Welcome to another race analysis episode, a special one.
This is from Tulsa tough.
This is the first day of Tulsa stuff, and it's been a bucket
list race for me for a long time.
Those that don't know it's three days of crit racing in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, and the United States.
It's hot, it's humid.
It's uh, probably the most prestigious or well-known criterium in the United States.
So it gets really packed field.
And this is the cat one, two field, not the pro one field that
happens later with the biggest.
It's still plenty fast folks though.
Uh, Pete, can you describe
this course?
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
This is a really nice flowy, uh, kind of almost figure eight.
You, you ride back in on yourself, um, over and over on the course.
So you get kind of two circles.
So we're going around the far left side circle square on this one.
And then we, um, It's kind of high speed the whole time, right?
Um, yeah, that's a lot of shit or should be, should be high-speed the whole time.
Sorry.
And, uh, and you end up finding a lot of momentum and flowing through the
corners a lot more because none of the straits are quite long enough for anybody
to kind of make up a lot of positions.
So the course ends up being pretty.
Pavement's not great.
Right?
I would
say it's surprisingly, actually in the turns in particular is
where the course was pretty rough.
There were some spots where if you were peddling through and not really careful,
you could end up on the ground pretty.
Yeah.
And there is actually a little elevation in this course too, which was, it doesn't
look like it on the video, but it's, you can definitely feel the start finish rise.
I would call it.
There's some higher speed kind of turn one and two and three are higher
speed because you were actually coming back down from that start
finish rise.
Yeah.
And this course actually unfolded very, or this race unfolded very differently than
I was anticipating in spoiler alert here.
Uh, this one ends in a crash.
This is my second crash ever on a road bike.
Yeah.
Yeah, in a big old pile up.
So stay tuned for that.
But I think that what we want to do here is break down the turns.
Each one, one by one, we'll go through them because like you said, Pete, I
anticipated after watching this race on TV and looking at everything I
anticipated at this race, it's about positioning in the turns and I'd
be able to move up in that regard.
That's usually a relative strength of mine, but I found that extremely,
extremely difficult with this race.
So, uh, let's start with, uh, turn one right after the start.
So this is the start finished rate we're coming up right now.
It gets usually pressed up against these left-hand barriers.
And then you come into turn one, which has a lot of like, it has like metal plates.
It has a lot of bumps, it has a lot of stuff.
So let's go ahead and pause it right here at the apex of the turn.
So this is a rare circumstance where we actually had clear track
through this term and usually.
It was fattening up before this, because I think that people would jam it out of
the last turn and then the hill would start to come up in their face a bit
and they, these up and kind of look for somebody else to do the work and then
it would fan out and get really well.
So then this turn was rarely ever taken like this.
Instead, the turn was taken like quite literally about 12 riders wide.
Yeah.
Kind of, since this is the longest straight in the whole course, people
get so excited about being able to accelerate into the Strait and
make some movement like whether that's moving forward or attacking.
Um, and what ends up happening is it's really easy out of the final corner.
And then the, the rise starts hitting you a little harder and
a little harder and a little.
So everybody in the back of the field is able to kind of.
Flow forward into the front of the race.
Right.
Everybody on the front is finally getting hit with that rise.
And so they're fanning out.
So you're kind of getting the magic of both the front slowing down and the
back going much faster than the front.
And this turn is pretty open.
So you had options, it looks like you have options, I guess.
Right.
But you don't have as many options as you think you do because of
the following two turns out.
Yeah,
and they come up really quick.
Let's play through from here and you'll see that you take this turn
and it follows the, can see the whole pack is kind of following that line.
Oh, I wish their whole race was like this.
That would be great.
And then it flows into the next term.
So it's kind of tough to do like, okay, I'm inside now.
I'm fully going to go outside.
In-between turns like that without causing a major disruption to the group
and being unsafe to riders around.
So that was, uh, that turn itself.
Wasn't too tricky, but it was everything before it was difficult.
And then it had implications thereafter.
Yeah.
And as you saw everybody flow through that line, there really
is only one fast line through turn one and turn two and turn three.
And what that means is to get out of that line.
You have to put in so much more effort to make it around.
Um, and a lot of people tried that, right?
Like, you'll try it a ton.
You'll see everybody thinking that there's an opportunity there.
Um, but the speed is so high because it's that little bit of a downhill,
there really is only one line and having four or five guys all decided
that that's the time to move up.
