Valley of the Sun 2019 Race Report

Photos courtesy of SnowyMountain Photography

Everyone is nervous. It’s the first time trial of the year. It all comes down to this… Hours and hours have been spent on the TT bike over the winter, dialing in an aerodynamic position on the trainer and doing mock-wind tunnel testing on our home training roads (if you’re lucky enough to be riding outside in January). But that’s all just training – race day is all that matters.

Stage 1 – Time Trial

The Valley of the Sun (VoS) time trial course is one of the most intimidating in the country: 14.4-miles, out-and-back, flat as a tilted pancake (+1% on the way out; -1% on the way back), in the middle of the Arizona desert. That means that the entire course is wide-open, and fully-exposed to the wind. This year it was a tailwind on the way out, and a headwind coming back.

Question of the day: how much do I conserve (i.e. hold back) on the way out?

Do I pace it by power? Heart rate? Or just on feel?

Being mid-February, everyone’s form is all over the place. In other words, many riders are coming off the trainer, base miles, and little-to-no intensity. Others are coming off of multiple 20+ hour weeks, fast group rides, and maybe even a local race or two – I am a member of the second group. We’re always faster in the middle of February. By July…not so much.

Time trials are funny: we spend more time and energy during our preparation and warm-up than we actually do racing. We spend hours dialing in our TT bike fits, tuning race wheels, removing bottle cages, and cleaning the chain and drivetrain until it’s sparkling like new. Two hours beforehand we’re pinning our race numbers, pumped up our tires, and squeezing into our child-sized skinsuits. An hour before the TT is when most riders begin their warm-up. This is the time to start sweating, get your heart rate up, and prime your muscles for an all-out effort less than 30 minutes away. And while most warm-up on a trainer, others choose the open road. Only the brave (and stupid) start a TT with no warm-up at all.

I slipped into my skinsuit, slathered on some PR Lotion , and filled up my bottles before hopping on the trainer. As I squinted and sweat under the midday sun, the wind started to pick up. It was at my back (I was facing North), so I knew it was going to be fast on the way out.

Eight minutes into my TT, I was consistently seeing 31-32 mph every time I looked down at my Garmin. I was riding hard but steady; I knew I needed to save some energy for the way back. As I made the turnaround, I prepared myself to go all-in.

Turns out, I was a little bit too motivated. I went out too hard the first few minutes after the turnaround, and my power steadily dipped during the last 10 minutes. (I didn’t blow up, my power just dipped from a steady 360 W, to a more erratic 340-350 W). I finished 7^th, but I knew I could’ve done better. My teammate, Matt, ended up 3^rd, a huge result for our team in the first PRT race of the season!

We put 5 guys in the Top 20 too (Full results here). As we drove back to Phoenix, we talked about our plans for the next day’s road race: attack, make the race hard, and hope it blows up.

Click here to see my TT ride on Strava

Stage 2: 95-miles Road Race

It was quite chilly for Arizona (50 degrees and windy), so the talk before the race centered around: arm-warmers or no arm-warmers? Vest or no vest? Base layer or no base layer? You know, super-exciting-bike-racer talk.

 As we rolled downhill in the neutral start, we were all a bit chilly. But that all went away in a matter of seconds. As soon as we made the right hand turn and crossed over the cattle guard, the flag dropped, and the race was on. And when I say it was ‘on’, boy was it ‘ON’. Nearly 30 riders went up the road in the first few minutes of the race. The GC (general classification) leader and his team sat on the front of the field, setting a hard tempo, but not responding – or even flinching – to the numerous attacks going off the front. The big group dangled out in front of us for the first half hour, but then they were gone. Only on the longest of straights – across the wide-open, windy, and lifeless desert – could we see the speckled mass of riders driving the breakaway.

As the big group up front slowly dwindled, Project Echelon maintained a strong presence. Out of the 20 or so riders up the road after an hour of racing, Project Echelon had five riders in it – Eric, Henry, David, Evan, and Ricky. The rest of us – just Matt, Tim, and I – were tucked into the field, conserving energy, eating food, and saving it for the final sprint. If it all came back together, that is…

For nearly three hours, the race was in limbo. Most of us were unsure whether we would catch the break or not. The gap got up to two minutes twenty seconds at one point, with the race leader and his team still chasing hard on the front of the field.

Is the GC leader getting tired? Are is teammates getting tired? I don’t know much longer they can keep this up…

Is the breakaway getting tired? Are they all working together in the breakaway, or is it a chaotic slugfest, with attacks going left and right, and splits forming in the crosswinds? That would certainly doom the breakaway, for sure.

