The Portland Criterium was a cool race. The course is in a solid location - the North Park blocks of Portland — near the Pearl District. I was able to ride to/from the start. Concretely, the course is less than 1/2 a mile. It’s very tight and has 6 corners. The the corners possessed extra features like manhole covers and patches of torn tarmac.

The race was at 3:20pm which is an awkward time because depending on your stomach, you might not want to have lunch before. I had a robust breakfast and some easily digestible carbs leading up to the race. Right before, I popped a caffeineited SiS gel (40g of carbs). I had one bottle of hydration as well — a Liquid IV or something.

This was my second OBRA race. I liked racing with a different pool of racers (i.e. not NorCal). The field had 21 riders and a large handful of them were skilled riders. Bike handling skills were crucial given the course layout. It quickly became apparent who was good at cornering. The race started (and stayed) fast. The corners approached rapidly. As soon as you took one, you were trying to get speed to carry through the next one.

It took me a long time to figure the course out and learn which wheels were/weren’t safe to follow. Many riders would strike trying to pedal through corners which made things sketchy and unpredictable. The field was rubber-banding quite a bit.

I focused on the dynamics of the cornering. Specifically, I felt that because of sketchy riders, I was braking going into corners and using far too much energy accelerating out of corners. Tommy and Alex gave me feedback on this in Bend too. Instead, I tried to let a small gap open up between me and the rider in front of me going into the corner. The gap is maybe a bike length in size. Going into the corner, this serves as as a sort of buffer. I would carry speed through the corner and come out pretty much right on the wheel of the rider in front of me. This worked pretty well.

In addition to the cornering, it was incredibly hard to find places to move up in positions. It was cognitively intensive. I sat ~12th wheel the majority of the race. A few times, I used the straight-away (before the first corner) to move up 2-3 spots but lost them again near corner 3.

The next optimal place was out of corner 3. Consistent pedaling was needed through this turn and it was wide enough to do. Usually you would have someone on either elbow. but you had to be really quick since the stretch was small and I didn’t want to shoot inside gaps on the corner.

With 5 laps to go, the rider a couple of wheels in front of me started to aggressively move up. I followed his wheel but couldn’t confidently hold it through the corners for the remainder of the race. I was pretty unprepared for bell lap and wasn’t in a favorable position at all. I also wasn’t in the right headspace to make a move safely.

This was frustrating but that’s part of bike racing I guess. Ultimately I rolled in like 16th or something. The spread between my average power and normalized power was smaller than in the Cascade Classic. I think this means I was riding more efficiently through the corners. That’s good I suppose.