Redlands Crit Report - Mailing it In

I've been pretty busy lately, so I'm getting this one submitted a little late. Sunday morning, 3/25, I headed up to Redlands for the Redlands Classic Crit.

It's a long convoluted story, but last week I started getting worn down again and was feeling pretty sick. I skipped my team's Saturday morning crit clinic and instead slept in. Last week was a low volume week to begin with, the sickness only resulted in less training taking place. So I wasn't feeling my best or very confident in my fitness going into Sunday's race.

On the drive up I missed the turn off the 215, which ended up adding about 20 minutes to the drive, so all in all it was pretty helter skelter. We got the race about 30 minutes before the start (I normally like to arrive at least an hour before the race in order to ensure plenty of time for autograph signings, registration, bathroom stops, and warm-ups). When I arrived I raced over to the registration table to sign in and get my numbers. By the time I got back to the car it was about 15 minutes to start time. Normally I like to have a 30 minute warm up prior to a race, which means I need to get started on my rollers about 45 minutes before the scheduled start (I'll post something on warm-ups one day soon). Simply put, my warm-up was completely inadequate.

This was a category 5 only race, rather than the 4/5 combined fields you'll have at a lot of races. When coupled with the ridiculous start time, it made for a pretty small field. I think we had 40 guys at the start. When you consider that normally 10 to 15 guys don't really have the fitness or strength to hang in one of these races, you quickly realize that there were less than 20 guys to worry about.

The pace of the race was fairly slow (22 miles per hour for a good portion) with only about 5 people who were really willing to work at the front. It would have been a great race to try an attack and try leave the field in the dust. However, I just didn't have anything in the tank. Basically I just rode with the pack the whole way, had nothing for the sprint, finished a disappointing 12th and notched one more race up toward the ten that I need in order to move up to category 4.

Here are the results.

And here are some photos.