BY POPULAR DEMAND (one person)
Hey @ryantkelly, you really need to dig your Tour of Hilltowns recap off your website backup and repost it.
— Nicole (@nswan) November 5, 2015
I pulled this out of an .sql backup I had from before I totally deleted every post on my site one time in 2011 or something (which…honestly was for the better).
BACKSTORY: 2008 Ryan worked full-time from home for a small software company in a house with three of his college friends and didn’t have any responsibilities so he drank a lot of High Life and that was reflected in his race results.
If I ever say to you “Hey, I’m going to go do a 97 mile road race with lots of climbing,” pistol-whip me into a three-day coma.
Please.
Because Tour of the Hilltowns sucked more than anything has ever sucked in my five years of bike racing. I have never cracked so badly in a bike race. I fell apart worse than the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (yes, I was just watching Modern Marvels).
For your viewing pleasure, here is the course profile with my annotations (click on it!):
[Note from 2015 Ryan – I think I drew a picture of the course profile, and there were some jokes or something on it? Maybe a dick?]
It got to the point where I would be riding up the final hill (where I was going ten miles an hour), and I wanted to stop, sit on the side of the road and cry. My legs were wrecked, my spirit was broken, and all I wanted to do was drive my car and my bike directly to a pawnshop and drink all the money that I would get for it.
Even today, walking up the stairs of my apartment, my legs hurt. Still.
I don’t know who won my race, and, frankly, it doesn’t matter. Because by the time I had finished, they had probably taken a shower, had lunch and gotten halfway through writing a dissertation on Dostoyevsky.
Things that were going through my head during the race:
– Creating lyrics to the song “Bike Racing Sucks” – which are “Biiiike racing sucks. Oooooooh bike racing sucks,” repeated infinitely, or until you catch the group at the base of a monster climb.
– Thinking about the best way to sell my bike – eBay as a whole bike, or a frame and group set? Craigslist? Selling it to someone on the UNH team?
– Wondering how I should spend the upcoming week – Completely demoralized, off my bike and drunk; or motivated to improve and getting in good training?
– The song “Rage!” by Chromeo.
– Hoping that more people give up – if that happened, I’d have more friends to ride with.
– How good my post-race Baconator was going to be
So, yeah, that was a ton of fun.
Time to put Tour of the Hilltowns in the “don’t do again for a really long time” pile of races.
p.s. Dear other teams that I might try to get on…I’m a really strong racer. Really. I swear.