Joe Sheehan Memorial RR

JB and I went the the Joe Sheehan Memorial RR this year to battle the north winds. This race was moved back a couple of weeks from the last few years, where unpredictable April weather plagued the race.

Two years ago, we had rain, sleet, snow, and 20+ mph winds. I won in the Cat 3 race by attacking solo about 20 miles into the race. I attacked only because I was so cold in the group in that I could barely shift or brake. Last year I flatted trying to bridge to Walt Bleser's solo brakeaway, which ended up being the the winning move after Phil Gronniger bridged up.The thing about this race is that with the north winds if you can get a break going on the way out and have it stick through Atchison, it will probably stay away.

We showed up about an hour before the start and registration was a mess. The line was out the door. About 5 minutes before the start they pushed all races back by 15 minutes, whew. The other issue was our wheel vehicle was a small car that was jam packed with wheels. In fact, we were only able to put one set in.

So the race finally started and we had a nice sized group of 25 or so. My early plan was to get into a break after the initial attacks happened. Bill Marshall got away solo early. Then a chase group formed with some of my old teammates Craig Henwood and Cam Rex. I was interested in bridging to this group then jumping up to Bill, but the trouble was that Shadd Smith was in the group and I didn't really want to drag him up to Bill. Bob Cummings was in the group too and he's been riding really strong this year, so I was hoping we could get away together to get up to Bill.

It turns out that both Shadd and I were marked pretty heavily by the rest of the field. Shadd was putting in some little fake surges to keep the group from organizing, and I wanted to counter but if Shadd didn't immediately grab my wheel, someone else did.

We hit some new gravel sections, and Shadd really drove the pace through those. I got through behind him, but several people (including JB) ended up flatting here. It was kind of weird deep gravel with some really big chunks, but everyone seemed to ride it cleanly.

At this point Cam had jumped across to Bill and they were working well together and putting in alot of time to the group. I really wanted to get a whittled down chase group going but everyone was now looking at me or Bob to attack, so no one was really working. Coming out of Atchison, there is a medium length climb, so I punched it and Shadd was the only one that could hold the pace. Not ideal. But the gap to Bill and Cam was over 2 minutes at this point and growing, so it was the time to try to get up there. I just kept it rolling and trying to monitor the chase to see if they were closing the gap to us. In the meantime, I was closing the gap up to Bill and Cam, but not very quickly. In retrospect, I should have eased up a little out of Atchison to let some others come up with us and then spread the work out. As it was, I got to solo TT and drag Shadd in my attempt to catch up.

Anyway, I brought the gap down to about a minute with a couple of miles to go, but it was too little too late. Enough to keep them honest. So Bill won, Cam took 2nd, Shadd sprinted for 3rd, I got 4th. Lots of work for 4th, but money in the bank for CX season, where it's always that hard.