Yesterday I told you we were taking a break from the excessive number of vacation pictures to bring you the races from this past weekend. The Crit this weekend was really fun, and scary. Fun and scary all wrapped into one because James raced his first Category 4 race. I don't think we covered Categories in our primer mainly because I am not sure at that point I really understood them. (There is sometimes bliss not knowing what you don't know.) Any way...
Categories....who can guess what doesn't belong in the picture above? Well, in fairness they belong but they don't look like they do and many of the other guys in the picture don't think they do. When a guy first begins racing, he is a Category 5 and races against other "Cat" 5s, a.k.a. newbs. These guys have no experience and our juniors are not allowed to ride with them until they have "catted" up to Cat 4. (You never knew cat could be a verb, did you?)
You "cat" up by earning points and to move from 5 to 4 is easy. You get a point for each race you do and once you have 10 points you can cat up. For our juniors, the coaches won't let them cat up until they are comfortable the kids can handle themselves with these guys. When I submitted James's resume, he had about 30 races on it so he is more than qualified, but tell that to some of these behemoths. (We'll deal with moving from Cat 4 to Cat 3 later. A little more complicated.) (This race had 4 juniors participating in case you are like me and were never good with finding the items that didn't belong. And, if you're really bad, they are in the blue, black and white kits.)
The strategy was for him just to get out there and get some experience. It's not uncommon to not finish the race the first time or two since you are going from 20 minute races to 45 minute races so we were prepared for him to make a just a few laps since he had been sick. He just hung around the back (taking advantage of an incredible draft - he said sometimes he hardly had to peddle) until the end.
As a mom, you look at this and pray there's not a crash where the guy next to him falls on him. He said one of the guys he talked to was pretty nice. Upon further probing it sounded like there was a lot of chatting going on. In the juniors races, they go all out for the 20-30 minutes. After hearing the debrief, I decided the guys take it easy until the end. Chatting? During the race?
In the end, he finished in the pack, which was his dream finish, in 15th place out of 23. Very proud of him.
Back to vacation soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment