Copperopolis

One word to describe the Copperopolis road race: humbling. And a few more would be bumpy, rough, hilly, jarring, hard, long, beatiful, fun, bumpy and jarring. This photo is a soon-to-be-in-pain Karla. The Copperopolis Road Race is refered to as the Paris-Roubaix of California for a reason. The race started at 8:30am, which meant that Shana and I packed up and headed out at 4:30am. We managed to only get slightly lost, and actually arrived with plenty of time to do everything we needed to do. Amazingly, we had no emergencies before the race, and both of us made it to the line with a nice warm-up. Here we are warming up:




We'd heard that the first hill came early in the 21 mile loop, so we wanted to try to be ready for it. Shana's race (the 1/2 ladies) started before mine, and then the 3s (my race) rolled out 5 minutes later. All 11 of us. The smallest field I've seen so far in California.

The first few miles were easy enough, and I started to get used to the rattling. Then we started climbing. At first it was fine, but then a few of the girls started drilling it on the front. I can now say that I'm definitely still not a climber. Near the top, at the steepest point, I popped off the back. A couple other girls fell off too, but at different times, so I ended up alone. I could see the group of about 7 girls up ahead of me, but after the climb was a pretty intense crosswind section, and there was no way I was going to catch back on alone. At this point, I started thinking to myself, "Wow, this sucks. Maybe I don't want to do the Wente Road Race. I think I'll be fine with just the Wente Crit. Yes, I like flat crits. And Sea Otter is going to be brutal...." The rest of my race was pretty boring. It was just me, all alone, pretty much time trialing for the remainder of the 63 mile race. There were some long, somewhat flat, windy sections, another minor climb, and then the AWESOME descent. It was truely amazing.

I didn't think I'd like feeling like I was going to be vibrated to pieces, but oddly enough, I really enjoyed it. This was one of those descents where the corners are wide enough that you don't have to brake, which is good, because my hands were holding the bars in a death grip. I just kept pedalling and didn't loosen up my fingers for anything. Of course, the whole time, I was wondering whether all my teeth were still in my head. And I couldn't really see the road very well, I could just sense, somehow, that it was really really rough, and that it wasn't going to help to try to avoid the potholes because they were everywhere. But by the time I was done, I had a huge smile on my face, and I had convinced myself to finish the next two miserable laps of the race just so I could do that descent again. Amazing.

In the end, I finished 7th out of the 11 girls that started my race. Not at all what I wanted, and I can see now that I have a bit of work to do. But I guess, to look at the bright side, it was good practice in staying focused mentally even when I'm not with other people. And to put the cherry on top, as Shana and I were spinning around after the race, who should ride by but Levi Liepheimer. Of course he won the P/1/2 race.

And here was another stellar tidbit from Copperopolis. Excellent signage.

Thanks to Kris McNeill for the photos and the hand-ups.