Alliquipa criterium

Matt is taking his cycling a lot more seriously these days, and has been enjoying opportunities to race in a competitive field. Like I said, he has been doing these Criterium races weekly. In his category of racers, he should be able to win, or at least come out towards the front, depending on his strategy and a bit of chance. It makes him train hard, and gives him some metric to work on.

This weekend there was another event in Alliquipa, 30 min from our house, that he wanted to enter. I decided to go with, since I am still not fully understanding the strategy and etiquette of this style race. In this race, the pack (today, almost 30 riders including amateur men and juniors) sets a couple "pace laps" and then the official tells them how many total laps they'll do. They pack generally stays all together for aerodynamics until the last lap- or even the last corner of the last lap. I am told you burn a lot of energy being out front, so they take advantage of the group to conserve energy. The winner is never the fastest overall rider- they actually have another designation for that at some races, the Most Aggressive Rider (MAR) who leads the most laps- just the guy who was placed strategically for the sprint finish.

Today's race was in an industrial park, so I could only watch the racers on the long straight between the start finish. The lap was 1.6 miles, and the official decided to give the Category 5 racers 10 total laps (about 45 minutes of riding). Every time the guys came around Matt was in the back half. I can't lie, it makes me worried. He wanted to come to this race because he thought he could do well- what is he doing back there? Is something wrong? But at the start of the last lap, he was suddenly in the upper quartile. The final sprint started a long ways back, but Matt was making a quick charge with another guy right up to the line. It was SO close, they actually run a camera to collect finish times. Neither guy knew who won, but both were very gracious. When the results were posted, the camera declared Matt the winner by a tire! Hooray!

I hadn't realized (since we showed up for the first heat at 7:30am with the other Cat 5 and junior racers), that this was a big event. The Master's race launched after Matt's, and the women's and Cat 4 racers were milling around in the lot waiting for their turn. Unlike the weekly Tuesday races, this is an annual event that counts as a USA cycling event (if you are collecting points to level up or go pro or some such. I don't think Matt is, particularly, but it is another metric). So this was a cool event to get his first trophy! One of his teammates/coworkers, who opted to race with the Masters (who are, for the record, much faster than the younger guys) was there to see him. It was a pretty cool way to start the day, I know Matt is feeling good about finally getting a win. We went to a Bob Evans for breakfast on the way home by way of celebration.