Me, Michelle, and some random woman who is NOT Big Red. This is absolutely, positively not Red, who I promised I would not post pictures of. The woman on the left is SOME OTHER LADY. 
Finally it was time for my wave to start. I don't know if I'm in this picture, but let's imagine that this girl in the sleeveless wetsuit and black goggles is me. I have a sleeveless wetsuit and black goggles!
How very me. I'm not even out of the water and I'm checking my watch. I can never remember unzipping my wetsuit... I guess I do it as soon as I stand up.
I love this picture. You can totally see on my face that I can't believe the time that my watch says. It turns out that the course was about 500m short. I'm glad that the photographer got a picture of my double take!
Alright, ONWARDS! (I totally look like shit in this picture! I look about 20 years older than I am.)
Here we go!
This isn't me, but I found it in the lost & found and I love this picture! She totally stopped to pick her wedgie!
'Aaaah! So much better!' Well it looks like she's having fun.
Yes! This is the part we've all been waiting for!
I remember almost crashing into this guy. God knows why he decided to mount on the inside rather than the outside where there was much more room... He never passed me. Nobody did.Nice helmet visor, buddy. Is this a mountain bike race?
And off we go!I love the following sequence because you can see me coming at you, and see my whole pedalstroke. If you flip through it quickly, you can almost see me pedaling and breathing hard.
Finishing the first loop. I'm averaging 22.6 mph right here and thrilled! Can you see how happy I am? Nope, because I ALWAYS have that face on when I'm riding. 
Note: Camera side knee bent, ALWAYS! I swear that my legs go all the way around!Coming at you again! Get the hell out of my way, the Speedy Train is coming through!
What I love about the picture above and below is that if you look at the position of my left shoulder (right in the picture), you can tell how hard I'm heaving down on the pedals.
And then I won! (I was SO HOT in that jacket. It was about 85ยบ and HUMID.) What's hilarious about this picture is that I'm standing a full step above the other chick (who I beat by about 17 minutes), and we're STILL the same height.So there you go. It's almost like you were there watching the whole thing.
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In other news, I've decided to drop out of the Longsjo Classic 4-day stage race in Fitchburg next weekend. I signed up for this race months ago when I was planning on spending all my free time doing road races. But then I met this great girl and started spending all my free weekends with her. I'm not saying that I'm not in good cycling shape, I'm just not in good ROAD RACING shape.
What I'm learning is that road racing requires a whole different style of fitness from ultradistance riding and triathlon riding. The balls-to-the-wall accelerations followed by recovery require a completely different kind of training which I just haven't done. I'm much better at holding 85% effort for hours at a time than I am going back and forth from 40 to 100 and back. It seems like every time it comes time to ride in a pack and do road race-style rides, I come up with an excuse not to do it. I've done a lot of thinking about it, and it's not that I'm not comfortable riding in packs. I'm comfortable riding shoulder-to-shoulder, wheel-to-wheel with others. It's that I don't LIKE it. I don't like letting someone else dictate my pace, and I don't like being lead through potholes and over branches. I don't like going slow when my legs want to go fast, and I definitely don't like when they make me go faster than I feel like going.
Plus, two stages of this race are a crit and a circuit race. I'm comfortable riding in groups, but not at full speed around turns. No-sir-ee! I'm not comfortable with that at all. Today I sat down and had a conversation with the King of the Bike Geeks, who knows everything (or so he thinks) about riding a bicycle. He said that this was a really technical course on really shitty pavement with horrible visibility coming out of the turns. "You would just have nothing to gain by having this be one of your first real road races," he told me. This is a guy who thinks that everyone should jump into every kind of cycling that there is out there.
The final reason for me to scrap the race is that I have my 24-hour race the following weekend, and all I want is to save my poor legs for that. I know, I know. This is a strange time to change my M.O. of never resting, ever (not true, by the way), but this race is really important to me. Way more important than a road race with a bunch of road riders with seat posts up their butts.
So I've made an executive decision. I'm going to do the time trial the first day, and then I'm going to drop out. There will be a time to get into road racing, but this race is not the time or the place I want to be doing it. Maybe I'll find more time for it this fall when I'm not trying to squeeze 200-mile rides into the same week as balls-to-the-wall group road rides. Maybe I'll focus on it next year. Maybe never. Who knows.
