Race Report: 2025 Bariani RR Men’s Cat 4
Race: Bariani Road Race - Men’s Cat 4
Date: March 16th, 2025
AVRT Racers: Jack Lund, Sam Moskal, Clark Penado
Top Result: Jack Lund - 11/38
Report Author: Clark Penado
Course: 3 laps of a 20mi loop, 60mi total. Mostly flat (300ft of climbing by lap), high winds from the SSW during the race. Some poor overall pavement, with potholes and cracks on the first half of the course, better on the second half.
Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/13901632172
Nutrition: 1 energy gel, 2 bottles of high carb drink mix
Event Recap: This was certainly a windy day during the race, and the pace started out quite moderate. However, after the first left turn early in the course (into the headwind) the pace picked up considerably, and the subsequent right turn was followed by some heavy attacks. This is where the group started to break apart, and following through to the next turn, I noticed that there was a considerable gap between the wheel in front of me and the main group. I opted to try and bridge, but was only able to make it to a smaller group that formed off the back of the main group of about three other riders.
From here, I started rotating with the others in this smaller group to try and chase back on, and about halfway through the first lap we were able to absorb Jack and one other rider into our group. A key aspect to the rotation that was happening was echeloning based on the relative direction of the wind, staggering ourselves in either direction to get a maximum benefit. By the end of the first lap, we also added Sam into our group, who had lasted the longest within the main front bunch but unfortunately got a flat which required a quick CO2 injection. By this point, there were about 13 other riders up the road from us.
The second lap was fairly uneventful, where we continued to rotate, but didn’t appear to be closing on the main group much. At the start of the third lap, we lost a couple people in our smaller group, but also caught two others that had come off the back of the group up the road. They similarly joined our rotation plan, which continued until about 5 miles to go. Here one of the other riders from Super Sprinkles took the front, and Jack and I ended up sitting on his wheel until about the last hill kicker roughly 2 miles from the finish. Here he put in an attempted attack, but wasn’t able to shake either of us. Coming into the finish we got a bit game-y, and Jack was able to react to the Super Sprinkles rider’s sprint roughly 200m away from the finish by slipping onto his wheel and getting a slingshot effect to win the relative sprint from our bunch.