2010 Tour of Hampton Roads

Posted by Dan on 8. October 2009 04:31

The 2009 racing season is dead, may it rest in peace. It's time to start thinking about winter training and next year's races. The VAC annual meeting in Richmond should be sometime next month and we'll want to be sure we're there with our hands in the air when they firm up the schedule for 2010.

As for the training, I've enlisted the help of one of Hunter Allen's canned plans from TrainingPeaks and am in a good place with my program.

As for races, so far we've got a contract with Langley Speedway to do a crit on Sunday, June 6th. It's been two years since anyone's hosted a race here and it seemed like a safe bet for a BAR race.

On the more exotic side, I've been wanting to start a bigger race, maybe a stage race or omnium, starting in Virginia Beach at the ocean front and finishing atop Reddish Knob in Harrisonburg. A race this size probably requires two years to plan, so we may stay in the Hampton Roads area and do only three races instead of four. I'm having some luck getting a prologue and crit or two together, but the road race may prove to be a challenge. There's still a ton of calls to make so we'll see how enormous of a project this will be before we mention it to Bill Henderson for inclusion in the 2010 calendar.

For now, we'll keep quiet about possible race sites because I can see how much fun it is for speculators to guess. I will say we're shooting for a TT, crit and road race. Please feel free to post your guesses as a comment. We may be short of ideas.

To throw another wrench in the works, I'm being forced to go to France for the entire month of July. It'll be hard to organize a race from the Col du Tourmalet as 180 or so cyclists work their way to the summit while a bazillion fans scream, shout and strip, but I'll try. I guess.

Should anyone come across a nice 1-ish mile loop in a secluded area with no traffic, please let us know. We'd love to do another training series, but just can't bring ourselves to have everyone drive to Virginia Beach for a 0.4 mile circuit around half of the Sportsplex course.