Ronde Van Brisbane from Mike P.

Brisbeen or “I think I can, I think I can”
Like life bike racing is a gamble: I traveled down to Brisbeen or Brisbane near South S.F. on Sunday for the circuit race. I signed up for the 45+ 3,4s and the 35+ 123 races. They were back to back and with a short 10 minutes scheduled between the two 50 minute timed events. The course was a gradual descent with a sweeping right hander to a 90 degree left then 90 degree right at the bottom of the hill. A gradual up hill for the second half of the lap with the finish at the top after a long sweeping right hander. This was my first 45+ race this year and I didn’t notice anyone of note in the field but there were a lot of teams represented. I was the only DBC guy. This was the second day of a two day omnium. I missed the first day. My goal was to get some good training for Copperopolis hence the back to back events. I hoped the hill would make me work also. 10 minutes into the first race a break of two had formed. One of the riders had won the criterium the day prior. The second man in the break had quite a few team mates in the field. I stayed near the front and monitored the gap and the team tactics unfolding. There was some blocking but it was very passive. With a little less than 40 minutes to go I jumped up the hill and caught the break that was dissolving. I hoped that the winner of the previous day’s criterium would join me. I dropped him like a sack of potatoes. Hmmmmmmmmmm whata I do now? I continued wondering if the pack would remain passive. With 36 minutes to go I had a 12 second lead that would eventually grow to 24 seconds. By the way if you are ever at a crit and warming up if you have a teammate in a break time the gap for him. This is priceless info. Darin Salk and Bryan were trying to help me out with this. Everyone else along the road was just “Go Davis Go” egging me on like…….. well some X-Games daredevil about to do a back flip on his motorcycle. With 5 laps of the circuit to go I had attained my goal of producing a lot of work for myself. My HR on the shallow climb was right at AT. Not getting any updates on my gap I soldiered on. With two to go the crowd was saying “you’ve got it” and even the announcer was getting excited. I had been here before and I had seen it before from the peleton and on that last lap even with a sizeable gap it is very tough to pull something like this off in a short race. I had lost the gamble many more times than I had won. On the last lap I really hunkered down and descended as fast a possible spinning down the hill in an aero position. Then came the hill, I went right to AT in an effort to maintain the gap It was a good 1.5 kilometer effort to the finish. The crowd or what little there was on the back stretch was going from “you’ve got it” to “stay on it, there coming but you can do it”. With about 500 meters to go I was looking at the highest HR on my Polar that I had ever seen while on the bike in recent times, well above AT an more like Max. With 200 meters I could feel them on me as I hugged the inside of the turn. No sprint left in some spent legs. At about 150 meters the first rider came around me followed by at least 20 more. Bike racing is a gamble, and like I said I have played this solo flyer game before and it is a low odds proposition, but I did get a great workout.
I arrived at the back of the 35+123 field after Darin squared my second race number away and handed me a bottle of water for my cage, I had thrown mine with two laps to go hoping to lighten my load a little. The majority of the 35+ race was spent watching John Licatesi break his chain at the start and maintaining position in the field fight with calf cramps and a half dozen Specialized riders. I hung on and finished what look like maybe a top 20. I was just glad to finish after completely exhausting all my resources. Looking forward to Copperopolis.