Race Report: Ian Harris @Tour of the Catskills
Photo by Harry Zernike
NYC Velo is all about supporting racers. We love to watch, and many of us race our bikes in some form or another. In addition to sponsoring a bunch of amateur teams, we also have a few riders who kit up in our bold home team uniforms and proceed to turn themselves inside out at various races in our region. Last week two our our U23 riders, Ian Harris and Evan Murphy took part in one of the hardest stage races in the area: The Tour of the Catskills. Below is Ian’s race recap. Nice work guys!
Evan and I both happened to conveniently call in sick last Friday, so we threw our bikes in my pick-up and chowed down on the breakfast of (NYC) champions — bagels w/ lox — on our way up to Tannersville, NY. After a few coffees, and thus a couple requisite porta-john inspections, we checked out the steepest section of the day’s TT course with Rapha Conti’s Dan Action (a former Providence, RI man like ourselves), vacillating between the choices of big or little ring. An easy decision as my legs screamed “little” for most of the 2+ mile ride. After some steak, corn, and a few IPAs at Uncle Peter’s house in Chatham, Evan and I conked out at 9pm, totally cooked from 8 little minutes of riding…
Saturday’s 50+mile RR was.. “mehh..” Evan has been cleaning up in the 4′s at Prospect all summer long and this was his first cat.3 race since upgrading. We both did a solid job staying towards the front of the 70-dude pack, though in hindsight probably wasted a bit too much energy doing so.
After hitting 55 mph on the descent, we sped through some rollers, then made a left-hand turn to see the day’s first KOM climb. The “holy shit’(s)” from the peloton were drowned out by chains frantically shifting to the little ring. I dropped out the back like a bag of bricks, recovered a bit thanks to some unaware civilian motorpacers, and found myself in a 7-8 man group that caught and picked up riders along our way, including poor Evan who had been hangin’ out in no man’s land. On the run-in into town, Evan and I were sitting pretty at the back of our 12-man group when I had the cramp of a lifetime. My quad was doing its best impression of “the worm” and i had to pull over, unaware of how close to the finish we were (SIGNS NEXT YEAR PLEASE) and lost 4 minutes in about 2K. Pretty impressive! Turns out we were 4 minutes behind the leaders, sprinting for 25th, so E. Murph moved up a bit on GC.
Sunday’s race was pretty uneventful. We both felt fine sitting in the first 40+ miles. I yelled at a guy for almost coming to a complete stop in the feedzone — obviously, someone missed out on little league — though to be fair, a 30+ mph feedzone isn’t the best idea. The yellow jersey of our field crashed right before the canonized Devil’s Kitchen climb and our field had a Schleck/Contador moment. Chalk one up for hypocrisy. Ayn Rand would have approved.
Photo by Harry Zernike
Evan and I were both in the front group on the climb (yeaah, what up 34-27 gearing!?!?), until some CRCA guy decided that the 22% section was a GREAT time to shift to the little ring. He even had the nerve to act surprised when he dropped his chain and ran me into the grass. I almost saved it but slipped a pedal and even in my pansy-gearing I had to “skateboard” for a ways to even clip back in, it was that steep. P.O.’d, i sprinted through the field back up to mid-pack and at that point could only go as fast as the rest and rolled it in from there. Evan just missed the 2nd group, as there was some confusion when we caught the 40+ field, but rode to a solid top 25 GC nonetheless.
Happy with our respective races, although not so much with our results, we will be hoping for better luck next weekend. But as we like to say at NYC Velo, a day gone by without being attacked by farm animals is a good day.