From dhayes@apl.washington.edu Wed May 23 11:29:51 2001 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f4NITm035732 for ; Wed, 23 May 2001 11:29:48 -0700 Received: from kraken.apl.washington.edu (kraken97.apl.washington.edu [128.95.97.25]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f4NITmX08839 for ; Wed, 23 May 2001 11:29:48 -0700 Received: from localhost (dhayes@localhost) by kraken.apl.washington.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id LAA29960 for ; Wed, 23 May 2001 11:29:47 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 11:29:46 -0700 (PDT) From: Dan Hayes To: uwracing@u.washington.edu Subject: Road Nationals Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII A summary of the conference results from Bill Wykoff is below, the results are available at the nwccc web page (http://users.moscow.com/wykoff/NWCCC.htm) or http://www.usafa.af.mil/ncca/index.html http://www.race-ncca.org/ (some stories here) Here's my quick synopsis of Sunday (RR) and Monday (TTT). I missed Saturday's criterium, maybe someone else can do this. I do know that it was extremely wet with deep puddles and wet manhole covers and extremely sketchy. Clarissa had a great race, finishing in the lead pack at 15th. After Saturday's downpour came Sundays hot sun and wind. The road race was extremely tough with almost 1000 ft of climbing every lap of 9 miles. The women doing 5, the men 7. A lot of the climbing came right after the start line, that and the altitude made the first lap very intense. Clarissa was not feeling well and made her exit early to save for the TTT, while Charlotte ground out the miles in ever-changing chase groups to finish 48/72 (not sure how many starters). The men's race also started extremely fast, and on the last big hill of the first lap, there was a crash in the back part of the pack. I tried to go around in the sandy shoulder, but couldn't catch on, Jim also chased for a very long time and couldn't quite catch up. The descent was so long and so fast, there was almost no way the pack could be caught. I maxed at 52 mph in my small group trying to chase. Jeremy escaped the crash, but began to feel the hot sun and climbing later in the race, he finished 59/81; we think there were about 100-110 starters. I chased as hard as I could, riding with groups that would pick people off, and shell others out the back. Jim decided to save it for another day, I continued on to finish 67th. The last 5 miles or so were very windy, the temperature dropped from about 80 to about 55 and the wind increased to upwards of 35 mph with extremely strong gusts. It was difficult to control the bike at times, and even in the tailwind segment going 40 mph, a side gust blew people 3-4 ft laterally in a split second. When I finished there were awnings flying all over, people running for cars, mangled tent parts around, and I was almost positive the port-a-potty was going to blow over while I was in it. At the bangquet that night, us non-vegetarians wolfed down our piece of lasagne, while the veggies ate iceberg lettuce and bread. Hello... We're athletes!! We heard Travis Brown and Chris Carmichel speak (actually read, pretty much verbatim from Lance's book). But it was fun, we could relax with the thought that the TTT might be cancelled due to snow. There were already 2 inches on the ground. Sunday: Sunny, windy, cold, snow still in the shadows. A 45 min late start and rescheduling w/o breaks between divisions caused a lot of confusion. The women had a terriffic race, finishing 12th/20, passing teams and only having 2 riders. There were only 3-4 teams with 2 people. The men, well, we missed our start time by almost 2 minutes. Trying to stay warm and keep track of the time was too much for our pea-sized brains. We still managed to beat OSU, who didn't start, but that's about it. If we had started on time, we would have been 24th/26. It was a strong tailwind for 5 miles out (watch out for service trucks swerving into your lane unexpectedly on this supposedly closed road!) and gentle uphill and strong headwind back. Wind was about 25 and temps were about 45-50 deg. We were a little disappointed at the time, at least I was, but we had a great time overall, and looking back, we rode as hard as we could and had some good results, in fact the women did an outstanding job, bringing us to a 29th/43 finish as a team for the weekend! But as I said, we had lots of fun, and the atmosphere was great (figuratively speaking), and I think we learned a lot. Dan PS If you stay at someone's house who has cats, beware the ancient marking rituals of the feline. Especially if you don't feed them on time. MMM...what's that smell? Bill Whykoff: Congratulations to all of the participants at Road Nationals for a strong NWCCC showing. For the second year in a row, the conference has a National Champion, as Mark Legg won the Men's Division 2 criterium. Accolades are also in order for Alice Pennington, who placed 5th in the Women's Division 1 road race and 3rd in the criterium. I have not seen the omnium standings yet, but I suspect that Alice was close to a medal there, as well. I added the NWCCC results to the web page, along with a link to the complete results. I will also try to get some info up on MTB results to date before too much longer. I don't know the schedule for MTB Nats yet--when I do, you will be the first to know. Have a great summer and keep the rubber side on the road. Regards, Bill .