Col Maciver chases women, wins Masters instead

Nice try Col, I’m sure the Masters title is a nice consolation!

Col has sent me a sensible report instead which you can read after the fold:

Col writes:

I competed in the MMAS8 category (65 to 69 years of age). The road race was held on Saturday over 57 kms on an undulating out and back course in very cold and windy conditions giving us some tricky head and cross-wind conditions to contend with as well as the undulations. It was not a day for deep rim wheels so they stayed in the car. The course terrain was not hugely challenging, similar to Bundarra Road from Armidale out as far as Invergowrie with long open straights and little shelter.

Chris McGuigan from Waratah Masters, Sydney briskly led the bunch of 17 riders out of Goulburn into a head-cross wind from the right and by riding in the left gutter he quickly had the bunch strung out and fragmented into three groups. Having started at the rear of the bunch, I had to bridge across two gaps to get to the front and by the time we came to the first uphill drag beyond the airport the front bunch was down to a handful of riders. Swapping turns with Malcolm Scott-Logan, Waratah Masters, I ended up leading the bunch up the latter part of this uphill drag and by the time I neared the top I realised that I had a gap on the rest of the bunch. This was only about 8 kms into the race and I didn’t really want to be off the front by myself with such a long way still to ride in windy conditions. However, although I eased up to allow the bunch to catch up, they were making slow progress in closing the gap so I decided to go hard for about 5 kms and see what happened. A decent lead soon opened up so I decided to keep going and settled into a hard steady time-trialling mode. By the turn-around I had a handy lead and now had the incentive of being able to see some riders ahead to chase who had dropped off the main bunch of the Women’s MAS4+ race who had started 15 mins before my race. The ride back was a long hard slog in the conditions, knowing that I was being chased by a group of 4 working together but having the women to chase (sarcastic comments invited) certainly helped and with about 3 kms to go I caught up with the front bunch of the women’s race. My lead car went past this group so I had to follow suit and as I did so caused some consternation in their bunch as they thought I was a female rider attacking off the back. It didn’t take them long to recognise that I was not one of them (who knows how!) so I was left free to continue to the finish and win alone.  A pleasing statistic for me was that, essentially on my own, of all the divisions that raced on the 57 km course – MMAS 6, 7 8 9 &10 and all women’s divisions- I had the fastest time ( by 1 sec from the MMAS 6 and 5 secs from MMAS 7 finishing bunches).

The Criterium event was held on Sunday in better weather conditions at the driver training facility near Marulan just off the Hume highway towards Sydney. This is an excellent facility, similar to our own facility here in Armidale, with a two lane, hot mix surface about 1 km in length with some high speed technical corners and an uphill drag to the finish line. The MMAS8 race was contested over 30 mins + 3 laps with 13 starters. The first few laps were fairly steady as the riders sorted out the lines through the corners and got used to the circuit. Once this initial phase was passed, I started to increase the pace up the finishing straight and was heavily marked each time I did so. After a few of these, approaching 10 mins into the race I put in a hard surge up the hill and got away by myself. A few hard laps followed to establish a break then I settled into a hard steady pace to hopefully get me to the finish alone. With about 10 mins to go, I realised that I was continuing to slowly increase my lead and was less than half a lap behind the main bunch, I decided to see if I could catch them and increased my effort. I managed to catch them with two laps to go and, on the instructions of the commissaire (and some spectators), went past them up the finishing drag and finished 1 lap+ ahead on my own. With riders who had been lapped earlier being withdrawn from the race, we had only 7 finishers.  All in all, another pleasing result in that, although I have won on my own in previous championships, this is the first time that I have managed to lap the field.

In the road race, winner of the bunch sprint for silver was Malcolm Scott Logan Waratah Masters with Michael Sales Penrith in the bronze medal spot.

In the Criterium, it was Michael Sales with silver and good old Alan Miller (Chicka’s mate) Coffs Harbour in bronze.