Ouch

Clarendon Cup Masters. 15 or 20 laps of raging fury. When a brief respite from that maelstrom comes, it is a perfect time for me to reduce my vision down to triple from quintuple, and a perfect place for Rick Norton to attack permanently. We perfectly defined the opposing ends of the bell curve, all before most of the zip code that we were in was awake. The majority of this gap is physical, to be sure, but there is a big mental element as well. In a boxing match, both guys get bloody. Cycling's no different; the aggressors drag everyone down the spiral staircase into the glowing rings of hell in order to create their opportunities. In a race lot Clarendon, a lot of guys don't even get as far as that. What were there, like 60 guys? By the midpoint of the race maybe there were 35? By the end there were 20? If you can make it to be one of the 20, the trick is to convince yourself to fight. There aren't a lot of seams to slip through, but they exist. Sometime around maybe 6 to go or so there was a crash that slowed me down a little bit but slowed others more. I pretty easily chugged my way back to the small lead pack, taking a couple guys with me. To just keep going right there when people were confused about what was up would have been the move. Apart from that, it was just roll the last few laps and be more concerned about the late punch drunk crashes than trying to get a result. Last of the lead pack. A challenging, fast, and exciting race. Sunday was apparently the day when we ride mountain bikes all day. Good to have the lady back out charging, and a perfect day to get someone new completely hooked on riding dirty. Sure wish I hadn't washed out in that lefthander, though. I'm all scraped up and my left pinkie and right thumb are MESSED UP.