Beautiful Bend, Oregon hosted elite nationals in 2009 and again in 2010 with a venue well suited for a team vacation to the alpine desert town. The mix of amateur racers at elite road nationals ranges from full-time cyclists (perhaps working a part-time job to support themselves) to mid-level professionals and full-on executives. The difficulty of competition is designed to suit any Category 1 cyclist older than 23 who’s able to balance bike racing with professional and personal obligations in order to ride and race roughly eight to 15 hours per week. (Read: The founding members of Super Squadra.)

Post race huddle
Ian and Phil took full vacations from their jobs to recreate in Bend. I mixed my racing with business and lead a handful of juniors through a pre-nationals camp that included previews of the national’s courses and workouts mimicking what the racers could expect on the day of competition. The camp made for a relaxing approach to my personal racing focus of 2010, elite nationals.
Racing got started with the
time trial. It’s a 35-kilometer trek about 12k up 320-meters in elevation, then a 12k back down the mountain to a rolling 11k loop that was plenty open to the wind. The course was tough. I knew I’d be less than the best rider on the circuit, but wanted to see where I’d stack up. I approached the time trial partly as an opener for the mass start races and partly as a form check to set expectations for the rest of the week.
Thanks to a little help from Kevin Burandt, I had a good idea of what poor, good, and great times would be for me on the course. My time of 47:01 was a solid 15sec faster than my best-projected time, so my hopes were high for top 10 or medal. Turns out that the fields were much, much stronger than the 2009 edition where that time would’ve landed me a 3rd place finish. In 2010, a 47min time put me in 21st place.
Regardless of the placing, my time trial effort gave me confidence I was in for a great week—with legs, lungs, and head ready for maximal efforts.
The next morning we took an easy spin to loosen up for that evening’s
criterium. Good thing we did. The largely wide-open, rectangular course—aside from an unusually high amount of road furniture jetting out from crosswalks right about were the pack would swell before turns—made for an extremely high pace with speeds topping 36 miles per hour on the long flat straightaways.
The concrete islands on the course’s backside claimed many, many victims. Luckily none of them were from Squadra. My plan was to not do a lick of work and ride the back for 40min, then turn things up a bit to see if I could get a gap with some other riders and force teams to chase in hopes of softening up lead-out guys. That would give Phil a better shot at the end, he’s great at positioning himself at national level races and our best tactic is less of a lead-out and more of a strategy of blowing-out the worker bees. That way, its just chaos at the finish—the way Phil tends to like it.
Once the race got to the halfway point, I began to follow moves and force the pace a bit. Eventually, this led to me countering a move, then another. The second attack led to a huge gap on the field, the biggest of the night. Sadly, I was by myself, in a losing situation. It took about 380w in a full-dork position to ride 29mph around the course to hold the gap once it was opened. Fortunately, the winner of the TT and another rider made it up to me about a lap into my break. Unfortunately, the effort that it takes to go around a dead-flat course at 34mph left both bridging riders without legs to continue their effort. We were soon caught, and that was the end of my race. I’m just too much of a chicken to play roulette at end of the race. Phil rode great to finish 9
th in the sprint.
On Saturday the team got a day off. Ian and I took a morning spin of 80min east of Bend, into the flat desert lands where we gossiped about how great Chad was going to do in that afternoon’s U23 road race on a neutral support bike. On a frame two sizes too small, and making no excuses after a hard crash the night before, we watched Chad finish 14th in the road race. He looked very good late in the race, but was clearly limited by lack of top tube and will be a force in the elite (or USPRO!) race in 2011.
The elite
road race was the final event of the Junior/ U23/ Elite nationals week. The circuit was about 18-miles, mostly on rolling climbs but with some light crosswinds thrown in on relatively level terrain. We would complete six laps for a roughly 100-mile race. For Texans, it was perfect. Think of it like a Lago Vista type course. It starts off with an eight mile or so loss of elevation, with a single small-ring climb on for good measure. From there, the route includes a curvy run-in to a long uphill section toward the feed zone. That effort takes about 3- 3.5min from bottom to top. Things back off again before a few tricky sections leading into the hardest part of the course. The Archie Briggs climb starts off steep, but only takes ~45 to 60-seconds to pound to the top. Then it levels off again before another riser. From the bottom of the climb to the first loss of elevation, it takes about 3min, but that’s also where things get interesting nearing the end of the circuit. The road is constantly up or down, left or right, and the field gets strung out for what amounts to a full 8-9min of hard racing before any relief on the long descending section. Perfect for Texans, really!
