If you are a careful watcher of this journal, you may have noticed that I skipped a week of reporting on my vital and exciting cycling career. This is due to nothing happening during that cycling week. There were many obligations required by life, but nothing compelling happened in my parallel cycling life that would justify typing 500 words worth of description. This is the new reality of my journals—if nothing happens, nothing gets typed. That’s my strategy for keeping myself sane. Will it work? Only time will tell.

And speaking of sanity, I spent an hour and three-quarters in traffic (including a stint on the Belt Parking Lot Way—the worst roadway on the planet) to take part in my weekly (when possible) ritual of getting flogged by much faster people at an abandoned airfield whose surface, should I ever fall off my bike, would sand off a layer of my skin faster than you can say, “Aren’t you too old for this?” This is not rational behavior. I should be searching for events that would offer even a slight glimmer of hope for success, but let’s be honest, events offering opportunities for racers of my vintage to square off against one another are rare. And that is how it should be, the sport needs new racers to continue and thrive, it doesn’t need to cater to the needs of old dudes like me who would request fields sorted to such a specific criteria (how about a separate competition for 53+ Iowa ex-patriots?), that success would be ensured. We don’t need to make all races like Master’s Nationals (nothing disgusts me more than the prospect of preparing myself for nationals, why? I have no idea). If you want to go through that process, God bless, it is not for me. We can just add it to the list of things that I dislike irrationally, joining the following: races at Bear Mountain, pleated pants, henley shirts and the term “vacay”.

OK, that’s enough yelling at clouds, we’re here to dig into the FBF race. I can’t be the only one who, after a Tuesday butt-kicking, goes home, greedily downloads their Strava file and basks in the self-inflicted pain and torture. I think last night was one of the fastest races I’ve ever participated in at FBF. The race averaged a straight 29 miles per hour. And in the finishing sprint I hit 37.7 mph. Me. I went that fast. I can only imagine how fast the racers who were actually contending the sprint went. The whole night was a blur of attacks, efforts and the sight of the whole race lined out as guys tried to snap the elastic of FBF’s boxer briefs. I’ve raced harder races at FBF, but not many that were faster. There was no wind, so the race wasn’t getting blown apart (evidently last week’s race had a ripping wind which blew the race to pieces), it would just get stretched.

So for 12 laps, we committed bike assault against one another. Just one attack after another, you’d go to the front, get tortured and shoved to the back of the race. This swirl went on for the whole race. On the last lap, I was near the back of the pack between turns one and two when I saw Jermaine Burrows getting his team together ahead of me, so I did what any greedy bike racer would do, I hopped on their train. A free ride to the finish? Sure, why not? We went up the inside on the dirty wind section, stayed on the inside over the bumpy weeds and then they started taking some risks and I remembered that I’m a wuss. I was on the back of the sprinting wave, with no hope for a placing, but I put in a “Cat 4 sprinting for 25th” effort anyway because I didn’t want to end the race with a Trek crammed up my keyster. I spun out my 11 cog and made up no ground whatsoever.

But the race was a fine opportunity for some self-abuse, which seems like a good comeuppance for missing a week’s bike typing.