Speedweek has been like a punch in the gut. I traveled down here by myself, as you can read in my previous blog post, which in and of itself was pretty scary. I've had a couple of near disasters with my phone almost dying and that being my only means of directions back to my host housing. (Don't laugh, who carries maps nowadays?) Besides all of this the racing has been intense. I'm not going to lie and say I expected to come down here and get my ass kicked; I mean, I knew it was going to be hard, but I didn't expect it to be skull-crushingly, skin-evaporatingly difficult...
It's been a long time since I've been pulled from a criterium. I like criteriums, they suit my strengths: short, fast punchy efforts. From my own experience they tend to be periods of efforts followed by periods of recovery. However short, there have always been periods of recovery. I was not prepared for a race with none of that.
Athens Twilight Terrapin Criterium is definitely the fastest, hardest criterium I have ever done. Its layout is simple, it is a four corner crit with a small hill on the backstretch that slopes down into the last two corners. Flatter crits are usually faster paced, as there aren't any obstacles to slow us down, but holy hell I didn't expect it to be skin blisteringly, nitrous fast.
Let me pause for a moment and tell you a little bit about what the atmosphere was like. The course is fully metal-barricaded on the inside and the outside, and for good reason, for on either sides of those barriers is a frat party. That's right, a frat party. To make Athen's Twilight you simply take a bunch of drunken college kids, a bunch of drunken normal people, and you layer them like cake frosting all around the course, but you do a really shitty job. Some places have three layers of frat parties, some places have ten! It doesn't matter, this is your drunken human barrier-cake you can frost it however the crap you want. You then coat it with broken-glass sprinkles, fumigate it with a healthy dose of cigarette smoke, and then yell really loudly at the center of the cake (the racers). I'm not sure how well that cake analogy just worked out but hopefully I painted a thrilling picture.
To some this may sound disgusting, (broken glass, drunken cigarette cake?) but let me assure you that it was awesome. I have never seen so many spectators lining a course in my life. There is a trend in bike races that only bike racers come to watch them. Not so with Athen's Twilight. There were people from all walks of life, all united in their cause to get outside on a nice night, get plastered and watch men and women and a car, and some motorcycles go really fast in circles and sometimes crash into each other and the pavement.
I lined up not realizing that my destruction was imminent. Naively, I did not believe that this would be the hardest criterium I had ever done. Just getting to the start line was trial enough. Since as I mentioned before there were barricades lining the inside and out, I wandered, (wheeled?) around looking for a small break in the wall of metal so I could get myself onto the race course. I finally found a crossing only to discover that there was…a running race going on? I suppose this is what makes Athen's Twilight so popular: it has something for everyone. The only issue with this is that we were already running behind, and with a 7:45 start time we were definitely going to be racing in the dark.
Finally we were all able to stage, right at dusk. They did the call-ups, waving all the super-fast women in front of our faces, kind of like a little taunting preclude to the race. "Haha! Look who's going to kick your ass today, these women are!" The crowd was getting a little crazy by this point and I was getting worried about my ability to see the race course.
They blew the whistle and we were off, stretched out like a long, string of taffy right from the get go. Oh, and who missed her pedal? This girl. I was subsequently shuffled right to the back, right where I did not want to be, tail-gunning territory. Let me tell you a little bit about how a criterium works. The speeds and the efforts actually differ drastically depending on where you are in the field. The riders in the front and middle of the field are protected in their nice little bubble, whisked along and safe in the draft, while the riders at the back are suffering from the dreaded yo-yo effect. The way a pack of riders looks also indicates the speed. Bunched up like a horizon means slow…ish, strung out in a long skinny line like unravelling yarn is more indicative of, kill me please, in however horrible a manner, fast. So when I say stretched out like taffy, I mean the fastest fucking taffy you have ever seen.
The riders in the pack naturally go through the corners faster. The front riders are not braking, they fly through those fast corners with finesse and ease, however, the more riders you jam through that corner, the more people have to hit their brakes as the speed slows. It's the same thing on a highway when you pack in too many cars, people hit their brakes, and then everyone else behind them hits their brakes, and then before you know it you're looking at a sea of brake lights and you're late for work.
I was looking at the sea, and it looked like I was going to have to call in sick at this rate.
Being in a flat stretch looking far ahead of you up into a corner and seeing the field already going through it, 5 seconds up the road is a terrible feeling. By the time my group in tail-gunning territory got to the corner we were going slower than we should have been, and that means you have to SPRINT LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. Because it does, at least your life in the context of being a successful bike racer for the evening.
So I did this, out of every corner, and just for laughs, the field was sprinting up the hill, full gas, every time, and even though they were ringing the bell for primes nearly every lap, oh hell, let's sprint through the finish line too, every lap! By the time we got fifteen minutes in it felt like all of my organs were on the outside of my body and I would have welcomed it if a field of lava had suddenly come down and swallowed up the field, ending my suffering.
There's really nothing quite like turning yourself inside out in front of thousands of people. Nevertheless, I didn't have long, and much sooner than I'd have liked the official stepped into the course and gestured my little group, which had been having a harder and harder time sticking to the back, until we finally popped like a balloon, off of the course.
My first thought was, 'oh Jesus sweet relief!' and then immediately, 'aww crap, that's my race!'
I then quietly slunk back to my car, changed, and then proceeded to sulk next to the race course eating some Mellow Mushroom pizza, (which is delicious regardless of sulking). Watching your own race is not fun.
After some careful reflection and guidance I did however realize that being in the tail-gun, and blowing monstrous amounts of energy trying to stay on out of every corner sort of dooms you form the start. You can be super fit, but at those NCC races, being in the tail gun is going to tire you, and eventually crack you. I needed an improvement in my tactics. I had three races to go, and that was exactly what I was going to do.
Also, who charges ten dollars just to get INTO the beer serving area? I'm looking at you, Athen's Twilight.