Makes it
pretty hairy.
Yes.
Let's look at some examples of that.
So here's a great example of what you just said, Pete, of many people thinking,
Hey, this is a chance to move up, but when everybody thinks that suddenly
it doesn't become a chance to move up.
You can see this slowly.
This course should be a 30 mile an hour course, but we're down to 23.
So I go outside because it's chaos on the inside and to try
to move up snag a few spots.
So don't want to be mean and jump in too much.
But look at, I have to slow down and then check out that surge coming out
of the turn 600 Watts every time.
And
even though you're going 28 through the bottom corner or turn to it, just, it,
the acceleration that happens is so, so much harder than just everybody carrying
their speed through the proper line.
And so it's a good reminder.
Even if you are barely offline, the power required to get back
up to the same speed of everybody taking the right line is huge.
It's a big, big difference.
And you're only two feet off the line, one feet off the line.
Yeah.
So it makes a monumental difference, especially when it's quarter
after quarter after corner like
this.
Absolutely.
Once again, to that point, Pete, if you look at my ride file on trainer road,
I went over 120% for five seconds to look at like five second chunks where
I was over 120% of MTV, which on the
Stepford.
Yeah.
That's, that's a real dig, right?
Like you had to peddle hard to remove yourself out of the situation you were in.
Yeah.
90 times.
That's that's uh, that's 90
times.
So that's three or four times the lap or, yeah.
That means you're, you're spending energy.
Yes.
Just to be in the place you're in.
And if
you, and we'll bring up right now, so you can actually see the profile
of this, it looks, uh, it looks like the pointiness thing ever.
It's like a bed of nails.
So, uh, it, it, when you take those lines that compromise the, where you're at.
And once again, as you can see, on course right here, I'm doing
that same thing where I'm coming through, but I'm not trying to take
anybody's line, but watch boom, I'm up to 800 Watts again, out of that.
Yep.
So when you do that over and over, it just gets really rough.
Let's look at that turn when I don't get caught in that situation.
And I actually take a different line.
So I know that this is far before turn one.
Oh, and there's a bike with a wheel.
Oops.
His forks snapped in half.
I don't know how it happened and we're bouncing around in the race right now,
but we're just looking at these turns.
So right now you can see that I'm positioned on the rider's right.
Which is effectively going to be the inside for that
turn one that we're talking.
But I had to do that all the way back here to be able to do this because in
this straightaway, it was so hard to move around because you'd get caught up in once
again, that, that weird fattening at the front, and then speeding up in the back.
But check this out.
I go inside, I have to ease off cause there's breaking and then I
have to jam it, but it's not as bad.
Not much.
Right?
Yep.
And then you can see that it sets me up for this turn with
a totally different line.
I don't have to surge again, really hard here, or everyone hits her.
Yeah, so that that's actually pretty much perfect.
And kind of, as the race progressed, you tried many different lines through all the
corners, which is like a, it's something that you should be cognitively thinking
about is that there are always options and at different points in the race,
some options play out better than others.
So this is a little further into the race.
Yes.
And one of the things is, uh, some people figure out turns later than that.
And so you had the right line at the beginning of taking outside and then
inside and then outside on turns one, two and three, but 20 minutes later,
most people had figured that out.
And so then the left side and the outside on turn one is getting more and
more crowded as the race progresses.
The
point is that you're making here, it's a good thing to explore the space, so
to speak in that race and to think, okay, what happens if I go over here?
What happens if it go over here, you have a lot of laps.
. And, and the race is going to unfold differently as people learn more things.
And so if you find the line that's working really, really well, it will work well
for a while, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work the whole race.
So jumping back to corners before you, you have to make a decision
to try a different line 60 seconds before you're at the corner, which
is a huge thing to think about that.
You're going to start breaking down the course.
Pieces of the course, rather than turn by, turn by
turn.
Yeah.
Once you've gotten to the turn, correct.
Let's look at some other turns.
So looking at the next batch of turns, and I say batch, because they're kind
of inherently linked together, you can kind of reposition in this street.
But then in this one, and I had clear track for a second.
Um, I know that it probably seems like this is common because we've just shown
you that before, but it was so rare.
And I actually went here and I was okay with taking wind because
I wanted free track to actually see what the corners could be like
when I wasn't surrounded by people.
Um, but let's rewind again and let's just go back to those turns.
So if we look at going into this turn, it's still going downhill right here.
