SCCCC Championship: My Collegiate Road Season Ends With a Bloody Mess

Midwestern State University hosted the 2008 SCCCC Conference championship in Wichita Falls, Texas. It consisted of a road race and team time trial on Saturday and a criterium on Sunday. As the final race of the conference road season, and with every race counting for double season points, the tension was high and the racing was crazy.

Saturday morning began with the road race, five laps around a 9.5 mile country road circuit. The North Texas roads were mostly flat and open with a few very small hills. Attack after attack came almost right from the start and the pace throughout the race was pretty hard. Several break away attempts went of the front, but most were brought back fairly quickly. I was once again left to do a lot of the work in chasing them down. At one point, a strong three man break formed that contained one of MSU’s riders. The center line rule was in effect (and actually being enforced and followed for once) so the road space available to us became very narrow. As soon as the break got away, four or five MSU riders went to the front and spread out across the road, literally blocking anyone from passing. Despite shouts and curses from me, they stayed that way for quite some time. Eventually they broke formation and the pack roared into action. Not wanting to miss out on another break, I took some very hard pulls, but this time I at least received more help from my fellow racers who apparently also disapproved of MSU’s cheap ass tactics. After several miles, we brought them back. The pack was whole once again, but the attacks kept coming and kept getting shut down. The race remained like this until about a lap and a half to go. After that, the break attempts were fewer and less ferocious. By this time, most people had realized that a break away was probably not going to work on a flat course in the most important race of the year. The pack was all there. I began to psych myself up for a crazy sprint. I was slightly fatigued from chasing all the breaks but my legs still felt alright. Coming into the last mile, the pace ramped up once again. The center line rule was in affect until the last straight so, even with our relatively small pack, there was little room to move around or pass. One of MSU’s sprinters went first. After some risky maneuvers and tight squeezes, I was free of the pack, but he was already long gone. I kept second place for most of the finishing straight but just didn’t have the leg speed to finish it off. Three riders caught me right on the line and I got fifth. The spread between us four was probably no more than a bike length. For a while, I didn’t even know what place I got. It wasn’t quite the result I was hoping for but not too bad considering the bunch sprint is not exactly my forte.

Next was the team time trial that same afternoon. The time stopped when the third man crossed the line, and five were allowed to start. My teammates Austin and David joined me in the B division despite being C riders. The course was 20k out and back with a stiff head wind coming back and rolling hills the whole way. The hills were small but still plenty big enough to hurt a lot when you are giving an all time trial effort. My teammates both stepped up to the challenge of competing in the B division and gave great efforts. Though we only had three riders, two of which were C riders, and had no time trial equipment, we still posted a respectable time compared to the rest of the B teams.

Sunday morning was the crit. The crit was insane. It was cold, windy, and rainy all morning. The course was very short (well under a mile) with four ninety degree turns. Turn four had a very wet, incredibly slippery strip of cobbles right before it, a large puddle in the middle of it, and another, even more slippery, strip of cobbles right after it. It was a recipe for disaster.

The races began and carnage ensued….

Chris Collins after hitting the horizontal wall.

My buddy Aiar (left of this photo) avoided the bodies of the fallen, stayed upright, and powered away from the pack to win the C race.

PURE CARNAGE!!! This is my first crash. Turn four was almost comically slippery.

I was the first to fall in the B race. I wanted to hit a hard pace early and try to form a break away but I foiled my own plans. On lap one, I learned the hard way that turn four had no traction. They let me wait for the group to come back around on the next lap with no penalty and I hopped back on the main pack.

After a few laps I got my confidence back on the turns, a confidence that ultimately lead to my downfall. While I was waiting on my free lap, a two man break went of the front and ended up surviving to the end. In retrospect, I probably should have gone all out to try to catch them, but at the time it seemed as though they were coming back, and I have made the mistake of doing too much work on the front before. My competitors were already setting a pretty hard pace so I just tried to hang on and occasionally took a pull when I felt the pace slipping.

The straight aways were short and the corners were slow, so it was a sprint out of every turn. Every so often someone would crash in front of me and I would have to serve out of the way and make a mad dash to get back onto the group. Sometime in the last five laps another rider managed to get of the front. The finishing straight was short so I put in an acceleration on the second to last straight to get a jump on the sprint and got to the last turn ahead of the main pack in fourth. This videos shows the result at 1:05….

Behold The Madness!

I’m the one in the red jersey and white, now torn and bloodstained, shorts. By the end, quite a few people had either gotten dropped or crashed out. After my wipeout, I got up as fast as I could and sprinted across the line. I managed to hold of any stragglers (well the guy behind me would have caught me if he hadn’t crashed worse than me) and finished somewhere around tenth.

The Aftermath. Not quite the souvenirs I was hoping to take home. If you zoom in on this wound, you can see small pieces of scraped off flesh on my leg and shorts.I had a total of six wounds: both elbows, my right knee, right hip, scrapes down my right shin, and my right ankle and a very sore shoulder. I also tore a hole in just about everything I was wearing (sorry to Vanessa, Austin, and Vicky for tearing up your stuff). Sorry to Bo for crashing his bike twice in less than 45 minutes. Worst of all, I put a big hole in my King Kong socks

It was a weekend full of pain and pandemonium just like any good bike race. I am still waiting on my final result for the season. My fifth place finish in the road race moved me from 9th place to 4th so I probably finished the season off somewhere around fifth in the B’s. I will update this post with more info and hopefully pics from the road race and TT when I get them.