Vuelta Maestrago

Day 0: Viajar (Friday, March 28, 2008)

Well, even though I've done this a number of times now, travelling days never cease to be interesting. Usually, Jose is in a super hurry, or we see a women walking a black pig, or we drive 1000 kph. But this time, for the first time, Jose isn't with us. He's off at the more prestigious Vuelta Cartegena in Murcia, so our director will be the former racer and all-around nice guy from Alcoy, Alex Largo. I'm definitely excited to find out what a vuelta will be like without the chaos that Jose generates. It was a bit of a tough decision to come to Maestrago instead of Cartegena, but given that everyone else from the Cueva (Felix "el Canario," Robinson "el Venezolano," Andrew "Gringo 1," and Elliot "Gringo 2") was coming here, I couldn't resist the temptation. Also, I'll admit racing with Largo in the team car instead of Jose made it a bit more appealing too, but don't let that get around.

Back to the trip, this is by far the closest Vuelta that I've done so far, only 2.5 hours away. I rode with Ayala and his girlfriend in a small, orange, very-European Kia. I can't remember if I mentioned him last year at Circuito Montanes, but he's a friend of Jose's who comes to races sometimes to help out. Last year, he and I drove back together from Circuito and got to know each other pretty well, so the fact that he was coming along made Maestrago even more attractive. His girlfriend proved very friendly and talkative too, which made for excellent Spanish practice. Both Ayala and his girlfriend (who's name I haven't caught) speak quickly but clearly, with traditional Castellano accents which I can understand without much trouble.

I think I mentioned that they're talkative, and I might be understating that a little bit. They spent the entire trip talking to me first about the different accents of Spanish speakers from different places and then about all of Spain's problems with immigration and socialism. In their view, which they made very clear, the Spanish government foolishly accommodates foreigners at the expense of Spaniards. They weren't necessarily opposed to socialism or to immigration, but in their view, the governments policy of providing housing and health care and education to anyone here causes tons of people to immigrate here just to take advantage of the hand outs.

They also thought that Spain is too soft on criminals. They told me that the Spanish prison system is set up to rehabilitate instead of punish. Thus, you can get college degrees and take all sorts of classes and what not. This certainly seems reasonable, but they claim that it causes people, especially immigrants from really poor countries, to not fear jail, thus perpetuating crime. They also told me that there was some minimum amount of goods that had to be stolen before someone could be sent to jail (~400 euros I think), so supposedly serial thiefs just steal in small quantities and avoid the risk of serious punishment. They also claimed that Romanians in particular teach there children to steal for them because there aren't punishments for children under some age, maybe 13. Further, in order to convict someone, they said that he needs to be caught with the stolen goods or the drugs he's just smuggled or whatever on his person. If he was videotaped smuggling drugs into Spain but then flushed them down the toilet before the police come, he gets off. Finally, they told me some stories about people who had been incarcerated for shooting armed robbers that had broken into their homes.

Who knows how much of what they told me was fact versus folklore versus right-wing propaganda, but they certainly were passionate. I could barely get in a word edge wise. Their basic thesis seemed to be that Spain's compassion for criminals and the poor (in particular immigrants) has gone way too far.

Anyway, we finally arrived at our hotel, but not before spending 30 minutes wondering around the town looking for it. It turns we're staying at one of hundreds of beach-front hotels. The beach is pretty nice, and if the weather holds, we might even have a little time to enjoy it.

We only drove at 100kph, so the rest of the team had aready sat down for dinner when we got there. I wasted no time diving into the very typical pre-race meal of pasta and fish. Afterwards, my apartment-mates plus Ayala, his girlfriend, Largo, and I went for a little walk/cola cao stop. On the way, we came across a 20-foot-tall pole on the beach with Christmas Tree of ropes making a really cool junge gym. Elliot and I wasted no time getting to the top. The Spanish playgrounds, at least this one, are way cooler than ours!

Shortly thereafter, we stopped at a bar for Cola Cao. As soon as I sat down, I noticed a Jamon behind the counter and couldn't resist ordering some. The Spaniards, particularly Ayala and his GF couldn't stop laughing at me for being such a foreigner. But it was good!

Now that I'm finally back in the room, I'm absolutely stuffed to the brim. I just hope a good night's sleep will work some of this off. We don't start tomorrow until 2pm so breakfast is at 11am. We'll see what time we actually wake up.

Day 1:

At the moment I'm enjoying my last few minutes of relaxation before getting changed to head to the start. At breakfast, I may hae eaten a little too much because I'm feeling pretty full right now, only 1 hour 40 minutes before start time. Fortunately, the start is only 5km away, so we're going to e riding over. Thus, I can put off getting ready a little longer than usual. Today's race is supposed to be about 110km with two Cat 3 climbs near the end. I'll have to check the profile before we start to find out exactly where they are. I'm hoping to do well on GC, so staying near the front and possibly getting in a break is the order of the day. Even though the strongest guys on the team are at the Vuelta Cartegena, we do have Felix and another guy named Pedro who certainly aren't slow. Four 18-year-olds fill out the team, so I'm definitely the senior citizen this weekend. My main goal is to ride well so as to not dissapoint them. We'll see how it goes.

