Cal Poly Race Weekend / Sea Otter Classic by Ben Kurtz

Cal Poly's team was lucky enough to manage to combine their race weekend with the famous Sea Otter Classic cycling festival.  Saturday's circuit race was held on the epic curves of the Laguna Seca race track, while the nearby hills and trees of Fort Ord National Monument served as the gorgeous backdrop to Sunday's challenging road race.  Racers who had shown up to Stanford's race weekend earlier in the season had already experienced a much soggier version of the road race loop.

 
Due to time constraints, Saturday's circuit race started with the Men's C/D field followed shortly by a combined Women's A/B/C field.  Also on the track at the same time were a Cat 5 race and a Masters field.  The first lap of the C/D race was restrained, with everyone antsy to get going, yet also wanting to get a feel for the course before really letting loose.  Up the hill, swoosh down through "the corkscrew", a couple of tight corners to the back side of the course, and then around again.  Unfortunately, with so many races on the course, from there out confusion ensued.  On the first lap, a Cat 5 rider had gone down in the corkscrew, so by lap 2 there was an ambulance on the course, and by lap 3 the lead group was passing dropped riders from the other fields (including some from our own).  As is typical in C/D races with hills, by the end of the race the field had whittled down to about 15 riders for the sprint, which went to Nathaniel Ng of UC Santa Cruz, followed by Ryan Mostofi of SLO and Paul Nguyen from UC Irvine.   Ryan Mackintosh (SLO), Eddy Bach (SFSU), and Hector Vega (UC Irvine) finished top in the Ds.
 
The women's race was if anything, more chaotic.  By mid-race the pack was mostly shattered with Grace Chuchla of Stanford and UC San Deigo's Kat Ellis off the front.  However, near the end of the women's fourth lap, the Men's Cat 5's caught most of the women meaning that everyone but the leading pair finished a lap early.  Those two battled it out for their last lap, with Grace taking the win by about half a bike length.  Taylor Burdge of Stanford was third in the Women's As, while UC San Diego's Lilly McCormick and Stanford's Diniana Piekutowski topped the Bs.
 
Due to the excitement of having just raced and being at a place with so many bikes (and to not having any teammates in those races), I actually forgot to watch the Men's A and B races.  I hear there was a break, and I'm sure whatever it was was epic.  Top three in the Bs were James Evans and Andrew Weitz from Stanford and Raymond Lee from SLO.  In the As, Robert Pearce of UCLA took the win followed by Ben Demaree and Reese Levine both of UC Berkeley.
 
The course for Sunday's road race started with a fast 3.5 km downhill, followed by 5 or more laps of an 11-km loop, followed by climbing back up the first hill to the finish.  Each lap started with a brutal hill through the feed zone, which maxed out at around 11%.  Speaking of the feed zone, one of the awesome things about piggy-backing on a giant festival like Sea Otter is that there was neutral feed zone with an army of volunteers and a seemingly-unlimited supply of bottles of water and water+sugar+electrolyte mix of some sort.  Not to mention the honest-to-goodness neutral support car that followed each race (even the C/Ds!) with shiny SRAM/Zipp spare wheels for backup.
 
The Men's C/D race started painfully early in the morning, but by the end of the race we were glad to be done before things heated up too much.  For the C/D field, the feed-zone hill proved to be the defining feature of the course.  Every time up it we'd drop a few more riders until by the final lap we were left with only 13 of our original 50.  A few riders made half-hearted attempts to break away at various points, but no one ever worked together at it and nothing lasted long.  Going up the last hill, the remaining group of 13 fell apart completely, leaving the riders to struggle in ones and twos.  Ryan Mostofi (SLO) topped his second place from Saturday to take the win, with Joseph Katz and David Miller (both Stanford) filling out the podium.  Top 3 in the Ds were Jose Moreno Pine (SDSU), Gregory Peterson (Saint Mary's), and Jan Pena (SFSU).
 
In the Women's A/B/C race, Grace Chuchla (Stanford) and Kat Ellis (UC San Diego) led a group of four away from the rest of the field, though that group of four eventually split and by the last two laps, the women were riding pretty much solo.  The women also had to contend with rising temperatures on top of the hills; many of them looked ready to keel over as they crossed the line.  In a show of dominance, Chuchla scored another win, putting nearly 15 minutes on the Women's Cat 3 leaders and finishing around 4 minutes ahead of Ellis.  Taylor Burdge (Stanford) once again took the third spot.  In the Women's B field, Stanford's Diniana Piekutowski and UC San Diego's Lilly McCormick battled it out at the line, exchanging places compared to Saturday.  Liya Klingenberg (Cal State Long Beach) came in third.
 
For the Men's A and B fields, I am once again empty-handed.  I can only imagine that it was a long, hot, hard, epic race, but I had better places to be, namely in a car starting the 8-hour drive back to San Diego.  Preliminary results show that Colin Patterson and Raymond Lee (both Cal Poly SLO) and Andrew Weitz (Stanford) topped the Bs, while Samuel Boardman (UCLA), Ben Demaree (UC Berkeley), and Eric Gibbons (Stanford) got the podium spots in the As.