Sunshine Hill Climb

Bucked up and paid for an annual ACA license earlier this week so I'm entering a few additional bike races this season. Cycling is a great way to get hard efforts and specific training in for longer triathlons, so I like hopping into a few of these each year.

We've got a good weekend of racing here in town this week with the Sunshine Hill Climb today and the North Boulder Park Crit.

Today was the Sunshine Hill Climb, a 9.1-mile climb from Sanitas Park in Boulder up to the outskirts of Gold Hill. The first six miles are pavement and the final three are dirt. The average gradient of the climb is 7.6% with steep sections of 23%.

This climb is an annual staple on the racing schedule, but I haven't raced it since 2005 when it was a stage in the Boulder Stage Race. Today was a cool one, with temperatures in the 40's both at race start and up higher on the mountain. It meant two things; it would be a quick pace up to the top and it would be a chilly descent back down to the bottom.

The Cat 3 race started out with a neutral roll out from the Boulder Center of Sports Medicine parking lot but quickly started once we passed the Sanitas Park trail head. For the first two miles, the pace was a good tempo but not high enough to put forth too hard an effort. The first major split in the group came at the first switchback leading up towards mile 3 where a young 5280 Chipotle rider, Yannick Eckmann, went to the front and started putting in hard efforts. The 50-strong group split into a lead group of six. I had my Velo News teammate, Fred Dreier, in there and I knew he would put in some strong efforts for as long as he could.



The next split happened at the 5 mile mark when Eckmann again put in a surge on a short but steep pitch of road and split the group up for good. I found myself alone in third place with second dangling about 50 meters up the road and the lead rider putting more distance on the rest of the field.

The real test is when the dirt starts and it was just a matter of finding a good tempo and concentrating on ticking the legs over. After a series of switchbacks, the 4th and 5th place riders caught up to me and I road with them over the last few miles until the final 200m. I wasn't able to react to the sprint to the line and crossed the finish in 5th. I finished at 8:53AM (we started at 8:07) which means I finished the climb somewhere between 46 and 47 minutes (edit: 46:47).

Now to climb into the Norma Tec MVP "puffy pants" to get in some recovery for the crit tomorrow afternoon.

LF

Pic of VN teammate Fred Dreier suffering down the final "straight" 200-meters