And then you have these flat turns and you have this really
wide entrance to this turn.
And actually if you go inside bad pavement, if you go outside
bad pavement, so you kind of want to thread the needle here.
But I noticed that everybody in this section down at the bottom, they were
kind of fattening up and it would slow down every single lap there.
And it
feels when you are moving that fast and with the high speed downhill, it feels
like you're wasting a lot of energy because you can feel the speed that
you're going and you can feel the power.
It takes a lot more power to go 32 or 33 or 30.
But you already had the clear track you're taking the best line
and all those corners are linked.
So it's so much less work to not worry about a surge, to not worry about
finding position and just take a little more wind and get the free track and
do it exactly as you're supposed to.
Do you get to relax mentally, even though it's a little bit
more work physically I would do.
I would probably have taken that every chance I got
in this race.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I should have done it more often.
So let's look at that.
Uh, which is going to be turned three in some sketchy circumstances.
Now I noticed that at the bottom and I said, everybody fattened up.
There was this opportunity to carry momentum around them.
And if you went outside here, then you could do it.
But check this out.
There's like street side dining right there.
And there were multiple riders that ended up clipping that with their handlebars.
And it was just terrifying.
And it, you could get pinched into that.
And then you had to slow down if you're on the outside.
So it was kind of.
Okay.
This sets me up.
Good for the next term, but big vulnerability here.
I can get pinched, right?
Yeah.
And that's kind of like a gamble if the, if you only have the outside
and it's the only opportunity you have, and you're trying not to
waste momentum by all means, try it.
But as you saw it over and over and over, most of the time, it
didn't actually pan out because.
Buildings sticking out in the road and people aren't capable of
kind of reorienting midway through a corner and then reorienting
again for the next corner.
So it kind of throws off everybody.
And then you deal with the repercussions of everybody
blowing it in that 10 seconds.
Yes.
Let's look at turn four because it's inherently linked to this.
So here's that outside line where things do get a little tight,
but it's okay because this next turn, now I'm in a position to
be able to have some free time.
I'm not fighting for the inside and look at all these people I can pass.
And I did a quick surge up to threshold.
Yep.
And you, you put in the power at the right spot.
Um, you really wanted to get the power down as soon as you possibly could.
And then you coast it past six or eight riders and you were still set
up correctly for the next corner.
So that's why if you can make it through that far outside line and most of the.
Well, let's say half the time it works half the time.
It doesn't, but that's where the benefit lies.
That was tight.
You can, if you can make it through without being squeezed too much, it does
pay, pay benefits overall, but you have to decide when it's worth it to try for it.
And depending on how everybody's handling those next couple of corners
too, because you could have very easily been smashed against the wall.
If it fattened up again and nobody will.
Yep.
And it meant that you could just kind of carry on and carry that momentum
into the next turns there, but that did mean that you ended up pinching.
It turns six on the inside and that bit, me quite a few times,
man, this race is sketchy.
I don't know, like kidding.
Just flashbacks.
There's PTSD in here.
So let's look at some other things.
Okay.
So now we're going to roll into these turns like we're talking about we're
once again, going into that turn three, going into turn four, but look, I'm
on the total on the other side of the field and I'm going to take a different.
But you'll see that it's a lot tougher to move up because they don't have
that outside line where I'm shielded.
And I can just carry that moment.
Because everybody pinches and slows down on the inside
and, and knowing that the following term, uh, is always more spread
out than the terrain you're in.
You can kind of preemptively anticipate that you're going to have to either
do more work or not any work at all.
If it's going to fatten up, I think you, you made the exact right call
where you take the inside line, you don't accelerate out and you know,
it's gonna, it's gonna fatten up.
So you actually just saved your position and you didn't use any energy.
So you're in the same spot over.
But it's, it's one of those ones where you have to know, or at least
anticipate what the next corner is going to feel like while you're
taking the corner before that, or else you're going to get into trouble.
Well, and now I'm totally boxed and I should have carried more momentum
of the inside on that straight away.
Lots of things I could have done to that preservation of momentum is so important.
So now let's look at some time.
So coming into turn, seven cars really turned seven and eight.
This straightaway we're in right now, it was kind of like a reset point in seven
and eight were absolutely linked together.
And on final lap, many trends relate together, but I'm on the inside here.
