by Katie Lambden
9/29
I write from a cybercafe in San Salvador. I’m here with the composite team TRIA (consisting of various U.S.-based riders, three of which are with Lipton back home). We are competing in the Vuelta a El Salvador, which is a international-level – i.e. UCI – event, albeit with very small field. There are 27 racers, which is a big disappointment, but Nobili from Italy is here and some good riders from Colombia.
I arrived on the 24th, and was picked up at the airport in San Salvador by someone connected to the race. As it happened, the Colombian team arrived at the same time, so the race personnel decided to put us all in the pickup truck he had brought. With 5 bikes in cases of various sizes, plus all our personal luggage, plus 7 people including the driver, it was quite a tight fit. The luggage was piled past the roof level in the truck bed! By the time we arrived at our destination, I was fast friends with all the Colombian girls and their director, Chepe.
@##=#<3,L>@##=#We were taken to the beachside home of the race director, where we would stay until moving to the Olympic Center in San Salvador the day before the race. This home was amazing – a palacial villa with a beautiful back patio that opened directly onto the sand of the Pacific Ocean. The roar of the waves put us to sleep at night. The following day, we rode a few hours on the ocean road, then returned to the house for a nap in the hammocks on the patio. We hoped to see sea turtles coming to lay their eggs on the beach, but I slept too soundly all night to look out for them.
On Tuesday we (the Colombians plus more of my teammates who had arrived in the last day) moved to the Olympic Center in San Salvador (the capital). We left on bikes, intending to ride for a few hours and then jump in the pickup trucks for the rest of the trip. First there were a few miles of potholed dirt road leading away from the beach house. The driver had to honk frequently to rouse sleepy dogs from the warm dust. Then we rode along the Pacific coast for a bit until turning off towards the capital. This road went up, up, and up some more for many kilometers. Of course by the time I was really hot and thirsty for fresh coconut water, all the roadside stands selling them had petered out. The gorgeous scenery gave me a little respite, distracting me with views of lush mountains, roadside waterfalls, and profuse greenery. The country reminds me quite a bit of parts of the Dominican Republic, except that it is more humid here and the mountains are more volcanic-looking.
We made it to the Olympic Center in San Salvador and were welcomed with press taking photos of our arrival. This was my first indication that this race is a rather big deal here. Our rooms in the Center (called the Albergue INDES, which stands for the something-or-other Nacional de Deportes de El Salvador) are extremely comfortable; they are more like hotel rooms than the bunkrooms of the U.S. OTC. Food is served in the small dining room three times a day, and is quite edible if not quite 4 star. After spending a summer playing host to intestinal parasites (picked up in either France or the D.R.), I am trying to be very careful about what food I eat, but it’s hard to deny oneself fresh fruits and vegetables for a full week!
The race started with a prologue time trial of 4 kilometers on Wednesday. We were confident that teammate Grace Fleury had a good shot of winning it (and contending the overall GC too). The best-laid plans of mice and bike racers threatened to go badly awry, though, as we were warming up on the course when we heard that Grace had crashed. She’d been practicing the descent after the course had supposedly been closed to traffic, when a man suddenly walked out from behind a parked truck, straight into her path. She was lucky to have fallen on the grass, so she was unharmed except for some very scary-looking abrasions on her face. In fact, she looked like she had a clown nose on, since all the skin had been scraped off her nose, leaving it bright red – poor thing! Tough as she is, she decided to start the race anyway…and incredibly, she won the prologue by 11 seconds! What a trooper.
Since I’m the only one on the team who speaks Spanish, I accompanied her to the airport after the race, along with Julio, the race doctor. First we went to a clean, well-appointed private hospital, but when it became apparent that Grace’s U.S. insurance wouldn’t be any good there, Julio took us to the national (i.e. public) hospital. This was a far cry from any institute of health I’ve seen in the states. The waiting room was cramped and hot, and the bathroom was a fetid cell with no light, separated from the waiting room by an ill-fitting door. Still, the hospital is open without fee to any Salvadorean requiring medical attention, which is more than we can say about hospitals in the U.S. Grace got X-rays of her face and wrist quickly and with professional attention, although I’m not sure how we skipped the waiting room line. Her X-rays showed no breaks, so we were free to go. It was a relief to escape the place: the posters on the walls warning of dengue fever were making us nervous!
The next day, the 28th, we had a 111K stage from San Salvador to the town of Santa Ana. There was a fast downhill section soon after the start, and we were bombing down it when the commissaire car in front of us suddenly got much closer very quickly. The comm was leaning out the sunroof, frantically waving her little red paddle signifying that we were to stop. The reason? A traffic jam on the road. The police had not been able to clear it in time because there was nowhere for the trucks and cars to go, so we just had to neutralize and slowly roll through the bumper-to-bumper mess. Passing pickups piled high with used tires and buses crammed with people, I had an odd sense of the surreal, but – after all – we are in Central America and adventures must be expected!
The second major climb of the day proved the deciding factor in the race, as one of the riders from Nobili attacked, bringing one of her teammates along with Grace and Aimee from my team, TRIA. They ended up gaining a two minute advantage by the end of the stage, with a Nobili rider winning the day and Grace remaining the GC leader.
