Race Report: 2025 Giro di SF Women’s 3/4/5

Race Report: 2025 Giro di San Francisco Women’s 3/4/5

Date: 9/4/2025

AVRT racers: Katie Monaghan, Sam Dewees 

Top Result: Sam 16/29, Katie 22/29

Written by: Katie Monaghan 

Course: L-shaped 6-corner course with a small bump. Pavement is bad on the backside stretch, and the second corner has tracks on the road.

Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/15662427460

Nutrition: my typical banana and peanut butter sandwich before and nothing during. Start line gummies

Race Recap:

This was my second time racing Giro di SF. I had a great time racing last year with Katarina Zgraja and I was looking forward to racing again. The women’s 3/4/5 field had an awesome turnout of 29 racers which was exciting. There were a lot of super sprinkles racers, maybe 10?, and the AV representation was just myself and Sam. 

For those of you who know me, I recently decided to upgrade my bike. I bought a barely used Orbea Orca on Marketplace about 3 weeks ago. It has all the nice things: Di2 shifting, nice deep set hunt wheels, crisp disc brakes and a nice race geometry. However, I’ve been having issues with the seatpost dropping. (I’m hoping carbon paste and a torque wrench are going to fix that going forward but we will see). I planned to race the Orbea at Giro but at 9 pm the night before the race, I began to have second thoughts. The women’s 3/4/5 had a crash last year and at this point I’m still more comfortable riding hard and taking corners on my old trusty CAAD10. I figured it's a good crit bike, who needs nice things? So I debate via text with a few teammates but ultimately decide to take my CAAD to SF. I wasn’t able to move over my power pedals because I don’t yet own a 8 mm allen key. I figured that I don't look at my power in crits anyway so it didn’t matter. Steph Hart told me she could not possibly support this decision because “how could you ever ride a bike without a power meter?” If you bother to read on, spoiler alert: I maybe should have raced the orbea. 

Race starts, things are going smooth. Pavement is a little bad, oh well. The corners are fun and fast and the field is big. Yay, all things that I like! Lots of SF AVer’s came out to support so I could hear cheers from the sidelines at most points during the race which made it even more fun. Shoutout to Richard Red, Simon Parton, Robin Kutner, Jermey Besmer and Ari Fischer for coming out to support! One of my favorite parts of AV will always be the general bike community from the race and club team combined. 

I was trying to stay in the front 3rd of the race to make sure I could see any moves that seemed threatening and hopefully stay ahead of crashes. I was successfully able to execute this for the first 30 minutes of the race. There would be an occasional solo sprinkles rider off the front for a lap or two but they were mainly getting brought back. At about 20 minutes into the race, one sprinkles girl had been off the front for 2 laps and no one was making much of an effort to chase her. I figured that was dumb, sure I only have myself and Sam, but I made an effort on the hill to close the gap. After I initiated the chase, the rest of the peloton eventually decided to help me finish it.

Having burned a match, I decided to slot back into the peloton for a little to conserve some energy for what I figured would eventually be a field sprint finish. I slot back to about the 7th wheel but I quickly felt myself slowing. I thought to myself “well I am a little tired but I’m always tired by 30 - 35 minutes into a 40 minute crit, why am I suddenly struggling to keep up?”. The peloton slowly started to slip away and eventually I got completely dropped. I rode alone for the last few laps. During these laps, I was trying as hard as I could to push harder but I just kept getting slower and my heart rate was dropping. I figured this must be late season chronic fatigue and I just had the most catastrophic bonk in the world. Apparently Simon got some dirty looks when he yelled at me during these laps that “it wasn’t a coffee and cake ride and I should get myself in gear”. I didn’t hear it but I still would have found it funny if I did.

We finished the race and I slow rolled off to the side to discover that at some point during the race I broke a spoke. The spoke was slowly causing my rear brake to close down on my wheel and it barely turned by the end of the race. (There is a video of this on my strava post.) While disappointed this happened, I had a big moment of relief. It at least made sense why I so suddenly got dropped by women who I’m normally very competitive against. 

I’m not exactly sure at what point in the race the spoke was broken. My best guess is during one of the bumpy corners over the train tracks. I had an instance or two during the race where things didn’t quite feel right while shifting. I figured my chain was jumping and that I had already become spoiled by the smoothness of electronic shifting while riding my Orbea. One of these instances must have been when I broke the spoke but I don’t know how long I rode on it. I’m very thankful to not have crashed despite the mechanical.

I was able to hand my bike off to the mechanics after the race who fixed my spoke for me in time for me to race the women’s P123 later in the day. This was cool but again the AV community in itself is so great. Steph had seen my strava and already offered to pick up my orbea so I could race again later. Simon had also offered me an extra set of wheels from his house. It’s definitely special to have such a good crew of people behind you.

Ultimately, It was a super fun day of racing. I hate to admit it but maybe Steph was right and I should have found a way to switch over my power pedals. It would have certainly been interesting to see what power I was putting out at the end of the race as my back wheel was slowly getting stopped more and more with each pedal stroke …