I hadn’t planned on racing Pigeon Lake this year. I’d been waiting on my race fee reimbursement before entering the Stieda Classic again, but that came kind of late. A couple of people from my club mentioned that since I’m a bit better climber than a big powerful guy, I might find Pigeon Lake more suitable. I debated a bunch, but I’m glad I tried it out.

First off, there were more people in the race than could fit on a podium so it felt real! The citizen class shared a start time with the Fondo group so there were people to compare my ride with right off the hop.

Starting off1

Three of the other racers and I joined up at the front. I heard one of them say to another “One minute pulls?” and figured I would just slot into that. After 10 km or so we had our first hill and dropped one of the guys. The three remaining pushed for a while before figuring we were probably well away from the bunch so we could ease off a bit.

The podium group establishing early

On our second lap of the course it became evident that one of the three guys was not doing so well on the hills, but instead of dropping him, David and I kept the group together. He thanked us, but I know I wanted his big body out in the way when we got to the headwind section, so it felt a little self-serving.

Finish line sprint

In the end I did a bit too much work on the last few kilometres, letting David get an easy ride. The other guy sat up for the sprint and David came around me. He said afterwards he felt super-empty, but I didn’t have anything else to do to take advantage of it. In the end, he won but it was a great ride.

It’s possible that next year I’m going to branch out from the Citizen category to get my ass kicked in Cat 4 racing, but for now this stands as a highlight for my bike riding. There was no podium celebration, but we did win beer.

results

  1. All photos in this post are by Stefan Ritter ↩︎