The Lower Mainland is blessed with 3 such series. Escape Velocity runs the World Tuesday Night Championships. Phoenix Velo has a Wednesday night race out at the Mission Raceway. Finally, the Coastal Race Club runs a the CRC Challenge series on Thursdays.

This is pretty awesome.

I mostly race the Thursday nighters.

The circuit in South Richmond is in an industrial park. This means the road is wide and the turns are sweeping so you can take the corners at virtually any speed safely. There is only one part of the circuit where there is consistently a bit of a squeeze, a gentle left-right chicane on the backstretch and while the ideal line is maybe 2 bikes wide, a bunched field can go through this fairly safely.

It’s also pancake flat. This is a really nice feature for a weekly series for me as I don’t go uphill well. It’s also a nice feature as if I’m going out to a training race, I’m mostly interested in practicing racing. I’m not interested in hill repeats, I can do that by myself.

For these reasons, this is the best place to start racing bicycles on the road in the Lower Mainland.

So this year is going to be about criteriums, mostly the Thursday night races down in Richmond as the flat and non-technical circuit is pretty good for a sprinter in questionable form. Hopefully I’ll make a decent showing at the Tour of Delta, though with a thrice downgraded Cat 2 sprinter likely in the field, I have my work cut out for me. Rant on that topic forthcoming.

My sprinting isn’t quite what it should be at this time of year either, I’m down 10% or so in my 5 second power, so that’s kind of unfortunate. On the other hand, that’s just raw power and can be trained fairly easily. I’m going to have a harder time with the longer harder races.

Those haven’t gone well this year. Life getting in the way meant that I ended up having to miss a couple of the Spring Series races that were more suited to me. The two races I have contested this year have both ended up with me going off the back. The first, at the beautiful Atomic circuit only lasted about 15km. The second was closer to 70km before I was left by myself in offthebackistan.

Again though, limited training time means that I really can’t expect to have the fitness to be around in the finish of a 2-3 hour road race. Yeah, I’ll go with that. So, I will continue to work on the sprint, the threshold efforts to last for a 45 minute criterium and we’ll call this year a rebuilding year after the successes of last year.

One of the most important things when learning a new programming language is to have a couple of small programs in mind that you can implement. You don’t learn a language by reading about it, though that helps significantly. Also, you don’t learn a language by reading code, though once you have a handle on the syntax and semantics, this is invaluable to improving. You learn a language by writing code in it, running the code and debugging the code.

You don’t jump into a new language and write a dependency injection framework or build VisagePamphlet, the new killer social media application. You need to write a few small programs that you can personally validate are more or less correct with a test suite or simple manual execution.

The choice of what to write is kind of tricky, so here is what you should do :

Implement a Brainfuck Interpreter

WHAT.

If you have never attempted this, it might seem kind of insane, but it’s actually far less difficult than you may imagine. The language is so tiny that a reasonable implementation in any current mainstream language is going to be under 100 lines of code. But more importantly, this little program you are going to write requires:

• variables
• loops
• if/else
• switches
• possibly recursion
• thinking about types (if applicable)
• string manipulation
• IO

But this has an additional side benefit as well, you have to write Brainfuck programs to exercise and test out your new interpreter. This in and of itself is a challenge due to the limited features available in the language. In addition, once your test programs are working, there are a host of programs available on the Internet which you can download and throw at your interpreter.

Finally, depending on how deep you wish to go, this program is now an excellent launchpad for future experimentations into the language you wish to learn. Write something so you can dump the memory of the Brainfuck program. Add another pass to verify the program is valid before running it.

To Summarize:

• 1st Spring Series Murchie Road Race (C)
• 1st Devo Stage Race Criterium (C)
• 2nd Devo Stage Race Overall (C)
• 1st Random Coastal Thursday Nighter (B)
• 4th Random Coastal Thursday Nighter (A/B)
• Couple of other Top 5 (B)
• Several Primes (B)
• Upgrade to Category 3

Outside of the palmares though, there are some important observations I can make about how this season turned out.

I am a sprinter

This was known, I think. I did not properly appreciate it though. The powertap says I’m pushing 17.5 W/Kg for 5 seconds, 15.8 W/Kg at 10 seconds and about 11.4 W/Kg at 20 seconds. It falls off pretty hard from there, but it appears that that is enough of a jump to get a gap on the vast majority of Cat 3/4 racers around here.

Of note though, I need to be somewhat rested. If the pace ramps up, I can jump at the end, but if the race has a regular sustained high power section, my legs will be cooked long before the end. The Tour de White Rock and the WTNC out at UBC are examples of circuits that I have no real hope of ever sprinting at.

I can read races

This made me happy. I’ve kind of been a slow developer at this sport, which roughly translates into that I raced a lot before I ever saw the front end of a bike race. But now that I’m confident enough to get up there, I’ve been fairly decent at picking important breaks and when to make decisive moves.

My win in the Murchie Road Race came after watching a bunch of breaks come back due to the attacker sitting up, not the field speeding up. It was wet and cold and the field was sad and miserable. I attacked as a cross headwind turned to a cross tailwind then spent 20 minutes alone at the race average speed and didn’t get caught.

In two different races I correctly picked very serious and dangerous breaks and got into them. The first, the Devo Stage Race road race, I hung with the break until a couple of km to go, but stayed away. The second, in Delta, I burned far too many matches in my 1 lap chase to bridge across the 10-12 second gap and got dropped from the break after 4-5 more laps. That break wasn’t caught until 3 to go. Arguably, if I hadn’t been weak or was able to help longer, it might have stayed away.

Lots of times I attacked at the wrong time, followed the wrong wheel or just plain didn’t have the legs, but I felt that my ability to read the races has gotten to the point that I can call it a strength.

I’m not terrible at Time Trials

I’m not great at them either though. Ottawa’s regular TT series taught me how to ride a time trial, so despite not having a huge threshold or anything, I know how to suffer. I placed in the top third of the two TT’s I raced this year, both in stage races.

Race 1 – Criterium

Saturday morning started out with a 35 minute flat criterium. This would be my first crit since August and was shocking. The few road races and most of the riding I had done thus far had completely not prepared me for a criterium.

It was hard and fast and by the halfway point the field had been whittled down from roughly 35 starters to a group of fifteen. Other attacks went out of this group but with 15 minutes to go it was pretty clear that this was going to be the group for the finale.

Of note, the final corner into the finishing ‘straight’ (which was actually a gentle S curve), was tight, off camber and roughly 100m from the line. So hitting that corner in first or second was going to be critical.

With 5 laps to go, another hard acceleration shed the last couple of riders who were hanging on. With 4 laps to go, the pace slowed down a bit and I could recover. Since I had no desire to jockey with the field on that last corner, my plan was an 800m or so attack, right after corner 2, which was the first of 3 on the circuit that required some speed control.

Last lap, I was feeling pretty good and when the pace inevitably slowed around the start/finish, I accelerated to put myself in the top 5 for corner #2. A car on the course which I hadn’t seen due to my tailgunning position slowed the field further and I shot to nearly the front. Kind of unsporting, but I had committed before I saw the car, so whatever.

I came around the corner in about 4th position and when the three in front of me eased after the usual acceleration out of the corner I accelerated hard while staying seated. Quick look back several seconds later to see if there was an immediate reaction. Nope.

Coasted the next corner to get a few seconds of breather and sprinted hard again out of it. Ditto coming into the final straight. I heard yelling behind me as I rounded that last corner so I assumed the field was close. I stood and sprinted and no one came around me. 1 minute attack FTW.

Race 2 – Time Trial

Uneventful. 7th overall. Of note, the official results had everyone down as 1 minute faster than they actually were. Not sure what happened there, but from the dozen or so that I sampled it was consistent so if the timing is wrong for everyone by the same amount? Meh.

Race 3 – Murchie Road Race

64km, the furthest race for us ‘C’ guys so far. Somewhere between 40 and 50 starters, with at least a couple of dozen who were not a part of the stage race. They would be a bit fresher and thus had implications for the GC, which I was now 2nd in. 1st in the GC was right behind me in the crit and over a minute up on me in the TT where he took second.

The race started out fairly sedate with the first lap being fairly uneventful. By the second lap, attacks were going fairly consistently with solo flyers and groups of two getting decent gaps from time to time. I participated in one, but with 50+km to go, it was too far for a two man break as far as I was concerned.

The field wasn’t reacting to these breaks as there were still several strong guys in the field so tiny groups weren’t worrisome.

Then, just before the halfway point it changed. Two guys, one of whom I knew to be strong, had a relatively serious gap. Then, three guys, including two from the same team* flew past the front of the field where I had been monitoring the situation. Two of the three I knew to be strong.

That meant potentially 5 guys off the front where three were capable of going the distance. Crap. I need to be in that break.