Okay, now it's time to get dressed. I'll fill you on on the rest this evening.

Wow, what a race. Actually, what a day! Things started off pretty normally. Felix and I managed to sleep until 10:30am, I'm not sure how. Breakfast was a bit bland, plain white rice, fried eggs, bread, and a lot of Cola Cao that I had to ask for. Given that the race start was close, we had some time to come hang out in the room and relax for a while before heading to the start. Since we thought that we were riding to the start, we got completely dressed here, but packed clothes for after the race in our backpacks. As we were about to go downstairs, Largo came in and told us that he wasn't allowed to drive the team car because he doesn't have a director's license, so unless we could find a licensed director to drive for us, we wouldn't be allowed to race. Fortunately, someone had given Largo the phone number of a licensed director somewhere nearby and he was trying to get in touch with him, but if that failed, then we wouldn't be allowed to race. Felix and I figured, correctly as it turned out, that it would all work out in the end, but Largo seemed a bit nervous nevertheless. Apparently he had asked Jose about this issue more than once, and Jose had assured him that it wouldn't be a big deal.

Anyway, we headed down stairs anyway and discovered that we were going to be driving to the start, but since the two othe Gringos (Andrew and Elliot) were with us, there wasn't enough space for everyone in just the van and the team car. Thus, Felix and I hopped in the car of another team whose riders were riding to the start. Just as our team left, the van of the team that we were riding with failed to start, so the driver sprinted off to find jumper cables. Felix and I laughed our heads off. To my thinking, if we didn't make it to the race, I would go for a good training ride and then maybe enjoy a little dip in the Medeterranean. Bu of course, our team cars fortuotously doubled back once they saw we hadn't left yet and we piled in. Good thing cyclists are skinny!

Finally, we got to the start and everything seemed squared away with 30 minutes to spare. But when I went to grab my number in the pile that Largo had dropped off, I discovered that I didn't have one. So Largo had to once again go haggle with the race organizers, this time in order to get me into the race. With that sorted out and my number pinned on, I hopped on my bike (which I had actually been riding around for a while) to spin a little bit in the 15 minutes before the start. When I tried to clip in my left foot, the pedal didn't click and fet really weird. I unclipped and looked down to see the pin that holds the rear retention system onto the pedal coming loose and the retention spring spinning in circles. I had noticed the pin coming out a few days before, but Andrew pushed it back in for me and I figured I was good to go, apparently not. I quickly asked Ayala if we had extra pedals, but we didn't. Luckily, probably half the teams use KEO, so it didn't take long to find someone willing to lend me one. From there, things actually went smoothly, thank goodness

I'm downloading the powerfile now, so I'll fill you in on the details once I have them. For me, it was one of my bigger days. I foolishly decided to go in the very first breakaway at kilometer 0, and then tried to make sure that I didn't miss any big moves from there on out. I really tried to work on jumping very hard to catch wheels quickly so that I don't end up chasing 5 meters behind someone for a full minute every time I try to go cover an attack. At first, I wasn't very good at this, but as the day went on, I got a little better, which might have been just because other people were getting tired and weren't sprinting quite as hard as they were in the beginning. Who knows? The moral of the story is that I went really hard.

My powerfile has downloaded, so I'll take a minute to summarize the highlights.

3:06:43

74.4 miles

23.9mph avg

293 watts avg

340 norm power

163 avg HR

182 max HR

5 minute best: 434 watts (the first 5 minutes of the race :-))

10 min: 392

20 min: 347

30 min: 336

60 min: 315 (though for the first 1:07 I averaged 317 watts ...)

120 : 302

53 min above 400 watts (though not all at once.

First cat 3 climb: 3:48 @ 464 watts

Okay, back to the race. We hit the first of three Cat 3 climbs at kilometer 30 or so. I started the climb a bit out of position, probably 30 guys back, and really had to peg it to stay with the first group. According to the PT, the first 4 minutes averaged 464 watts, and then the entire climb, including some rolling parts at the top, was 6:30 at 413 watts. I think that only 10 - 20 of us went over the top in the very first group, and the attacks continued from there, but since no team was pulling consistently, the peloton came back together not too much later. I continued working to try to get away in whatever breaks looked promising, but I ended up trying for and not quite making the one that finally went away at kilometer 55 or so, though I'm not really sure.

At kilometer 60 - 70, I attacked and got away with three others. That's when things really got hard. One of the three insisted on jumping accelerating a lot everytime we hit a hill and chasing each of these accelerations wore me out. When one of them came right after I had pulled a bit too long, I couldn't catch back on to the wheel. That was at kilometer 80 or so. After riding chasing by myself for a while, 4 more riders caught me, and we worked together until a group of 10 or so, including Felix, caught up at kilometer 110. It's worth mentioning that the stage was supposed to be 110km long, but turned out to be about 121km.

By this time, I was totally tapped out. I hadn't gotten any water until kilometer 90 or 100 and as a result hadn't eaten very much, so I was really whacked so to speak. Given that the stage finished with a steep, 1300 meter climb, I knew that I wouldn't be able to hang on, so I took as many pulls as I could for Felix's sake to try to close the gaps to the groups ahead.

The nails were hammered into my coffin going up the final climb. I could only muster 307 watts with a max HR of 161, pretty poor.

Anyway, it turns out that got 25th on the stage and Felix got 14th, which is a bit further back than I had thought I was, but c'est la vie.

As soon as we finished, I took full advantage of the Estrella Damm beer truck. It turns out that their alcohol-free lemon-flavored beer is a reasonable subsitute for Coca-Cola after a race. You learn something new every day.

The last notable event of the day was that we had soup for dinner. Actually, that was less notable than the reaction of all the other riders. They were distraught beyond belief that we weren't going to have pasta or rice for dinner. I on the other hand was totally stoked to have something flavorfull. These Spaniards are crazy, what can I say? Oh yeah, and they ended up making them some pasta afterall.

Well, given that tomorrow's stage starts at 10am, we've got to be down for breakfast at 7am, and since the time change is tonight, that means I don't have much time for sleep, so good night!

Day 2:

Fortunately, the prerace shenanigans of yesterday didn't play out again today. Instead, I was just really tired. I'm not sure why, but I didn't sleep very well last night, and 6 hours of restless sleep wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Fortunately, I found breakfast to my liking, with cereal, croissants, muffins, eggs, pasta (which I didn't eat), cola cao, and orange juice. I ate quickly enough to afford myself a little bit of extra nap time before getting ready to go by 8:30am. We had to drive 20 minutes or so to the start, and for some reason, unlike in my bed, I promptly fell asleep. Upon arriving at the race, I decided to keep napping for a while and finally got out of the car about 35 minutes before the start. Since I was all ready to go, all I had left to do was ride around a little bit and make sure that I visited the toilet (aka side of the road) enough that I wouldn't need a nature break during the race. This worked out fine.

The start got delayed a bit while we waited for the ambulance, but before I long we had embarked on our mountainous, allegedly 146km stage. The first climb, a cat 1, started around kilometer 5, but a group had already gone up the road, and we just crawled on up the climb.

Today, I decided that I wouldn't go with any breakaways until after the 4 climbs, the cat 1 at 5 km, a cat 2 at ~30km, another cat 1 at ~50km, and finally a cat 3 at ~85km. After killing myself yesterday, my goal was to stay at the front and hang on the climbs, which I did.

After the first, ridiculously-slow cat 1, things were pretty chill until about 6 minutes into the 15 minute cat 2, when the pace someone attacked and the pace jumped considerably. From there, I tried to stay with the front of the pack without wasting too much energy sprinting when someone would attack. After the first few attacks, I found that when I would up my pace, but not sprint, I wasn't actually losing much ground and could quickly regain contact once the pace inevitably slowed a bit. Finally, after 10 minutes that averaged 402 watts, we hit the crested the climb, providing a wonderful rest.

About 15 of us had gone over the top of the climb together (I think), but most of the pack caught up on or just after the descent. For me, the ~13km between the top of the previous climb and the bottom of the next one passed much to quickly, and before I knew it, we were hammering up the second cat 1.

The attacks started right at the base this time, and it was all I could do to hang on. This time, a few climbers managed to get a bit of a gap, but I just tried to stay with the yellow jersey group and not worry about the folks attacking. After going flat flat out for the first ~5 minutes (averaging 431 watts), people got a bit tired and things calmed down for the rest of the way. At the top, the breakaway had about 1:30, and then there were probably 8 guys between us and them who had presumably gotten away at the bottom of the climb.

In my group of 15 or so, there were 4 Comunidad Valenciana riders, including the yellow jersey, so they quickly got to work chasing. For me, the rest of the day was pretty straight forward. I sat in the group and waited for the finish. In an ideal world, the Comunidad riders with the help of a Polish rider leading the U23 GC would drag us up to the breakaway and I could try my hand at an attack before the finish. But it was not to be. The breakaway held there 1:30 - 2:00 advantage the rest of the way.

There were some attacks on the last Cat 3 climb that whittled our group down to 11 or so, but I was never in serious jeapordy. I ended up 7th in our little sprint for the line, putting me 13th on the stage and 18th (I think) on GC, not too terribly bad.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with the race. From a training perspective, stage 1 was about as good as one could ask for, and stage 2 I was pleased that I could hang with some pretty fast guys on the cimbs.

My next race is the Valenciaga Spanish Cup race up in the Basque Country. It's supposed to be the hardest and most prestigious one-day race for amateurs in Spain. I think cold and mountainous will be the order of the day. We'll see how it goes.

As for post-race stuff today, the race organizers were kind enough to pay for us to eat lunch at the hotel before heading home. In a wonderful departure from race food, the hotel made a fantastic paella and brought out some slices of Jamon serrano too! I couldn't have been happier.

Hasta Luego!