Madera -- Shawn Pearson

Loads of great reports to come out of madera and I don't want to spoil any of them, but I'll share mine....

Drove down with Dimitri H. on Friday afternoon. Hit a little traffic through Stockton and Modesto, but we made good enough time to get to the road course and preride a little bit of it. Wow was it hot! Got to the hotel, checked in and then went to a divey Mexican joint for the best shrimp burrito I've ever had.

Saturday was a late start for me... my crit didn't go till 1:30 (which really ended up being 1:50). It was super hot (a record breaking 97 degrees) and I thing I drank about a half gallon of water and a quart of Gatorade just warming up. Troublingly, I got a flat about five minutes before the start, so I had to swap out a zooty race rear wheel for a less preferred rear (no power data either). The race was really not all that hard, but I raced it conservatively, trying not to burn up too much mojo in the heat. A break went up the road with Hernando, Larry Nolan and Brian Bosch in it. The break stayed away, and Larry got the time bonuses every time the bell rang. I came in an uneventful 12th or so, 17 seconds down on the break.

Went back to the car, drank another quart of Gatorade, ate a bagel, and drove to the TT course, where I'd be racing in two hours. The TT is basically a rectangle. Uh, a poorly marked rectangle at that (loads of people missed turns, and not just in the lower cats. One of the top AMD TT'ers rode himself out of contention on GC because of the poor markings on the course). The course circumnavigates an almond grove. I parked, got the trainer out, warmed up, drank a little more Gatorade and a little more water, then hit the course at 4:45 p.m.

I'd felt like I'd held back a little in the crit and I was itching to stretch my legs. Other than slowing down for a turn that wasn't really a turn (all those cones at that corner are to let you know NOT to turn there, duh!), which saw me scrub speed from 28 mph to 11 mph, I felt pretty good. I pushed it wide open and was ready to puke by the end. Make of it what you will, but my powertap reported 360 watts average power for the 23:45 duration (previous best 20 minute power -- ever -- was 320). Frustratingly, though, that was only good for 14th! Mid pack! I did 23:45; Brian Bosch of CVC did 21:53. Ugh. Whatever, stupid bike racing.

We had a great team dinner on Saturday thanks to Spencer. It was really nice to get to sit down with my teammates and break bread without any of the other distractions of life. For a weekend we were stage racers, and we talked racing. It was a hoot.

So I went into today's road stage in 14th (out of 29), 2:49 down on GC. The road stage is a looping affair, and our group did four laps (65 miles) over the loop. Half of the loop is really good pavement with a long, rolling, false flat-ish descent. The next third of the course is probably the worst pavement known to man. Awful stuff. And of course that's where people always drill it. The next third is a roller coaster set of whoop-dee-doos, and the finish line is at the top of the last one. I'd been cautioned that with the team tactics at play that if a break with the right composition went up the road, that that would be the race. And that's exactly what happened. About seven miles into the race, a small group of eight, which included Michael Hernandez (why does that name come up so often?) took off on the first lap, right at the bad pavement section. The composition of the break was good (Hernando, two AMD guys, one of whom was high on gc, a spine GC leader, a CVC worker bee and a couple of other free agents like me), so if the break made it up the road, the likelihood of a big chase was slim.

As luck would have it, I made the break. Mucho luck. Wow. Once through the bad pavement and the rollers and back to the good pavement, Hernando set the break on a swiss-clock rotation, and we TTT'd. And we TTT'd. And we TTT'd. Two of the eight dropped out with a flat and a mechanical and then we were six. Our moto ref updated us periodically with time splits. "45 seconds!" Two laps in we had ridden through the P12 field that had started five minutes ahead of ours, and we had over a minute on the pack.

And by the third lap, the moto came by and told us we were at four minutes! All of my GC deficit erased! At that point my sole goal was the old mantra "never get dropped from the break," and I didn't do a lot of work from about 2.5 laps in. Which is not to say I could have... the rough sections were taking their toll and it was all I could do to stay on. I'd take a pull every once in a while, but I felt like I was messing it up more than helping so I mostly just sat on the back like a freeloader. On lap four through the rough stuff, the attacks began and I was hanging on for dear life. I stayed with two huge surges, but the third cracked me wide open and it happened... I got dropped from the break, about four miles from the finish.

Tail between my legs, I resolved to salvage what I could and still beat the pack in if I could. In contrast to the previous day's stellar power output, I limped to the finish on an empty-tank 260 watts. I crossed the finish line down about 1:15 on the leaders (now down to just four, since one of the others flatted)... and immediately looked at my watch. The seconds slowly ticked by. One minute. Then two.... then three! YES! I'd salvaged enough to jump from 14th on GC to 5th!

So home I came with a T shirt, $15 in my pocket (which Dimitri and I promptly blew at the first In-n-Out we came across), and a weekend fully of teamy-good memories.