5/2/09: Lookout Mountain Hill Climb

Lookout Mountain sits above the town of Golden, where Molson-Coors is headquartered. Not a particularly steep climb, it winds 4.5 miles to the top, where a turn-off can take you to Buffalo Bill’s gravesite. A roughly 20-minute hill climb’s a tricky race. A lot of racers think that they can gun it from the start given how short the race is, and race it like a flat-and-fast time trial. Big mistake. Gravity is a leg killer. Despite the shortness of the race, you gotta respect the upward tilt of the road.

My history with this race is love-hate. I love to climb but the race hates me. 3 years ago, poised to catch the lone leader with about 5 minutes left to race, some juniors who had already raced and were descending hit a switchback way too hot. Two of the riders came straight across the road; one of them slammed into me. Broke my glasses and my helmet, and sheered the fork of my bike clean off. The force of the impact caused a 4th degree separation of my left shoulder (effectively, it got ‘blown out’). 2 years ago, I missed the race because my wife graduated from her Masters program that same day. Last year, I got knocked down at the start line because somebody didn’t know how to clip into his pedals. Lost a good 30 seconds and wasted too much energy too early to get back in the race. Maybe this year would be a better experience; it really couldn’t get much worse.

The weather was cold, in the low-40s, overcast and quite foggy. At least the rain which was hitting Boulder and the towns to the northeast was completely missing Golden. Climbing in the rain or snow is OK; it’s descending in this crap which sucks and chills to the bone. The legs felt good warming up. Not sharp like they will in July, but strong enough. Podium legs but whether or not they were victory legs was TBD.

We started 10 minutes after the Pro/1/2 field went off. On the start line, some young kid was yammering on. Pretty damn nervous, was all I could think. The race starts and there’s a quick 15-yard runway before the road takes a switchback to the right and the climbing begins in earnest. It’s not really important to hit that turn in the lead, but you also don’t want to be caught in a cluster fuck as the road narrows. I hit the bend in the first 3 riders, then settled in to a sensible rhythm. Almost immediately, 2 guys came blowing by and shot into the lead. The move looked premeditated and like they were friends wanting to work together. Somewhat ironically, the Metallica song ‘Cyanide’ was running through my head and I had just sung the part of the chorus which went “Suicide, I’ve already died. It’s just the funeral I’ve been waiting for.” Very apropos for the 2 riders on the suicide mission.

Panic sets in to a pack of riders when attacks occur. You need to balance your output with conservation. Once you light your fuse, there’s a finite amount of time before it snuffs out. Yet, you don’t want to be left in the wake of the move you should have paid attention to but missed. My goal was to let others cover breaks for the first 10 minutes or so and ride the momentum forward. At that point, I would assess how I was feeling and figure out what to do the final 8 minutes or so.

Greg Krause was the only rider I was paying attention to. He’s a stellar mountain biker and it’s just a matter of another race or two before he hits the pro ranks on the road as well. I hung on his back wheel and waited. About 7:30 into the race, Greg shifts into his big ring. “Here we go,” I think. I go to shift into my big ring and prepare to jump on his wheel when he attacks. Unfortunately, for the first time ever, my SRAM Red derailleur froze up. WTF? For about 10-15 seconds, I’ve got to fiddle with the gearing and get it working. In the meantime, Greg has attacked. By the time I’m back to the front of the group, he’s bolted to about a 12-15 second lead. No one has responded to his attack. I flirt with bridging up to him, but decide to wait. If he continues to gain ground, I’ll take off; if he dangles out front, I’ll hold back and wait.

Greg ends up dangling out there. At 10 minutes, I decide to start chipping away at his lead. I attack out of the small front group and shrink his lead to under 10 seconds. A look over my shoulder reveals 2 riders on my wheel, so I back off. The last thing I want to do is pull those guys to the front and then allow one of them to take off while I’m too tired to react. About a minute later, I surge again and trim Greg’s lead to 5 seconds. I figure now I can relax a bit, recover and save my energy for one last surge to fully catch him. Another look over my shoulder shows that there’s now only one limpet on my wheel.

I ask the guy if he wants to join forces to finish bridging up. To his credit, he started working with me. Unfortunately, he felt the best strategy was to surge hard, redline himself and then dramatically back off and pull off to the side so I would come through and take a turn at the front. The constant surges did neither of us any good. Not only did we fail to trim Greg’s lead any further, we also torched ourselves.

With 400 meters to go, the guy came past me and tried to sprint Greg down before the finish line. The constant surging had softened my legs enough so I couldn’t respond, try as I might. To my companion’s credit, he nearly caught Greg, missing out by a mere 1 second. I rolled across the line in third place, 4 ticks of the clock later in 18:40.

Overall, I’m pleased. The first hill climb of the season as well as the shortest. Next up is the Sunshine Hill Climb on May 16th. Sunshine is a 9-mile grunt up one of Boulder’s canyon roads, 5 miles of pavement followed by 4 excrutiatingly difficult miles of steep dirt. Not for the faint of heart.

Looking forward to some rematches . . .

Ride safe,
Nate