Craig Roemer - National Champion

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...

Gold Nugget Stage Race

Stage 1: Mass start hillclimb

The hillclimb started at 5pm and was 9 miles long with 6 miles of rolling hills and a steep 3 mile climb. At the start, I sat in the group to not waste any energy, then when the hill started, I began to ride at a fast pace and when we only had less than halfway up the climb to go, it was only Chris Flanagan (Team Swift) and me. I attacked him several times, but he matched all of them. I didn't know where the finish line was and when I saw an official near the top I started sprinting. Unfortunately, my sprint was too early and Chris won by 5 seconds plus a 3 sec bonus time, so I was 8 seconds off Chris.

Stage 2: Greeley Hill RR

It was a 5 mile loop with only one climb at the end and we had to do nine laps for a total of 45 miles.

The first half of the race I sat in and followed attacks. With 5 laps to go there was a breakaway

of two riders: Bjorn Fox and Alex Freund. I attacked and only Tyler Hanson could follow. We worked together to catch the breakaway and when we did we all started working together. With 2 laps to go Alex and Tyler were dropped. With one lap to go Bjorn broke away and I couldn't catch him. He went over the top first. I knew he was 1:02 behind me from the day before and when I crossed the finish line to take 2nd place, he was 19 seconds behind me in the GC. Chris caught Tyler and Alex and got 3rd in the stage, and he was now 33 seconds behind me in the GC, making me the leader.

Stage 3: Toll Road TT

Stage 3 was in the afternoon after stage 2. I started out with a steady pace, but was tired because of the RR I had done in the morning. I got 2nd in the stage and Chris won by 23 seconds over me, leaving me with only a 10 second lead. That was a problem because the time bonuses for the last stage were 20s for 1st, 10s for 2nd, and 5s for 3rd, which means I could not let him win the final stage because that would tie us and then he would win because of the stage wins.

Stage 4: Bootjack RR

A 12 mile loop with 1,300 ft of climbing and we did 3 laps for a total of 36 miles and 3,900 ft of climbing. I decided to stay behind Chris for the whole race and watch him. Best would be to have a field sprint so he couldn't take the time bonus but the chances of that happening were slim because of the climbing.

Many people attacked and Chris chased them down, while I sat on his wheel saving energy. With one lap to go more attacks followed from Bjorn Fox who now was over minute behind me on GC. Chris chased them down again and I still stayed on his wheel. I attacked once when Chris was in the back, and got away from the field. I let Chris chase me down.

The last attack came from a SoCal rider on one of the climbs. Chris climbed at his max speed and flew right past him, dropping everyone in the field except me. He asked me to work with him to get away from the others but I didn't lift a finger. He then pulled me all up the last hill, where there was a right turn with about 200m to go, all of it uphill. Just before the right turn, I came around him and took the turn as narrow as I could go. I sprinted to the line and won by 2 seconds and got a 10 second time bonus over him, increasing my lead to 22 seconds to win the GC and a stage win.

Next time we should get the rest of the team to come,

Great race for team work.

The Bogus Basin Bird Incident

I went to Boise, ID with my wife so that she could race in the Ironman 70.3 triathlon this weekend. Yes, it's a mixed marriage, but somehow we make it work. :-) That meant that I would miss the District TT championship, but on the plus side I was in town for the Idaho State Road Race championship.

But first we had a couple of days to play around in Boise. One day I rode up to the Bogus Basin ski area outside of town. How cool is it that there is a nice ski area 20 miles from down town?! It is a great climb from Boise (2500') to the ski area at 6100' in 16 miles. We found a road that went up to some condo's at 6600' and while we were up there I got off to take a few pictures. While I was taking pictures a bird approached me and I snapped a few photos of it. But then it snapped at my hand and I decided that was enough. As I walked away it chased after me and started nipping at my heels! I had to move quickly and put my bike between myself and this bird that was second in viciousness only to the Rabbit of Caerbannog!




Turns out it was a Blue Grouse and they are known for this type of behavior.

Here is a picture of the foul creature.



Harlan risking his life to get a better look.



Finally, the brazen bird inspecting my power numbers for the climb. Not very approvingly, I might add...



The triathlon was fun. Harlan and I had a good time watching the various methods of exiting T1. Kitty had a good race even though it rained for most of the bike and all of the run. Local triathlete and some time bike racer Chris Lieto had a 5+ minute lead off the bike but got run down and caught by Ironman world champion Craig Alexander in the last TWENTY METERS! Here's a good photo sequence of the finish.