10/7
The third day held a 95K jaunt along the Pacific coast from the town of La Libertad to Nahuizalco. We ate lunch (the entire peloton and race crew) at a restaurant overlooking the ocean. Since it was less than 2 hours to race time, I didn’t want to eat too much, though the food was good. There was a little boy down on the beach three stories below, asking us with signs for something to eat. We surreptitiously threw down rolls, chicken breasts wrapped in napkins, and Coca Cola poured into a plastic water bottle. Meanwhile, there was a band playing merengue, cumbia, and other traditional songs in Spanish. I embarassed Chepe, the Colombian director, by making him dance with me.
We started racing after 2 p.m., and it was so hot on the start line I thought I could hear sizzling – of tires or skin, I wasn’t sure. After the lunch, the music, and dancing, I really felt like I’d rather take a siesta on the beach than do a race. But I was shaken out of my apathy rather quickly when a Nobili rider (the French girl, Elodie Touffet) attacked and I covered her. I wasn’t about to work with her since Grace was GC leader and Touffet had 45 seconds on me in GC. However, Touffet, after a Colombian rider bridged but was dropped, decided to keep towing me. The terrain was hilly, but there was nothing very steep, so I sat comfortably behind the French girl’s blue-and-white-clad butt, saving energy and letting her set a steady pace for over 2 hours. Our lead over the main group grew to three minutes at one point.
With about 15K to go, we hit a flat section on the highway just in time for a massive thunderstorm breaking directly overhead. The rain poured down, and Touffet continued at the same steady pace, like a freakin’ TT machine. Meanwhile, even though I’d been sitting comfortably on her wheel all day, eating and drinking continuously, I was getting tired. I knew I HAD to win the race since I’d been sucking wheel all day long, and my teammates had shown their faith in me by allowing the breakaway to stay out. But Touffet wasn’t showing any fatigue at all, and I was honestly worried I wasn’t going to be able to drop her. I decided to attack on the climb we expected to see around 5K to the finish, hoping the grade would favor me with my fresher legs.
Attack I did, and managed to gap “la machine” and hold it to the finish. As I pushed my tired legs over the last few kilometers, I kept thinking how great it would be to win the race for my dad, whose birthday it would be in 2 days. When I crossed the finish line in a victory salute, I was so happy I really thought I would burst into tears! I have waited a long time this season for a good win like this.
The day after was even hotter, and a much harder day for me compared to sitting on Touffet’s wheel. We let an early break with 2 Nobili riders and a Colombian go, as they were all at least 4.5 minutes down on GC. However, keeping the motivated 3-woman break under control proved to be a pretty tough test in the heat and some techincal & scary sections through towns. We reeled it back in to a minute and a half by the end, which was fine for Grace.
Day 5 held a 5K TT in the morning, and a 60K circuit race (12 laps of the TT course) in the afternoon. Grace again won the TT, by 3 seconds over Olivia Gollan. We figured Nobili would attack the heck out of us on the circuit, since they must have known we were tired from setting tempo 2 days in a row. However, there was a nerve-wracking silence from them, and we rode almost the whole race steeling ourselves for attacks that never came. Finally on the second to last lap, a Colombian went away with the Salvadorean rider on Nobili. Everyone wanted Evelyn (the Salvadorean) to win a stage, so the press and the race director and the public could go home happy. She did win, and we kept Grace in yellow for another day.
The last stage was short but grueling: an uneventful 35K flat “warm-up” followed by a 17K climb up the volcano (Quetzaltepeque) outside San Salvador. Thank goodness I had begged a 28-tooth cog from one of the Salvadorean mechanics to supplement the 25 I had unwisely assumed would be sufficient for the terrain of the Vuelta. It was 17K of hard climbing (up to 15%) with only one break in the uphill grade; that “break” was about 3/4 of the way in and consisted of a 20 meter flat bit of road. The field separated in slow motion within a few K of the climb’s start. I found myself behind Grace, Aimee, Marta and Olivia (both Nobili), but our positions shifted over the course of the hour and a half or so that we struggled uphill. Aimee was long gone and ended up winning both the stage and the overall by some ridiculous amount of time. She said afterward that her experience on Mt. Washington was similar (Mt. Washington being steeper, but her relative gearing feeling roughly equal).
So our little composite team took the overall team GC and the individual, and felt pretty proud to have held off the ravening Nobili squad!
Winning my first semi-major race was very exciting and gratifying, especially after a tough season during which I often wondered if I could ever put all the pieces together to create such a victory. However, in the week or so since that little triumph, I keep thinking of one of my favorite poems. Robert Service, in the last stanza of The Spell of the Yukon, remarks:
@##=#<2,r>@##=#”There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old.
Yet it’s not so much the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold…”
I’ve found to be true for myself as a bike racer what Service found as a prospector. Success – gold, victory, etc. – is the motivation for the struggle and the search, but it’s the struggle itself that is ultimately its own reward.
With that thought in mind, I look forward to a new season and new challenges with excitement. Thanks go to all who have supported me and encouraged me this past year, and a happy off-season to all. I plan to get a cross bike, enjoy slow “bird-watching” rides on 9W (unencumbered for once by the weight of the baleful yellow eye of the PowerTap), and get my running shoes out. Until next year…
Katie Lambden