Taken out of the lead group by a mechanical. That is the 2019 Tour of the Gila ended for me. A rollercoaster of emotions from beginning to end; I wish it had a happy ending.
I was right there – in the Top 25, in the front group, in arguably the hardest stage of the hardest amateur race in America: the Gila Monster. I had survived the climbs to and from the Cliff Dwellings, going as deep as I ever have and blowing up harder than ever before. But I rallied – I slowed down for a moment (a weird thing to do in a bike race, but it worked), took a few deep breaths, and regrouped.
I can catch back on during the descent, I thought – and that’s exactly what I did. Pro tip: upload the race route to your head unit before time, so you can see the corners coming up while everyone else is too busy braking.
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Stage 1: Mogollon
The crosswinds were just a steady breeze at the 9AM start, but with over three hours of racing on tap, we knew that this slight tickle could soon become a race-shattering gale.
70 miles in, that’s exactly what happened. We had been riding along comfortably, easy enough to take a nature break, have a chat with ‘long-time-no-see’ friends, and eat a CLIF Bar (or six…) But with less than 25 miles to go, the Semper Porro team went to the front on an open valley road and split the field to pieces. My teammates and I weren’t in great position when the field split – it’s usually a waste of energy to fight for the Top 20 for almost four hours – so we had to fight back to the front quickly, or our race would be over.
My teammates and I went flying up the gutter, battling the wind and swerving around dropping riders. I made it across to the second group on the road, dripping sweat and coughing up phlegm. After a furious chase led by the Floyd’s Pro Cycling Team, our second group made contact with the first, making a ~35 rider group at the front. The rest of the field was nearly a minute behind with only 25k to go. My teammates (Paul and David) and I were in a great position in the front group, with no pressure to pull, and a little buffer on the field. But with 15k to go, it all came back together. We were all in good position heading into the race’s critical point, a right-hand turn near the base of the Mogollon finishing climb.
The climb is two-parts: a four-minute effort at the bottom, with a brutal valley section in the middle, and then a 4k climb averaging over 9%.
At the top of the first, short climb, I missed the split by two wheels. The gap opened up just in front of me, and I hesitated to close it. I looked around, too afraid to burn a match before the final climb – Matt to the rescue. He pulled David and I across the valley, 10 seconds behind the front group of ~20 riders. The rest of the field was gone, trailing in our wake, never to be seen again.
We hit the base of Mogollon with the front group in sight, but I was already blown. My legs felt horrible; 320 W was as hard as I could go, while in training I had done repeated efforts of 340-350 W. Matt, David, and I rode together the first half of the climb. After David dropped off at 2k to go, Matt and I started a torturous game of leapfrog all the way to the finish. We yelled at each other, telling the other to go, shouting words of encouragement, and then slowly catching back up in another hundred meters. We gave it everything we had, and finished in 18th and 19th. Decent results, but not what we had been hoping for. With all of us being at least two minutes down on GC, there was only one objective for Stage 2: breakaway.
Stage 2: Fort Bayard
Halfway through the stage, I thought, where’s David? I asked my teammates and no one knew. We hadn’t seen him since the second KOM, over ten miles ago. We hadn’t seen him on the downhill either. Wait… David loves that downhill. He reconed these courses. He knows these descents like the back of his hand. The breakaway went on the descent… David bridged to the breakaway on the descent!!
With a rider up the road, my teammates and I had the easiest job in the world: sit-in, do nothing, and eat food. I was rooting for David the whole stage, wishing the break would stay away, wishing he would get a shot at a stage win…
The breakaway’s gap was over two minutes for most of the stage. They would need more at the base of the final climb, though – it was still 25k to the finish. Halfway up the climb and the gap was down to 90 seconds. The break was still working, still holding their gap, and now it was all downhill to the finish. Inside 15k to go the gap was down to a minute; at 10k to go, less than. With 5k to go, the break was in sight, and I knew they were going to get caught. I felt for David, wanting it so bad, working so hard to make the break, but then being brought back at the last moment. But while I was feeling bad for David, I still a bike race to finish.
At 1.5k to go, a crash took out five riders in front of me. I got around it by swerving into the gravel, and fought back to the field in the crosswinds. I preserved (most of) my GC time, finishing in 33rd place on the stage. Evan took the team’s top result of the race thus far, finishing 11th in a wild group sprint.
