Getting Destroyed at Alviso

hey what's up guys welcome back to another al viso and today we have a special guest that is my teammate chris although in this race he is actually not my teammate we decided on the way here we are going to be racing against each other and that is going to be very clear in a few moments so stay tuned for that but um first let's kind of set the scene here you guys know the normal wind direction at alviso see the little blue arrows in the bottom right and um other than that i think the only other big team out here today was sjbc san jose bicycle club alviso is in san jose after all and they are in these blue jerseys you guys probably recognize them by now so uh with that said let's just dive right into it so how do i beat my teammate chris it's a good question because it's no easy task he's he's smart and uh he's a really strong bike racer too it's a good thing he's usually my teammate so i have to i have to try to beat him today and here's my thought process if i can separate myself from him get into a breakaway group chris is gonna be a marked rider no doubt so if i can establish a gap work with a small group of riders everyone's gonna look at chris to try to bring that back and i wanna i wanna force that situation where chris has to do chasing so that's kind of my thought process and that's why right here when there's uh an attack that's just brought back the front riders are slowing down i put in a little dig and i get some separation off the front right away it's that good slingshot attack i've talked about a lot on this channel didn't have to spike up over a thousand watts watts just get good separation i'm not over committing here i'm just using my good position good timing conserving my speed and all of a sudden i have a gap so this was part of the plan right chris is not part of this group i'm doing somewhats you know we're we're doing some power here but i'm not going deep into the red or anything like that i just want to see if i can have the riders behind force chris to the front and force him to do some chasing and it did not have the intended effect unfortunately actually it may have done more harm than good because as far as i could tell everyone else chased me back instead of chris like i wanted so now i've got one less bullet and uh now i got to be careful for the counter attack so here's chris on my left asking me what's going on like what happened there buddy he's in the green shorts and the brown top right there so i decided it's probably time to fall back spend a couple of laps resting in the draft and make sure that chris is in front of me so i can keep an eye on him and maybe i'll try this again a little bit later in the race when people are a little bit more tired and less eager to chase everything back but then this is the moment where i drop the ball and i allow just a little bit too much space between chris and i so you can tell by my mid-race um exclamation that i need to immediately respond i i immediately recognize this danger and i have to just get up there as quickly as possible and notice that chris chooses by the way one of my favorite places to attack through this little wiggle through the crosswind this is a great place to establish a gap unfortunately i was just on the losing side of it and it's totally my fault by the way i just became complacent became lazy and allowed myself to drift far too far back into the group and chris capitalized on that so now i have to commit this energy to bridge this gap which eventually i managed to get across but it's a huge effort look at the commitment and energy here i'm pretty much going into the red to make this happen but i have to because this is the race if i let chris and this small group start rotating off the front then then that's it it's race over so now we're in this group of like 12 which is just way too big to work together as a successful breakaway so the hard work isn't quite over yet because nine times out of ten there's going to be a breakaway from this breakaway until we reach that sweet spot of about uh two to six riders i want to say see like right now there's a move that's gotten a few seconds off the front and everyone is just waiting for the rider on the front who happens to be chris by the way to respond but chris is just coasting which is but which is what i would be doing by the way uh towing a breakaway group to the finish is no way to win a race so with chris at a position on the front i try my luck once again to slingshot off the front just like i did earlier in this race to join a breakaway and force chris to chase and again i find myself doing a pretty big bridge effort here spending quite a bit of time in no man's land it's committing a bunch of energy but eventually it works and we immediately start rotating nicely with a healthy gap back to the chasing group so i'm thinking maybe this has worked maybe i've distanced myself from chris and forced him to chase me back but chris is strong and chris is a savvy bike racer so he told me after the race that his chase cooper was rotating nicely but once they stopped helping him he basically teleported across the gap to us solo and decided he wasn't even gonna slow down so you're gonna see in the rear camera he is just light speed just attacks right through us and once he blasts right through us i had just taken a pole the timing was awful through this corner i give it one little yell to see if they can chase him back but this is just one another one of those those moments where i have to commit the energy which is seeming like a a pattern here right i keep putting myself in this situation where i'm committing energy kind of unnecessarily and now chris is really capitalized on it because yeah i mean you might think 11 kilometers is a long way to go solo especially you know on a windy open course like this but the rider like chris he's absolutely capable of it so i have to commit the energy to stay on his wheel but look at now i mean over 170 beats per minute we're doing 32 miles an hour and i'm in his draft still doing 300 something watts uh like this is bad it might seem nice that look look jeff you're in the breakaway this is great but now i am racing chris's race i prefer a sprint chris prefers a breakaway so this is totally his domain chris has successfully put himself in a position where he's waited waited waited and now he has has sprung this attack and i'm on the back foot to be totally honest look i i don't usually talk much about numbers on this channel and i don't mean to like toot my own horn here but um i normalized uh 380 watts for this last 20 minutes of this race which is a ton of power for me for chris that's comfortably below threshold so fans of this channel will know