Annual Dairy Queen Tour of Columbus(cat 3)
(8/19/2005 to 8/21/2005)

"Hold your line"
Frank Karbarz

I could write a Steven King-sized story about this weekend's 3's and 2's races. Since I'm no Steven King, I'll Readers Digest the whole thing for you.

First, in the 2s race, Aaron Sinclair pickup up some cash by finishing in the top twenty in his first P/1/2 stage race.  Great job!  Kevin Baker also represented well.  Off the bike he shared his racing wisdom and sensibility to all those who would listen. In a field of some 75, GCCA was represented in the Cat 3s by Clarke, Dykema, Gunter, and Karbarz with good individual results in every stage of the race. In the 3K prologue, Karbarz tied for 6th, 6 seconds off the lead time set by eventual GC winner. Clarke was 2 seconds off.  The prologue was a very technical course with 6 turns, 2 trees, 1 jump, and 52 whistling volunteers(to keep the locals on their driveways) in 3K.

The Road Race ended with a 2nd place GCCA finish by Bradley Gunter who worked into a three man break on the last lap.  Watch for him in the upcoming Killer Diller, he plans to peak for that event.  Unfortunately the field sprint took out Karbarz and Clark in the last 1000 meters.  More on that later in the educational section of this post. We did receive the same time as the field.

The TT resulted in Clarke moving into fifth place overall, only a few seconds from fourth.

Sunday's crit was fast and furious. Karbarz managed to get GCCA a 7th in the crit and placed 16th in GC. Clarke crashed two more times but the officials didn't have his crashes recorded so they added an additional lap time, costing him a GC position. Worse, the fast pace caused the dude in 3rd or 4th to bonk out of the race.

Now the educational part - and title of this report.  

This weekend saw spectacular crashes in the cat 3s, and GCCA was in all three.  You would think that these crashes were all on the crit, but that was not the case.  I was going to describe the crashes, but that's not the memory I want.  I do want safe racing. To keep the story short, Lesson 1 is, before you cat up to a 3, learn how to take turns parallel to riders next to you. NEVER sweep inside-out in a pack turn like you might in a solo time trial.  You will take out riders.  Lesson 2 is know where the gravel is.  If you take a line that pulls you outside - you better know the course conditions at the end of your turn, or you never should have taken that line. Lesson 3: trust the bike to hold a line, it will stick.  Don't let the bike carry you out. Lesson 4, sometimes jumping over a fallen rider and/or his bike works, sometimes it doesn't.  This time, it didn't. But if this is justice, I walked across the finish with my bike, nearly unscathed while the perpetrator who failed lessons 1 and 2 will not be racing for a month. Lessons learned the hard way, I guess.