The 2010 Tour of The Battenkill aka: "the tour of the big-frickin-unpaved-hills in upstate new york" was my second race of the year (not counting training races). Talk about an experience! 11 hours of driving, sleeping on a hotel floor, finding a nice crit course in a hotel parking lot, freehub bodies coming loose from wheels, Navy stories, Air Force stories, frat stories, oh and all this before we even started the race.
The race was so much fun! Seriously hard work, but lots of fun. 20 miles in, just after the first feedzone, I had the two lead groups in sight but couldn't get the 5-6 guys with me to work at pulling the other groups back, so I waited for a little kicker, launched an attack from 3rd wheel, and solo'd across the gap, never saw those guys again. That was fun as hell.
Next best experience was working with the 2nd group on the road once I caught them, we had the best paceline I've ever participated in going; there were about 14 riders and everyone was working well together hammering trying to catch the lead group. 40 miles into the race we were down to about 7-8 guys and had the gap down to about 1-2 minutes with the lead group of about 25 riders and wheel cars in sight but we had burned ourselves out pretty well and the group lost motivation to keep chasing hard so we gave up the chase, and my group ended up finishing 4-5 minutes behind the lead group. On my end, I had destroyed myself by mile 57, hit the wall hard, got dropped on the descent before last big climb, and trickled in 2 minutes behind my group, but overall it was a great experience. I just wasn't prepared for racing that distance yet, my longest ride previous to Battenkill had been Barry-Roubaix at 35 miles. But I'd still do it again in a heartbeat.
This race really taught me a lot about the importance of cooperation during races, it pays huge dividends to implement the pacelining and other strategies that we practice in training, also communication is absolutely key. In the group I was in, we all discussed the strategy for trying to bring the lead group back and how we were going to work as a group to get it done, and everyone cooperated really well, nobody was sitting in and everyone was equally dedicated to the task at hand. Nobody attacked up the hills because we knew that we would just all be getting back together at the top to continue the chase. We talked about when to accelerate, when to back it down, and of course gave good indications of when wheels were clear, last in line, etc. It was probably one of the best cycling experiences of my life.
