Monday, April 7, 2008

Sometimes your the hammer


And sometimes you the nail.....
That pretty much sums up the crew's weekend
Depending on where you live it was a 63-80 mile hammerfest on Saturday out to Harvard MA and back. A real mini Flanders for my longest ride of the year thus far. And as usual, the sun comes out when we are done.
Next day was off to Wells Ave. Ride over and meet Nick in Brighton and then on to Newton. Of course we are mad early so I end up with 18 miles worth of "warm up". It was dry but getting colder. Billy rolls up and it's time to race.
Wells is not technical and at 12 miles not super exciting or challenging. My legs felt good, but I couldn't really hammer for too long after the day before. 15 laps tick by and here we come to the last lap and what do you get? Crash. Some unknown kamikaze takes out a big dude on an IF, who takes out Billy and a couple other dudes. As this is unfolding in front of me I am having full on visions of riding over the big dude. Luckily all my years of stage dives come together as I manage to launch myself over the pigpile and land (sans bike) on my back. Nice.
Bike is good, I am good, adrenalin is in full effect. Billy is not so good. He got a full serving of hamburger helper and snapped his stem. Check his blog for details and carnage. Call in the sag wagon(Thanks Brad!) and it's a wrap except for watching Flanders (where I felt a lot of empathy for that Suanier Duval rider who hit the curb and did the exploding wheel cart-wheel move)
But I didn't escape unscathed. I manged to kung fu kick the road on my way down and cracked the heal of my shoe and gave myself a limp inducing heel bruise. (Maybe now I can get those limited Bettini Sidis-a silver lining???) What pisses me off, is that I was even in a position to crash-I should have been free wheeling in at the back. Contesting a sprint in the C race at Wells makes as much sense as me asking out a teenager. It is all vanity, no brains. I could have had a "season over" moment, before any of the races I am stoked to do even happen. Stupid.
Hopefully my heel still hurts next week as a reminder to be smart.

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