My First Road Race: Killington Stage Race

 
I left Baltimore around 5:00 on Friday evening, and headed north through Pennsylvania to avoid what was sure to be a traffic debacle in the major metropolitan corridor that is I-95. After zipping along for several hours, I finally made it to my hometown of Mendon, Vermont around 1:00 in the morning.

Sleeping in the next morning, I got up and had a leisurely breakfast consisting of about 200 calories for every hour before the first stage of the race, which was scheduled to start in the early afternoon. I cruised down to race HQ and picked up my packet and pint glass. What, no free T-Shirt? Oh well.

Stage 1

The first stage was a circuit race on an 18-mile loop. My category (Men's 4/5) was slated to do two laps, while the upper categories had the pleasure of doing even more laps. I was dead calm until I got to the starting line, then the pre-race nerves started to kick in, aided by the two double-caffeinated energy gels I downed before lining up near the back of the field. I barely heard the official say something about centerline rules and sprints and then we were moving.

The ride started with a 1-mile neutral approach to the course behind a pace car. Once on the course, we cruised along a gentle downhill. I was too focused on holding a steady line and wondering why my heart rate was so jacked to notice the perfect weather, blue sky, and clean mountain creek we were riding along. All the advice I'd been given and read about kept running through my head: stay in the front 1/3 of the pack. If you're not passing people you're going backwards. Keep your nose out of the wind. Don't chase all the breaks. Don't attack unless you know why you're attacking.

About 5 miles into the first lap, we made a right-hand turn and started to climb, ascending 500 feet over 6 miles to the first KOM sprint point. I was fully engaged in trying not to expend too much energy, and trying to figure out how the whole operation worked. After the KOM, we went through the feed zone and began a very steep descent, where I reached my top speed of 45mph.  Beyond that, it was a speedy ride back to the lap / finish line.

The second lap played out much the same as the first, except that when we got to the KOM sprint, I jumped on it for some reason and ended up being the second person to cross the line. Immediately after that, while I was trying to recover (read: not puke from having my heart beat at 197bpm, well over what my estimated max is), I was passed by 3 or 4 other riders just before hitting the downhill. I dropped down into an aero tuck to try to catch them, but they had too much of a lead on me. When we hit the bottom of the hill, I pulled like there was no tomorrow - we were getting near the finish line, and I wanted to be near the front. Little did I know that the entire peloton was riding my wheel, and I was the dumb thug that was bridging them all up to the break (one of the other riders gave me "kudos" on the monster pull later - whoops!).

With my legs on fire and starting to turn noodly, it was all I could do to keep pace with the front portion of the pack as we screamed down the final grade towards the finish line. It was all turning out to be a very exciting finish.... and then the pace car started to slow down. A lot. Riders started calling out "Slowing!" as we slowed to a crawl, and then finally to a stop within sight of the red banners marking the 500M line.


Ambulances and emergency vehicles blocked the whole road. After much speculation and some tidbits of information from the officials who were walking around, it turned out that the Cat 3's who had been in front of us had a "mishap" resulting in (rumor has it) a dislocated shoulder, a fractured wrist, and two riders on oxygen. Yikes! After standing in the hot sun for about 20 minutes, the officials got things sorted out and we neutraled into the finish, everyone taking the same time.


Garmin Data for Stage 1

Stage 2

After the fun and excitement of Stage 1, I was pumped for Stage 2, which was the Time Trial stage. Since the only event that I have done that comes close to a road race is the Team BBC Tuesday Night Time Trial (a super awesome event, by the way), I had a little bit of familiarity with how this worked.

The KSR Time Trial course is 11 miles long, climbing just under 400 feet (which is really flat for VT). I got to the start by doing a warm-up ride down the course on the other side of the road from the racers. Since there were no General Classification rankings to determine start position due to the neutralization of Stage 1, they started the riders in alphabetical order, which meant I started second.

The starting official held my saddle so I could clip in, and the countdown started. When they said "Go", I pedaled a few strokes and gingerly shifted into the big chainring, a 53 tooth affair. I had played with the idea of getting a bigger gear ratio for this event, but I'm glad that my local bike shop mechanic talked me out of it - I settled into the 53T ring and a cog somewhere in the middle, and there was no way I could have driven a higher ratio!

Although the course is billed as being mostly flat, it did have some perceptible dips and hills. I spun up the pedals, keeping an average cadence of 99 RPM and ramping my heart rate up to just at lactate threshold within the first minute. I kept a steady state effort for all the flat parts of the course, trying to keep my mental focus on putting out wattage.

Somewhere near four miles in, I passed the racer who had left the starting gate 30 seconds before me. I kept thinking to myself, "Even if someone passes me, it doesn't matter because I'm not racing them, I'm racing me, and I am putting out as hard as I can right now".

The course finishes with a short, steep 60 foot climb going into the final stretch; murderous legs which at this point had the consistency of a fine marmalade. I somehow managed to pull through into the finish, and did several laps around the finish area parking lot to get my breathing under control before saying hi to my family, who was waiting for me there.

