The first CRCA club race of the season will take place this Sunday morning. My weather apps (every bike racer worth their Cytomax has at least three weather apps) are saying that there’s a 50% chance of rain, which means there’s a 50% chance of me not showing up, as the temperature at race time will be in the low 40s. I tend to avoid rainy races, because I no longer feel the need to show the world that I’m a “hard man” and I’m not risking losing the overall championship because my chances at winning any season long championship besides “most consistently gassy” are extremely slim. So if I wake up at way-too-early o’clock, and see any rain whatsoever, I will be rolling over and going back to sleep—probably after being gassy.

The 2022 season will be my 25th as a member (that’s a silver anniversary, so I guess I’ll be getting myself some silver spoke nipples or something that sounds even dirtier) of the CRCA. In the past, members who had been in the club longer than 20 years were known as “dinosaurs” and got a little stamp on the back of their CRCA cards that meant they raced for free and didn’t have to fulfill marshall duties. I believe this is still the case, as I no longer have to marshall, or I’m the beneficiary of a membership slip up and in that case, I’ve just outed myself as a marshaling scofflaw and will be punished accordingly.

As this is my silver anniversary with the club, I wish that I had a better memory of joining the club. I don’t recall whether I emailed, called or mailed the club to contact them about joining. I just know that I joined in 1997, and got myself one of the gold-with-blue-chest-panel CRCA jerseys which has replaced the “rising sun” jersey design. (I preferred the chest panel design, it looked more classic to me, but many racers still wore the rising sun jersey, as racers tend to stick with the jerseys of their “freshman year” with the club.) At the time I joined the club, I had already been racing in the city for a few years, and in the cat 4 races I was always perplexed by the tactics of the many racers I saw in CRCA jerseys. I always wondered (sometimes aloud), “Why don’t these guys race like teammates?” And I would find out later that they did’t race like teammates because they probably didn’t know each other. The CRCA was a big club, and many times two club members seeing each other at a race would be meeting one another for the first time.

The “real” racers in CRCA were on sub-teams at that time. As I was a newbie, I wasn’t aware of the battles going on within the club races, but I remember the watermelon colored kits of Bicycle Renaissance, the CBS team, Metro, Remax, Breakaway and other teams who may or may not have been in the club. Like I said, I was a noob and I have the memory of a drunken goldfish these days. I do remember that Bicycle Renaissance was an especially formidable team, led in many races by their fast finisher Eric Min, who would later go on to develop Zwift and find a way to torture racers in a completely different manner.

I began CRCA racing in the Jim Boyd era. CRCA racing has been built on the work of many hardworking volunteers, and Jim was the steward of the club when I started. He was everywhere in those days. He was at registration, he got the results out, and he even joined the races. He was a steady wheel and was always good company during a race, willing to chat to new racers and offer advice. He kept the races going, and that’s more important than anything we racers do. If I sleep in on a cold rainy morning, the race goes on. If the volunteers sleep in, there’s no race and I would assume there’d be approximately 1,000 texts, emails and DMs from obsessed maniacs who will feel slighted at missing their chance to inhale wet horse dung.

The races were much smaller in scale when I started, the only glory was to be found in the pages of the monthly newsletter where the race results were listed. The newsletter was a monthly lifeline to the club and getting your name printed in the results (I think the results went three deep—can you imagine?) was like making the Olympics. (I guarantee that there are members out there preserving their CRCA newsletter glory in a shoebox or scrap book under the bed. If you made the newsletter, you kept it. And then probably forgot you had it, but it’s around the house somewhere.)

I’ve been a troll under the CRCA bridge for 25 years. And I’ve participated consistently each of those years. I’ve seen racers join the club, go all out, burn out and leave the sport. I’ve seen racers slowly build themselves into solid cyclists. I’ve seen some racers win, leave, come back win again and then leave again. I’ve seen battles, friendships, rivalries and even marriages—both started and ended. I’ve made great friends. I’ve seen fine people pass away. I’ve raced against the kids of racers I competed against. (I’ve even been head-butted by both a father and his son—in separate incidents, they didn’t gang up on me.) I’m not the fastest club racer (and let’s face it, I never will be), but not many racers have done as many club race laps as I have (this is an accomplishment born mostly of obstinance, not talent). I choose to keep racing, because I may not be able to have an effect on the races, but the race still have an effect on me.