Aaron Smith • 🥈 2nd of 36 UC Davis Flatlands – Cat 1/2/3
- James Yang (6th)
- Will Brickler (16th)
- Myles McGinley (17th)
- Jason Tang (20th)
- Zac Ooi (DNP)
Weather: Beautiful, and surprisingly mild winds.
Course: 3.8m circuit, pan flat and very open to winds. 11 laps made for a 41.8m race.
Plan:
Make the race as hard as possible. We had the largest team numbers (6) in the race and could benefit from making sure the race didn't come down to a bunch sprint. Alex Akins was in the house --one of the top sprinters in Norcal. We were planning on looking for opportunities to break open the field and to generally be aggressive throughout the race. In a bunch sprint James would be the guy.
What happened:
Off the gun Colin Patterson from Voler Factory Racing (VFR) took off down the road. There was a bit of dithering about what to do about it, and a lot of people got boxed in by the narrow lane immediately after the start straight. Pretty quickly some guys started chasing and it was a bit strung out. I recall there were two separate chasing groups of 4 riders ahead of me; I latched on to the rear one as it closed the gap to the further one. Once I landed into the group of 8 that were "chasing" it was clear that they weren't very coordinated, nor were they moving very fast. Colin wasn't that far off ahead, so I jumped and bridged to him solo (this was like a 1minute effort). The two of us started taking pulls immediately; we didn't really have any conversation about what our intentions were. It was clear to each of us that we were both in for going the distance.
From there we traded 1-1.5 minute pulls for 4-5 fast laps and consolidated a large gap; we held a 26.5mph average. Annoyingly there was not a single person (including the motorcycle marshall) who would give us any info about the gap timing. Thankfully we did get some occasional timings from Colin's girlfriend.
After 6 laps I was starting to fear a cramp and decided to lower the intensity a bit. I was trying to keep the power level roughly the same, but take shorter pulls than my break partner. For the next 4 laps I did manage to lose the crampyness.
Going into the last couple laps it seemed that we had a large enough gap to slow down the pace a little bit. The 11th lap was the slowest of the ride. Half way along the northbound straightaway Colin looked back and told me he saw something. It may have been a ruse or it could have been the Team California JRs guy (Ryder Ritchie) who had apparently escaped the peloton and was chasse patating. In any case I started taking a long hard pull ... after that Colin attacked me towards the end of the eastbound straight. I didn't really respond with an all-out effort for some reason. I guess my body and brain were exhausted, and my ego was satisfied with second place --just too happy to be there. I rolled in 10 or so seconds or so behind Colin for second.
Probably another 20? seconds later the solo bridger Ryder came through. Finally we saw James Yang take third in the field sprint behind Alex Akins (Mustangs) and Flo Costa (AVRT).
Effort:
Race was 41.8m in 1h:37s, at 26.2mph. In our 2-man break we averaged 26.3mph. For the whole race I did 303W/316NP; by way of comparison, Colin did 330/339NP. For the first 4 laps I did 325W/337NP and Colin 339W/346NP.
Many thanks to the whole squad working behind me to contain bridging attempts and slow coordination. I'm pretty sure it made the long break possible today.