Race Report: 2024 Snelling Road Race- Men’s Masters 1/2/3
Race: 2024 Snelling Road Race - Men’s Masters 1/2/3
Date: June 8, 2024
AVRT racers: Nat Green
Top Result: Nat (DNP – crash!)
Course: The original Snelling course - 12 miles of rolling farm roads with decent to bad pavement. The final sprint is 300m after a tight right-hand turn. The road was very bumpy, especially in the back half of the course through the finish, with sketchy turns partially covered by gravel. Wind was not much of a factor for the early races. Weather started in the 60s, but was heating up quickly to the 80s by the later laps.
Strava: Snelling 35+ 1/2/3 - crash end of lap 4 | Ride | Strava
Nutrition: Two bottles of Skratch mix and some gels. Unfortunately I lost both of my bottles on potholes on lap 1, and missed the feed twice, partly because they put the feed zone on a part of the course that was quite fast, and partly because my hands weren’t working very well after absorbing all the bumps from the back half of the course.
Recap: There were only 15 preregistered for this one and only 11 at the start line. Only one team had multiple riders, which was Work Health Solutions with four, and they clearly had a plan, so the fireworks started almost right from the gun. The pattern was generally that a WHS rider would attack and then the individual riders would look around for a few seconds and then someone would chase and the rest would follow, and then another WHS would go. But the individual riders were also counterattacking, which made for a really difficult first lap. I had also not done this Snelling course before (it was modified last year due to flooding), so I was surprised about how bad the road was for the last few miles and got gapped at one point when I was paying more attention to dodging potholes than to the race dynamic, and it took me a minute or so to catch up. I didn’t even succeed at avoiding the potholes, however, and felt something hit my leg at the end of lap 1, only to look down and see that it was my second water bottle being ejected from the cage and I had already lost one (unnoticed). That was pretty bad for my morale because I knew it was going to get hot.
Eventually one of the WHS guys got away with Alex Yermolovich in lap 2. This meant of course that the three other WHS stopped working. We had also dropped two guys by that point, so there were four of us to do the chasing, plus the three WHS guys sitting in. Some of the individual rider continued to launch attacks before someone proposed that we get an organized chase going. At that point, I was feeling pretty dehydrated (having lost my bottles and missed the handoff in the feed zone – whoops), so I tried to sit in for a little while the three other guys chased. This worked for a bit and I got some decent recovery, but eventually I started getting more demands to contribute, so I went up and took a long pull and then started rotating.
We continued to gain steadily on the break through laps 2 and 3 with the two riders always in sight. We finally caught them midway through lap 4, and with 8 of us together at that point, the last lap was set up to be very dynamic.
Unfortunately, three of us never got there. In the long stretch before the final turn, one of the WHS riders apparently hit a pothole and collided with his teammate behind him, who went down. This in turn caused Brian Schuster go down, who was right behind the WHS guy, and I was right behind Brian, so I went flying over him, landing on my back. The WHS rider (Olivier) mostly had road rash and was okay. Brian, unfortunately, had a broken collar bone (get well soon Brian). As for me, I wrenched my back pretty bad from the impact, but at least was able to get up from it, so it could have been a lot worse. Currently trying to recover for Pescadero.
Stay safe out there everyone!
Nat Green