Saturday’s CRCA club race was a race I really shouldn’t have attended. Aside from my normal reasons for forgoing race participation: elderliness, slowness, orneriness and unusually high levels of spite; I had another reason to stay in bed and not be prancing about in my thermal bike underwear—fatigue. You see, as a pretend bike racer, my athletic life is mostly imaginary. It’s an ongoing fantasy that I perpetuate in order to feel special—to feel like I am not just another station-wagoned suburban schlub. I don’t ride my bike around the neighborhood—I “train”. I don’t lay about the house all day on weekends—I am “recovering”. I am not exposing myself to the populace of Northern New Jersey—I am “wearing Lycra”. These practices enable me to think that I am exceptional, that I am better than others who don’t know the joy of mindlessly grinding their way up the same hill eight times in a row. Those poor, well-adjusted fools—they don’t know what they’re missing!

But occasionally my imaginary bike racing career has to be interrupted with the necessity to do “people things”, and last Friday night I was required to (brace yourselves, bike dorks) stay up past midnight the night before a park race! This meant that I would be running on about four hours of sleep for my assault on the middle of the pack on Saturday morning—a notion that makes most coaches puke in their mouths a little. But I decided to race anyway because everyone who races the parks in New York City eventually races on little or no sleep. (Racers who will go unnamed have also done park races while profoundly hung over or still inebriated from the night before, this is not recommended, as it totally kills your buzz.) Racing while with little or no sleep is a rite of passage in New York, and I am happy that I’ve got that rite out of the way for the year, as racing on four hours of sleep sucks.

So anywhoo, we raced bikes for 6-ish laps on Saturday morning. There were about 99 Lupus guys and the Weather Channel team was up north crushing the dreams and aspirations of a whole new set of bike racers, so we on team Rockstar were looking to slip our Swede Jonas into a break; preferably one that included one of the 99 Lupus guys. it soon became clear that Lupus wasn’t into the breakaway thing so much and things would come down to a sprint at the finish on 97th street. After jumping into every break possible Jonas decided that he would form a breakaway of himself with just over a lap or so to go. This solo move succeeded for about a lap before he was dragged back, and the rest of the race prepared for the sprint.

There are things that happen on a sprint on the West Side that I’m not going to tell you about because I like it better when our team wins, but I can tell you that Lupus did those things and Allan R won the race for their team, proving that they were right (winning always proves a point).  Somehow Jonas recovered enough to be in the midst of the sprint, proving he’s on good form. I was successful in my assault on the middle of the pack, after which I returned home, once again secure in the notion that if I can’t be exceptional, I can at least be unusual.