Category Archives: Racing

Racing

Rouge Roubaix 2015

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Annotated topocreator.com map of Rouge Roubaix 2015 (click to enlarge)topocreator.com map of Rouge Roubaix 2015 (click to zoom)

Every year I look forward to Rouge Roubaix and coming down to this unique corner of Louisiana and Southwestern Mississippi. The race itself has everything you’d imagine in a spring classic like Paris-Roubaix or Ronde van Vlaanderen (Flanders) – from strung out fields barreling down dirt roads at 30mph to tactics of making a break, chasing a break, or figuring out the run-in to a tricky sprint at the end of the race. No matter how experienced you are, it’s impossible to come away from this race without having learned something new about bike racing and/or yourself. Each category (even beginner) races the full distance of 100+ miles covering about 15 miles of gravel/dirt roads and some paved roads that are significantly harder to find a good line than the dirt roads.

The unique topography of the river bluffs above the Missisippi River delta is just fascinating with two Category 4 climbs rising up from essentially sea level to 400 feet. Plus, everything is so wet that the dirt roads sink down under the trees. See the annotated topocreator.com map above and the elevation profile and instagram photo below:

Annotated rouge roubaix elevation profileAnnotated rouge roubaix elevation profile (click to zoom)

How the race played out (P/1/2)
After the neutral section, there were a couple short-lived breaks. I was working my way to the front when I saw an opening and a rider about to attack. I hopped right on his wheel and we quickly got a gap. Three more riders bridged up to us, and our break of five quickly got a gap on the rest of the peloton. I thought this break had a good chance to survive all the way to (and possibly through) the first dirt section – but alas, we were chased down a few miles later after making the right-hand turn off of LA-66.

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Racing, Training

Two more epics

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Racing Camp Sumatanga RAAM-style, redux
This past Sunday was the training race series finale with a 100KM race ending with a steep 1 mile cat 3 climb to the top of Chandler Mountain. I had a four day block from the end of last week until Tuesday of this past week where I rode 586.9 miles with 73,087 feet of climbing. I had a pretty light load the rest of the week, and I wondered if I would be recovered enough for the race. It didn’t really matter, though, because the weather was absolutely beautiful and I was able to enjoy a shorts / short sleeved jersey ride all the way to the start of the race.

Annotated topocreator map of the race and the route there and back again (click to enlarge).Annotated topocreator map of the race and the route there and back again (click to enlarge).

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Racing

Updated RAAM elevation profile

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I’ve updated the topocreator.com elevation profile using a higher resolution dataset to get the full 3005 miles of the course. Plus, I turned on the box gradient feature. The box gradients are drawn into the profile and show ALL climbs and descents of at least 1 mile in length and a 5% average grade. Inside the box is the exact length of the 5% section of the climb, the exact grade, and the vertical difference between the start and end of the climb (or descent). Click on the image below for a 8500 pixel version of the profile. Your browser will probably load the image in a window by itself and then scale it down to fit on the screen. You may need to click on the image itself again to zoom in to see full detail.

Full 3005 mile RAAM 2015 elevation profile with box gradients (click to enlarge)Full 3005 mile RAAM 2015 elevation profile with box gradients (click to enlarge)

To get this to work, I rewrote the entire algorithm in Java so that it could run on a real machine rather than the virtual machine hosting the web server. The profile creation took only a matter of a couple of minutes … most of which was transferring the megabytes of data back and forth between the web server and my home system.

Racing, Training

First Win of 2015

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I’m happy to report my first win of 2015, and it was quite the epic! I rode from Birmingham to the training race up near Gadsden, won the 50 mile A race, and then rode back home to Birmingham for a grand total of over 200 miles and just under 20,000 feet of climbing on the day. This was in the middle of a very heavy block of training with the following rides:

Day Distance Climbing Description
Sat 155.6 mi. 32,618 ft February climbing challenge
Sun 203.9 mi. 19,377 ft Camp Sumatanga training race
Mon 18 mi. 2,700 ft Short commute recovery
Tue 209.4 mi. 18,392 ft Tuscaloosa locks touring adventure
4 days 586.9 mi. 73,087 ft 4 day block totals

The Camp Sumatanga training race series put on by GS Montagna Rossa of Birmingham has been a stalwart of early season racing for the Alabama cycling community for many years. Bill Seitz and his crew of GSMR teammates do an excellent job putting on this race year after year. For the second week in a row, the weather was not very cooperative with an annoying light misty rain for most of the day. At least this week, though, it wasn’t quite as cold with temps hovering around the upper 40s most of the day (and night).

I timed my ride to the start pretty well picking a 75 mile route that included Walker Gap and Chandler Mountain (if time allowed). I was running a little bit ahead of schedule so I went ahead and climbed Chandler Mountain at a very easy pace to kill some time before the race and to see the climb one more time before we race it for real at the finish of next week’s training race. By the time I finished the climb and headed back down to the camp for the race, I had just enough time to pay for the race, sign the waiver, and roll to the start line.

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Racing

2015 RAAM Elevation Profile from Topocreator.com

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UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a new profile with box gradients on this post: Updated RAAM elevation profile

Wow, it took a lot of computing power, but this morning the elevation profile I had started for RAAM yesterday finished. Part of the reason it took so long is that my algorithm scans for the highest and lowest point as well as all gradients along the route greater than 5%. This may not sound too difficult, but finding the exact starting and ending points of a hill allowing for smaller downhills to be included in the hill if the general slope is still up … is very difficult. To make it feasible, I had to filter the entire route down to 5000 data points or roughly one data point every km which is why the total length is shortened by almost 45 miles. So it looks like the total climbing for RAAM will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 feet of climbing for the 3005 mile route or roughly 4 times flatter than my normal riding. The profile below doesn’t show the gradients because I thought it would be too hard to see them so I checked “hide gradients”, which still does the calculations but doesn’t draw them on the map. Hopefully, I’ll have an updated version by tomorrow that has what I call “box gradients” — i.e., a box drawn around the climb with the vertical diff and average gradient.

topocreator.com - raam elevation profile (click to enlarge)topocreator.com – raam elevation profile (click to enlarge)