Valley City Road Race

On Saturday, August 23, I travelled with Doug McConnaha to race the State Master’s Championship Road Race at Valley City, just northwest of Medina. The course is a mostly flat 12-mile loop, broken up by some rolling terrain on the final two miles heading south along West River Rd.

Lining up for the start of the Masters 35+ race, I pick a spot next to John Lowry of Stark Velo, always a strong contender on any type of terrain. Much to my dismay, though, I noted that Tris Hopkins and Ray Huang of Team Columbus were in our field. C’mon, is there really any way I could compete with either of those two guys? Therein lays the pitfall of Masters racing. Doesn’t matter if you are a Cat 1 or a newbie - if you meet the age requirement, you can race.

The race starts with a brief neutral rollout, followed by some mild attacking, nothing too serious. Then about 5 minutes into it, Hopkins takes off of like a bolt of lightning from the back of the field with Erik Lesco (Stark Velo) glued to his wheel. The duo opens a decent gap before the peloton can organize a chase (if organization is what you really want to call it). By the end of the first lap, Hopkins and Lesko are out of sight, never to be seen again.

Laps 2 and 3 were rather uneventful, and the start of lap 4 was downright lethargic. On the backside of the course on lap 4, I pull up to John Lowry and Bruce Pisarek (COBC) and attempt to strategize. My message is that if we wanted to have a fighting chance, we needed to make the race really hard once we turned south on to the rollers on West River Road. John reported that he didn’t know if he had enough gas left in the tank, but Bruce seemed to agree, though he did not explicitly say so.

Heading into the sharp, descending turn onto West River Road, I position myself on 2nd wheel, ready to hit it hard on the first little rise. The guy in front of me had the same plan and we both punched it. At the top, we had a really good gap, but I was already at my redline and I needed to recover before I could pull through. Unfortunately, no one else (not John or Bruce) had followed the move and so it was just the two of us. When we got on the flat section before the next set of rollers, the other dude really picked up the pace and it was all I could do just to stay in his draft. He motioned for me to come through with the all-too-familiar flick of the elbow, but I couldn’t respond. He sniped, “If you can suck my wheel, then you can pull through.” Well, let’s just say he was wrong. Like I said before, I gave it all I had to just to stay in contact with him. When we hit the next roller, he gapped me and was gone for good, sewing up 3rd place. I still had a margin to the peloton and tried to hold on for the 4th place finish. I gave it all I had on the last short, steep pitch that was 500 meters before the finish line – the picture below testifies to my effort. But alas, the fresh legged peloton was upon me and sped by me in the blink of an eye. Turns out that Lowry and Pisarek were able to hold on for 4th and 5th, respectively. Hindsight being what it is, I think I could have contended with them if I had just stayed in the field and kept my legs fresh. But I took my shot and gave it everything I had, so I suppose I can’t be too disappointed with my effort. Sometimes you have to risk losing in order to achieve success.



One more thing... racing at Valley City this year brought back memories of last year's race when a stacked Stark Velo squad was able to get Scott Thor off the front and led to a long solo effort by him that resulted a nice victory. Before this year, Scott and I had been racing together for a long time, dating all the way back to mountain bike races around 2000 (I think). Scott is now in California living a charmed life. Check up on Scott at on his new website: http://www.scottthor.net/