So I am almost comfortable calling myself a bike racer again. I have been out twice now and feel pretty strong, except for the last two days because lots of riding. Tuesdays are almost a race also and it’s always hard. I am going up to FW Saturday to do the state champs and if I can recover in time, I should do well. Then it’s Mass Ave and whatever straggler races I can think of this fall…maybe even Franky T’s Cyclocross extravaganza.
Training has been consistently good this year. My skin is very brown from the constant exposure and I have been clinically dehydrated for three months straight now. It is at least 90 degrees every day and tonight I am going to Tractor Supply to see about getting a salt-lick. I eat ten thousand calories every day and drink five gallons of water. I am proud of my ribs and linguini arms and I hope to get down to around .5% body fat soon. I believe this will make me faster and hopefully I will be able to ascend the many long climbs around here with gusto…and aplomb.
It is now tomorrow, which is to say that yesterday is today. What I mean by that is that I started this piece today (yesterday) and am now finishing it tomorrow (today). Words and time are fun. So are custom insoles. Jeff Frame, the eminent Fit Guru and physiology genius came by last night to fit my wife and I for custom insoles. I am excited. Every time I talk to Jeff I feel like my IQ goes up by 10%. He is the most natural physio/fitter I have ever met, which means that he has a supernatural understanding of the human body as it relates to cycling and is able to translate that knowledge and passion into the most amazing bike fits/shoe orthotics/workout plans that I know of. Anyone interested in Jeff’s services should contact me and I’ll get you contact info.
So it looks like there are about 20 or 30 guys going up for the state road race this Sunday. Most of them are doing cat 5, which is a good thing. It means that a lot of the guys that are only used to doing the weekend rides and Hammerfest are going to try racing. They should do quite well considering that most of our team rides are faster than most road races I’ve ever done. I firmly believe that if you can hang on at Hammerfest for all six laps, you should be a top-ten finisher in most of your road races. Road races are easier than crits, by the way. Less chance of crashing also…unless you get bored or corn-hypnosis. Northern Indiana road races are way flat and way windy. I tend to get really really bored at these things. I’ll start thinking about the store, or my tomato plants, or weird song lyrics. I may end up singing MacArthur Park over and over in my head for thirty miles. I may begin to notice little idiosyncrasies in the pack to which I would normally be oblivious…like when I saw Damien pull out a full-on turkey sandwich in a Ziploc bag when we hosted the state race in 2009. I remember it was on white bread and he ate it like any fifth-grader in a lunchroom…only we were not in a lunchroom, we were on 113th street going toward Ringer Road. I thought that was pretty smart. Why restrict yourself to fibrous muck-bars and sugar gel?
I may also think of profound things like Amit Goswami and his theories on consciousness creating our physical universe and not the other way around. Nonlocality…Schrodinger’s cat…What is God…..memories of the panic in the 80’s when Reagan ran the government on what was then a staggering 200 billion-dollar deficit and we now routinely have over one trilltion-dollar deficits with 2011 close to 1.5 trillion. That is nearly 10% of GDP. I think it is wise to loathe politicians. The needs of the nation will never outweigh the need to be re-elected. Everyone wants job security. Very simple. No need for over-analysis. The deficit will continue to grow. We will continue to borrow. Money is cheap with a AAA credit-rating and lenders love interest. Interest is just money that goes away from us and toward a lender. This is money that has no inherent value to back it up. It is a kickback for someone being shrewd enough to recognize someone else who needs money and is willing to provide that money in exchange for a larger sum down the road. We pay for shrewdness. This is ridiculous because you cannot pay interest unless you have enough natural resources to exploit to make up the difference. We probably do but we keep too much of them here in the US where we sell it to ourselves at huge profit margins, thus weakening the lower and middle-classes and reducing our exports which could be used to overcome the interest that we pay on our foreign debt that we use to finance silly government programs like rockets to outer-space and making glow-in-the-dark mice. (I am most-likely grossly inaccurate on everything I just said but that’s okay because I am not trained in economics, just fixing bikes).
Anyway at some point I come back to the race from LaLa Land and maybe there is a break up the road and maybe I’m in it or maybe not. If I am not in the throes of terminal cramp I will position myself up near the front (this is instinctual, and I am very crabby when someone tries to bump me out of the way). Then we sprint and I finish somewhere. Langan has a cooler filled with a hundred cokes and probably some sort of Nabisco snack cake food. I just want beer now and for my wife to drive me home while I fight the Jimmy legs. And that’s a road race.
Good luck and I hope someone brings some SunKing Osiris.
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