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BIG
MONEY CRITS AND SUCH The dog days of August arrive as Superweek winds down, and so too the large dollar crits of the Chicago suburbs arrive. First on deck is the Elgin Cycling Classic which began as a UCI Espior event on a tough 4 mile kermesse style track back in 2000. The race has since morphed for better or worse into a downtown criterium with large payouts to all fields. The Procrit paid $5000 to 20 places plus a bevy of $100 primes. Loyal (Feed)Zone readers will recall the 2006 Elgin Cycling Classic as the low point of the summer of my discontent. It was here at this race last year that I found myself completely unable to escape the lickspittles on a course theoretically suited to my particular abilities. I had my ass handed to me and then to add to the ignominy of the day, I was taken out in a crash precipitated by a certain sMACK rider on the penultimate lap. I wrote about it. You can look up the details here. The first paragraph says it all; but feel free to read the full piece if you're so inclined. This year, after coming off a reasonably successful Superweek and being in an infinitely better place physically, I was looking forward to racing again in Elgin to put matters to right. I arrived in Elgin exactly 30 minutes prior to the scheduled start of the Procrit. I was unable to do the masters race earlier in the day as The Lovely Kathy had a business trip to Boston and had to catch a flight at noon. I was her airport shuttle. Upon finishing registration as the 84th rider, I had a full 20 minutes to return to my car, change clothes, put my bike together and warm up. Since it was 150 degrees with 72% humidity, the last item on the list proved not to be much of an issue. By the time I rode to the start finish area to catch the last 2 laps of the Cat 3 race, I was in full sweat. The course was 1k with 8 corners, a fast downhill followed by a heavily hay baled right hander over poor pavement and then a sharp climb at 10% back into the headwind start finish area. I staged next to Priebe - the only sMACK in the race. HeadsMACK was friendly and the détente remains strong into its second week. The other sMACKs - 15 in all stacked the 30 rider masters field, but were only able to secure 6th place as their top finish which was a shame. HeadsMACK and I talked about tire pressure and rolling resistance while Priebe picked crusty old pieces of what used to be handlebar tape off of his bike. I offered to get him a roll of new tape, which he declined. He's gritty not pretty as Billy(Labor) is fond of saying. The race started slowly which meant that I was able to ride the front for most of the first couple of laps. Then, announcer Zellman rang the bell for the first of several $100 primes on the next lap. The bell continued to ring about every third lap thereafter and the race completely detonated. An Aussie on the Colavita team went off the front and managed to snare two primes and the Grand Performance team drove the front. As the field was splitting I kept crossing gaps to stay in contention. As I made the final junction to a 15 rider group about 5 seconds up the road, that group split into two. There were now 9 up the road and my group numbered six - Priebe, ABD captain Mike Ebert, Grand Performance sprinter Pete Hannah, one of the White twins from WI (I can't tell them apart), myself and who I believe was Sean Metz from Turin. He wasn't really around for long enough for me to be sure. About 5 laps after our group formed, Priebe attacked for a $100 prime which he and I contested. He won, and our group split again down to four. Hannah, White Priebe and I worked pretty well together as we chased a group of three that had fallen off from the front group, but we couldn't close the 15 second gap no matter how we tried. I attacked on the bell lap and seized up mightily. Priebe countered and I was helpless to chase. Hannah and White gave chase as I flailed in behind. By the time the race ended, I believe there were approximately 32 finishers. The heat, humidity and 51 trips up that damn little hill took its toll. Eric Marcotte from Grand Performance won. I was 12th. Earlier in the day Stone Pony took second in the master race. He split the field, drove the break raced courageously and was beaten at the line by a loathsome wheel leech who NEVER took a pull in the six rider winning break. He won the race, but lost any shred respect he ever had in the masters' peloton. Ironically, it was this exact rider that my acerbic remarks in the previous (Feed)Zone epilogue were directed toward. He is quickly becoming persona non grata and he deserves it.
