There’s a point in the bike season every year where I finally come to my senses. This moment usually coincides with the end of the FBF Tuesday night series. As the FBF series winds down, I am drawn into moments of reflective contemplation, and I discover that on occasion, it is nice to not spend countless waking hours thinking about bikes and the racing thereof—to enjoy life and all of its varied splendor. I cast off the yoke of bike-based obsessive behavior and you know, do things that people do.

The issue with this blissful state of oneness with everything is that there is absolutely no way to use my newfound serenity to display my inherent awesomeness to the world or to dominate my competition so completely that they forget their mother’s birthday. It’s a conundrum. A season full of groin-punchingly difficult racing has honed me into a slightly faster version of the person that shivered his way through the darkness of the March season. (And seriously—look at the weather forecast right now. September is upon us and for all intents and purposes looks to be simply delightful from a weather standpoint; but noooooo, we have to start racing in the gonad-shattering cold of early March because you really want to get prepared for the upcoming season that you will be completely sick of once June roll around. Start. In. April. Dear Lord, is this that complicated?) The racing season has made me as fast as I am going to get, yet I am repulsed by even the notion of gathering the energy to go somewhere and race bikes.

Yet for the past two weeks, I have still raced at FBF, because bike racers are mental. Through guile and absolute treachery, I was able to weasel my way to a recent seventh place; and that sort of success (as mild as it sounds to the rest of the world) only encourages bike racing types like myself into racing more. You start harboring dangerous thoughts like, "I was so close to the podium, with a little luck and better positioning, I could…" I usually try to extinguish these thought as quickly as I can, as someone with an obsessive personality like mine (bike-polar?) can easily be tempted into doing silly things like wearing compression socks with shorts out into the world or hiring a life coach. I decided long ago that should I find myself in wither of those situations, it would be time to stop bikes.

So it was with this bike-polar optimism that I raced at FBF the last two weeks. Whenever the FBF approaches the end, things start to get a little weird racing wise. There’s the race for the "stage win" if you will and then there’s the race for the overall win, which are two competitions that don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another, and if you want to weasel your way to success like I do, you have to be aware of this situation. The race for the overall lead this season has been a perplexing one, two people that wear shirts with the same names on them have been racing in a fashion that would make one believe that they were in a hotly contested battle for the series win. Without naming names of teams or individuals, the last few weeks have been a race between these two people, with one racer getting into early move and then the other person organizing the chase behind. You could say that these two were merely doing this to get a good workout in during what amounts to a training race, but at the same time, these "workouts" would decide the series. Most of my workout end with heavy breathing on an empty road in Jersey somewhere, not with a yellow jersey.

So that’s how we rolled the last two weeks, races with endless surges and counter attacks, brought back by a certain fellow—with late moves that got caught at the last corner. If it weren’t so tiring, I would say it sounded monotonous. My hopes for a fine weaseling have come to naught, but that’s just as well, as it would only encourage my bike-polarity.