Race Report: Tour of America’s Dairyland Shorewood Criterium

Race Report: Tour of America’s Dairyland (ToAD) Shorewood Criterium

Date: June 27, 2025

AVRT racers: Robin Betz

Top Result: Robin 41/46 overall, 31/34 in Cat 2/3 omnium

Course: Four corner, 1 mile square with left turns and a slight chicane on one leg. Storm drains on the good lines in the corners and bad pavement with fresh asphalt patches on the finishing stretch.

Strava:
https://www.strava.com/activities/14935192253

Race Recap:

I felt pretty tired this morning due to not getting enough sleep and having done some max efforts for the past three days, and my calves felt like they were also becoming part of Thursday’s gummy bear amalgamation. I could ride to this race from where I’m staying in the UW dorms and enjoyed a nice warmup on the bike path, but it was pretty difficult to get my heart rate up and my head wasn’t really in the game— I expected to not finish and of course these kind of prophecies are very self-fulfilling in criterium racing.

I do succeed at staging! I line up near the side of the road with the other women in the shade, but a little bit upstream of the main group, and when the ref lets us go I hit zone 4 staying ahead of everyone and end up first row on the line! Complete victory! But I definitely burned a match there to get it.

Having already felt like I met my goal today, I didn’t think too hard about needing to preserve that position into the first corner and when the whistle blew I didn’t fight for position at all and ended up in my usual spot near the back of the group going into the corner. The race then played out kind of the same way the past few days where I have to brake behind the group and hit 600W out of each corner until I can’t anymore and get dropped.

TT mode again, but I’m not that upset about it, and I pick up a few riders ahead and get caught by a few behind for a decent chase group of 5. Everyone is more cooked than I am so I’m happy to pull everyone around, but keep it around hard tempo knowing we’re going to be pulled imminently and wanting to save some legs for tomorrow.

When the ref says one lap to go for our group, I try to let someone pull through but no one does. I take this as a good opportunity to practice winning when I’m stuck on the front, which is a weakness of mine, and decide that since I’m gapping everyone a bit at the corners that I should attack out into the chicane and try to hold it to the line.

This works well! I’m passed in the final sprint by one person who did 1000W (so I’m not even mad about it) but thoroughly drop the rest of my companions.

Not bad for 16 min of racing, but spectating afterwards and seeing the peloton had settled down into a pace that I could handle made me regret not fighting harder at the beginning to stay in. I’m learning a lot about how important the mental game is for crit racing, especially for multiple days. You have to really want it in the moment, and usually I only want it after the moment has passed. To be very honest it feels kind of pathetic to travel nationally to be only in the game for 16 minutes, so I really want to finish the last 2/3 race on Sunday (I’ll settle for 20 minutes in the Saturday P12 ACC race). Stay tuned for how things go.