Georgia Games Cat5 Race Report

The road race portion of the Georgia Games cycling competition was held in College Park on Saturday. I raced Cat 5, Rick raced Cat4, and Erica (sp?) raced Cat4. As I was leaving, I saw one other guy in a MAX Cycling Club team kit getting ready for a later race (might have been Chad Madan, but I'm not sure).

The course was a boring one. They gave us the inside lanes of a 4-lane highway with a grassy median. Cat 5s did two out-and-back 16-mile loops (32 total). Cat 4 men did three laps, and I'm not sure about Cat4 women. The finishing 250m was a 3-4% uphill sprint.I watched the Cat4 finish from the finish line. At the bottom of the hill, the group started to spread out across the road for the sprint. Then I saw about 5 guys do flips into the median. After the smoke cleared, there were several guys down on the median and a few more in a pile in the middle of the road. Rick had a very good sprint and finished 4th out of what looked like about 50.

When my race got finally started (we waited for 30 minutes at the start due to registration problems) it started out very slowly -- I guess everyone needed to warm up again. Not much happened on the way out on the first lap, so after we made the tight u-turn to come back in, I attacked on a long, gradual climb. I got about a 30-second lead and held it there for a few minutes, hoping to get some company for a more sustained breakaway. But I guess either nobody was in the mood, or they all thought they were sprinters. So I drifted back to the group before I got too tired. I tried it again on the way back on our second lap, but the pack was more attentive this time, and I didn't get very far. We finished in a bunch sprint, and I took 15th out of about 53 riders. But I was waaaay behind the lead sprinters, who are just amazingly fast.