Stage 3 – Tyrone Time Trial
Normally I love time trials. But today, I was more nervous than for any of the other stages. The reason was that I had bad memories from 2018; it was the worst time trial of my life. Back then, my legs felt flat from the beginning, I couldn’t breathe at the high altitude, and my body was not happy being contorted into my extremely aggressive TT position.
2019 went much better. I had spent the past three and a half weeks training in Albuquerque, acclimating my legs and lungs to the lower oxygen levels of 6,000 feet. I had trained on the TT bike extensively, even riding a century on it (STRAVA) just two weeks before. The position felt great, my legs were locked and loaded, ready to go. All they needed was a little warm-up.
I followed my standard warm-up protocol: a 10-minute easy spin followed by a 3-minute threshold effort. 5 minutes easy, then 2 minutes at threshold building to VO2. 3 minutes easy spinning, then two or three spin-ups, a high-torque acceleration until I spin out the gear at 150+ rpm. With twenty minutes until my start, I finished my warm-up, kitted up, and had a caffeine gel before heading to the start.
[I can’t thank my dad enough for helping my teammates and I the entire week at the Tour of the Gila. He took care of my bikes every single day (which turned into a monumental task, as you will soon read…) and helped keep my head on straight as I fought through the mental stress of stage racing.]
My bike passed the UCI “inspection” with flying colors, but my teammates got stuck in a battle between logic and fallacy with the officials – my teammates won.
I pushed off the start line, got up to speed, and settled into the aero bars. I pushed hard up the first climb, focusing on keeping a high cadence and a stable aero position. I crested the climb and went flying down the other side, electing to bend low instead of ‘super-tucking’ since my knees hit the handlebars when I get into a tuck; and I did not want to crash at 50 mph.
I pushed hard over the next few rollers, and made it to the turnaround in 18 minutes. Based on my pre-race calculations, this was a very good time. A little confidence boost. I started heading back, down the rollers that I’d just climbed. But my legs were starting to feel it now. I was no longer flying over the tarmac as I had on the way out. I was still pushing hard, but the cross-headwind made me wonder: Am I still making good time?
With 10k to go, I hit the base of the final climb, a four-minute effort up a 6% grade. I got out of the aero bars and pushed with everything I had. I wasn’t looking at power, heart rate, time, or speed; my sole focus was the next few meters ahead of me, and squeezing out every last bit of energy out of my legs as I crested the top.
I went a little bit too hard up that climb, in hindsight. The last 6k was all downhill, but it was gradual enough – and with a cross-headwind – that I needed to keep pedaling. My legs felt like jelly now, and I was swerving back and forth across the white line, trying to keep my head low while spinning out my 55×11 at 40+ mph. I was cross-eyed, sweating bullets, and dripping snot all over my face. I hope there aren’t too many photographers at the finish, I remember thinking at 45 mph.
I crossed the line in 35:05, the 6th fastest time of the day at that moment, but with 18 contenders behind me, my time would gradually fall down the leaderboard. When all was said and done, I finished 16th, less than 40 seconds off of the Top-10, and only a minute off the podium. Considering these were some of the best time trialists in North America (and the world, i.e. Sergei Tvetcov), I was pleased with my result.
Stage 4 – Crit Day
With the Gila Monster only one day away, there was only a single objective for today: conserve. Don’t waste your energy, don’t attack, and don’t go in any moves. And whatever you do, don’t crash.
I failed that last objective.
With 3 laps to go, the field spread wide heading into Turn 1. There’s a nice little traffic island in the middle of the corner, with both the inside and outside lanes open for racing. 99.9% of the time everyone fits on the inside. But this lap was so easy, and so widely spread, that the outside line seemed like a great choice. An easy way to pass 30 or 40 guys, as I had done with 25 laps to go, no problem. So I went wide, and one of the three riders in front of me slid out. It was too dusty for me to slam on the brakes and cut inside; if I did that, I’d be the second rider on the ground. So I braked as much as I could, held the bike upright, and went straight into the metal barrier.
Instinctively, I grabbed the barrier with both hands and flipped over it like a tightrope walker who had lost his balance, slipped off, and was now hanging on for dear life. I saved myself from slamming into the ground, but my bike was not so lucky. With my feet still clipped in, my legs catapulted my bike over the barriers and hulk-smashed it into the ground, breaking the rear shifter in half and rendering my bike useless.
With stage race rules, I was awarded the same time as the field and allowed the start the next day. Phew.
