RBR's Suz Weldon 3rd GC at Bisbee

Andrew Martin

From:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php...bee04/bisbee043

A frequent poster (and my teammate in Seattle) Suz Weldon got 3rd on
GC after a number of top finishes at Bisbee this weekend. Nice work
Suz - full race reports expected...

-a

Suz

"Andrew Martin" <andrew_f_martin@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:867aa7dd.0404261148.27ee09cf@posting.google.com...
> From:
> http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php...bee04/bisbee043
>
> A frequent poster

(and my teammate in Seattle) Suz Weldon got 3rd on
> GC after a number of top finishes at Bisbee this weekend. Nice work
> Suz - full race reports expected...
>
> -a

Err, I guess not frequent enough- I just saw this. Sorry, It's been a busy
week.

Bisbee was a blast- not as hard or as competitive as Redlands, but hard
enough. La Vuelta de Bisbee is mercifully short; a 3 mile hill-climb
prologue, a 40 mile RR, an 8.4 mile TT, and a 59 mile RR. The women's field
was about 60 riders.

I got in a lucky break in the first road stage. It was pretty short, ~40
miles, and attacks were going off left and right for the better part of it.
Victory Brewing and Basis, along other random riders were concentrating most
of their efforts on attacking Lynne Gaggioli, (T-Mobile) who was racing w/o
teammates. Mari Holden was off racing with the men. I was in 6th place
after the prologue, not bad, but not impressive enough to be noticed by the
rest of the field. Made it easy for me to get away with sitting in all day.

I got myself to the front/ right side of the pack at the start of the climb,
after another failed break attempt had just come back to the field, when I
saw Kate Sherwin attacking up the left side. Now, Kate, like me, is not
really known on the national circuit, but I happen to know she is an
outstanding climber, based on her performance at Redlands, as well as the
fact that she was on our composite team at SFGP (San Francisco) last year,
and I had the pleasure (or was it pain? Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure it was
pain) of watching her dance her way up Fillmore in our practice run the day
before the SFGP. She was one of only two members of our composite team that
actually FINISHED in San-Fran. She's not a great time-trialist, but she has
a lot of power for someone who weighs like 90 pounds, as she was able to
hang in the wicked fast crit at Redlands too. But I digress.

Anyway, I saw Kate coming up the left and thought "ooh, this is going to be
good" and I immediately jumped out from the right and bridged up to her
about 30 seconds later. The GC leaders, and other big players all kind of
looked at each other as if to say, "Nah, they'll be back" and didn't chase
very hard, to my knowledge... Until it was too late. We were able to
fairly quickly build up a gap of a minute or more, according to the moto
dude, but in the last 1-2 km, the gap started coming down. It seemed that
I was just a little stronger than Kate on the big-ring climb (Kate is better
at the steep stuff) so I took some pretty hard pulls; maybe a bit too hard.
Kate pulled through extra hard about 1 km from the finish, and I lost her
wheel, so she just kept going, all the way to the line. But I was pretty
happy with my first NRC podium finish.

The TT is my specialty, but this one was rather amusing. The pavement was
VERY rough and bumpy in the last 400 km before the finish, and my left foot
came unclipped- or so I thought- but I couldn't get it back in. I look down
at my foot, flailing in the wind, and see my pedal STILL ATTACHED to the
shoe! It had come unscrewed from the crank-arm! Well, by this time I was
only about a hundred meters from the finish, so I pedaled one-legged the
rest of the way in. Thank god for all those one-legged drills I did over
the winter. The rider I had just passed was able to pass me again at the
line. So I ended up 2nd place, about 25 seconds down from first, and I
figure I lost about 10-15 seconds with my pedal fiasco, but probably not
25. I was actually glad about that. I would hate to think that I lost out
on a chance at an NRC win because of a stupid mechanical failure, probably
my own damn fault for not checking that..

Stage 3 was very frustrating. A break of three went up the road in the
first 10 miles, and nobody wanted to work to chase them. They were not GC
threats, so we were all just interested in protecting our GC spots (I was
in 2nd at the time). 2 of the riders came back to the pack eventually, but
one (Michelle Beltran) just kept going, putting more and more time on the
peleton, which was REALLY dawdling by this time. At one point she was 5
minutes up the road, threatening GC for everybody, but we at least managed
to keep that in check. I kind of thought that the 4th-10th GC contenders
should be the ones worried and doing some work, but even they were dawdling.
Finally we hit the ~8 mile climb, and eventually the attacks started going
off. It was pretty brutal, Victory Brewing had 2 excellent climbers, in
3rd and 4th place in GC, that were attacking and counter-attacking most of
the way up the climb, when finally the 3rd place GC rider pulled away with
~3-4 others, and I couldn't hold on anymore. I lost about 10 more seconds,
and she got a time bonus too, so I was knocked down to 3rd place in GC, but
I'm okay with that :-)

We never did catch the breakaway rider, so she had a well-earned win after a
50 mile time trial, and she managed to move up from 31st in GC to a
respectable 8th. Bravo Michelle!

Okay, hope I didn't bore anyone too much.

Suz

Stewart Fleming

Suz wrote:


> The TT is my specialty, but this one was rather amusing. The pavement was
> VERY rough and bumpy in the last 400 km before the finish, and my left foot

How long WAS this TT?

David Newman

In article <bbKdnXE72ue-sgndRVn-sw@comcast.com>,
"Suz" <suzweldon@bigfoot.com> wrote:

> Okay, hope I didn't bore anyone too much.

Definitely NOT boring. Thanks for telling us about it, and Bravo to you
too!

>>Dave

TritonRider

>From: "Suz" suzweldon@bigfoot.com

>Okay, hope I didn't bore anyone too much.
>
>Suz
>

Nope, Thanks.
Bill C

Howard Kveck

In article <bbKdnXE72ue-sgndRVn-sw@comcast.com>,
"Suz" <suzweldon@bigfoot.com> wrote:

> "Andrew Martin" <andrew_f_martin@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:867aa7dd.0404261148.27ee09cf@posting.google.com...
> > From:
> > http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php...bee04/bisbee043
> >
> > A frequent poster
>
> (and my teammate in Seattle) Suz Weldon got 3rd on
> > GC after a number of top finishes at Bisbee this weekend. Nice work
> > Suz - full race reports expected...
> >
> > -a
>
> Err, I guess not frequent enough- I just saw this. Sorry, It's been a busy
> week.
>
> Bisbee was a blast- not as hard or as competitive as Redlands, but hard
> enough. La Vuelta de Bisbee is mercifully short; a 3 mile hill-climb
> prologue, a 40 mile RR, an 8.4 mile TT, and a 59 mile RR. The women's field
> was about 60 riders.

(snipper)

Nice report, Suz, and great finish, too. Sounds like you read the race
pretty well on the first stage when you got in the break with Kate Sherwin.
Perhaps your days of not being noticed in the peloton are numbered...

--
tanx,
Howard

"Moby Dick was a work of art, What the hell happened?"


remove YOUR SHOES to reply, ok?