Race Report: 2023 Snelling Road Race - Men’s P12
Race: 2023 Snelling Road Race - Men’s P12
Date: Feb 25, 2023
AVRT racers: Austin King, Cameron O’Reilly, Grant Miller, Nathan Martin, Shane McGuire, Jack Liu
Top Result: Jack Liu 9/38 (overall), 4/26 (Cat 2)
Course: 4 laps of a 23-mile rectangular course. Mostly flat with a couple bumps here and there. A very bad pavement downhill section right after the feed zone hill. The finish is an uphill kicker after two consecutive right then left turns.
Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/8622081769
Nutrition: I started with 2 bottles of 60g sugar bottles, grabbed 2 bottles during the race, and lost one in the shitty pavement section. Also ate lots of gels throughout the race.
Race Recap:
The weather forecast predicted freezing and rainy conditions, thus many people were on the fence before the race. Eventually we had 6 riders decide to test our luck, making Alto Velo the biggest team in the race. Despite fearful competitors including local pro Quinn Felton, project 74 and mike’s bikes, we had a strong squad and were confident to win from either a break or field sprint.
One issue with racing in cold and wet weather was that it was really hard to recognize everyone, including our own teammates, when we all had our vest/jackets on. We did a great job as a team in the first lap. For the first half, Cam and Shane were near the front covering attacks and countered. Grant and Nathan took over for the second half, and bridged over to a break with the help of Shane. Austin and I were just sitting in.
However, we were quite unlucky: Cam got a mechanical 30min into the race and dropped out; Nathan hit a pothole underneath the big puddle on the road and flattened out; Grant flattened out when he just bridged to the break; Shane sacrificed himself chasing the break back; then Austin unfortunately crashed out in the 3rd lap. So it was just down to me into the final lap……
Quinn Felton made several ferocious attacks that were heavily marked by everyone. When it’s done, a break of 3 sneakily went away with ~12 mile to go. People didn’t know about my teammates’ bad luck and even asked if I had any teammate in the break, and of course I said yes and sat in. Quinn, riders from Terun and Dolce did some strong pulls (or more like Quinn singlehanded) trying to bring down the gap, but a project 74 rider was also blocking the chase and the gap just kept going up and we never saw the break again. Going into the final 500m, I was in a decent position, but without any team driving the pace, it suddenly slowed down and I got swamped. I tried to make up some ground in the last two turns and managed to finish 6th in the field in the uphill sprint.
While this wasn’t what we had planned for the race, everyone still played his role well while he was in the game, and we definitely learnt how to communicate more effectively as a team when things happen. It’s also a lesson to all of us that anything could happen in a race and we should always plan for the worst. Lastly, I’d like to thank our sponsor Agile: I always had lower back pain issues after spending several hours on the saddle, which severely affected my ability to put down power near the end of a long race (and made me shy away from long road races). However, earlier this year before the season started, I did a bike fit with Amy Babcock at Agile, and my back issue has significantly improved! Now I was feeling so much better and alive during long races like Snelling and really happy that I’ve done the bike fit with Agile.
-Jack