(no subject)
So, I competed in my first race yesterday!
It was a pretty amazing event. I've never seen anything like it. I got there an hour and a half early so I could watch some other races, and they were going REALLY fast! I thought I could do it though, so I wasn't worried.
When my race set off, I was in the front of the 50 man pack, so I was in a good position. It's good to be in the front of the pack, because there you can draft off of the people in front, but you don't experience the need to catch up to everybody constantly.
I'll explain with pictures:
Here's the course. 7 mile round trip and much hillier than I'm used to.
These 2 are before the race. I'm the guy in blue. I'm just waiting and listening to the guy spout off some rules of the road.
And we're off! We're starting our first lap, and you can see that my position is fairly close to the front. I stayed there for awhile. At this point in the race, being in the middle of the field was pretty easy. No turns or anything. Then we came to turn one. I should have remembered the workings of turns in races from my dad, but at this point I wasn't really thinking about it. So the group would glide into a turn, which freaked me out a little because I was on the inside of the turn and had never done any group riding before, and then they would go into heavy acceleration out of it. This was the part that caught me off guard. So I tried to keep up with them, but the acceleration on my part was purely a reaction. Given this, I started sinking further and further back until:
That's me in the pack third of the bunch. Not good. I was getting tired too because I wasn't accustomed to the acceleration, just a smooth costantly paced ride. So when we came back around to the u turn you can see on the map on our second lap, they dropped me, and I completely lost the group. So I had to take the ride of shame on the wheel truck back to the front line.
It may have been dissappointing and a little scary, but it was still hella fun. I've gotta go find a group to ride with now so I can practice heavy turning and group riding and all that. :D
It was a pretty amazing event. I've never seen anything like it. I got there an hour and a half early so I could watch some other races, and they were going REALLY fast! I thought I could do it though, so I wasn't worried.
When my race set off, I was in the front of the 50 man pack, so I was in a good position. It's good to be in the front of the pack, because there you can draft off of the people in front, but you don't experience the need to catch up to everybody constantly.
I'll explain with pictures:
Here's the course. 7 mile round trip and much hillier than I'm used to.
These 2 are before the race. I'm the guy in blue. I'm just waiting and listening to the guy spout off some rules of the road.
And we're off! We're starting our first lap, and you can see that my position is fairly close to the front. I stayed there for awhile. At this point in the race, being in the middle of the field was pretty easy. No turns or anything. Then we came to turn one. I should have remembered the workings of turns in races from my dad, but at this point I wasn't really thinking about it. So the group would glide into a turn, which freaked me out a little because I was on the inside of the turn and had never done any group riding before, and then they would go into heavy acceleration out of it. This was the part that caught me off guard. So I tried to keep up with them, but the acceleration on my part was purely a reaction. Given this, I started sinking further and further back until:
That's me in the pack third of the bunch. Not good. I was getting tired too because I wasn't accustomed to the acceleration, just a smooth costantly paced ride. So when we came back around to the u turn you can see on the map on our second lap, they dropped me, and I completely lost the group. So I had to take the ride of shame on the wheel truck back to the front line.
It may have been dissappointing and a little scary, but it was still hella fun. I've gotta go find a group to ride with now so I can practice heavy turning and group riding and all that. :D