Finally on Sunday was the road race. It rained all night, but with a 10:50am start (yeah!) it was mostly clear and dry for my race. I raced in the Pro/1/2 race. I was the last pre-reg rider (literally 30 minutes before the deadline) and I was number 11... I hoped that like Nor-Cal we'd get a bunch of guys registering the day of, but no cigar. And one guy didn't show up so 10 of us started our 80 mile race. Half of the field was made up of riders from the Bob's Bicycles team. That and the fact that a couple of them did well in the pro race at Mount Hood made them the team to watch.

Sure enough after about two miles the Bob's guys started attacking. I didn't want any part of that and tried to just follow wheels until a small group got away and it looked like the Bob's guys would be happy to let it go, then I would try to bridge across. I made one bridge but they sat up. About 6 miles in I made a second bridge to a group of four (two Bob's) and that was the break of the day. One more Bob's guy bridged up and we were off to the races.

At first, the last Bob's guy to bridge didn't pull. He did this long enough that one of the other "non Bob's" stopped pulling. That was good enough for me so I stopped. Finally one of them asked us to work and I gave the "we'd love to work, but with half of the break all of your guys need to pull through" speech. It worked and we spent the next 1.5 hours rotating through at about 25mph average.

We lost one guy (non Bob) on the feed hill and with THIRTY MILES TO GO the Bob's riders started attacking! After a few attacks I asked them "do you really want to start the fun and games with 30 miles to go?" It turns out that the other non Bob's rider is the defending champion and any time he got with one of the Bob's riders they would shut it down. In retrospect it looked like the only combination that they would let go was a Bob's only break or me and one or more Bob's. Since I was out of state I couldn't be the state champion so win or lose Bob's would get the jersey. I countered one of the attacks and got a Bob's rider as escort. I pulled for a long time and then up the feed hill to establish the gap and then got him to start working with me.

So, 25 miles to go and it's safe to say we were not going to get caught. Which in a sense is kind of what happened... But first a quick bit of info. The course was a really nice course on good country roads, but it was a confusing one! See this map. Maybe 5 miles into our break away we came to an intersection. A group of 3's was up ahead and their lead moto had them turn left. It was confusing whether the moto was our or theirs. When we got to the intersection, the moto was pointing left, but the painted markings had the p/1/2's going straight. I asked my companion (remember, he's a local guy!) and he said straight. The wheel car followed us so I figured we were okay. After what was at least a half mile the motorcycle came up and told us that all of the groups needed to turn left back there! I guess the markings were for one of our previous loops and I made a big mistake in accepting the "local knowledge". We turned around and ran into another Bob's rider who was also off course. I kept riding urgently and those two sat up or something because I never saw them again.

After a a few miles I caught sight of a couple of guys up ahead and was able to clock them at a bit over 1 minute. I was slowly gaining on them, but didn't have much hope of catching them before the end and in fact was at least as concerned about getting caught from behind.

Into the last 10 miles or so I almost got hit head on by one of the riders I was chasing as he made a right turn in my direction and used the whole road. He actually passed on my right! I saw a rider behind him and thought "holy crap! They're going the wrong way too! I'm back in the lead!" About .5 miles later though I realized that they had just been finishing a lower case 'q' shaped loop as I made the same turn.

Coming up the last hill I saw a couple of riders who told me that there were two pro/1/2 guys ahead and one of them was only about 10 seconds ahead. Just a bit later I caught this rider who it turns out was the defending champion, Brandon Akers (non-Bob). Bob's rider, Chris Stuart was about 30 seconds ahead with about 4 miles to go. We did not catch Chris and Brandon and I came to the sprint together.

I had scouted the sprint out before hand and knew the finish. I ended up on the front with 500m to go and tried to use the "razor". I noticed that the wind was from the right so I stayed close to the center line. After slowly building I jumped with 200m to go, just as Brandon was jumping. He was trying to come up on my left and could have easily (and legally) shut the door on him, but I just couldn't make myself do it and he was able to come around just at the end for 2nd. You know what they say about nice guys... :-)

All in all, it was a great trip. Boise was fun and the race, even with our mis-adventure was a fun and well run race.

Dunlap ITT (State Championships)

