exit17

Rossman and Rudy are here and say hi.

Well, the Giro di Jersey has been interesting so far. Perhaps you would like to learn about it? Come with me, and learn about the last two days of bike racing.

First things first, we needed to put some bikes on the roof:

And so we did. 5 dudes, 8 bikes, almost enough dicks to satisfy me. Three of us had TT bikes, two did not. After we did the math, we realized we had close to $30k of bikes on the roof. With that in mind, I should have probably taken some of those off ramps a little more slowly.

After loading bikes on roof in Portsmouth, Worcester and Windsor Locks, we zipped on down to NJ, arriving four hours early. It’s cool though, we found a sweet coffee shop and I got a solid one-hour work phone call in.

Then it was time to do a crit, at 6 p.m. (the 6 p.m. start time wasn’t an issue…until we later realized our road race the following day was at 9 a.m. More on that later). Crit at 6? Yay! Townsfolk out watching us! Chicks probably thinking I’m hot!

But…approaching storm clouds? .46 mile course? EIGHTY LAPS? Um, okay. Thanks promoters.

It wasn’t so much that I was worried about the length of the race – it only turned out to be around 40 miles, which isn’t that bad. It’s just that 80 laps on a 4 corner circuit equals 320 right-hand turns. Which is super friggin’ annoying.

Further annoying things became apparent later in the race. For example, it was strung out the entire time, due to Dan Valliancourt and his buddies sitting on/near the front riding hard. And I had a horrible start. So I had to do a combination of bombing corners (with my super sweet non-existent roadie handling skills) and hammering around people on the outside of the straights. Exciting!

The most annoying thing, though, was definitely the piles of lapped people that kept hopping into the race. While we were approaching corners. Around 30mph. Hooray! Not sketchy at all.

Now, there were a large number of people that got dropped/popped. I don’t think it was totally due to any lack of fitness (for all of them), but largely due to the fact that a gap in a strung-out field cruising at 30 mph is not something that is easily closed. Bummer for them.

Somehow, I managed to stay in the field and finish with the group, ending the day only 10 seconds down (due to the winner getting a 10-second time bonus). Good? I guess?

The rest of the evening was spent realizing our road race left at 9 a.m., that we were staying an hour away…and we were probably going to get to bed at 11 p.m. Meaning we were staring down a night of 6 hours of sleep. But the sting was somewhat diminished because Colin’s mom was going to make us waffles in the morning. Booyah.

Boom. 5:45 this morning, I’m up, so I can continue increasing my lead over other racers in twitter posts about this race. And so I could get uninterrupted poop time. I also got a lead on the waffle consumption…which was necessary, considering our 80 mile road race.

Oh, also, it was pouring rain. I was convinced it was a radar blip. But after driving an hour to the race in continuing sheets of rain, arriving at the race and getting drenched while taking BIKES OFF ROOF…it appeared that this was a large enough radar blip that it wouldn’t pass by us.

Hm…up before 6 a.m., racing early in the rain? Can someone say collegiate cycling? Thankfully I have some decent training in dealing with this kind of stuff.

It still, sucked, though, don’t get me wrong.

Our excitement level continued to diminish while we were standing on the start line. In the rain. For 20 minutes. Waiting for a state police officer to come make our race legal.

THEN, the excitement level, which was currently at about 2, fell even further when the announcer spent time describing how we were all going to die on the course – our death was so imminent that we were going to run the first lap neutral, so we’d learn where we’d die and appropriate places to bail out.

Okay, whatever. Rainy race? I can deal with it. Strange, neutral lap? Okay, not too big of a deal.

But then I noticed that the road was covered in rain, vaseline, straight crude and Astroglide. Not two minutes in, I nearly took part of the field out as I attempting to break in time to avoid hitting the slowing group in front of me. We were totally packed in going up the hills, with no real chance to move towards the front (where it was obviously safer). There were several foot deep ditches on part of the course, cracks running parallel to the course, and potholes. But it was a bike race, so it was sort of okay.

As we continued riding, some guy’s bottle popped out of his cage, skidding across the road. I tried to avoid it, but I hit it, somehow staying upright. Hooray for me!

Then 30 seconds later dudes in front of me hit the deck.

And my brain went “OOOOOH THIS IS GOING TO BE BAD”. I tapped my brakes GENTLY in an attempt to limit the likelihood of my bike nailing a guys skull. However, in the “front steps in the winter” conditions that we were racing in, me tapping my brakes ended up with me going down squarely on my hip, coming detached from my bike, spinning around and facing backwards.

The advantage of sliding down the road backwards was that I got to see the carnage of people riding over my bike, hitting the deck, and beginning to slide towards me. We were all totally uncontrolled, like drunken pee-wee hockey players with unlaced skates. I eventually stopped as I slammed into someone, and other people slid into me. It was really super fun.

Then, I couldn’t stand up! Yay! My right leg was in a big ol’ pile of pain! I limped over to my bike, picked it up, straightened out the shift levers and hopped on it.

At which point pedaling with my right leg hurt, quite a bit. I wasn’t sure what the deal was with the race, but I figured I should keep rolling incase the ended up counting the result. This seemed unlikely, as about a third of the field went down with me. Considering the state of the course, it seemed likely that this would happen again.

Despite this, I kept on riding. We eventually caught up with the group, which was chilling by the feed zone, waiting for the riding wounded to come in.

Apparently everyone bitched enough about the race, and the sketchiness of it, and the rain, and the sand (in the vag’s), and the broken bikes, and the messed up hips so the promoters decided to negate the stage. Or whatever you want to call it when they make it not count.

This was nice for me, because I wasn’t going to be able to ride my bike with any sort of speed.

Then we were all soaked and angry and sad and I can’t walk or get in my car or walk up stairs or do anything that involves my right leg. I can, however, sit in a chair, internet, drink High Life and ice my hip and knee.

Man, bike racing is silly.

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