Race Report: 2025 Cantua Creek Road Race - Men’s P/1/2

Race: Cantua Creek Road Race - Men’s P/1/2

Date: 2/15/25

AVRT Racers: Henry Mallon, Nathan Martin, Grant Miller, Greg McCullough, Cam O’Reilly

Top Result: Nathan 3rd

Nutrition: 2 900ml bottles with ~150g of carbs each, drank about 250g total.

Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/13636413340

Recap (written by Nathan): 

Cantua is always an interesting race. First road race of the season, usually some of the central coast and even socal riders that may not race many NCNCA races come out and do this. Strong riders included Quinn Felton, Brad Wiggs, Tobin Ortenblad, Lance Haidet, and others, so it was definitely going to be a fun day.

Coming off my strong performance in the break at Santa Barbara, I was open to another long day in the break, and on lap 1 I was jumping on moves and rotated a bit for half a lap with a few other riders until we were brought back shortly after the turnaround. 

The rest of lap 1 would be more attacks, up to and including the turn around. Because cantua is just one stretch of road we ride on, the turnarounds can offer a spot to string out the group if you hit it hard from the front and everyone else is still taking the corner, as people would do each lap.

Lap 2 was more relaxed, we even stopped for a pee break at one point. There would still be attacks, but nothing really materialized.

Because there was a slight tailwind on the outbound portion, we know the lap 2 to lap 3 turnaround would be key, and indeed attacks began to fly as we turned to start the last lap.

Attacks would continue to fly at the bottom of the descent, and I found myself in a move with a Dolce Vita rider. The group would let us get a bit of a gap, and we started rolling turns, never getting more than 20 seconds or so.

We held this gap from about half way to the far turnaround all the way to the bottom of the climb, where the Dolce rider dropped. At this point, when the climb started, Voler bridged Brad Wiggs and Logan Unger up to me, Logan obviously a passenger not someone they were riding for.

From here I just hung on with them as long as I could, eventually we hit a point on the climb where I couldn’t hang and fell off. I managed to hold off the field though and rolled in for 3rd.

Overall a tough first NCNCA road race of the year. Teams came out strong, I was feeling good and got some good racing in.