Post-race, I still don’t know exactly what happened. But what I do know is that after more than three hours and 75 miles of racing, the breakaway had blown apart, and the gap to the field was coming down quickly. I prepared myself for what was setting up to be a hard final lap. I snacked on another CLIF Bar, gulped down some water, and took a caffeine gel, which for me is like rocket fuel.

With five miles to go, we were still riding along, tucked into the draft of the GC leader and his team who were still on the front. I had expected the race to split again as soon as we caught the breakaway, but no one really seemed interested. Matt, Tim, and I certainly had the legs to attack, but with our high-up GC positions, we didn’t want to risk losing time, especially when the sprint finish was almost built for us.

The last five minutes was a slog – uphill at 3-5% into a roaring headwind, keeping you on the rivet all the way to the line. Between the wind and the fatigue, the final 3km was chaos. Evan – who had amazingly gotten himself back on the front for Matt, Tim, and I after being in the day-long breakaway – put in a huge effort to move us into position for the final sprint. Inside 500 meters to go, it was complete chaos. We caught and passed an entirely separate field of Cat 2 riders, which added to the confusion and hesitation that already stifles nearly all sprint finishes.

Riders were launching left, right, and center. Some blew up while others clicked it down two more gears to sprint. I launched at about 300 meters to go, with Tim up ahead of me and Matt just off to my right. Tim uncorked a monster sprint – 890 W for 28 seconds – and took 2^nd on the stage. Matt followed closely behind in 5^th, and I beat one rider and lost to another in the three-way bike throw for 7^th place. Three in the Top 8 for Project Echelon – not bad.

My road race on Strava

Stage 3 – Criterium

60 minutes on an 8-corner course in downtown Phoenix. We came into the stage sitting 3^rd, 7^th, and 10^th overall. Keeping that was our #1-priority. The other was to go for primes, breakaways, and maybe even the field sprint. You know, the fun part of crit racing. But with the GC leader and his team setting a blistering tempo on the front, every attack was fruitless.

Breakaways went nowhere. Even a five-strong group of highly-motivated, incredibly strong, and cohesive riders could never get more than a few seconds. My teammates though, kept launching off the front and snagging $100 primes. While I lamely sat near the front of the field, tucked into 30-riders’ drafts, my teammates were bringing home the bacon.

After a slow start for me personally, I worked my way up through the field and was sitting comfortably in the front third when a big crash happened on the back stretch. Riders had been snaking across the road, left to right and back again, lap after lap, and I had an uneasy feeling that eventually someone was going to crash. Sure enough, as the field shifted from the left side of the road to the right, the squealing of brakes and cracking of carbon was unmistakable.

The first rider went down right in front of me. I saw it from a mile away, a rider and his bike scraping across the pavement. I waited patiently for him and his bike to bounce out of my way, but they never did. I ran into the rider (if you had the choice, you’d rather someone hit you then run over your $5,000 bike, right? I was doing him a favor) and went straight over the handlebars. I briefly caught myself with my right wrist – great for my face, not for my wrist – before rolling onto my right side. Just when I thought it was over, another rider came tumbling down on top of me, blood, bike, sweat, and all. As I gathered myself, I saw that my bike was pretty f******. But in order to save my GC position, I needed to finish the race. So I threw my bike over my shoulder, made sure the official got my number, and hobbled over to the pits. A few minutes later, with clearance from the race doctor and mechanic, they pushed back into the race.

5 laps to go.

I couldn’t put any pressure on my wrist – it was badly sprained. I couldn’t get out of the saddle, which meant that I couldn’t really sprint. And I knew my bike was not in great condition (the derailleur hangar was broken and only being held on by the tension of the wheel, I found out after the race), so I hesitated to take the corners at speed. In fact, it probably looked like I was trying to corner on ice.

I hung on to the back of the field with everything I had, and it wasn’t until the last lap, when countless riders in front of me started sitting up, that I started losing ground. I “sprinted” as hard as I could, my right hand floating over the bars, and my butt stuck in the saddle. But I still got gapped. I dropped one place in GC, ending up in 8^th Overall, an unfortunate end to an otherwise-incredible weekend of racing for myself and Project Echelon Racing.

Here is the crit on Strava (Note the perfectly straight line connecting the backstretch to the pits – that’s where my Garmin auto-paused when I crashed, and then restarted when I got pushed back into the race)

***

In just over a week – between Team Camp and Valley of the Sun – my teammates and I have already been through so much together. The good, the bad, and the ugly; we’ve had our disagreements, and little moments of tension, but they’re always brief, and everyone knows that it’s nothing personal.

We put together an incredible team performance at Valley of the Sun, but we also learned a lot of important lessons, from race day execution, to simple logistics, team tactics, and pre-race nutrition. We’ll take these lessons – and countless others – with us going forward, always aiming for the top step.

Next up: Tucson Bicycle Classic (March 1-3)