River Gorge Road Race

Gotten a bit behind on the blogs … this one I started last Saturday after the River Gorge race – and I think I’ll go ahead and try to finish it up before this afternoon’s race in Anderson, SC.

River Gorge Road Race
Wow, another epic race today at the River Gorge road race up in Chattanooga, TN. The race was going really well until it wasn’t. I missed the early move, but managed to escape the field with Dirk Polhman (Texas Roadhouse) before Sand Mountain. Looking at the strava data, we had about a 2 minute gap by the bottom of the climb. Across the top we caught Bryant Funston (Marx and Bensdorf) and Tim Henry (Litespeed-BMW) coming off the initial break. We worked well together across the top of Sand Mountain, but there was a huge group this year that made it up Sand Mountain together. And they were able to pull our chase group back shortly before we began the descent down Sand Mountain.

There was an attack immediately before the descent, so we absolutely flew down the mountain. At the bottom, I rolled off the front again when the pace slowed down – this time taking Mark Fisher (Village Volkswagon). The two of us worked well together to extend our lead all the way to the bottom of the stairstepper climb. But the chase behind was on, and we got caught by a flying field about halfway up the climb. I was struggling by this point and came off shortly before the top of the climb.

Me and Jacob Hill (Stan’s Notubes) chased back onto the back of the field on the long rolling downhill towards the river. The pace stayed relatively tame on the climb up to the TVA entrance before we divebombed all the way back down to the Tennessee River. I tried to move up across the short flat section before the Raccoon Mountain climb, but there were some attacks that strung out the field and I couldn’t even move up. I started the climb at the back having set my mind just to ride my own pace up the climb and hopefully catch a bunch of people who would ride too hard and blow up. Instead, I came almost immediately off the back of the group and was only able to push about 250 watts up the climb.

So I was disappointed with my result, but happy with another fun, hard, challenging strategic day at River Gorge. I think Jonathan Jacob, today’s winner, said it best “This race never gets any easier”. Mark Fisher did really well catching all but Jonathan from the original breakaway to take 3rd for the day. Stephen Bassett (Texas Roadhouse) also road really well and was able to beat Mark in a two-up sprint at the top of the climb for second place in the race.

At the front, here’s how the race played out: Chris Brown (Litespeed-BMW) and Bryant Funston (Marx and Bensdorf) got away really early (on US-11). Brendan Sullivan (Lupus) bridged across with a couple other riders – Dave Gearhart (Litespeed-BMW) and maybe one other rider. Then Tim Henry (Litespeed-BMW) and Jonathan Jacob (Bissell) bridged across. I ended up missing all of these moves and nearly tacked onto the last one getting caught in the middle for about half a mile but unable to close the gap. The original break of four worked well together, but when additional riders bridged across, the harmony in the break diminished and Brendan ended up soloing off the front of the break for a large portion of the race – only getting caught by the break towards the end of the race. The next group on the course was what was left of our main field (about 27 riders) – and we were given a time split of 1’20” to the break at the bottom of the Raccoon Mountain climb.

Mark attacked early on the climb and caught everybody but Jonathan before the top of the first steep part of the climb. Our group was shattered at this point, but I was far enough back not to see clearly what was going on in front. Here’s all my heartrate data from the race:

River Gorge Road Race - heartrate zone summary River Gorge Road Race – heartrate zone summary