That’s it—summer’s over. For me, the end of the FBF Tuesday night series means that summer is done and we’re barreling towards the mightiness dormancy of winter. There are still events on the calendar of course, but I will not be mustering much enthusiasm for them, because I’ve been racing since March and enough is enough already. This year was the first full racing season in two years, and things have come back to a sense of normalcy. You know, the normalcy of packs of mostly middle-aged maniacs flying around public spaces at all hours in bike underwear.

Last night’s race was a fast one, clocked at 27.4 average miles per hour, according to my Strava file. The night was pretty wind-less (FBF has been really lacking in strong winds this year, not sure what this means. Global warming? God hates wind? There’s no telling.) Conventional wisdom would call for a field sprint in these conditions, but that didn’t stop the attacking. So much attacking. A small group formed at around 3 laps in, but was brought back. We then had about 45 minutes of strung out and desperate times followed by clumped up lulls in the peloton. Looking at my Strava file (everyone loves to pore over post-Floyd Strava files, don’t we?), there were no fewer than eight instances where I had to put out over 600 watts to just stay with the field. Things were spicy. I averaged 243 watts (which Strava weights to 262 to make me feel better) during the race, which at my svelte summer weight came out to averaging 3.62 watts per kilogram (3.91 for the weighted average). Those are crazy Zwift race numbers for me, but the added fun of fear and danger.

The fields at FBF have been huge, and I credit/blame the many Instagram accounts that focus on NYC racing for this circumstance. There’s also a Spanish language live feed with post race interviews that happens somewhere on the internet. These factors have contributed to nearly 200 riders coming out every week, which is phenomenal. It makes the racing fast and fun and almost impossible for me to have any chance at success, but if you’re into bike racing for the winning, you won’t last more than two years.

All that being said, I must admit to you all that I’ve been harboring a secret during the FBF series. You see this series had a competition for 45+ racers in the 123 field. Did you know that? Neither did I until about mid-July, and I would posit that most other 45+ racers didn’t know either. My teammate Chris was in the lead for about a month and couldn’t really tell you how he came to be in the yellow jersey. This situation changed quickly of course, because it’s impossible to keep racers unaware of an opportunity to lead a classification, no matter how small or inconsequential. In fact this competition was so inconsequential that I was tied for the lead going in to the last two races. This was due to my mighty 15th-ish place finishes in the sprints. The situation didn’t last, as more finish-savvy aged racers looked at the standings and thought to themselves, “Yeah, out-sprinting that guy won’t be an issue.”

And that’s exactly what happened. I held out hope that I would stay in the top three for the GC, but that, um… didn’t happen. But that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the series. The last night of the series served as a reunion of sorts, with many racers coming out to check on the status of the series. It was great to see some faces I hadn’t seen in a while and I imagine once they settled back into the field, they found that the racers had changed but the race remained the same.