The Tour of Elk Grove has the largest purse for Procrit racing in the US. Hospitals must be making a ton of dough these days, because the former Bank of America classic in Charlotte, NC, which I was pleased to see was won by my old fiend Frank Pipp, is also now sponsored by a Presbyterian Hospital. This is all well and good. I like community involvement by health care providers and I'm sure that they make up for their sponsorship commitment in clavicle repair and ER fees on race day. Go here for details to check out the obscene payouts! $152,500 for the Procrits and time trial stage race - not to mention $500 and $1000 primes every other lap. $15,00 for a 4.7 mile TT! Are you kidding me? However, the (Feed)Zone is not concerned with Procrits that are closed to amateurs. I did not do this race last year but as the story goes, there were so many crashes taking out guys who were paid large appearance fees to race that the organizer decided to create a separate Cat 1,2 race to keep the pros safe. This worked out well as for the most part, as all races were safely contested with only a small number of bonehead moves that resulted in mostly minor injuries. Unfortunately my team mate Moso was caught up in the stupidest one. I'm not sure if the rider who caused it was over the age of 30, but if so, he would be featured in my "Masters Doing Stupid Things" section. On the last lap of the Cat 1,2 race, as the field was about 2 kilometers from the line, Moso was positioned well for a potential top 20 finish. A rider who is yet to be identified decided to make use the sidewalk as a means to move up from mid pack and when he jumped off the sidewalk back into the field, the inevitable pile up occurred. Moso landed on his shoulder, but at the scene it did not appear to be a fractured clavicle. The other riders suffered mostly road rash and required stitches etc. One wonders how the dunderhead who caused this was able to get an upgrade into Cat 2 or 1. If anyone knows who this rider is, please contact the (Feed)Zone so that I may publicly ridicule him. Otherwise the race was rather mundane. The course lent itself to a fast race with no breakaways and teams with able sprinters did their best to keep the race guppo compatto. I had moved into the top 30 or so spots with 3 laps to go when I had to slam to a stop behind a crash caused by a rider who clipped the barrier just after the start finish line. As I was passed by nearly the entire field, my race was realistically over. In the end we covered 43 miles in 1:30 for an average pace of 28.7 mph. Steven Howard of the Priority Health elite team won $4000 for taking first place. That's a fairly decent hourly wage depending on the number of team mates he had to share the haul with. His team deserves whatever cut they received as they did a good job of controlling and pace making along with the Grand Performance and Abercrombie teams. I HAVE A NEW HERO Up until yesterday, my cycling hero was Fabian Cancellara, the big Swiss TT specialist. My family has Swiss roots, and at 6'1" 82 kilos, Fabian and I are nearly the same size etc. There the similarity ends (other than Zipp wheels, more on that later) but that was then, this is now. My new hero is a slightly built, mild mannered computer engineer with a page boy haircut. I'd lay odds of a break successfully staying away for more than 3 laps on the Elk Grove course at roughly equal to those of a certain sMACK rider remaining upright through the course of an entire cycling season. In other words, pretty slim odds. Despite these odda, my new hero powered a three rider break that put 30 seconds into a raging field of 125 masters (30+ Cat1,2,3) vying for a $4000 purse. To add to the long odds, the field averaged 28 mph for the race. There was plenty of fire power in the race. Stone Pony, Scott Pearson and Jamie Kimberly were three strong riders on good days and they put it together on the right day. Jamie won what I believe to be his first masters race by cheating. You see, he is a 30 year old Cat 1 and he out sprinted two guys over 40. In order to be fair, Jamie should have spotted the two old guys half a kilo before he started to sprint. None the less, he richly deserves his $1000 check and $200 in primes. That's $1200 for winning a race that was about: 38 minutes long. Not bad. Almost like a real job. Jamie, who has consumed my liquor many times at OctDruberFest is interviewing for post doc work in Aeronautical Engineering so he's no $12k dreamer. He is a smart guy as evidenced by the fact that his two primary prospective employers are Johns Hopkins University and Northwestern University. As much as I like Jamie, I'm hoping he goes to Hopkins, because I don't want to have to race against him in masters races. As for my day - I was the tail gunner. I unfortunately staged vary far back and the race was either strung out single file at 33 per or packed gutter to gutter with riders. In either case, movement in and about the pack was nearly impossible after the first lap of the race. Too boot, with the race being only 35 minutes in duration, the field never really tired enough for the typical ebbs and flows of the race pace to occur. It started fast and stayed that way. I have many more excuses I can offer for my FLAIL of course but I won't belabor the point. The important thing is Stone Pony put another feather in his cap in what is proving to be a very stellar season full of note worthy results. One last thing - I promised BurnersMACK I would mention him. With 3 laps to go in the master race I saw the field do the tell tale scatter indicating a rider was down. Indeed, a Met Life rider had gone down. He was in duck and cover mode on the asphalt as the pel divided and surged around him, but strangely, there was no bike on the pavement anywhere near him. It was only after about 100 meters that I saw a bike on the pavement. The physics of this did not make sense. If the bike flew that far, why didn't other riders go down as the bike skidded around the pel? As it turns out, when the rider went down, his bike went airborne and landed on BurnersMACKs broad shoulders. He carried the bike for about 100 metes before he was able to dislodge it from his person. It's remarkable that BurnersMACK did not fall down himself, but he some how managed to come out of the situation with nothing more than a surface scratch on his leg and an out of true rear wheel and he took no other riders down in the process. We could use more riders with that kind of skill in master racing. Next time -time trials and some SWEEEEEET product reviews.
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