The ironclad agreement I have with the voices in my head stipulates that I at least mention ever race I take place in, so I will reach back in time and say that I raced at Rockleigh on July second, there were a lot of people there racing also, an inevitable last lap crash happened, but I was ahead of it. I rolled over the finish line unscathed. There, contract fulfilled.
FBF July 21, 2015
I had to sift through my Strava feed to recall the last time I raced at FBF, and the internet tells me that I last participated in a race at FBF on June 16th, which is over a month ago. That’s a long time between participations, but nothing much has changed as far as the race situation is concerned. James J is still ahead of my teammate Aaron in the battle for the overall, and there’s still no hill on the FBF course. Armed with this information, I made my way to the race with Life Coach Mihael in the car.
Our plan for the race was relatively simple—to try and drop James. This simple proposition was made complicated by the fact that James has been virtually taped to Aaron’s back wheel for the past few races—not that I blame him, mind you—as that’s exactly what he supposed to do. Also complicating our plans was the lack of a strong wind. I’m not sure what’s going on with the weather this year, but there seems to be some sort of Tuesday night biodome hovering over the race every week that keeps the wind from blowing, and it’s hard to drop people when you’ve got weather working against you like that.
As I did my warm up laps last night, things were looking up. There was a semi-strong “winning wind” blowing, which meant that there was a greater chance of breaking the race apart. It would take a lot of effort to make that happen, but you know, racing bikes…
We lined up and took off. The temperature was higher than weeks past, so I was hoping the heat would help split the race up also, but the heat and wind would make no difference unless the race was hard—so we tried to make the race hard. We attacked from the start in a whole kaleidoscope of different configurations. By my estimation, we probably attacked about 400 times, with every attack an attempt to dislodge James from Aaron’s wheel. I would like to say that we were successful in this undertaking, but James was just too fit and too tenacious to get rid of. The wind also worked against us when it petered out halfway through the race. We have also entered the time in the racing season when people have enough miles in their legs to no longer get gapped as easy as they might have earlier in the season. The links in the chain that would’ve snapped in the spring are now holding fast and adding to the workload necessary to make a break.
And so we rolled. Attack, catch, recover, attack. Ten laps spent panting and sweating with no effect. The finish would come down to a field sprint, which favored James. I moved up to James’ wheel in the spot where it’s possible to move up on the last lap (no, I will not share that information with you here), and hoped that Aaron would be able to join me. But alas, Aaron was waylaid. I then started to tread water behind James’ wheel, which is easier said than done, because his yellow jersey attracts a lot of attention. We hit turn four, and shortly after James signaled that he was going to jump. I tried to react, but as I stood to sprint, my left calf reminded me that we had been working like lunatics all night and downgraded my mighty sprint to a desperate flailing. James held off the pack and won, I did my best to hold position and let Aaron pass me, but he was too far back to contest the sprint. So it was missions unaccomplished all around. I guess there’s always next week.