I jumped hard and 30 seconds later was at least holding steady with the group ahead and took a peak back to survey the damage. Moderate gap to the field and #1 on GC right behind me. Crap. Decision time here, I could sit up and attempt to drop the GC leader at some later point or I could work to try to get into the break and pretty much settle for 2nd. I took the latter option.

The bridge was hard and took us several minutes as the other 3 were also bridging and working on establishing the gap at that point. We did eventually hook up and at that point, seven of us were off the front. We would not see the main field again.

With two laps to go, I was pretty cooked. With a lap to go, I knew the next acceleration would be throwing me off the back. With a half lap to go, the acceleration came and I was the first to pop from the break. I probably could have hung on for another km or so, but there was no way I would go to the finish with the break. That said, our gap over the field was somewhere between two and three minutes so I figured I could limp in without falling through the field.

I did, 7th on the day and 2nd in the GC. That’s it for cat 4 for me, I’ve got the required upgrade points.

The wins and high placings were great, but what I think I’m most happy with is my reading of races this year. I correctly predicted good places to attack and recognized a winning break when it went up the road and buried myself to get into it. That’s experience I suppose, but it’s nice confirmation that I’ve got a solid base on the smarts of bike racing.

*Two from Escape Velocity, of note, NOT the guy in 3rd on the GC. This effectively meant that two teammates of a potential podium on the GC just guaranteed his top position would be 3rd. Not smart racing on their part. Bluntly, if they had worked with him to shatter the field, I probably would have been off the back.

This particular race was a focus for me as this circuit will be used in the Devo stage race this year. I wanted to get out and race hard on the circuit once so I would know what to expect in early April.

From the finish line, the circuit went into a cross-headwind along a mildly rolling road for a couple of kilometers. A slight rise to a right turn then put you on a flatter stretch with a cross tail wind. Another right and another cross tailwind down the only real hill of the circuit. At the bottom of the hill, another right took us onto Murchie Road and several left and right corners before heading back to uphill drag to the finish line.

Before the race, I had expected a few things. The first, that an attack coming out of the long front stretch onto 0 avenue could be effective. Cross headwind to cross tailwind can stretch things out. Also, with a large part of the course being on some twisting roads, a break could well get out of sight. Finally, if the weather was particularly miserable, that would also bode well for the break.

Basically, I called it.

I had a couple of tactical goals for the race:

1. Stay on the inside and out of the wind on the the long 240th Street stretch.
2. Jump across to and start a couple of breaks.
3. Stay in the top 10 as much as possible.

By the time lap 4 (of 7, for a total of 56km) rolled around I had put in a few hard attacks and bridged up to a couple more. Nothing lasted for more than a couple of minutes. I was also thinking seriously of abandoning. My fingers were numb enough that taking a drink from the bottle wasn’t really possible anymore and the feet were numb so standing up and riding wasn’t really an option either.

Still short attacks went, guys getting a few seconds on the field and then drifting back. Basically no one was willing to face the long headwind alone and it appeared that the field was tired and miserable enough that the aggressive riders just wouldn’t get oraganized.

Three laps to go and I decided two things. One, I would attack on 0 avenue with a lap and a half, about 12km, to go. Two, after I was caught, at the first available opportunity I would head back to the car and call it a day.

Twenty more painfully cold minutes followed as we got to my planned attack point.

I came around the corner in about tenth place and put myself into the fast lane. When I was fifth in line I accelerated hard, about 200m before the right hander onto the downhill. I rounded that corner and took a look behind me to see what had happened, I definitely had a gap and someone was following me. This made me happy. I continued to pull hard, attempting to extend the gap before I rotated around.

Several seconds later, I glanced around again and realized I was alone. Oh. Crap.

The time trial started. I hit the wet, slippery corners at safe speeds and anywhere the road was good enough, I went down into the invisible aerobar position. I didn’t expect the break to last terribly long. But it just wouldn’t end. At the bell, with about 8km to go, I had a pretty sizable gap. After coming off the headwind stretch, I started trying to count the gap by glancing back every now and then. With half a lap, about 4km left to go including the downhill stretch I guestimated that I had a gap of somewhere north of 20 seconds. At this point I realized I had a very real chance of winning.

I pushed harder and checked my six out of most corners. The gap was coming down, but very slowly. Finally, after hours (20 minutes), I checked behind me one last time and sat up, lifted an arm and crossed the line a few seconds ahead of the sprint.