Stage 5 – Gila Monster
My hero – I mean, dad – built up the team spare bike in barely an hour the night of the crit. I stretched and rolled and wrapped my sore shin, which had quickly ballooned into a golf ball-sized contusion after hitting a metal barrier at 30 mph. My teammates and I filled our bellies with rice, sweet potatoes, chicken, and tuna, preparing ourselves for a 100-mile race with over 9,000 feet of climbing known as the single-hardest day of pro-amateur racing in North America: Gila Monster.
I rolled around on the spare bike for a few minutes before the start. We re-adjusted the saddle height and shifting, and it all felt good. But 100 miles of racing is a lot different than rolling around in a parking lot…
The fight for the early breakaway is always long and hard, but with an hour of racing done, it finally went. I was relieved, and as the field finally sat up, I chatted with some friends as we approached the day’s first feed zone. The fight for position would start a few moments later. As the peloton flew down steep and twisty roads, we approached the climb to the Cliff Dwellings, a 25-minute effort with steep pitches littered throughout. This is where the race exploded last year; in the first five minutes of the climb, the front group was down to less than 30 guys. It was tamer this year, much tamer. We still dropped a third of the field as Elevate-KHS led us over the KOM, but with still over 50 riders in the group, it was still all to play for.
The climb coming back from the Cliff Dwellings is steeper, with multiple sections over 10, 11, and 12% gradients. The bottom of the climb is a grind, and the field blew to pieces on these early slopes. I stayed in the group, tucked in around twentieth wheel, focused only on the rider in front of me, not letting an inch of gap open up. I suffered greatly, but I was hanging in there. If we hold this pace to the top of the climb, I can stay in it, I thought to myself. But then the group accelerated. Two miles from the top, the Columbian pros lit it up, and twenty-some riders slowly but steadily pulled away from Matt and I.
A few minutes later, I hit ‘the wall’. I had barely made a mistake all week, but a big one had just caught up with me: I didn’t have a gel at the Cliff Dwellings turnaround, which meant that I hadn’t eaten in almost an hour. Ten minutes sooner I was totally fine, but the glycogen was now completely drained from my muscles. I struggled up the final pitches of the climb, gasping for air with my heart rate at 180 bpm. Coming over the top, I had a gel, and prepared to throw myself down the descent as fast as I could. It would be my last chance to catch back on to the front group before the final hour of climbing to the finish.
One of the best decisions I’ve ever made was uploading the Stage 5 route to my Garmin before the race. As I flew down the descent at 45+ mph, I could see every turn and every bend coming up ahead. I knew which corners to brake for and which to take at full speed. I dropped two riders in the first mile of the descent, and halfway down, I caught a group of three containing my teammate, Matt. A little over a mile later we were back in the field – I had just made up over a minute in the space of eight, and I wasn’t even sh***** my pants (i.e. I was ripping through the corners, but I wasn’t riding on a knife’s edge).
Just as I had caught my breath, disaster struck. My chain was jammed, falling off the end of the 11-tooth sprocket. I tried to pedal, but couldn’t. Forwards, backwards, sideways, shift up, shift down; none of it worked. I had no choice but to stop. The Shimano neutral support mechanic (the same one who helped pick me and my bike up off the ground at Redlands) graciously accepted two hands-full of grease as he yanked my chain back into position, and gave me a hefty push as I got back up to speed. But by then, the race was gone. I had dropped my chain just 500 meters from the base of the Gila Monster, and as the GC contenders started attacking each other, I knew I would never catch back on.
I settled into an hour-long time trial effort, determined to give it my all and do the best that I could, on both the stage and in GC. My teammates, my dad, and my team had sacrificed so much for me that week, and it felt awful to be letting them down. They believed that Matt and I could finish in the Top 10 in GC, and making the front group on Gila Monster would have done exactly that. But with 30k to go, I was stuck in no-man’s land, watching the lead group – and any hopes of finishing Top 10 in GC – disappear.
I was angry, upset, physically and emotionally crushed all at the same time. But I still had a bike race to finish, and I took my anger out on those pedals in the last 30k of racing. I crossed the finish line in 23rd place, but over seven minutes down on the winner. I finished 19th in GC but was left wondering what could have been. It wasn’t a bad result, but I knew it was far below what I am capable of.
Next up: Cascade Cycling Classic, May 29th – June 2nd