Saturday, April 26, 2008

Los Vaqueros Time Trial


Found out about this event from a colleague at work. He said they were having trouble getting participants to sign up so I figured that meant I had a good chance of a high placing! It's put on by the Water District and they're one of our clients at work so I figured it might be good for business relationships as well.

Two days before my 49th birthday so it was kind of a ceremony as well.

I met blog reader Curtis at the start and we pre-rode the course. He's doing Chico Wildflower century tomorrow and didn't want to over exert himself but I assured him he'd quickly recover from the effort of a 3-mile TT by then.

Curtis said it's usually insanely windy out here in Brentwood - sometimes people come out for a ride and just say "forget it" and go back home. But it was not too bad today. The course was mostly flat with a half-mile hill at the end, about 11% I think, so it really was kind of fun... sort of like the prologue up to Coit Tower the first two years of the Tour of California.






Windmills!




They started us in one minute intervals and had a guy with a radio at the start line who would say "go" into the radio and then the guy at the finish line would mark the start and finish time for each rider... kind of rinky-dink but it worked.

There was a great tail wind the first mile and I was hammering at 30mph and then came this bend in the road and suddenly the wind shifted and I dropped back to about 16mph and my legs started to rubberize. I just got down nice and low and kept a smooth cadence through this bit. I was hoping to stomp up the hill in a big gear but instead I just sat back on the saddle and pulled on the bars and huffed it up that way and had just enough left for a little sprint at the top. I figure it was about the best race I could have ridden. The overall winner was 10m08s and I ws 10m29s so I missed a pair of new shoes by only 21 seconds. I was first in my age group though and got a dandy souvenier medal.






There were more volunteers there than riders I think and they were embarassed and apologetic that there wasn't more of a turnout but they liked all our ideas about how to get more people next time.



Saw this cool snake on the road and we pushed it off into the ditch - some other people there who sounded like they were knowledgeable about such things said it was a gopher snake.



The leader board was mostly empty.



I got sort of an honorable mention on the event website: http://www.ccwater.com/losvaqueros/LVDamTrials.asp

On the way home I stopped for a half-flat of fresh strawberries!



I couldn't decide which of these Diablo shots I liked better... so you get both of them.




2 comments:

kid kulaki! said...

you know why?? because it has Road Race in livermore that day, i saw a tons of riders there, i will put it in my calendar next time.

Diablo Scott said...

Dude - the Syclistas could walk away with everything next year!

Yeah, it was the Wente race weekend, Saturday was the road race and Sunday was the criterium.

Also it was the day of the Devil Mountain Double - I saw a half dozen or so fast riders on Marsh Creek Road already at 7:30am.

And Sunday was also the day of the Chico Wildflower Century.

So lots of other things going on that weekend for riders to pick from and the staff at the event admitted that they didn't check the calendar.