Solo, off the front for twenty minutes to a win. That’s easily my best race by a long shot. I’m over halfway to an upgrade now, that should be coming in the next handful of races I suspect.

This is my third season in the Vancouver area and for the third time I’m starting the season with the classic River Road Spring Series event. It’s a flat 6.3km circuit that’s simple and quick. Generally the defining feeling in this race is, “I want to move up now, but the road is blocked.”

Attacks rarely go and if they do, they rarely stay away. This is mainly due to strength and not any particular hard efforts on the part of the field. This is fine with me.

2011 was no different. A tightened yellow line rule meant that the accordion effect in the corners was even more pronounced. Thus, I made the decision very early to stay up as high as I could in the field as much as possible. The team’s goal was to cover any breaks if they did happen and to escort me to the front for the sprint.

There really isn’t much else to say about the race. With a lap to go, my teammate Drew picked me up and placed me nearly on the front. I was in a pretty good position with 700m to go. I did not jump hard enough to catch onto the wheels of the 3 long sprinters. I got a tiny gap on the field who never quite closed it and I came 4th.

That’s a few points though, so no complaints here.

All in all, looking at the power files after the race, it was a pretty easy ride. Average wattages for a number of the laps was in the 170-190 range which is an all day pace as far as I’m concerned. There were hard efforts on most laps coming out of the corners, but the average was way day.

Of particular note to me was that the long sprint at the end, about 40 seconds ended up with me setting a new personal 1 minute power record of 496W. This included 15 seconds of coasting, so I suspect that my real 1 minute power is at least a bit higher. Max power was under 1000W, so I clearly did not hit it terribly hard. I was conservative and gambled wrong.

At the start of the 2010 cycling season, category 5 was eliminated. Category 5 had been a true entry level category and 4 had some at least mildly seasoned racers. At the start of 2010, these two were merged giving the category a fairly wide breadth of abilities.

In 2010, the various race series, such as Escape Velocity‘s Tuesday night criteriums and Team Coastal‘s Thursday Challenge, did not count for upgrade points. This meant that there really were only about a dozen races that counted for upgrade points. Very few riders rode that many of the larger events.

Several of those races had category 3/4 combined fields. Tour de White Rock, Steveston Sockeye Spin and the Tour de Delta are three criteriums that come to mind. You were given upgrade points in a 3/4 race based on your position in your category, so if you finished 10th in the race, but were the highest category 4 finisher, you would get 8 points.

In theory, this all works out well. Unfortunately, in practice, there were a few problems.

First and foremost, there simply weren’t many upgrade points available. Category 3 and 4 each had about ten people upgrade by the end of the 2010 season. Approximately 60 category 3 riders and about 70 category 4 riders earned points in 2010. (2010 upgrade information) This might be by design. You do not want to push riders up a category until they are truly ready. However, if there are not enough points available you end up with a mushroom cloud situation where there are a large number of people near the top of the category who can earn points at any given race but since the spread is wide, none of them get enough to upgrade.

This makes for good, fun racing.

The failure in the system was that in 2010 many new, inexperienced racers entered their first ‘big’ bike race in the category 3/4 field where a hard fought battle among riders nearly in the 2′s was fought. The fitness and experience gap between a relatively new racer and a rider who was on the verge of category 2 in the old system is enormous.

This makes for a terrible and often expensive experience for your new, enthusiastic racer.

So the situation is, with category 4 being the entry level category, we shouldn’t be having them race with riders who are effectively strong enough to race at a national level. Thus, to improve the situation for the new racers, the strongest category 3 riders need to be moved up to category 2.

As it stands now, 2011 will have three times the number of available upgrade points as 2010. Upgrades are immediate so a number of riders will be upgraded by the time the Escape Velocity Spring Series is over. By the time the race heavy month of May is over, theoretically 30 riders could be upgraded. In practice, this number will be somewhat smaller, but we’re still talking about twice as many upgrades in half of the 2011 season as there was in the entire 2010 season.

Unfortunately, with the sheer number of weekly races available, I doubt this is sustainable. 40 new riders into the category 1/2 races this year might be fine once. It’s doubtful that BC can supply enough strong new cyclists to upgrade that many into the top ranks of the sport every year.

There are two ways this could play out.

2011 runs as is documented. Many 3′s move up to category 2. Many 4′s are properly slotted into category 3 with some going right on through to 2 (you know who you are). In 2012, the rules are changed such that local weekly races count for half points or something like that, slowing the upgrade flood.

