My weekend started Saturday morning. I got up early and headed over to the school to make sub plans. Let me tell you planning for a sub is worse then riding your bike for five hours. I went home after shooting the breeze at the shop for a while and dropping my bike off at Tom O.’s. One quick note; when I pulled up at Tom’s he was out on the deck in a lawn chair and I kid you not, Lizard Boy was basking. The boys picked me up at my pad and we were off. I worked on the way down to our hotel so the trip went fast. At the hotel we watched Man vs. Wild and I thought to myself “wow that could be me eating the poisonous snake raw tomorrow, if I get lost in the race again this year”.
Race day started with a nice breakfast of the greasiest omelet I have ever experienced. I think it is the first time I have not eaten everything on my plate since I was about ten. Well we paid our bill and off to the races we went. The start of the race is nuts. You do this thing called the death spiral. I like to think of it as the puke spiral. When you start you get funneled into a lane and the lane spirals into the center of a field and when you get to the center it switches direction and spirals you out. My thoughts as I do this are “if turds had feelings this is what it would feel like to be flushed” and “this is what I deserve for flushing those dead goldfish down the toilet when I was a kid”. Maybe my fascination with flushing was the spiral or maybe that omelet was talking.
I was feeling spunky at the beginning and was working my way through the field pretty good. I probably passed 10 guys fixing flats in the first 5 miles. I finally bridged up to the group Tom was in. Jared was nowhere in sight of course. I stuck with Tom’s group up to the single track. I was the first one into the single track. However, I got deflected by a rock and right into a branch. I put my foot down and probably lost fifteen places in the blink of an eye.
I got through the single track and rode the next portion completely by myself. Then came the “run-up”. I passed a lot of people on this (top speed here was probably.000025 miles per hour…ouch) and got to the top just as Tom was leaving. I scarfed down a banana and stole a water bottle and I was off no more then 3 minutes behind Tom. I never saw him again.
I was ok to check point three where I was blown away to see Jared. We started the climb from three together. He left me in the dust, apparently having the plague doesn’t even slow the guy down for long. I suffered on that hill, it just sucked. The rest of the race was just putting up with misery and self-pity until the end. The only exception to feeling lousy was this stretch of super smooth single track. Now mind you I am not that good on single track. When I hit this stuff I was absolutely rocking and dropped the group I had been riding with like they were a greasy omelet.
Jared ended up catching me a little later. Yeah I was confused too. It appears that in his lactic haze he misread a sign and zigged when he should have zagged. Once we hit pavement it was drag race to the finish where Tom was waiting for the rest of the O train. He only had to wait about fourteen minutes for the young bucks of the squad. We cooled down and grabbed a bite to eat as we waited for Jimmy an Eric to finish and they came in together. I thought that was totally cool. I can’t wait until next year!!!
