Monday 18 April 2011

Nothing Like Racing

There's nothing like racing to smack you in the face with it. I raced both Chantilly and Dolan in the masters field. Solo on Saturday, one teammate Sunday. The weekend was an exercise in reintroduction to acceleration skills and other things that are generally important to racing well. If I could do that without racing like a sheep, great.

Saturday was better in that regard. I was a huge puss in turn 1 the first couple of laps, a lingering effect of a rainy slide out a few months ago. Then that improved. All told, Saturday was pretty okay. Sunday was not. I had to remind myself not to be a sheep, and was constantly moiving up on the outside, in the wind. My sense of when I needed to be up front was great, my technique for getting there sucked. With about three to go I had just done a great big move up and three or four guys launched, followed by two more. I was gassed from a poorly executed move up but jumped across. Missed all the free rides but made it. Once there, it was embarrassing how spanked I was. Pulled through once, nearly died. Let a gap open before the downhill. No one behind me screamed at me to close it, which they had every right to do, so I think maybe everyone there was a bit shot, but these were good racers. Hmmm. I farking screamed through the downhill turn to close the gap and sat on up to the start finish. The break was clearly falling apart so I went left in a sort of 'the stupidest thing I could possibly do here is to ride hard, so let's do that' sort of a deal. A big gust came and nearly made me go backwards and that was the end of that.

I've never before gotten into a break and thought 'Jesus God I hope this thing gets caught right now I don't want to get dropped from this thing and if we are out here for any amount of time I will get dropped from this thing'. That was a terrible feeling. That whole thing that happens in the summer when I takes all of about three seconds to recover from a majeure effort? That seems decades away right now.

One or two of you who have a clue who I am are probably wondering why I didn't mention the other things that happened this weekend. The person that made those other things happen would smack me in the head if I did. So I never will, that's why. But if there was ever cause to, there was this weekend. Wow. Cracking stuff.

First time we've seen a bunch of Novembers in the wild. Some people just did such a nice job with their builds. Incredible. Lots and lots of very positive feedback and even some good results for the stuff. Nice.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm in love with the expression "racing like a sheep".

TCR James said...

Buddy of mine got a November, no prompting from me, no direct prompting anyhow. *Looooooves* it. Not shocked - you guys made a lot of good design choices, and if I was going to build a crabon fibre road bike, I'd make most of the same choices you did w/r/t to stiffness in particular places and flex in others. *Sooo* well done. You going to do another order this fall? There may be some space in the budget for it.