A Lesson Learned...

Posted by our resident up and coming star cyclist... Ken T.

A Lesson Learned:

This was my first time down at Ningret Park in Charlestown, RI. Ningret has a beautiful flat bike track that has lots of corners through out the course. It almost looks like something you should be racing go-carts on instead of bike racing. The weather was not exactly the best, it started out just drizzling in the beginning of the race, but about half way through it really started to rain.

The format of the race was a 55 minute circuit race. This was a new format to me, but I didn't think much of it. I mean how hard is it to know when a race ends right? Well it turns out harder than I thought. Through out the race I felt really good. My legs were a little cold(only one with shorts on) so I decided to make several attacks during the race to try to get the blood moving. None of them really stuck for more than a lap, though my plan was not to really to break up the peleton, but more to just stay warm.

About half way threw the race the rain started to really come down, and you can tell riders were not very comfortable going around the turns at high speed when it is wet. So after a few laps of sitting in I decided to make another attack at about 42mins into the race. This time I was able to get 2 other riders to join me. Initially it looked like we could stay away from the pack. Taking the corners faster than the peleton, but the riders that joined me were either too tired from bridging up or were just sitting on me to control my effort. For the next lap I pulled the whole way without any assistance from the other riders. So I decided to sit up and rejoin the peleton to conserve energy for the final sprint. Which I thought was a good 10 minutes to go. Well this was not the case, exactly 2 laps later the final lap bell ran and I thought it was a prime lap. I mean we still had 10minutes left, right? Well wrong, the field was getting stretched out and I was just sitting in trying to recover from my last effort assuming there was at least 4-5 laps left. Well I basically soft pedal past the finish line and the race is over. It ended up being only a 45min race.

I was completely oblivious to the lap cards on the referee hut. This was completely my mistake and I learned an important lesson. The good news though is I felt really strong and I'm glad my training is paying off. I do need to get more race experience in different race formats.

All in all it was still a super fun race and the organizers did a great job putting on the race. Especially in the poor weather conditions.

-KT