On
Sunday, May 15, I rode in the Connecticut Masters Games 20 and 40 kilometer
cycling races. I finished second in the 75-79 age group in both races. (I’m 74
now, but for these purposes, your age is your age on the last day of the year.)
The CT Masters Games are held
every May, in a wide range of sports. For the last five years or more, the
cycling races have been held in New Britain on a fairly flat 0.98 mile loop in
Walnut Hill Park.
There are separate award for
women and men for each 5-year age group from 40 up, although some of the groups
race together. I raced with the 65+ men, and we started one minute after the
40+ women.
When I first did CT Masters way
back in 2004, it was somewhat amateurish and the competition wasn’t all that
stiff. It’s still amateurish (in the best way), but in the last few years the Games
have developed some sort of affiliation with USA Cycling, the country’s main
amateur cycling group. That, combined with the Games being open to non-CT
residents, means that a better (than me) class of riders has been showing up.
This year, the 70-74 group featured two national champions. As a result, I and
quite a few other oldsters got dropped before the two-mile mark, something
that’s never happened to me in past years.
I rode by myself for a few
miles and then gradually picked up or was picked up by a few other stragglers,
and we worked together, though not very well. For those of you who don’t know
much about cycling, riders in a group can go much faster than a lone rider, and
the bigger the group, the faster you can go. That’s because air resistance
plays such a big role that the rider at the front ends up doing 20-30% work
than the riders behind (though that 30% figure may only applies to
professionals, who go really fast). Still, at any level, you go faster if you
can rotate the lead. It was even more important yesterday, where the wind was
averaging 19mph, with the only mild uphill on the course facing right into the
blast.
Our own rotation was
helter-skelter, with some riders contributing more than others, and the pulls
being longer than optimal. Plus, at about 10 miles we got lapped by the women’s
lead group, followed closely by the men’s leaders. (In the process some rather
unladylike things were said to me for not getting out of the way fast enough.) The
rule is that the women aren’t supposed to ride with the men and vice-versa, so
our little group got split up and it took some time to reform.
The 20K and 40K races are run
as a single race: Your time and placement are recorded at 20K (actually 12
laps, or 11.76 miles) and then you continue on to 40K (24 laps, or 23.52 miles).
But everybody finishes on the same lap, so when we were lapped, our races became
11 and (if we didn’t get lapped again, which we didn’t) 23 laps. In the
confusion I lost track of when our 20K race finished, and I never heard the
bell that is rung to signal the start of the final lap, so I was never aware of
the 20K finish.
There were never more than six
in our group, but eventually that number got whittled down to three as riders
fell off the pace. We also rode with two women who had been separated from their
lead pack. We weren’t supposed to work with them, and didn’t for the most part,
but they were there, yo-yoing as much as 25 yards behind or ahead.
I sprinted for the 40K line,
finishing second in our troika. I didn’t know then what age groups my
companions were in, but the guy who beat me was the
75-79 winner; the third 75-79 rider was a few minutes behind us. It turned out
that all the 75-79 riders (there were four of us at the start) had been dropped
more-or-less when I got dropped.
The results are posted here. I averaged 19.4 mph for the
20K and 19.2 for the 40K. This is about what I did last year, but somewhat
slower than in prior years. On the other hand, I did a lot of pulling (which I
never had to do in past years), and there was a lot of wind, so it wasn’t all
that bad. I’ll get ‘em next year.
—Howard
