As if my first Shootout experience weren’t enough to scare me away, I was back for more 2 weeks later in the cold desert hours of the morning. For a teenager, this was like having to wake up at 3:00 a.m., which was the equivalent of 6:00 a.m. in regular people hours.
There was one key difference to this Shootout, though. As you’ll recall in my last Shootout report (which I’m sure you all have read) I explained how there are really two Shootouts: The first one consists of older riders with pent up energy and competitive spirit from a week of sitting at a desk, while the second one (which left 15 minutes later) consists of professional riders spending their off-season training in Tucson. It wasn’t until I was sitting amidst a pack of cyclists with about 1% body fat that I began to realize how little dignity I would have by the time this was over. My only options were to 1) sneak away quietly before anyone even noticed I was there, 2) crash out the entire field within the first mile, or 3) prepare to lose a massive amount of face. I decided to go with option 3 since my kit was far too bright to be able to sneak away and I didn’t want to be charged with crashing out a potential World Champion.
The first 20 minutes of the ride was a regulated warm-up, and then as soon as we hit Valencia Road the testosterone began to fly. As long as I could stay protected from the wind I was able to hang on (let’s face it, there was no way I could hold 400 watts like the riders at the front). And then my luck ran out (as it always seems to do) and we hit a brutal sidewind section and everyone decided to screw everyone else over by staying in the gutter and not moving over to create another echelon behind the one at the front. I soon found myself dodging an obstacle course of riders shooting off the back and trying to get every bit of draft I could from the rider in front of my by riding in the 2 inch gap between his wheel and the pavement dropoff on the other side. Then I made the mistake of looking up the road and seeing the dire situation the rest of the peloton was in as everyone was suffering in a single file line several hundred feet long. And yet I was determined to squeeze every ounce of training I could from this ride. I don’t quite remember (because of memory loss due to lack of oxygen to the brain) but I’m pretty sure I was frothing at the mouth and blood was dripping from my eyes and lactic acid was coming out of the pores in my skin before I finally just couldn’t close that gap that the rider in front of me so kindly left as he sat up and called it quits.
I wasn’t alone off the back, though, as a small group of riders came to my rescue and murdered my legs even more as they insisted on chasing as though they were in fact the breakaway and were racing for a million dollars (which is also the equivalent of racing with a giant ego). So I suffered on the constant uphill section with this group with the main pack in sight for the next half hour until I got dropped for the second time on a nasty steep kicker. Luckily it wasn’t long before the Scraps Group came along and I became an official Scrap Member. This group was finally down to the level where I could actually pull through in their paceline which redeemed about 2% of the ego I had lost from the beginning of the ride. So by the time I got back to the parking lot where we had started at 7:30 a.m. (4:30 my time) I had lost about 98% of my ego. Another 1% was lost when I realized how badly I had parked my car (trying to back in at a slant) and the other 1% when I realized I hadn’t even turned on my bike computer.
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