I say that the road race course is perfect for Texans as it takes a massive amount of time at VO2max on this course. The climbs are steep or high powered, nothing like the TT, which is clearly a course for riders who have been on the NRC stage race circuit. To do well in the crit or road race in Bend, it was not so much a matter of watts/kg at threshold as there was plenty of time to coast, but more of a repeatability of power at VO2 pace as pushing wind at 34mph at the crit takes a massive amount of power. Similarly, the road race breaks down to how long a rider can go at their VO2 pace, and how quick they can recover when it’s time not to pedal on the Archie Briggs section of the course. If a rider is looking to do well in the mass start events at elits nats in Bend, then racing in Texas as well as a good load of VO2max training will do the trick. If a rider wants to excel in the time trial, they need to be able to buffer a high load for 16- 18min up the climb (for me, 20ish minutes), which cannot be easily simulated in training in Texas.
Phil and I got to the front of the road race very early, just to watch the early break roll up the road so we knew which teams would be hanging back with us until it got caught. Both THSJ and Metro VW had Texans up the road with Josh Carter as well as Tyler Jewell respectively. Tyler was back in the field within a lap due to a flat tire. Josh came back about 2 laps later. For the first 2.5hr of the race, the Squadra guys got to sit back and relax at 194w, 255w NP, and have a very relaxed ride. The large teams of Exergy, Yahoo!, and Cal Giant did all of the pace making.
The fourth time up Archie Briggs was when Yahoo! went on the attack with several of their riders. I was able to sit on them in fourth wheel and watch as solo riders would attempt to gain ground on the pack, but never could. Things slowed again as we entered the fifth circuit. The start of the feed zone climb saw the 2009/10 elite time trial champion and 2009 road race champ, Michael Olheiser, crushed the first 1.5min of the climb. Once he sat up, I played the same card as from the criterium, try to get a gap and make others bridge up on a tough section of the course. My gap as I led the race through the feed zone was small, but one Cal Giant came across solo, then the whole field. Olheiser immediately counter attacked and was away solo with 25-miles to go.
Olheiser’s attack was fierce and well before the hardest section of the course. The bigger teams again got to the front and rode a solid tempo, enough to keep the leader in site presumably in hopes that they could send riders up on the climbs of Archie Briggs. Once on the climbs, no one organized to get a group going off the front. The big teams never worked together, they were always looking for an advantage with number of riders in the split, and this lead to solo moves that went nowhere. I launched an attack right where Shontell Gauthier told me the winning move went in the women’s race that morning, and the year before, on the final climb on Archie Briggs. I again had a huge, pointless gap by myself. No one was racing, it was now time for the field to think about getting the best placings they could rather than sacrifice for the win. I was somewhere in limbo, hoping a move would come up so we could make it to Olheiser, or hoping that the laziness would continue so I could pull a similar move to Andrew Dahlhiem in the U23 championship. He attacked rather than watch the naval-gazing for a medal.
I put my head down and elbows on tops of bars to go as fast as possible. It was successful. I held my gap to the field, and pulled back 10sec on Olhieser, by the top of the ascent on the descent. At this point, eight other riders made it up to me. There was no cohesion in the group as lone riders from Yahoo! and Cal Giant sat on the split, so I followed wheels up the road and attacked again. This pulled out a very strong group with 22k to go, four riders in total. I had a “teammate” in Seattle Super Squadra’s Russell Stevenson, a THSJ rider from Colorado by the name of Benjamin Blaugrund, and a motivated Lang Reynolds from Hagens Berman. We all worked smooth, but fast, extending our advantage to 25-seconds over the field, 50sec to the leader. It hurt.
I gave it everything figuring that back in the pack, the big teams would assume they had a rider up the road. When they would find out they didn’t they’d have a few tired worker-bees chase, they’d blow, then our group would stay away to round out the medals. Right?
I felt great. I pushed the pace very hard, as did Reynolds, and our gap held steady until the final ascent of the feed zone climb. We stayed smooth, but not too fast, thankfully as I was starting to cramp. The effort to get the break going and then maintain the pace at the 80-mile mark was at 285w/ 340w NP for ~30min. The field put the hammer down and closed the 25sec gap by the end of the feed zone. Despite leading the race through the feedzone laps 4, 5, and 6, I was not going to be clear of the field.
Here I was, bitter and cramping with 8k to go and a group of about 40 riders, many of whom hadn’t touched the wind most of the day. I stayed with the field until 5k to go, then it was just too much. At a national championship, there’s no money at stake, only five shiny medals. At the end of the day, just one rider goes home with a stars and bars jersey. In Bend I raced for that jersey, rather than a placing. I tried to prove that I was the best guy in the race. I wasn’t the best guy, that was the winner, Olheiser, who deserves many congratulations.