Tokeneke Classic Road Race Men's Cat. 4

This was second year doing this race, and my second year failing miserably at this event. Last year I chalked it up to overtraining, or more accurately I realize now that last year my constant case of getting dropped was due to overtraining; this year it may have been a repeat case of too much riding. My little TT experiment on Friday evening, coupled with the Concord Criterium on Saturday was not taking its toll on my legs.

I woke up tired and with sore legs, not a good sign for a pretty hilly race. The drive is a little more than 2 hours, I gave Dave a lift and we proceeded to park, ride over to the registration and check in about 40 minutes or so before my race started. After finding a puncture in my front tubular tire before the Concord Crit, which for some reason I forgot to mention in my race report as it saddened me to no end to not be able to run a full set of Mavic Carbones and just the rear, I was now riding day two with my hybrid wheelset of Fulcrum shallow section clincher in the front and Mavic Carbone deep section carbon tubular in the rear. The race was technically full at 100 riders but the start had less than that, and the results only show 81 finishers. I was about mid-pack at the start lined up with Stephen Rock, the only other BRCer in my field when I quickly exited to get one more pee in, just in case. I then found myself lined up in the back, as usual, with a huge field, on really small roads. Not a recipe for success in my book.

This race is comprised of a 22 mile loop that we do two laps of. The race website states that there is a total of 4400feet of climbing for 44 miles, and lists Hilltowns as only have 3600 feet of climbing for 56 miles. I don’t know if someone’s math is off, but I can definitively say after doing Tokeneke twice and Hilltowns four times, that Hilltown is categorically a much MUCH tougher race than Tokeneke. That being said, Tokeneke is hard because the climbs in the middle of each lap are short but steep, and the finishing climb is only 5-6% but at least 2 miles, which is demoralizing if you aren’t feeling good, but great if you are a world class power climber.

I find myself in the back for the first several miles, sort of hanging back through some pretty fast descending sections, which only leads me to have to push unnecessarily to latch back on to the group each time this happens. It starts to drizzle a little bit at about mile 7 or so and this slickens the road, which of course makes me more nervous for the usual impending Cat. 4 disaster[s] that will inevitably take place. Thankfully nothing happened to us through the race, at least not that I saw. As its slightly raining and I am catching back on, I notice a juniors rider, a Mystic Velo kid who I have seen at several races and who happens to have mroe than 50 upgrade points but is sandbagging in the 4’s, peeing on/off the bike. I marvel at his ability to 1. relax enough to actually urinate, and 2. his ability to not fall down while trying to pull down his shorts enough to pee while riding slightly downhill on wet roads. I am off the back approaching from his far left on the yellow line, fearing that this rider’s urine will start pelting me in the face. After he is done he casually pushes way up into the field as I nervously reattach myself to the peloton. He is a better than me, able to pee on the bike and goes on to finish 3rd while I will soon be dropped.

We go into a slight downhill and then turn right onto a completely disastrous road that apparently has not been fixed either in 100 years, or 1 year [it could be either seeing as how roads seem to go years without being fixed in New England or they are fixed and then ruined a short time later]. This is the first test of the legs and I am starting to fade a bit. I get out of saddle several times but my rear wheel is slipping because the road is wet and there are so many holes that I am trying to avoid. I get over this little climb and proceed to hammer down a slight downhill that is still a bad road but not as bad as the climbing portion. Unfortunately the main climb in the middle of the loop is shortly upon us and try as I might I get detached from the main group.

As I crest the hill I find myself alone for a stretch and then a couple of riders come up to me, one in particular looking strong. He and I try to work together to catch the group and we pass a couple of stragglers and for the next few miles we bury ourselves, coming close a couple of times to reattaching, one time we are literally about 200 meters behind the race official car but as they finish cresting a little hill the super fast descending section of the course comes up and we have no chance. We start our descent, my front wheel doesn’t have a speed magnet so I have no idea how fast I was going, but it was easily over 45mph. We see the group for a little bit and then after one little rise in the road followed by another even longer and steeper descending section they are gone forever.

The rest of the race is a bit of a blur to me as I was too focused on failing then on anything else. At one point before the end of the first lap there were other riders with me, but I cannot remember how many. We go over the finishing climb, which is now just insulting to my legs, as it steadily climbs at 5% for a full two miles, on a road that is mostly straight so you can see your doom for an inordinate amount of time up the road, the time of climb that I hate because it stares you down for so long. The next lap found me riding first with a group of about 5 riders, which later swelled to around 12 guys. When the group was smaller one rider in particular, I don’t remember the club name, kept attacking our little group, even though we were about 15 to 20 miles out from the finish line. I realized that I could have been accused of this earlier in my short racing career and I have learned that this really annoys guys who have been dropped and mostly just want to work together to get to the finish line. It is one thing to attack out of a group near the finish, 5 miles in or so because you want a higher placing in the results, but so far out, its futile and sort of rude. The group mentality takes over though and every time this guy attacks, everyone else chases him down which causes every other rider to dig in a bit each time becaue they don’t want to be left behind. After doing this numerous times I ride up alongside him and yell out asking him if he is going to keep attacking the rest of the way or work with us, and that if he is going to attack then just attack and drop us because it was annoying us. I then launch my own little attack which was into a downhill so I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere but I was doing it out of anger.

Eventually we find a small group attaching itself to us, swelling our ranks to about a dozen riders. I could tell that most of the guys were tired and not full of that much energy, except for one Cycle Loft guy who had dropped his chain on the first climb in the first lap which caused him to get dropped. The constant attacking guy kept attacking even as we were riding through the fast descending section near the end of lap 2. I told Cycle Loft guy to let him go and that when the road flattened out we would come over the top. This didn’t work as everyone chased after him even though we were all descending. The road flattened out after the descent and there was a couple of miles of flattish roads before the final climb. Right before the final climb started I knew that I wanted to launch my own attack to try and ride away from everyone and get a higher finishing result. I launch my attack and I ride hard for a full 30 seconds as the climb is starting, all in my big ring, before I sit down and look back, only seeing the Cycle Loft rider right behind me as the other riders are all spent by now. At this point I would have been happy to just ride in with this last guy but as I point of pride I want to beat him. I was in my 39×25 and 39×24 for most of this climb, not because it was that steep but because my legs were tired and I wanted to spin rather than grind. About halfway through the climb I drop down a gear or two and put a little dig in to see where the Cycle Loft guy is. He stays right on my wheel and eventually pulls in front of me. I know that the road will flatten out a little bit before there is a further uphill section, another flat area, a slight downhill through the feed zone and then more flat to the finish. When the road starts to flatten out I go into the big chainring and launch one more attack, using the police car that is now for some reason riding in front of us as my rabbit to chase. After 30 seconds I look back and don’t see the Cycle Loft rider on my wheel. I continue to push on despite knowing that he won’t catch me and I pass one more rider on the way.

I finish 42nd out of 81 finishers, 7:48 down on the winner, but 10 seconds in front of the Cycle Loft rider, although it seemed like more and 1 to 2 minutes up on the rest of the riders that had been in our group for most of the second lap.

Lessons learned -

1. don’t do a hard training ride 2 days before a big race, especially not if you have a crit the day before to open up your legs.

2. without going into any details on here [ask me in person], avoid Cyclonauts riders.