湘南シクロクロス 開成大会 GP佐宗 ME4 2024/01/07 (Shonan CX Kaisei) w/ commentary
Hi everyone welcome to the first race of 2024 so this is the second race of the shonan cyclocross series it’s the KA race it’s in kanaken just south of Tokyo I’m racing in the me4 category which is the the beginner category and there’s about 60 people in this
Race it’s my eighth race of the Season which started in October I’ve been doing pretty well have a few top 10 finishes I think top 50% in all of them so just based on the number of races I’ve done and and doing reasonably well in all of
Them I’ve managed to climb my way up to the first position in the rankings so that means that I get called up to the start line first and get to pick my spot in the front since there were so many people in this race I wanted to make sure I was
Staying within the top three or five or so uh uh you know in the first lap there’s some technical sections where I really didn’t want to be behind a bottleneck the start was a few hundred meters before the Finish Line then there was this tricky feature coming up here
On the right um that’s um it was closed off for the first leadin right there off to the right so it it’s pretty fast coming around this paved section and see the finish line coming up right here there’s the finish line and this leadin stretch was pretty
Fast at over 30 km hour but very narrow and windy so very hard to pass a little bit of grass here before opening up to another paved area but this paved area wasn’t very long and again no room to pass or very little room to pass because there’s a um a
Dismount here to run up the steps and then in the top of the steps there’s just a little bit of paved area to hop back on the bike and if you missed that area it was really hard to um to get clipped in well here uh
Because it was um a little incline that was really hard to to maintain balance on so later in the race you actually saw people running through that area until they got to the next uh flat paved section where they could clip in more easily coming up in a little bit there was a
Little bit of a strange decline um it was paved with sort of some cobbled sections and some smooth grooves looked like most people are trying to ride in the groove um although I don’t think it really mattered uh but what I wanted to try to do is get um to
The to the farther end of it because after reaching the bottom there’s a pretty tight leftand turn so I thought that maybe I could preserve some more speed this way and um not have to accelerate as hard coming out with so many turns in a in a CX
Course um especially like this that’s flat it’s really helpful if you can minimize the amount of acceleration you have to do coming out of each turn all those efforts just accumulate over the um well 30 minutes at this category um but then when you get to the higher categories it’s even longer 45
Minutes or an hour um so all of those repeated efforts just really take their toll so the course was really dry today um and most of it was this thick dry grass and in most places it was pretty slow to ride through um but the more we
Rode over it the more backed down it would get and some of those technical turns were a little bit off camber on sort of an incline so they as they got more packed it was harder and harder to maintain traction so there were a few slips throughout
I slipped a couple times myself but it wasn’t that much of an issue I was using mixed terrain tires in both the front and the back um I think a little under P 30 PSI it ended up being a pretty good choice for this course I
Think in some of the grassy sections it may have been faster to have a sort of a less knobby file tread tire but I’m not sure it would have made that much of a difference there’s also a trade-off attraction so on some of those off camera terms I might have been
Slippier so this was an interesting section here it was a long straight away and again the the grass was very tough to ride through so on the left- hand side here it looked like there was a little bit of a Groove worn in um and I
Think a lot of people were trying to follow that same line I’m not sure how much faster it was than other parts but it just it somehow felt easier to pedal through but you can see that I’m up over 350 400 watts and still barely 27 26 km
Per hour so um despite the effort it was uh not especially fast at this point I was mostly where I wanted to be I was in third place second place was still in sight um I’m not sure I realized how close fourth fifth and sixth were behind me but seemed like I
Was still in a a decent enough position hadn’t dug myself into too much of a hole um although I was starting to notice my heart rate creeping up 172 beats per minute is um is manageable for for a 30 minute race for me but this
Early I was a bit worried that it was just going to creep up and up which would start to be unsustainable couple of barriers coming up here which aren’t too much of a problem usually um but they can be a little tricky when you get tired in in
The back you see someone Take a Tumble there that’s always tough another slow rough straight away again a bit of power but only 25 km per hour 26 then we come back into the more packed straightway here leading into that uh the feature that was closed off on the lead in
Lap as you can see here it’s a steep up hill and then a very tight turn coming back down wasn’t that much trouble to ride it uh as long as there was no one around but if you end up getting stuck behind someone um there’s a good chance that
You have to hop off the bike and then figure out how to get up and around and uh hop back on on the way down so here we’re barely into the second lap and my heart rate is up at 176 definitely not going to be able to
Keep that up without a little bit of rest guy in front of me just managed to have a smoother clip in I struggled a bit on a couple of the Laps on that slow up uh remount it was just hard to get my feet back in and and get
Pedaling I might still have been remembering that finish from last month I thought I was clipped in and took a big spill before the Finish Line just up ahead you can see someone slip out there again one of these off camber turns with the grass matted down
A little bit where it was just hard to maintain traction I don’t think I was getting quite as wide on that turn as I had intended again with trying to conserve energy and minimize the acceleration I really try to take as much of the course as I can coming around those turns and
Start on one side towards the tape and then sort of go through the apex of the turn and come all the way out to the other side what so we’re approaching that long straightway again here after the U-turn I lost a couple of spots down to fifth place
Now ideally I wanted to use this straightway to try to make some passes and move up a couple spots but with my heart rate a little elevated and this section just being pretty slow for how much power I had to put out I just sort of abandoned that idea for now and um
