Cascade Classic - Stage Five

The queen stage of the 2009 cascade classic lived up to the hype.  Starting with a 15 mile climb, my day was almost over just 30 minutes into the race.  I started the first climb of the day in good position and stayed within myself to get over the first mountain pass with the peloton.  But the pace quickened after a couple of hard attacks from riders at the front and before long I was climbing in the gutter, single file, fighting for my position.  There was a small break in the middle of the group that turned into a large gap when the climb flattened half way up before the final push to the top.  I got stuck in between groups in no-mans land with 3 other riders, and I was extremely nervous that we would not regain contact.  I helped with the chase, rotating through when I could, but I was already on the limit and didn't want to push it into the red with 70+miles left to race.  We got to the top and started the long descent with 3 riders (Ben King was with us and putting in some monster efforts) absolutely flying down the mountain.  Reality started to set in that the 3 of us were not going to catch a huge group of 40.  We slowed a bit when we saw the group behind us was pretty massive, consisting of many Rock Racing riders that needed to regain contact with the lead group and help their man Sevilla keep the yellow.  When they caught us, the descending got even faster and when we finally got to the flat roads at the bottom of the mountain we could see the caravan in the distance.  I limited my pulls at this point, knowing that we would catch back on.  With one final push past the caravan we were back in contact and I focused on recovering from the huge effort I just put in the first hour of racing.

The middle section of the course was pretty uneventful, and I was even able to grab some water from the med car.  With the final climb of the day approaching, we were on open and straight roads, but somehow, in almost identical fashion to stage 2, there was a nasty crash in the middle of the peloton.  I saw a couple of people go down hard, and was caught behind the crash, but I stayed extremely calm.  I worked my way through the carnage and got back up to speed with other chasing riders.  It was almost weird how calm I stayed this time, since usually when there is a crash like this my first reaction is a raised heart-rate and an urgency to get back up to speed as soon as possible.  It was no trouble regaining contact to the pack since a lot of people were caught behind the pile up.  The climb started with some hard rollers, slowly trimming the peloton of riders already on the bubble.  I was feeling OK at this point, but not very sharp.  I knew what was coming up and focused on just staying within myself to climb at a pace I knew I could hold for the next 30-40 minutes.  The final climb started with more attacks and a very fast pace, which I just could not respond too.  This whole week I could tell that my accelerations on the climbs were no where near as good as they were last year.  I didn't have any problems climbing at tempo, but if there was a fierce acceleration I couldn't match it.  So again I started this climb just off the back of the main peloton and climbing by myself.  I was slowly working my way up through a couple small groups of riders going backwards, but for the entire climb I was solo.  If the gradient was steep the whole time this wouldn't have been a problem, but there was several times the road changed to a false flat, so anyone in a group could get some real fast speeds going.  I finished the day pretty tired atop Mount Bachelor, just happy that it didn't end the same way stage 2 did.  I feel as though my fitness was actually getting better each stage, and was excited to fight it out in stage 6 to finish out my longest stage race to date.