Attleboro Crit Cat3/4

Attleboro is home to one of the most unique, technical and fun crits in New England. The course features a short power climb right after the start finish, two tight corners, one open corner and a deceptively tight elbow moving right into the finishing straight.
I rolled up (almost) ready to race with Gert and Mover, using race entry of the unfortunately sidelined Nick the Brit. I say almost because when I was putting my bike on Mover’s car on the way down he looks at my rear wheel and says “what’s that on your sidewall?” Turns out that on my ride across town, I had gotten a pretty ugly slash in my tire. We get to the race and step one is switching registration, which worked easily and step two was paying everyone’s favorite Butch Balzano of Sram Neutral Race Support a visit. With a brand new tire (seriously, neutral race support has got to be the best thing in the world), I was ready to get on the road.
To make things interesting, just as the 3 race was about to begin, the skies opened and the race was postponed due to lightning.
Game-time decision was to combine the 3 and 4 races, split the difference between durations (40k instead of 30k for the 4′s and 50k for the 3′s) and score the races separately.
More than a little excited to be racing with our awesome 3 squad of Leo, ZLB and Matt D, knowing that bad weather suits me pretty well and feeling confident in my handling skills, I braved the end of the storm to hit the course with Michael Brier of Refunds Now. Up the climb, I found that I was able to accelerate really comfortably into turn 1 and hit the corners pretty comfortably at speed.

Race gets started and immediately I’m tailgunning. Lots of brakes, lots of quick pushes, lots of people taking poor lines in hopes of moving up. About ten laps in, I start to feel my legs and I start moving through the pack and wind up jumping into a nine-man break with, among others, old friend Scott Glowa of Svelte Cycles. We don’t get more than a few seconds and are brought right back in. I return to my spot about 2/3 down of the pack. With some exceptions (people crashing on their own in corners for instance), nothing of much interest happens over the next bunch of laps. Little moves get away and get brought back without any fanfare.

A couple laps after the halfway prime, I realize that the move is about to be made (this course suits breakaways really well), so I start sliding up to the front of the field. Luke Fortini, Craig from GLV and a couple other guys start to move on the hill. Matt D is on the front of the pack and he gives me the faster lane to his outside and closes the door behind me. I hit it hard and make contact with the group of four. As a group, we stay on the gas hard for a few laps to establish ourselves. Having the two most numerous teams represented certainly helped (GLV and Threshold). I don’t remember how long we were away before I realized that I was the only 4 in the break, but at six to go, I told my breakaway partners that I wasn’t racing against them and all I cared about was working.

We get the bell and one of the 3′s comes around on the hill with what looked like a really well-timed attack. He builds up several meters between turns one and two, but overcooks turn two and ends up over the curb, on his back on someone’s front yard. Coming down the back stretch, I sit on the back, letting my three remaining breakaway companions sprint for their finish and come across the line solo, the front of the 4s. Leo won the field sprint in the 3s for a fantastic and well-deserved 4th place. Gert hit it hard in the finale and pulled down 7th in what must have been a really chaotic sprint (that I was very glad not to be a part of).

What I learned: Having some really strong teammates who will do the real hard work of disrupting chases makes getting into a breakaway a great idea. I have some decent intuition for how races develop and I have learned over my last handful of races that without a specific plan (like at Fitchburg, where the goal was keeping Miller in green), if I trust that intuition, good things will happen.

And, as a result of that, I have this:

Dear Jeffrey Bramhall,

The following request to change your USCF category has been approved and processed by USA Cycling:

bramhall – 2010-07-12 9:36
Member: Jeffrey Bramhall
License: Road Racer
Request to change category from Cat 4 to Cat 3