that i much prefer a 20-second effort over a 20-minute effort and for that reason i'm i'm in a little bit of trouble here chris has got me up against the ropes and you might be wondering you know why wouldn't i just sit in chris's draft force him to do all the work well that's a mistake and we're gonna find out why here just a few minutes so two laps later still two laps to go about six kilometers to go i roll through take my my pole here and um there's one difference here is is my poles before like i said i was i was up in the kind of high 300s close to about 400 watts my polls up to this point for the last two laps but now you can see i've i've knocked it back a little bit about 340 watts remember on the straightaway before we were going about 32 miles an hour now we're only doing 28. and here's my plan i want to knock off the pace a little bit bring that heart rate down and i want to start thinking about the sprint because the way that i win this race is we come to 200 meters all things equal feel pretty confident i can beat beat chris in a heads-up sprint but he doesn't want that to happen right he's not going to let me race my race so he he recognizes the fact that i've dropped the pace back a little bit and he is not having any of that so he is patient he waits for me to finish my pull and then he just immediately rips it right over the top of me through this corner the timing was perfect ouch this stings and what's my response well nothing really you can see i stand up here for a second i mean i feared this was gonna happen i just expected it to happen later than 5.5 kilometers to go um but again this is my mistake like i totally underestimated chris who usually is is racing as my teammate so i don't have to experience the devastation of chris's attacks until today so i'm in this awkward position where um i just decide i'm going to sit up catch my breath a little bit get caught by the peloton and see if i can fare in a sprint for a second but the race is over chris has won this race in classy fashion so congrats to him walker drop me let's get him yeah so i'm asking people to get them like as if that's gonna happen chris has this thing wrapped up it's over but that's just a ploy for me to get people to chase anyway here we are two kilometers to go i'm doing a thousand watts um because it's just a total mess you can see there's a group off the front that i'm chasing back inside of two kilometers to go this is no good this is what happens guys when there isn't any control in the race and there isn't a high enough rate of speed what happens is you get all these people trying to attack trying to do a late race breakaway which is totally understandable but i still want to contest the field sprint so i'm doing all this work to try to keep it together for 200 meters to go and i'm probably just getting a little bit overzealous and you can see in my rear cam guess who it is it's the birthday boy jerome and he is for sure much more patient and playing it much more cool than me and the moment i catch this little move off the front like i've said a bunch of times on this channel you guys there's always a great opportunity for a counter attack and boom big dave casel on the right always puts in a super threatening one anything from dave i mean look guys the dude has stars and stripes on his jersey he comes from the track he always puts in these these haymakers at around one kilometer to go so that's that's the one that is very threatening because nobody wants to chase right that's what's so threatening about these late race attacks is like everyone's thinking about the sprint and they're trying to save all this energy and nobody wants to chase and that includes me but but somebody's got to so i'm going to get behind i believe this is blaine right here um blaine and dennis and i'm kind of hoping that they're going to do the chasing and they're going to they're kind of hoping that i'm going to do the chasing and then here comes ben so ben is going to uh is going to take one for the team here and and chase back dave and this is my ride up there so i got a i got to make this this punchy surge in speed to get up onto ben's wheel and i know who's in my draft at this point i don't even have to look back guys you know it's jerome he's always positioned so well so he sees this too just like i do as our ticket up to the front of the race and i'm like yelling at ben right now for some encouragement like come on dude you can do it you can do it because look there's actually a group of two off the front i check back you can see on the on the chest cam i'm looking back okay i know it's jerome back there 450 watts okay i just have to commit because otherwise dave makes it to the finish so i gotta launch an early one what was that about 300 meters to go i have to try to shake jerome but man i can't do it i just don't have that pop anymore um chris basically took all of it out of me and i i catch dave here and i think i have it but i can you can see i checked back under my shoulder right there and i'm like oh crap i see jerome coming up on me and there's just nothing i can do legs are seizing up jerome had the much better sprint today so kudos to him and huge congrats to chris for dethroning me at my beloved alviso what a jerk right but what mistakes did i make and and how can i beat chris next time well um i think my first mistake was telling chris we shouldn't race his teammates no in in all seriousness i i think i probably i could have just been chris's shadow the entire race and waited for a field sprint that's not usually a good tactic i mean chris would just continuously attack me in from that breakaway and it wouldn't have worked out anyway probably would have been the same result and also that's just not the way i race so uh i think earlier on i could have done a better job uh to have a little bit more patience and then later on in the final selection when it was just chris and i i probably should have you know eased off with more than just two laps remaining i should have eased off a little bit earlier and forced chris into a more difficult decision so i have a lot more of these i'm trying to catch up on guys some really exciting ones i'm really looking forward to sharing on the channel so if you haven't subscribed please consider doing so and i'll catch you guys at the next one oh good spirit man

Channel: NorCal Cycling

Views: 219,896

Rating: 4.9619269 out of 5

Keywords: cycling, criterium, tips, p/1/2, racing, strategy, gopro, win, sprint, leadout, crash, Pro cycling, bike, bikes, bicycles, bicycle, road bike, road bikes, American cycling, zwift, indoor cycling, road race, Tour de France, peloton

Id: RprbnO2XvwQ

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021