Blythewood sans Roubaix

Sans me too.  Anymore the latest craze in bike racing promotions is to add a dirt section to your race and slap the word Roubaix (pronounced roo-bay) at the end of the name.  Named after perhaps the most prestigious one day classic, Paris-Roubaix, it implies a race of shear agony and suffering; the result of a few hundred kilometers of racing over multiple cobbled sections. For Blythewood-Roubaix it implied the twist of a few dirt sections around a seven mile loop.

Implied is the operative word.  It seems that the Blythewood city engineers forgot to tell the race organizers that they'd be paving over their dirt section; and it seemed that no one told me that racing, despite not riding for nearly two months, wasn't the brightest idea.  Oh well, I was going; you've got to cut your teeth sometime and there's no better way to gauge your fitness than racing.  Two hours, some wrong directions, and four bottles of urine later, I was ready to race.

The hours leading up to a race are tenuous--sometimes antsy.  You want to make sure you stay well hydrated, but get it all out pre-race.  You become very adept at pissing in bottles.  Nerves also play a role, but strangely as I was warming up, I didn't feel that nervous.  Perhaps I was too busy feeling the gusting wind in my face or the nagging pain in my knee.  Whatever the case, the race was about to unceremoniously begin.

Without much trouble the pack reached 36 mph on the first lap. The course was surprisingly non-technical (which was a good thing considering the forty-man field), but did include some nasty little climbs.  Staying near the front is always key, but never more so than at the base of these climbs. You could easily find yourself in oxygen debt, legs seizing, and off the back in no time at all.  This was the first of s aeries of things to cross my mind.  The others being:  "Wow, my knee doesn't hurt so bad anymore," and "I guess not riding for those three months really wasn't too bad after all," to "I'm losing places like a rock."

In retrospect, it had happened so quickly.  I lost place after place until finally I found myself trying to grasp the last wheel of the field.  The Phil Liggett play-by-play would have sounded like "he's blown his engine" or "the field has had one look at him and said 'well are you coming or not' and the answer--not".  I had blown up spectacularly.  I rode another lap and a half alone until getting lapped by the CAT 1s and called it quits.  Normally I would have stubbornly rode the extra miles under the guise of the "at least I didn't quit" mantra, but not today and I didn't even feel bad about it.  Instead I left with a few takeaways; until I imploded, I had felt pretty good, my knee had stopped hurting, and I could still make it home in time for dinner with the family.  These are the important things.