Today was the district TT for juniors. All of us were there except for Joel, and all of us did 20k. For the 15/16s one of our biggest threats was the German quad-turbo diesel Alexander Freund. While I was getting ready I noticed that I forgot the spacer to make my SRM mount fit onto my handle bars, but Craig was there like he said he would be and had a smaller SRM mount that I could use. He also had wheels for us to use too! Thankfully these wheels came in handy because as I was warming up on the rollers, I heard the horrible sound of air seeping out of a tire and sure enough I had a flat on my front wheel, but Craig saved the day and let my use his über fast 808. Once that problem was fixed I hopped back on the rollers and my dad and I decided that it would be best to split the race into 3 intervals at 9 minutes each. For the first interval I would aim to hold 315 watts, then for the next 9 minutes I would aim for 350 watts and for the last 9 minutes I would push as many watts I could hold until the finish line. The first 9 minutes went well, but in the next 9 minutes I was not able to push as many watts as I had hopped. Thankfully it was a tail wind on the way back and my speed was able to stay at about 30-28 mph. This made the way back seem extremely short. I ended up crossing the line with a time of 27:40.5 but according to the parent's early calculations the German beast had beat me by about 30s. Lucky for me their calculations were incorrect and Alexander had a time of 27:47.96. James was third with a fast time of 28:29.09, and David was 6th with Alistair 7th (David = 29:14.17 & Alistair = 29:32.61) Chris and Marcus felt the effect of hard racing the day before and placed 14th (Chris) and 16th (Marcus.) For the 17/18s Charlie won with a crazy fast time of 25:54.67, Peter was 2nd (27:40.02), and Daniel was 5th (28:19.0) Below are all the podium photos, as you can see from the 17/18s photo, the race took everything out of Charlie and left only his jersey ;). 

ICCC Dash for Cash

The name tells it all, this race usually has some of the best prizes and some races you can win some nice cold hard CASH! However, the junior race was not one of these races with a “dash for cash” prime. 

Since the race was a 10/12, 13/14, and 15/16 it was only Marcus, James, Chris, and myself (Joel was coming later in the day to do the p/1/2/3 race.) Our race was 35 minutes long, and although the field was not as big as other races this year, there was still some fast riders like Joseph Christiansen (Rocket Sports) Gento Kusano (San Jose Bicycle Club) and Ryan Gadow (Teni Duro.) In the beginning of the race all of us focused on attacking and counter attacking. Marcus was able to roll of the front and got a gap of about a 1/4 of a lap. This left James, Chris and myself to control the pack and to make sure that no one could bridge with out us. When we knew that Marcus had a good gap, I went to the very back of the group and on the back side I went to the other side of the road and attacked hard. I was able to get away and bridge up to Marcus, who lapped the leading 13/14, Dylan Durmmand. After a couple of laps we heard that James was on his way up to us by him self. He was able to get up to us

 with one lap to go. All of us did a pull and I was first through the last turn and as we came out of the last turn, Marcus pulled through, but I thought he was starting to sprint so I then started to sprint. Marcus had a very small lead on me and I knew I had to have a good bike throw, but as we crossed the line, Marcus threw his bike too! Below is a photo of the finish, which wheel is the winner?

I ended up nipping Marcus at the line. James came in 3rd, he wanted to do well in the 3's, and Chris was second in the pack sprint.

 

In the 3's James placed 2nd, Marcus was in the middle of the pack and myself in the back. We all stayed safe and James got some upgrade points. Then Marcus and Joel did the p/1/2/3 race along with Larry, Steve, and Dean at the end of the day.

15-16 Soto Classic

55 miles of hills, hills, and more hills

We started the day with Andrew in 4th, David in 9th and Marcus in 10th overall. We road near the front of the pack for the first few miles. I had a mechanical, but caught back on. Ben Gabardi (2nd overall) started attacking on every short climb. We were doing great until David flatted. He didn't have spare wheels and the cars had a weird system so he could use Andrews or mine. One rider went up the road 2min but was caught. On the feedzone hill Ben attacked and was counted by the other riders. 5 riders were in the lead group (1,2,3 overall). Andrew was in the middle by himself and I was in a 5 man chase group. We stayed around 45sec behind, but no one wanted to waste energy to close it and then be dropped. We made 30sec on the middle climb and caught them on the flats just as Andrew did. We talked afterwards and Andrew should have come back to my chase group, except he didn't know if we were going to catch the leader. On the final climb of the first lap I moved up to the front and climbed at my own pace. We strung out the field and the other riders kept it hard over the top. Ben caught around the finish of the first lap and attacked on the descent. We chased and caught back on as another attack went. We couldn't stay with this one. The lead group had Matt Lipscomb (1st overall) two other riders and Jack Funk (3rd overall). In the middle was Ben then 15sec back was Andrew and then 20 sec back was my chase group. By the middle climb we were losing firepower so I attacked. I got 10 sec from Andrew, but he caught Ben and they worked together. I was by myself for 5miles until my chase group caught me. Andrew was dropped by Ben and Jack Funk was dropped from the lead group. I didn't work because I didn't want us to catch Andrew. They pulled me to the hill and I follow a Red Zone attack up it. He tried to have me pull with 700m, but I didn't. I sprinted on a hill with 400m and kept a gap.

Finish RR:

Matt Lipscomb

Andrew Dillman

Logan haskew

Jack Funk

Ben Gabardi

Andrew Lanier

Marcus Smith

Hard racing with a lot of attacks. Showed me how hard Nationals is going to be and gave me a goal for training