Chapter 2

The Killer-B’s rolled out a few minutes later. They had held a quietly intense exchange about tactics, though not quiet enough to keep from being heard by me on the B push on my radio. It seemed that they had decided to live and die as a team, which I took as a very good sign. The B team needed more time together to learn to think and act as a team before any of them would be able to move up to fill any potential openings in the A team ranks that might result from injury or simply becoming a better rider than a member of the current A team.

When I had taken them on as a team, I had made it pretty clear that the strongest, most well-rounded cyclists would form the A team, and that the membership of the squad was subject to change based on results. Any rider that was injured in the course of training or a race would be given every opportunity to rejoin the team and their squad, but overall the objective of the team as a whole was results.

So, the ‘foxes’ were away, now to see what the hounds would do ... As the time to their start ticked closer, I thumbed the microphone in my Jeep on the A push and said, “Okay, ladies...”, and they all looked up at me in unison, so I knew they could hear me, “the foxes are away. I know that you want nothing more than to ride them under, but it will take a lot of talent and no small amount of luck to do it. I think they might be a tad motivated right now!”

Everyone chuckled at this one, and someone said, “Yeah, motivate this!”

With a laugh, I said, “Well here’s your chance ... in thirty seconds...” All the ladies on the A team lined up at the start point and clipped into the up pedal, ready to sprint out of the gate in pursuit. As the clock wound down to zero, I clicked over to the team push and said, “Release the hounds...” The A’s weren’t kidding, as they stormed off in full-on-pursuit-mode. They sorted themselves into a rolling time-trial pace line and thundered off in hot pursuit. It was a thing of beauty to behold on the road, as I rolled along behind them in my Jeep, trying to keep both teams clearly located in my head.

In reality, I didn’t know if the A’s would be able to catch the B’s or not. They had a five-minute head start, and in road racing, five minutes is a lot. In a normal time trial, the trailing rider, the one that starts later, is usually only two minutes back, and even then, overtaking the rider in front of you is pretty rare unless there is a clear advantage held by the trailing rider. The things in favor of the A team were overall team speed, which as a team was greater, due to their greater experience and time spent training together, than the B’s taken as a unit and the fact that it would take just over two hours to cover the fifty miles back to the park, assuming a fairly constant speed for both teams. The riders I was following didn’t have to make up the full time in the first hour, but they could, if they worked it just right, make up the time of the full fifty-mile distance.

Moreover, the physical demands of riding fifty miles in a team pursuit would take their toll on both squads. The B’s would always be looking over their shoulders, while the A’s would have to get over the psychological hump of the five-minute gap. Tired is tired when you are on a bike, so both of them would have to figure out how fast to go and what sorts of risks to take. The B squad was calling out their street crossings as they made them, and I would then relay to them where the A squad was in relation to them, of course I was also using their location as a lash to keep the A squad in motion and gaining. So far, it was working best for the A’s as they had made up three minutes in an hour, and the A team seemed to be getting their second wind. The B’s seemed to be struggling a bit, so they may have set too high a pace out of the gate and were now fading. Moreover, I knew from experience, that being told the team behind you is gaining can only lash you on for so long, and then the dread of being overtaken starts to eat at you, sapping your resolve and making small aches and pains seem bigger.

The B’s had just cleared the last large-scale descent before the final run in to the park as we started to climb to the top of that same descent. It was going to be close ... if the B’s could hold out just a little bit longer...