Race Report: 2024 Sea Otter Circuit - Women’s B/C/Masters/Collegiate
Race: 2024 Sea Otter Circuit - Women’s B/C/Masters/Collegiate
Date: April 20, 2024
AVRT racers: Louise Thomas, Hannah Chen
Top Result: Louise 5/22
Course: 30 min circuit race on Laguna Seca Raceway. Each lap is 2.2 miles, featuring a 0.55 mile climb at 5.6% and a fun corkscrew descent. The road surface was the best I’ve ever ridden on.
Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/11226553219
Nutrition: a few sips of malto/fructose mix. It was such a short race that I probably didn’t even need that
Recap (Written by Louise): Having never done the circuit race at Sea Otter before, I was excited to try it this year. With such a big festival area, the first challenge of the day was getting parked, registered, and finding my way around to the circuit race. It definitely felt like mountain biking was the main focus of the event with a couple of the help desk people not even knowing where the circuit start line was.
Eventually I managed to find my way to the start where Hannah was also waiting, and after a shortened warm-up we lined up along with all of the women from all of the categories (apart from elite/A). It was nice having such a big group but difficult to see who you were actually competing against.
The first lap was pretty easy. Since we didn’t get any practice laps it seemed like everyone was just scoping it out and enjoying being on the super smooth track (would highly recommend trying it). The descent was also a lot of fun with banked corners that you could lean into and pedal through. Not everyone was taking them smoothly though so positioning was still important; unfortunately Hannah was forced to brake multiple times after being stuck behind another rider on the downhill, and then waste energy to catch back up.
On the second lap, a couple of the collegiate racers attacked on the hill and I went with them. We ended up with a breakaway of five; three of us from the B’s and the two collegiates. We were taking turns on the front to stay away, but coming up to the start/finish line I felt like we were going too slow with other racers still in sight behind us, so I told Shantelle to rotate off the front so I could push the pace up a bit. That was a critical error. I stayed on the front until the start of the climb, at which point the others attacked and I got jettisoned off the back. Note to self: don’t do more work than necessary, and definitely don’t do more work than other people who are stronger than you.
For the final lap and a half I hung out in no man’s land, unable to catch back up to the breakaway but far enough away not to get caught myself, and finished the race solo. Hannah then finished not too long after. I definitely should have played it smarter, but honestly it was still so much fun; it’s not very often you get to race on a race track like that.