An alternate method, and the way I’d personally do it is to closely monitor the upgrades. Once the upper eschelon of category 3 riders has moved up to category 2, slow the tide and count local weekly races for half points or cap them at the ‘races with 5-10 racers’ level, regardless of the total number. (3,2,1 points for 1st, 2nd, 3rd place respectively)

That has the effect of quickly moving up the strongest riders in the various groups as well as still providing a reward for coming out and racing hard during the week without making a Tuesday night race as important to a rider’s development as a 100km road race.

The one variable I don’t know is how many people get out of the sport or go on to only race in the masters categories. Those numbers would have some effect on the outcomes here.

Either way, it will be interesting to see what actually happens.

————–

Primes are a part of racing that I haven’t been overly interested in as of yet. Recovery isn’t really my strong suit and, as a classically pure sprinter, I tend to get one really good effort in a race, then I am cooked.

So I’m out at the Thursday nighter. My plan for the evening was to ride at the front, lifting the pace when appropriate and perhaps get into some breaks. After four laps of this, the first prime was  called. I was feeling pretty good, so my major thought was to stick near the front and if I got a clear lane, go for it. The final corner of this course is really wide and that night the front stretch had a really nice tailwind. As we rounded the corner, I was in about third place, to the back and right of the guy currently leading. He was looking solidly back over his *left* shoulder to watch someone else.

And he kept looking that way, for several seconds. I’m a pretty good sprinter and I’ve done enough of these races that I get marked now. “Well, if he’s busy watching some other dude, I’m going to make him pay for it.” I stood up and started sprinting, since he was looking the other way, I quickly got a little gap and once he wasn’t in my slipstream, I pretty much had it with 200m to go to the line. First ever prime!

I had a pretty good workout yesterday, so the legs were feeling a bit… not heavy, but definitely feeling that I had worked them. That said, I do loves me the Richmond races and it had been nearly a month since the last time I lined up for a race so I was itching to get back into it.

The race starts and immediately is off quicker than any of the other races that had happened thus far. Everything was getting chased down, but unlike some of the other races, that didn’t stop anyone from trying, which was awesome. By the time the first prime was called, my legs were feeling pretty good and I made a concerted effort to, not win it, but stay within close striking distance in case anyone went off the front immediately afterwards. Someone did, but it didn’t last long. I hit the front *very* briefly and then drifted back.

This continued to repeat itself. My secondary goal for the evening was to take one of the primes as I’ve never done that either. Coming into the front stretch I was on the outside in the wide right hand sweeper, unfortunately, the entire race drifted to the left and I found myself up against the yellow line. I feel very strongly about these things and eased up, waiting until things opened up again. By the time the prime sprint was down to the three or so that were in contention, there were only a total of six riders in front of me most of whom were looking a bit blown.

This situation had worked well for me before, so I took off on the back stretch. A lap time that had gotten me a ten second gap six weeks go gave me a whopping 2-3 seconds today. One guy (from the largest team present on the day) did bridge up, but I wasn’t really sure if he was chasing or bridging. After another half lap it was clear he wasn’t going to pull through, so it didn’t seem worth it to blow myself apart for another 10 minutes with a tiny gap. I eased up a bit.

Almost not enough, the race promptly surged as the most aggressive rider of the night hit the front again. I went straight to the back. Fortunately, it eased up then, one more surge and I would have been completely off the back, I needed the time to recover.

Fast forward a few more laps, more aggressiveness and nothing sticking. I’m mostly recovering from my 3 minute adventure as I only ever have a few matches to burn. The plan now was ‘long sprint’. As we came around that wide right hand sweeper, the field drifted towards the outside. I noticed a familiar jersey sneaking up the inside and it looked like he had found a nice little hole. I followed and, when he drifted slightly towards the middle of the road, I just started accelerating in a straight line.

It was good enough.

All in all, pretty exciting, that was the first time I’d ever really sprinted in a race against other guys who were also sprinting. Generally, I try to sprint when no one else is.

It was fun, and I can totally see the lure to being ‘the sprinter’ and surviving until the end and then unleashing. We’ll see how it goes though, I suspect I’ll continue poorly timed attacks because riding off the front is ‘fun’.

Some stats: My attack lap was 1:53, essentially the same as the first lap in the solo break from a few weeks ago. Average lap times were on the order of about 2:04 so several seconds faster than the previous races. I do enjoy faster races, assuming I finish them. Average speed for the race was just a hair over 39km/h.