Early Bird Gets the Win

By Marian Jamison
Reno, Nevada

Marian Jamison on the main climb of the day.

Me and CJ drove down to Modesto on Friday night to stay with a buddy of my buddy Jerome (that’s Jeremy who works at Bananas, for the rest of you). The weather was kinda lousy over the pass and I did my very best to scare the hell out of CJ by almost side swiping a semi. Anyway, once we arrived in Modesto, we were entertained with amusing anecdotes concerning themselves, cycling, and their mysterious friend Givo (Geevo?) until well past my bed time, and were then awakened at 5:30 AM to the preparing of a rather weak pot of coffee. To make a long story short, we arrived in Patterson in time to admire the thankful dry weather, register for our races, and, in my case, drink a lot of espresso.

My particular race had the predictably small field size of 3 riders, fortunately we got to race with the 4s so things were a little more interesting. If you haven’t ridden up Del Puerto Canyon Rd. in Patterson let me just tell you, it’s gorgeous this time of year. Anyway, things rolled along pretty well in my race, with a couple of us taking pulls and moving things forward. The road twisted and rolled (more up than down) for about 19 miles. Then we hit the climb. It’s not really such a bad climb, but it was a hell of a lot steeper then I remembered from three years ago. I think I told CJ that it was only steep for the first 100 meters or so until you cross a cattle guard, and then it levels out a little.

Well, I lied.

But I’ve been working on my climbing lots this year, so I was looking forward to the pain. I hit the gas as soon as we hit the base of it and before I’d crested the cattle guard I had opened up a pretty good gap over the rest of the field. I only felt ok, but kept the pressure on and opened my gap up to probably about 2 minutes before reaching the top of the climb (it’s about 2 miles long) and the turn around. I started my descent, feeling pretty confident that I’d be able to ride alone to the finish and not get caught.

Unfortunately, about half way down the descent I came upon an older guy who’d obviously just crashed pretty hard. He was just picking himself up, his bike in a ditch on the other side of the road, with a fair amount of blood coming out of his nose and a rather alarming cut on his forehead (in addition to lots of nasty road rash). I stopped, set down my bike, and tried to help him. He seemed a little dazed, undoubtedly had a concussion, but assured me that he was okay. I saw the first girl on the descent above me, not too far back, so I told him I’d tell the first official I could find, jumped on my bike and took off.

I reached the bottom of the descent without incident and put my head down to try to TT it back to the finish. I could see the girl behind me from time to time, but I think I was putting more time on her than she was on me. With about 10 miles to go, however, another girl caught up to my chaser and they started working together to close the gap. I sat up, drank some water, ate some food, and let them catch me. If it was going to end in a sprint I figured I might as well get all the rest I could and be nice and fresh.

They caught me and we worked together until 1 K to go. The finish line was on top of a little roller, and one of the girls started her sprint a little soon and blew up, while I jumped on the wheel of the other girl. Right as we started the last little up to the finish I jumped around that girl and won the sprint by a fairly large margin. A good start to the season.

Sooo, yeah, bike racing is awesome and I encourage everyone to go get some.

Photo copyright Ronald Mariano. Used with permission. Grazie Mille! See more Early Bird action.

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