Princeton Stadium Classic, Collegiate Men’s A - Peter Chiu - 3-8-09
The first race is always tough, because you never know how the legs will respond to the intensity. Beyond that, you don’t have your rhythm down, so there’s a lot to get nervous about. Fortunately, I was blessed with a lot of reading to do, so I buckled down and read some neuroanatomy. Ironically, I was reading about the Anterolateral pathway, which conveys pain afferents to the brain. Interesting. Now if only I could get this periaqueductal gray business to start working… hmmm… no dice.
After packing my brain with facts, I rolled down my team’s vans and got everything ready:
1)Line up my bibs with my totally sweet tanlines (relics from last season!)
2)A bunch of Vick’s VapoRub on the legs, to look super fast and smell awesome
To be fast, you have to feel fast. To feel fast, you have to look fast. At least, that’s what I tell myself. I imagine it has something to do with confidence, but my n = 1. Therefore, this is a terrible study. Truly terrible.
After a solid warm up getting a good sweat going, I sneakily inserted myself into the first row, then it was racing time. Serious racing… the kind of stuff you read about on the intarwebz. It was full on from the gun. Everyone was nervous, and because the race was only 45 minutes… everyone felt like a monster. There was a little hill that was perfect for attacking, and I was fighting to stay in the top 15 or 20. That’s when it happened. Dan Cassidy (CCB/UVM), who is racing in his 9th(?) year of collegiate racing goes to the front on lap 5 or so and lines the entire field out single file for who knows how many laps. You know it’s bad when you start going cross-eyed, and you’re only on lap 7. People were desperately trying to move up to avoid getting caught behind the splits on the hill, so there was a little jostling for position. You could smell the nerves in the air as we cracked the corners, and it smelled like burning cork. After falling out of the top 15, it was really tough trying to maintain position as the accelerations came, and I was starting to yo-yo. Fortunately for me, one of the spectators was commentating on my position:
“Hey, that guy is so done. Out the back, but he has a good pain face.”
Gee, thanks buddy. To my credit, I stayed in for 3 more laps before I was toast, and I got more commentating on some good old fashioned suffering. I was finally pulled with 9 to go… just in time to see a solo rider (Josh Lipka?) fly by me like a freight train. I wanted to yell at him, “hey buddy! Slow down! You’ll pull a muscle!” However, I could barely breathe, so all that came out was a pathetic whimper. Disappointing result, because I’m in pretty good shape. However, it was a really good learning experience. After a 6-month break from racing, I had lost that basic racing instinct to stay at the front of the race even though I had been thinking clearly enough to get myself into that first row. Bottom line: you have to keep moving up. Always. It’s one of the first things you learn when you start racing, but it’s so easy to forget. Beyond that, you have to trust in your ability to crack that corner hard. Unless you go into that corner with confidence, you’re losing places.
The Rutgers Circuit Race is tomorrow, and it’s gonna hurt. 80 minutes.
Alright, off to study more neuroanatomy.
Peter