The contract with the voices in my head stipulates that I write something about every race I take part in, but if I am to be honest, the last two races have provided little inspiration for tales of personal mightiness. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I should set the scene for the last two races.

They were both CRCA club races in Central Park. There, scene set.

Last Saturday’s race was my first since my “get up to speed” race of a few weeks ago and, despite my feverish hopes for a seven-day transition from fodder to fastness; there was no personal mightiness to be found. There was team mightiness aplenty, but personally, I was not a factor.

The race started at a brisk pace—I’d check Strava for lap times, but Central Park is an endless morass of Strava segments, posted by everyone with two legs and a Garmin—so I will just say that we were doing 13 and a half-ish laps, which is pretty fast for April. The race surged and purged and accelerated and so on. There was an exciting moment in the race when we came around horse sh*t alley to find a nut truck and trailer jackknifed across the road. For most racers with park racing experience, this is not a huge deal—we shouted and careened our way past, causing a runner on the side to execute what I consider the most head’s up runner action ever when he sprang up and over the guardrail to safety like a meth-filled lemur—huzzah, intrepid runner, you are a king among the fleet footed.

After Jayson J of Weather Channel snuck away up the road and had about a 15 second gap. Teammate Paul then decided to cagily jump across, and joined Jayson at the front with about two-ish laps to go. They worked well together and a few others joined them. Back in the pack, we on Rockstar generously allowed this to happen. Most of the break made it to the line, with Jayson taking the win. Paul got nipped at the line by the rapacious remnants of the Weather Channel team (yes, that’s you Kevin), finishing a fine seventh.

This Saturday’s race promised a more Margarite-free race environment, as that particular lycra tsunami would be blowing in the north at Battenkill (I’ve retired from Battenkill), so I was cautiously optimistic about being a non-disaster in the race. There were some fast people in attendance, the Weather Channel front and the Lupus team both had fast racers in the field. I did not allow this to dim my spirits, because delusion is a pretend bike racer’s best copilot. I surveyed the field and decided who I would mark, because of the aforementioned delusion.

We set off and proceeded at a brisk pace like the week before. Moves were attempted, exertions were made, but thing stayed together until James S of the Weather Channel team hopped away briefly. I was near the front and joined a move that made it up to him. I was joined by Alejandro G of Foundation and the guy from Blue Ribbon with the beard that’s not Zach (sorry, we haven’t been introduced). Our move was a brief one that involved a lot of effort along with the vision of tunnels and the slight threat of self-soiling on my part—I didn’t ask my break-mates whether they had these same symptoms.

After we were brought back, I was breathing through imaginary gills on the side of my head, when I saw the threat massing at the front, and then the split happened. Teammate Aaron was boxed in as the split slipped away, and our day was done. Teammate Josh the track sprinter was in the race also, but could only muster four climbs of Alpe d’harlem because he’s a track racer, those guys can barely climb stairs.

And now a quick aside about being an elderly racer

I’ve been asked in the past what it’s like to be an older racer, and I’ve never quite had a good answer to that question, but an analogy came to me as I driving home from today’s race and signing along with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

Imagine that a racer is a gun (normally I’m not a fan of firearm metaphors, as they’re pretty hack-ish, but indulge me here, as I’m hoping to shed a new light), and this gun has a limited amount of ammunition. When you’re younger, you can carry more ammunition, and you can also fire this ammunition rapidly, you are—in essence, a semi-automatic weapon, with lots of bullets that you can fire in rapid succession. As you get older, you lose bullets AND you lose the speed with which you can fire those bullets. You devolve from a rapid firing gun to a revolver, a gun with less bullets, and a fair amount of firing speed.

When you get to my age however, you are a musket. You shoot one musket ball at a time, and after you fire, you must fuss about with those cardboard packets that revolutionary soldiers bit into and poured into their barrels, then you have to add a round ball and finally you have to tamp that all down with a ramrod. And then you can fire another musket ball. Your balls may still be lethal, but you have to be very selective about when you use them because of all of the tamping and biting and other things that need to happen before you can fire again.

When the split went away on Saturday, I was tamping away with my ramrod (I may also have dropped it, along with getting my cardboard packet thingy wet), as I had just come back from being in an inconsequential move. I wasn’t able to reload in time, and away the race went.

We rolled around for about two more laps. Allen R of Lupus jumped away to the break and then won the race, because he is some sort of wolf-person, and I rolled across the line, with my balls dropped all along the course.