Podium smiles: Lynn Cochrane & Denise Mitchell-Dignum
By Lynn Cochrane:
The dead flat track at Ninigret Park, RI, where this race takes place was a welcome antidote to the vertiginous heights of the Mt. Greylock TT. Racing Saturday's TT with (or, more precisely, behind) many others from our team may not be the best prep for a crit, but with winter ahead, packing in as much racing as possible is imperative.
Sunday's women's crit race comprised ages 30-54. Unsurpisingly, the pack split in half before the end of the first lap, and never regouped. I raced with about 5-7 other women close to my own age, including three from Mystic Velo who are great women, and great competitors. The younger bunch were off having their own race. Those of us in the slower group averaged about 20 miles per hour, not too bad for such a windy place. In fact, it seemed at times that the wind was blowing strongly from both the East and the West.
For almost the entire race, our group of 6-7 racers were in a long pace line which sometimes bunched up at corners. I tried, not always successfully, to huddle in the middle to stay away from the wind. Although my legs were feeling pretty normal, I wasn't sure how long they would last after Saturday's hill climb.
The three MVC women consistently stuck with a strategy of dominating the three front spots of the paceline. Every lap or so, the third MVC racer in the line would surge ahead and take over for the first MVC racer, allowing the tired person to drop back just one or two spots. Consequently, I and the other two women were usually at the rear, and MVC ended up doing the vast majority of the pulling. We three non-MVC racers did pull for a lap or two, but not nearly as much as the others. Is that fair? Should I and the others have tried harder to take the front for more laps to share the workload or should I have allowed MVC to wear themselves out if they wanted to dominate the front three spots of the line? Had there been more CCRT racers, I know I would have pulled more, but I was a loner. (I can hear some of you out there saying, "Let other teams knock themselves out if they want to.") Anyway, I would be very interested to hear some feedback from wiser and more experienced racers.
This pattern played itself out for about 11 of the 15 laps or so of the race - at one point, the three leading racers lapped us, and we pushed harder to keep up with them for about three laps, but it was tough. There were no mid-race breakaways, we were all pretty evenly matched, and the three MVC women had raced the New England TT yesterday in RI, so maybe they weren't feeling that springy themselves.
You could sense things heating up during the last lap and I wondered what MVC planned to do- meanwhile, I was planning my own positioning, edging to the right of the now bunched up paceline, waiting until we all pulled through the last left hand corner to stomp on the pedals and make a beeline down the last straightaway to the finish. I felt like I was ahead, and could not see or hear anyone behind me, until I was about 30 feet from the line and heard a moan of exertion behind me, so I just stepped on it as hard as I could. My wheel crossed the white line mere millimeters ahead of the other racer - I won 3rd place by 5 100ths of a second. Due to the 1st place racer, who was with the faster group, being from New York, we New Englanders were bumped up a notch, and I was given the silver medal for the 50+, and 8th overall. Denise Mitchell-Dignum of MVC took the bronze. The rest of our group came in after, but very close.
Afterwards, I joined two MVC racers for a bit while they talked about the pulling issue. They were not of one mind about whether they caused the problem by dominating the front of the line or whether I and the other racers should have, in the cause of good sportsmanship, unilaterally stepped up our efforts to take more pulls. I promised them I'd help out more at the Jamestown Classic on 10/10. Anyone care to join me there? #
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