Point and taunt all you want. I know I'm making the right decision, even if it is based 70% on fear and 30% because I won't be instantly successful at it. Road riding just doesn't lend itself as well to "participation" as "you against the course" sports like triathlon. So if you see someone riding all by herself around the potholes of New England, go ahead and yell names at me out your window, honk at me, throw Gatorade bottles at my head (it's all been done before). I'm confident that I'm making the right decision.
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What I'm learning is that road racing requires a whole different style of fitness from ultradistance riding and triathlon riding. The balls-to-the-wall accelerations followed by recovery require a completely different kind of training which I just haven't done. I'm much better at holding 85% effort for hours at a time than I am going back and forth from 40 to 100 and back. It seems like every time it comes time to ride in a pack and do road race-style rides, I come up with an excuse not to do it. I've done a lot of thinking about it, and it's not that I'm not comfortable riding in packs. I'm comfortable riding shoulder-to-shoulder, wheel-to-wheel with others. It's that I don't LIKE it. I don't like letting someone else dictate my pace, and I don't like being lead through potholes and over branches. I don't like going slow when my legs want to go fast, and I definitely don't like when they make me go faster than I feel like going.
Plus, two stages of this race are a crit and a circuit race. I'm comfortable riding in groups, but not at full speed around turns. No-sir-ee! I'm not comfortable with that at all. Today I sat down and had a conversation with the King of the Bike Geeks, who knows everything (or so he thinks) about riding a bicycle. He said that this was a really technical course on really shitty pavement with horrible visibility coming out of the turns. "You would just have nothing to gain by having this be one of your first real road races," he told me. This is a guy who thinks that everyone should jump into every kind of cycling that there is out there.
The final reason for me to scrap the race is that I have my 24-hour race the following weekend, and all I want is to save my poor legs for that. I know, I know. This is a strange time to change my M.O. of never resting, ever (not true, by the way), but this race is really important to me. Way more important than a road race with a bunch of road riders with seat posts up their butts.
So I've made an executive decision. I'm going to do the time trial the first day, and then I'm going to drop out. There will be a time to get into road racing, but this race is not the time or the place I want to be doing it. Maybe I'll find more time for it this fall when I'm not trying to squeeze 200-mile rides into the same week as balls-to-the-wall group road rides. Maybe I'll focus on it next year. Maybe never. Who knows.
Point and taunt all you want. I know I'm making the right decision, even if it is based 70% on fear and 30% because I won't be instantly successful at it. Road riding just doesn't lend itself as well to "participation" as "you against the course" sports like triathlon. So if you see someone riding all by herself around the potholes of New England, go ahead and yell names at me out your window, honk at me, throw Gatorade bottles at my head (it's all been done before). I'm confident that I'm making the right decision.
5 comments:
Does this somehow mean you are going to start running with me again? Yes? Woo Hoo!!!!!
If you're looking for good New England Road Races talk to John Hirsch @ http://johnhirsch.org He's a pro Triathlete who does some early season racing with the Block Island Cycle shop.
Also on the counter you're getting an M-Dot?
Also if you want in on the Bob-O Josie Rides of Death we usually leave from Quassy at 1:30-1:45 on Saturdays.
I know exactly what you mean about the road riding. I hate having to go at someone else's pace. I always end up swearing at the fuckers who go off the front. I say, "Fine! Fuck you! I'm going to stay back here and work hard on my own!" Which ends up really sucking anyway.
But I LOVE crit-style racing--both on and off road. It's aggressive and technical and strategic and there's something about it that gets me all aggressive and bad-ass. You're right that it's less conducive to participation, though--especially in New England, I bet, where the fields are so much deeper. Here, everyone's pretty laid back about everything (at least on the female side).
But I have to say, my racing schedule would be different if I had a young, attractive better offer waiting in the wings.
Great pictures. I wish the photo companies down here would get their thumbs out of the rear ends and put the pictures up sooner than a week after the race.
I went to watch a crit race here in Truckee a couple weeks ago. It was AWESOME to watch! But it looked scarier than hell to ride. I had to dive out of the way when a rider crashed and came flying toward me on the final turn. The poor guy had some serious road rash and his clothes were in tatters, but he was just pissed because he fell and missed his finish.
Personally, I could do without road rash all over the shoulder, arm, hip and thigh of one side of my body, thank you.
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