An off-and-on road race over the years, the Poor College Kids Road Race has gone by a lot of names, and today’s edition used some subset of the original words in the title.
But what a venue.
You wonder why Pro teams come here for training camps? Nearly pristine roads and typically awesome weather. Like today. Those of you waiting until Blvd RR to start 2009, hey, check the weather forecast!
But seriously, the UCSB Cycling Team did a terrific job promoting this race and hopefully they raised some good money for their season. Judging by the (mostly) large fields, I’d say they banked a few grand. Nice.
OK, until earlier this week, I had planned to do the Pro/1/2 race. Some things happened, including getting a bit of intel that the entire Team Type 1 pro squad would be racing. I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of suffering. Throw in a few more random pros, like Aaron Olson and Ted King, and you could pretty much guarantee it would be fast.
The biggest shock of the day was to see M-Dubb lined up to race. No I did not photoshop in a picture of him. He really did it. Hairy legs and out-dated McGuire kit and everything! Very cool to see actually. He should be racing –for fun now– because he is absurdly strong.
As expected, Team Type 1 dictated the race, and after lots of attacks, they established a select front group which they drove all the way to the line. C-Walk bridged up and rising star Vinny Owens got in there too. I think they were the only amateurs. In the final few km’s, TT1 tried to keep the speed high but Aaron attacked them and messed up their plan. Well, not completely, since they still took first and second. Gritty ol’ C-Walk hung on for 4th, a damn fine result in that crowd!
Cool to see Platinum’s Brian Cook rip off a good sprint in the next group. Any sprint in which you nip speedster Aram is a good sprint! Platinum’s Seth Zaleski was right up there too, an awesome result for his first ever pro/1/2 race.
40+, 2 laps for 67 miles, ~45 starters
From the gun, Greg Leibert from Cynergy rolled pretty hard and, shockingly, there was no reaction from the field. Obviously many of these guys are not SoCal regulars.
I wasn’t about to let him TT away so I scooted on up with two others attached. Couple rotations and we already had a thirty second gap. Hmmm… 67 miles rotating with four guys? Why not?
Over the little bump of a hill and we looked back to see Todd Darley (Cynergy), Joe Wenninger (Cynergy), and Dave Gonyer (CA Pools) motoring up.
Greeeat, now Leibert had two teammates.
Our gap stayed at about one minute for the entire lap. At both turn-arounds, we could see the field was still motivated (with dudes like Mike Hecker and David Larsen pulling hard) so we never let off the gas.
Going into lap #2 we were seven, but we dropped two quickly, the numbers really favored Cynergy (3 out of 5). At the far turn-around, with 16 miles left to race, we saw that the field finally cracked and that our gap was safe.
On the return leg, Greg was strong and one of his surges popped his two teammates plus Gonyer. Lucky for me, so I started pulling hard and within a few minutes we were totally clear.
I was dying of thirst and totally fixated on Greg’s half-full bottles. Refreshing water sloshing around… I almost conceded the race in exchange for a swig! Then I thought about C-Walk and his 90-mile training rides on a single bottle.
Final time up the little bump and I pushed hard enough so Greg didn’t try any funny business. If he got a gap on me over the top, with 5 miles of false-flat descending, it would be all over.
Fortunately he didn’t, and we rotated together until about the final KM, upon which he jumped me after my pull. It was all I could do to pull him back, and then I locked on and he was stuck in front. I jumped at ~200 M and came by to win by half a bike.
Results: Pro 1/2
Chris Walker 4th
Brian Cook 17th
Seth Zaleski 20th
Ben Halderman Pack
Results: Masters 40+
Mark Fennell 1st
Chris Brown 27th