You know was hoping to get uh if not rest just um you know not dig myself into a deeper hole at this point you know not even halfway through the race it looked to me like the guy in dark blue ahead of me with a red helmet was
Starting to lose a little bit of steam um the guy in white overtook him and I was thinking maybe he had just gone out a bit too hard so I was hoping that maybe I could stay close behind and um you know in pass him when I had a chance
But he ended up with pretty good stamina and stayed ahead of me the rest of the race I think I’m not sure where he ended up finishing over those barriers again it’s interesting in Japanese they use the borrowed word chicane for those double barriers um um I always think of chican
As more of a a sort of an scurve or maybe a straightaway with sort of um a little semicircle jut out that breaks up the um the straight path so I’m not really sure why the The Borrowed term ended up with that meaning maybe it’s used that way in Europe where
Cyclocross um originated and is so popular didn’t really have any issues with that up and down I don’t think um and I usually had pretty good speed coming out of it but I didn’t realize how quickly this guy behind me was was catching up right behind me now no chance to pass
Here but then on this next straightway I think is where I started to uh notice him so I tried to uh speed up a little bit to hold them off for dismounting but something I don’t know what happened here he spooked me and I I just knocked him over sorry about that
You can see he’s wearing number 63 uh I think there were only about 63 people registered for the race 56 people started or finished um so that means he started in the very back of the race um the last row he must have made up a ton of ground over the first two
Laps um I looked at the lap data and uh it looks like he had I think the the second fastest overall time for the maybe the second third and fourth laps um at least the third and fourth and then ended up finishing third so very impressive with my heart rate at 175
It’s just so hard to respond to that so by this point I was in sixth place and you know I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel but I definitely um felt my chances at a top three finish slipping away but I figured I still had enough
Energy to keep pushing and maybe I could um pick up another spot or two if I was lucky um but if nothing else hopefully hold off anyone else from passing me it’s tough to decide on the right pace when you’re just stuck here on your
Own but um the one silver lining is you can you can sort of practice your cornering in these turns and figuring out which lines work best and um just taking the chance to work on some skills coming back to the straightaway again I’m curious to see what my power and
Speed looked like when I was on my own here with no one immediately in front or behind so I’m still keeping it up over 300 350 my threshold is around 300 watts so um it’s definitely a hard effort to keep it up there for a minute or
Two but still only 24 km per hour I think I was up to 27 or so the last couple laps heart rate still around 173 yeah topping out at 25 km per hour so it wasn’t quite a rest but um at least I didn’t um dig a deeper
Hole that was a laed rider there so even though there were 56 people in the race it was pretty spread out um I think I fin I passed just two or three lap Riders and everyone else was just scattered out throughout the whole course in the top category you see maybe a
Couple people Bunny Hop those barriers but uh I I don’t even practice bunny hops I um I’d like to try but it’s it’s kind of hard to uh set up something I’m comfortable with uh and I’m not about to try it in a race this little crowd up at the top would
Cheer every time we came through uh it’s a pretty tame crowd overall not like it’s ever Rowdy but sometimes it’s a little livel they coming into the last lap here still thought I had decent speed coming through here I didn’t notice anyone behind me but I also didn’t see anyone close up ahead
So again at this point I was really just hoping to maintain position I think this must be another lapped Rider up ahead didn’t recognize him from before got I was really feeling it here with my heart rate creeping up towards 180 but I knew that if I wanted any shot
Of picking up another spot or if I wanted to be sure that someone wouldn’t come up and catch me I’d just have to keep pushing for the the last five minutes so around here I started to notice someone um picking up a little ground behind me he was still far enough where he
Didn’t seem like a huge threat but I hadn’t noticed him before so he was obviously a little closer than he had been I’m slowly picking up ground fore spee oh I could see that the guy behind me was starting to get closer this little stretch here he was picking up some
Ground and then coming into this straight away uh I didn’t know how much energy he’d have so I figured that as long as I kept the speed up he was going to have to exert a lot of energy to catch up hopefully that that would be too much for him so I’m up
To 28 29 km per hour which is as fast as I’ve uh been through this section today um Power is consistently over 300 400 but the heart rate yeah just about 180 and I think just around here I just started to fade I remember feeling in this uh
Roundabout here like I just had nothing left felt like I was crawling around this turn here but I could see him right on my heels the last few straightaways here were fairly fast so you I really wanted to be able to have some um some energy to push through here
But I just I didn’t have it in my legs and he just comes right by me he was impressive too number 23 so he started Midway through the pack at the start um I looked at lap data and it looked like he must have gotten stuck behind some sort of bottleneck in the
First lap um but then was very fast the next few laps he was still close enough where I thought there was a chance that I could um make up a little ground through these last couple of stretches here maybe catch him in that uh faster section leading
Into that steep tight turn before the finish line and even if I couldn’t catch him before that um you know maybe I could stay close enough where I could just Sprint out of it and um possibly catch him right at the Finish Line though there’s so little room to do that
There um but I just didn’t have it in me there was another laed Rider here that I would have had to have gotten around um and I wasn’t confident doing that right here with a little room before the the incline so I just resigned myself to uh
Not falling here and then slowly rolling over the finish line so I finished seventh overall which I can’t really complain about too much um you one of the top three spots would have been great but the six people who finished ahead of me were all really strong Riders uh so congrats to
Them I’ll keep working on it and maybe hope to do a little better next time but congrats to everyone on a great race and I hope to see you next time thanks for watching
This video replaces an earlier version that had poor audio quality.