So this was, I was, yeah, I'm want to explore the outside, but here I am on
the inside and it allowed me to kind of choose my line coming through here a whole
lot better and was, we'll see in a bit.
I also have more options right here.
Now I should have pushed.
And gotten to the right of that writer, but, um, Pete, what are
your thoughts on those ones?
Yeah, I think, I think that's a great way to think about setting up for the
start finish straight, because like we talked about earlier, if you're
pushed all the way to the left, you really only have one option.
Um, but if you're taking the inside line on those last two corners, which is not
very, I would say arguably the same speed as the outside, but you have more options.
Um, so you can play with where you're coming out and whether you're
gonna make a big effort on the, on the start, finish straight or not.
Um, and it's good to think about that.
Uh, inside versus outside is the same cost, but you have different
opportunities if you're on the outside versus on the inside.
And so I think your idea to explore more.
Through both of those corners, you figured out a lot more over the course
of the race by taking both inside and outside and what that meant to your next
30 seconds or the next 45 seconds of the
race, right?
Yeah.
It just didn't carry it through the streets.
Gosh, darn it.
So let's go to an example of when I was outside, like you're talking about, so
let's look at this now I'm coming into this turn seven at this straightaway,
and I'm positioned to the outside.
I'm thinking I'm going to carry momentum around some riders
and it'll work out really well.
The barriers are pushed out pretty far, but it's really rough.
But they carried a lot of speed and then check out what, oh yeah, I
guess that was a sketchy checkout.
What happens here?
I'm up against the side and I don't really have many options
and you'll see that right there.
I probably could have cut across.
I didn't want to be dangerous to the other riders.
So you just kinda get stuck up against the side.
Now, if you watch the full race video, you'll see.
There are times when I am literally on the feet and my, my hand and my lever
was rubbing the barriers cause I was so.
And that's the danger of that one, right?
Yep.
This is a rare moment where it's stretched out and you have options.
And we saw this before, where I went to the front, but in
men, in almost every other lap,
And, and it really depends on if people, a lot of the people on the
outside were choosing to accelerate.
They thought that was the line where you could make something of it.
So when you see the, the riders taking the outside line and really accelerating
out of it, you also know that you'll probably have to make that effort to,
um, versus the inside where you had options and you didn't have to make
an effort if he didn't want to, but on the outside, especially if the race is
going fast, if you can feel the moment.
You're going to have to do a lot of work to maintain, and it might pay
dividends at the end when people start cutting in for the corner.
But sometimes it doesn't, like you said, your hand is just against
the barriers and that's that's your
life.
Yep.
So this has been a great example of a course.
Number one, it's constantly turning.
So the turns are very consequential, but a good example of, of this is how you
should think about the course when you.
Right.
Thinking of okay.
Where all the different options I can take and what are their implications
in the next turn and what are the implications in the few turns before?
And if you do that, that can help you kind of unlock positions.
Right?
Right.
And I think that's a great way to think about it.
Court.
Most especially technical courses, you don't unlock it.
You unlock a piece of the race, right?
You unlock a couple corners or straight away in a corner.
Maybe there's bad pavement.
Maybe there's positioning, maybe there's speed.
But a lot of it, you kind of take in bite sized chunks and do the best
with what you have with that chunk because you can't make any crazy
new decisions halfway through it.
You're, you're committed on the line or you're committed, um, based on what
everybody else is doing that that's it.
So if, as you started to online, Each piece of this race, you got to see
each time it made differences later in the later down that stretch or
later in a corner or things like that.
So the decisions you're making early actually have implications down
the line.
Absolutely.
So what I learned in this one is that turns one and two were connected.
Turns 3, 4, 5, and six were connected and then turned seven and eight.
We're connected.
Different speed in different pack dynamics.
They could become more connected than others, but that's what
I learned from this one.
So, uh, this is just a short look at this race.
And if you, uh, look into this YouTube playlist, you'll also see that we have
another look at this race where Pete and I break down some more of the race itself.
And then of course you can also see the full race video, and
he can check that out as well.
So thanks Pete.
Thanks for joining me.
I'm glad you, uh, I'm glad you got to participate in
Tulsa.
Tough.
Yeah, me too.
Oh.
And if you're listening to this, you should let me know what I did wrong.
So go down to the, or what I did well, but let's submit it.
I did a lot of things wrong here, so you can check that out.
Uh, as we go through here and we play out the final crash.
So you can see that check out the other videos.
If you haven't seen it yet.