Race Report: 2026 Berkeley Streets Criterium - Men’s Cat 4

Race: 2026 Berkeley Streets Criterium - Men’s Cat 4

Date: April 19, 2026

AVRT racers: Suhith Rajesh

Top Result: 23/30

Course: 0.6mi rectangle, slight incline on the front side, slight decline on the back side. Corner 4 has a slight drainage bump running through it.

Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/18176890738

Nutrition: Oatmeal for breakfast, carb gel 45mins before the race. 

An emotional support bottle of water on my bike for the race.

Recap (written by Suhith):

I was looking forward to this race, which I hoped would provide some tactics and some crit fun. However, coming off of a cold earlier in the week, I was only feeling about 90% on Sunday. With the race so easy to get to, I opted to race. A forced test of efficiency, nothing extra today.

After enjoying a leisurely morning breakfast, rolling up to a race scheduled for 11:30AM is a luxury not often seen as a Category 4 racer used to pre-dawn alarms. I ran into teammate Michael Matthews who has both impeccable number-pinning skills, showed me some appropriate warmup roads nearby & put on a breakaway clinic in his race.

Line up, whistle, clip-in, off.

The race started quite hard with some moves going off the front in the first couple laps. But today I was here just to sit in.

We settled down a bit after the breaks were established, with some chasing attempted. The rhythm of the race would be a hard effort up the start-finish straight, through corner 1 & 2, carry speed down the back straight, then take corner 3 & 4, rinse and repeat. I focused on moving up into corner 1 & down the back straight. With everyone kicking hard out of corner 4 onto the uphill, it was important for me to keep moving up to not fall off the pace.

I never quite nailed corner 3 & 4, either having to brake for C3 and the ditch running across C4 making me wait until my rear wheel had cleared this bump before I started pedaling.

With the lap counters coming down the pace started to heat up, and unfortunately there was a crash towards the back of the in corner 2, due to overlapped wheels. I saw a friend of mine hit the ground hard. I was caught behind after checking to see if they were okay (thankfully they were). It was too late to take a free lap, so I just watched the sprint finish from the sidelines.

Overall, a fun day of racing put on by Berkeley Bicycle Club!