We sat around and waited for the rest of the riders to come in before the results were posted - to my shock and surprise, I had taken second place! We spent the afternoon recovering with a lazy paddle around the local reservoir, it was fantastic. After getting off the water, we headed down to the Long Trail Brewery to attend the awards ceremony, where I received my first ever prize money! A very exciting moment. 

Garmin Data for Stage 2





Stage 3
I got up nice and early to get ready for Stage 3, which promised to be the most demanding stage of all. If you look at the elevation profile of Stage 3, it has a hill at the front, a pretty big bump in the middle, and something that looks like a brick wall at the end. This brick wall is called East Mountain Road, and I rode down it on my warm-up ride to start, as I wanted to get a feel for what the pavement looked like and how nasty it was truly going to be. It didn't look good.

Arriving at the starting line, I got called up to the front because of my second-place finish in the Time Trial. We rolled out behind the pace car, which kept things neutral for the first kilometer. There was some relaxed chatting amongst the field, and everyone sounded cheerful and a bit tired, which was exactly how I felt.

The first four miles of Stage 3 were a picture-perfect warm-up ride - pancake flat, no wind, and nice warm morning sunshine. After the flats, we climbed up the flanks of Killington Pass, and made a right turn onto Route 100, where the pace started to pick up.

Again, my strategy was to just sit in the pack and try not to tire myself out to early. However, on several occasions I found myself out in front, pulling (gently). Each time, I asked myself "what the hell are you doing out front, rookie?!?" and slowed a bit to hide behind another rider. The first 20 miles of gentle downhill grade proceeded like this, feeling like a morning spin with 50 of my buddies, no aggression whatsoever. Someone even complimented the paint job on my bike.

On a side note, Vermont is still recovering from the damage caused by Hurricane Irene last year, and there were some huge and obvious signs of damage on many river banks and a few destroyed buildings. One of the other signs of this was the very rough pavement during this first part of the stage. One rider got a flat, and another's chain got rattled around so much that it dropped.

After this bumpy but mellow ride, we made a right turn on to North Road, the first major climb. I pushed to keep pace, but purposely did not hammer it. I didn't know how long the hill was; it kept going up (steeply) around a corner and I could not see the top. Eventually, the amount of wheezing coming from around me increased, as did the number of riders that I steadily ground past. I wasn't trying to go faster, they were just starting to go slower. Soon, I found myself steadily climbing with a few other riders, and nobody else around. After a short while, it became obvious that we were the group that was going to fight it out for the first KOM competition of the day.

When the 500M banner rolled around, I attacked! (Hey, I was there, why not?). Unfortunately, 500M turns out to be a lot longer than I expected. My legs ran out of gas with about 100M to go, and instead of crossing the line first, I crossed the line third.

The group of us was ragged and strung out, but we all caught our breath and formed up into an ad hoc group. We came through the feed zone, where I learned out to take a water bottle handup without throwing your caged bottle away (you put it in your back jersey pocket before taking the handup, duh!).  After the feed zone, the idea that we had dropped the field began to percolate through our fatigue-ridden heads. A paceline coalesced, and we began to communicate about getting a nice rotation of pulls going. 

This sort of broke apart as we screamed through a section of dirt road downhill at 35mph, but re-emerged as we hit the valley floor and began the long slog twenty miles towards the looming spectre of East Mountain Road. The miles flew by as I began to get the hang of taking a 30 second pull, then dropping back and keeping enough speed to smoothly grab the wheel of the last guy in the line. By the time my turn rolled around again, I would be ready for another solid 30-second effort.

Everybody in the group took good pulls. There was one rider who began to fade about 12 miles in; he started to take soft pulls, then he skipped a few rotations, then he popped and we dropped him. My legs were screaming but I knew that if I got dropped, I'd be left in the no-man's land between the breakaway and the peloton. Not a place I wanted to be. I managed to hold on to the pace, which was averaging about 24mph for a half an hour.

Eventually, we reached the base of East Mountain Road, and the teamwork which we'd been using shattered into a battle royale as we started up the crazy steep 10% grade. My legs were turning into water, but I kept grinding it and pushing, thinking to myself "no wonder they recommended a compact crank for this course!". At this point, it wasn't even about hanging with the leaders or competing, it was just sheer survival. My pace just happened to be right behind that of the two guys in the lead, and I took the third place in the East Mountain KOM.

I got passed by one climber near the top as my legs started to near the verge of cramping up. As the grade leveled out a bit, I played a game of yo-yo leapfrog with another rider for a bit - and then my chain dropped when transitioning from a brief downhill into another climb. While firing off an artillery barrage of curses at my drivetrain, I managed to re-engage my chain and hobble into a gear that could support forward motion under pedal power.

Emerging from the shady wooded cover of East Mountain road, I made a sharp left onto the final stretch of the course - a half mile, three-lanes-of-broken-pavement, exposed and headwind-swept expanse of uphill. It was probably one of the toughest things I've ever done physically, but I managed to crawl up it and finish in fifth place. 

Garmin Data for Stage 3

Then it was back to Baltimore and reality. What a great weekend!