Month: March 2010

Race Report by Shane Haga

This past weekend was my first run-in with the Tunis Roubaix.  While the road race could have gone much better, I’m still proud of myself for finishing all six laps of the Hell of the South, despite exploding all over the road on lap 3.  Never has 22 miles felt so lonely.  Oh, and a special thanks goes out to Shimano for their reliable products.  Reliable as in: I can count on the rear derailleur cable to shear after a couple thousand miles, leaving me with a horrible gear combo for the last three hills of an already disheartening race. 

I WANT SRAM! WANT SRAM TO RIDING THE SRAM PLEASE! 

While the only thing I have to write about the Roubaix is that I managed to finish, the crit is a whole different story:

The day began way too early.  6 am.  Like I said, way too early after the most brutal race I’ve ever encountered.  The night before I’d done what homework I could convince myself to sit down and do, before cleaning my bike and replacing the aforementioned sheared derailleur cable, and slipping into bed at midnight.  It was one of those sleeps where it feels like you no sooner laid down than you had to get up again. Fortunately, the trailer was still loaded from Saturday, so packing up and leaving was fairly quick and easy.  The 5 minute drive to the course was pretty convenient too.  As the sun rose and the racing began, we watched the D’s, C’s, and B’s do their thing.  About the time the B’s were reaching the halfway point, Chad, Herc, Cody, and I decided it was time to get a short warmup ride in.  Off we went around the familiar campus roads to warm up our legs and talk a little strategy.  Today, Chad had come up with the idea to flip our racing strategy  180 degrees.  “Too long” he said in his awe-inspiring presidential voice, “we have raced defensively against MSU.  Where has that gotten us!? No longer shall we put up with their ‘no work’ strategy!  We’re going to attack! And when they sit up, we’ll attack again!  This shall be our plan, as I have decreed.” And we all said, “Oh yes, you are so wise.  We shall do this.”  Okay, so that might be a little bit of embellishment, but you get the idea.  We weren’t going to put up with MSU’s crap any longer—we were going to control the race. 

Road Race

We actually had  a sizeable field compared to years past–5 Aggies (me, Shane, Cody, Herc, and Tom), t.u. had a few riders, and MSU had once again stacked the field.  I wasn’t so concerned with their cat 3 riders as I was the 4 cat 1’s.  Jason and Todd were carryovers for last year, whereas Alexi is a recent addition, as was Josh Carter…husband of the MSU coach.  I was in a playful mood, so at the start line I loudly asked which lucky fella had Haga-duty.
The race turned out to be a comedy of errors for MSU, and I was beside myself with laughter.  As I learned later in the race, here was the sequence of planned events for the race:

1. Carter would attack immediately.  They expected I would follow.  I did.
2. Carter would attack again immediately.  They expected I would follow again.  I did.
3.  Here’s where things went wrong for MSU: After Josh’s second attack, Jason and Todd were supposed to counter and leave me behind.

The way things actually went? I ended up off the front with Josh and and Joseph from t.u after the second attack.  We didn’t really push the pace…just kind of rode tempo for a little while expecting the counterattacks to come flying by.  We checked back and saw we already had a 10 second gap.  Josh blurted out, “Well that’s not the freaking plan.”  He confessed that he would not be working with us, as he was not the chosen rider of the day.  Joseph and I decided we’d keep the pace a nice tempo just as a placeholder.  There was no way we would stay off the whole race, so why burn too much energy?  Funny how things work though, when MSU forgets a simple plan…  By the first climb of the first lap (about 10 miles in), we were out of sight.  Josh was irate with his team behind us.  At this point, Joseph and I had a decision to make:  we could sit up and refuse to drag Josh around all day, and go back to the pack where we would again be outnumbered by MSU, or keep going and hope that we could drop the sprinter on the climbs later on.  We pressed on.