Hindsight is 20/20

My season unfortunately came to an abrupt end on on Monday when I tore several ligaments in my left hand, so I am left with no choice but to end my season and begin focusing on the next.  While not ideal, it’s also not the end of the world either.  This end allows me to take a long hard look and what went wrong/right and figure out what I need to do to make this next season even better.  As an added bonus, being forced to take my season break means I’ll be able to started training earlier, which means I will be ready for some extra early season racing!

A Lesson in Bad Position

The Bannock Criterium started off like any other, a sprint off of the start line in order to position for the first turn.  In fact, this race was pretty standard and I even felt like the race was downright easy until about five laps to go.  This is where I started having problems.

In a criterium, position is everything (I’ll write more about this in another post).  If you’re not reasonably near the front, then you can’t respond to attacks very well.  If you’re boxed in the middle of the peloton, you also can’t respond to much.  From this point in the race (5 laps to go),  I did a poor job of creating escape routes and staying near the front.  What would happen is I would move up, but, once I attained good position, I wouldn’t fight hard enough and ended up getting boxed in by other racers trying to do the same thing.  Once this happened, I would generally get sent four or five position back, which I would then have to make up again.  This constant battle is no way to race a criterium.