson, the team mechanic. I had a ton of stuff to do on the bike and he took care of it all for me and left me to focus on getting myself and my head ready (he also did this for the 11 other racers here. Such a treat and absolutely amazing!). Second, to my boy Gavin Melly. G-money-G, as a one Tyler H. would often call him, loaned me his TT bike, a true silver bullet if ever I’ve seen one, as well as his slick helmet and possibly a bit of his euro style (my buddy Rand saw a photo of me from the race and swore it was really Gavin. Am I denying it? No). Lastly, I have to give huge thanks to Lauren Hecht. She’s a teammate from the Webcor Women’s Bridge team and is out here racing on a composite team. We were talking after she had raced and she told me that the course was made for me and that I’d kill it. Even though logic and reason told me she was lying to my face, those few positive words worked some kind of magic and before I knew it I was half believing I could have a decent ride.
I got up to the start ramp, feeling cold, poorly prepared and nervous as hell, but I didn’t have long to think about it and then I was on course. Jesse Moore, a great racer from NorCal riding for Cal Giant, had done the Pro Ride last year and gave me the lowdown on all the courses. The one thing he told me was to go easy through the devil chicane because you don’t make up any time there but you can lose it all. He warned me that people had crashed there last year and he had almost crashed himself. But did I listen. No. I am an idiot. I flew through there in the extensions, but because they had coned off my line from the practice run I couldn’t handle it and flew off the road, one hand still on the extensions the other trying to check my speed, and managed to miss the guardrail, a sinkhole and a plunge into the river by a few inches. Funny, but while I was careening towards serious injury and a very premature to my Nature Valley Grand Prix I was distinctly thinking about how much it was going to cost to replace all the borrowed gear. Ridiculous.
I somehow managed to ride it out and then got on with the suffering. I held myself back a little on the way out, took the turnaround like a coward after being shaken up in the chicane and tried to go a little faster on the way back. I was gaining on my 30 second man and got within spitting distance of him at the base of the climb. I think this helped me out incredibly. He basically paced me up the climb and then I gassed it in the last few hundred meters to come around him. You can see a picture of me on the hill here. Pictures these days can be decieving, but I can assure you of two things. 1) That is actually a climb, and 2) Despite the look on my face I was suffering tremendously.
I could pick out the voices of my mom and sis as I neared the line and that was really special for me. They came all the way out here to watch me race... or visit the Mall of America, but either way its nice to have them around. It didn’t feel like a great ride, but they ran up to me and told my I was sitting in 6th place. Love has been known to mess with one’s calculus so I didn’t quite believe them, but when the dust settled at the end of the day I was sitting 16th out of 144 guys. No, I didn’t crack the top ten, but I beat a lot of guys I’m proud to just be racing against. I landed only one agonizing second away from grabbing the Best Amateur Jersey, and 36 seconds off the winning time of Tom Zirbel, the only guy here bigger than me and a certifiable freak of nature. The guys is strong.
So it turns out a 16th place is one of the best results of my life. If things go my way over the next few months, hopefully I won’t have to keep saying that.
More racing you say? Bring it on…
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