Finding my place: "Where am I?"

With yet another race in the books, bringing me, sadly, one weekend closer to the end of the season, I've had the chance to learn a little bit more about bike racing and little bit more about myself, two things that I take as pretty fair consolation for not getting a noteworthy result.

Yesterday was Tokeneke, a race that I had not done before but that I had heard was a serious challenge. Although it was a little on the short side for a P1/2 race at 66 miles, the 6000 feet of climbing and utter lack of flat road made the race live up to its reputation. In the interest of keeping your attention and focusing on the real subject of this post, I'll just give you a quick synopsis of how the day went.

No one was shy about racing, and the first lap was intense to say the least. Things cooled off on the second lap, and a break finally rolled away that the field was happy with. The break never gained more than a minute, things got hot again on lap 3, then on the last power climb before the long run-in to the finish climb, the race went nuclear. The field shattered, I didn't have the gas to make the split, and finished the race in a chase group, dropping most of my fellow chasers on the 2.5-mile finish climb and rolling in with Jerome Townsend and James Morrison 3 minutes down for 24th place. The winner? The Fin himself, who clearly earned it by being one of the few riders in the peleton to make any effort to control the break before Jamey Driscoll and BikeReg took over.

Ok, now that we've established a background story, I can try to answer my own question: "Where am I?" Working backwards, the answer to that question is off the front. Unfortunately, that's only the answer if we're working backwards. At the moment, I'm really just a face in the crowd, holding on for dear life and trying to survive in the shadows of the big boys. That's simply no way to live, let alone race. Going forward again, where I should be is off the front, trying to take advantage of my relative anonimity in the P1/2 field. I realize that when I toe the line every weekend, I'm not considered a threat the way any of the top riders are. And nor should I be. I haven't done anything yet to warrant that kind of respect or fear. The problem, then, is that I haven't taken advantage of that.

Rather than trying to mark the fast powerhouses in the race and hoping, rather unrealistically, that I don't get spit out the back when the shit hits the fan, I should be taking advantage of the long leash that I'm sure I'll be given and forging my way up the road with other riders who, like me, are not yet considered a true threat. That way, when the big boys decide to pull out their guns and are shedding riders in every direction, I'll be safely up the road, riding a steady pace and biding my time before they catch up. By then, I can at least hope that just a little bit of the sting from their relentless pace has been used up already. It would be ludicrous to think that I'm ready to match their speeds when they decide to turn on the heat, especially when I know that it is short, intense efforts that give me the most trouble, and long sustained ones that allow me to excel. Granted, it is a major gamble to take off up the road, where you are working much harder than you would be in the fold of the peloton. But the steady effort in the break can be so much less punishing than the constant accelerations of a charging peloton.

So what's missing now? In all honesty, just a little bit of courage and touch of racing savy. These are all things that I know well from racing for 4 years and watching the Tour on TV every summer. All that's left is to work up the nerve to actually apply the lessons I have learned to an actual race and risk losing in order to try to win. I realized yesterday how much I admire those racers who, like me, are not yet labeled a threat, but who actually have the courage to go up the road and try anyway. Some of you may be reading this post right now, and you probably know who you are, as you are the riders who try this same stunt week in and week out. Sometimes it fails, sometimes it succeeds. Either way, you played your best card, and that's really all you can ever do. Your courage inspires me, and I only hope that, starting now, I can find that courage in myself and join you in the possibly doomed, but not necessarily so, break of the day the next time we toe the line. Here's to hoping we make it!