Rist Canyon Road Race

Slightly more than 70 riders lined up Sunday, August 21 for the Rist Canyon Road Race held in Fort Collins, Colorado.  This was to be the UCI qualifier for the Masters' World Championships held in Liege, Belgium next month.  All 50/55/60 and 65+ riders started together but were to be scored separately.  This kind of arrangement always impacts everyone in unexpected ways, as the age categories over lap naturally during the course of the race.  This race was no exception.  Approximately ten miles or so into the race after having covered a short but fairly steep climb, Bingham Hill, we cruised through Bellvue, Colorado and began the nearly ten mile climb to the top of Rist Canyon.  

The field started breaking up almost immediately, and I found myself winding my way through the dropped riders and finally reaching what was left of the main field, which had maybe 15-20 riders still in an intact group, and a handful further up the road, including former many time National Champion, Wayne Stetina.  I had to ride this at my own pace, so I ended up riding right through this group and started picking off the stragglers in between Stetina and friends and the remains of the bunch.  As I did this, I noticed Ed Chamberlin, who I raced with in Utah last month, and Rick Montgomery of Fort Collins.  These were the only two other 60+ riders in the group; everyone else was well behind us at this point.  I took a couple of hundred yards or so out of the bunch by the summit.  The last 1000' of this climb has two very steep pitches that exceed a 20% gradient.  As I described earlier, the summit is very narrow, razor like, really, and one begins descending at high speed immediately.  I hit 54 mph over the first couple of miles.  I appreciated descending alone here, as I could take my own line through the curves without needing to worry what anyone else was doing.  The first sharp left hand turn came up with a cattle guard right after it, and I sailed through the turn.  Fortunately, there were no loose cattle on the road as was the case on both Sunday and Tuesday when I pre-rode the course.  

I was caught shortly after by one rider and we began working together for the next couple of miles, when we were caught by the bunch, which gradually grew again as it regrouped.  The descent continued for several miles at very high speeds before we began to be hit by the increasingly longer and steeper rollers.  About 30+ miles into the race we caught a group of dropped riders from the 45+ field and we unfortunately mixed in with them for awhile.  Given that they were dropped from their own group, I didn't trust them not to let gaps open up, so I tried to maintain a position near the front.  This was the right move to make, as we hit a longish uphill grade that shed riders off the back continuously.  

There were supposed to be neutral feeds on the course, and my feeder was disallowed on the course.  The bad news was that the race supplied feeders were untrained and only a handful of riders got anything at all.  I wasn't one of them.  Grr!  Fortunately one who did generously shared part of his bottle of water with me.

After regaining the road to Horsetooth Reservoir, the course begins its sawtooth attack on our legs with five very steep climbs, one after the other, each followed by an extremely fast and sometimes technical descent.  On each one of these the field continued to shrink as riders were shelled off the back.  The 60+ field now consisted only of Ed and me, as Rick crashed out on that sharp left turn I mentioned above and ended tits up in a ditch.  I don't think he was hurt, but he was out of the race.

After negotiating the five climbs, we only had one more major hill, the back side of Bingham Hill, a gentle roller, and a high speed dash downhill back to the finish line.  The course was supposed to be completely closed here, but it wasn't.  A car pulled out in front of us, and we narrowly avoided ploughing into the back of it.  There were lapses in the race organization, let's say.

Coming into the finish we were told we'd take a lap around a couple of blocks leading to the finish.  The road surface was in very bad shape, full of cracks, bad patches, bumps, pot holes, etc.  I was glued to Ed Chamberlin's wheel and looking for the opportunity to come around him.  He jumped early (later he told me he thought the finish was after that turn, but it was a couple of turns away yet), which surprised me, so I had to jump to catch him.  Coming through that turn I got my front tire caught in a deep crack.  I didn't go down, but it caused me to lose some momentum, to say the least.  I lost four or five bike lengths here.  I was again gaining on him on turn 4, but some fool was ringing a bell at the line, which has always meant one more lap!  I thought great!  I really can take it now, but no, that really was the finish line and I narrowly missed pulling ahead of him, so I took second.  The other source of finish line confusion was that the race was consistently advertised as being 66.7 miles.  At the finish I showed 65.5 miles on my Garmin.  Several of us afterwards were scratching our heads over that one because when you consider the bell ringer and the fact that we were a mile short of the distance it made sense that we would have another go around before the real sprint...  Grr.  Still, it was a good race, and my best ride ever since I came back into this form of craziness.  There were a small handful of riders ahead of us, two 55+ riders, including Wayne Stetina and a couple of 50+ riders.  In my finishing group there were 7 50+ riders, one 55+ rider (third in his category), and Ed Chamberlin and myself in the 60+ field.  So Ed and I beat all but two 55+ riders and the vast majority of the 50+ riders, and all of the 65+ riders as well.  The two of us were likely in the top 12, give or take, of over 70 of the best Master's riders in the U.S. of all ages from fifty years up.  

Left to right:  Ken Louder, Ed Chamberlin, and yours truly.

Left to right:  Yours truly, 2nd, Ed Chamberlin, 1st, Barry Messmer, 3rd

Full placings list here

Ken Louder of my team took first in the individual time trial on Friday, and he took fourth in the road race, so even though there were only two of us, FFKR/SportsbaseOnline.com took a first, a second, and a fourth in two races.  It's a pleasure belonging to a club that takes all the top spots in every race they enter.  While we were battling it out in Colorado, Dirk Crowley took the World's Stage Racing championship (Omnium) in Austria in front of the Worlds' Road Racing championships there.  

On another note, the effort was so severe I managed to dislodge a chunk of vitreous humour in my left eye that is so bad my left eye looks like it has a giant squid swimming around in it.  I saw my eye doctor and he said it wasn't anything to really worry about, but it is strikingly annoying.  Every one gets eye floaters, but this is unbelievable.  It looks a lot like this in my left field of vision:

Ride safe, and go red line yourself!

All pictures, with the exception of the giant squid, which I stole off the Internet somewhere, are courtesy of my daughter, Lindsay!