Birf-Day weekend

That's right, ho's, this bitch got 1 year closer to death and i celebrated like a big nerd, riding my bike.

Saturday morning we drove down to Church Creek to do the 4-man 3/4TTT. It was gonna be Drew, Chris, Cam and I. Chris jut got back from a week in France, where he was - GASP!- not biking, but imbibing copious amounts of Cotes du Rhone and Chateauneuf-du-Pape and eating rich french food. Cam had just got his new bike after something like 6 weeks of only riding his fixed gear, so it was going to be weird. Drew, Chris and I were all rocking the aero bars and I had my Rudy aero helmet (endowed with Ken Johnson's brain sweat). Anyway, the course was very nice and the weather was pretty much perfect. I was feeling phenomenal and was taking nice long pulls, about 1-minute each time and trying to get the speed up to 28 or 29. Of course, I wouldn't surge when my partner would pull off, I'd gradually increase the speed in order to keep everyone together. Chris was on my wheel and I guess after about 12 minutes or so his legs felt like crap and he had to be dropped. After some confusion as to whether I should drop back and try to get him back on, we reorganized and were left to complete the TTT as a 3-man outfit. We pushed it pretty hard and on the home stretch I was pushing harder and harder and had to be asked by Cam to slow it down a bit or otherwise face the disintegration of our paceline. I tried to push it over 30mph on a few occasions and although I guess it hurt the team mates, I think over all it was a good strategy since it got us the maximum speed and each took his pulls at the power they could provide. Cam gave me the right feedback so I wouldn't push it over the top and ruin everything. he probably had it the hardest since he's 7" taller than I am and probably didn't get much drafting off of me. Sorry. One final note on this event, our result wasn't posted to the results page, so it sucks a bit to pay and participate in an event and not really get anything official out of it. It's not super important, but I believe this counted for some MABRA BAR points or something, so it'd be nice if we got scored. I heard the DC Velo squad got like 50 minutes, we were slightly slower, sub-58...

Sunday continued the birfday festivities with the Wilmiington Jason Gundel Crit. Small field, like 50 or 60 or so. We probably had the biggest crew out there. It was going to be fun, the course was sick with nice turns and we had some strong crit racers, Drew, Cam, Kendall Bros and myself. My plan was to sit in as much as possible and not get too much time in the wind. This course wasn't very conducive to passive riding though. You really had to push it to not get dropped and Steven, who had previously won the junior race, clearly knew where all the turns were and right off the bat was driving it really hard, torturing the old farts in the field I'm sure. So anyway, pretty basic crit riding for the first half of the race and I felt like I was doing a semi-decent job of staying out of the wind. I was staying close to Will from Route 1 since I knew those boys were most likely to animate the race. Coming on lap 10 was the first prime lap and as we went around turn 7 I figured I might as well get some shwag out of this race, so I crushed it up the hill and across the home stretch. I got the prime (more on that later) and turned around to see that I had a huge gap. Of course I may be gay but I'm not a fag, so I was going to capitalize as much as I could on this. Like Bear Mountain, I was off the front in a solo break with half the race to go. I put my head down and pushed it at full throttle for as long as I could. I got as much as 15 seconds and the field was getting destroyed by the effort. Route 1 got anxious when they could no longer see me anywhere on the backstretch. Jose, god bless him, then worked all by himself to pull me back and finally I was caught with 3 to go. The field was reduced to 15 or so. In the intervening laps, Drew was crashed by some dork who went down on the straight before turn 7. Steven got stuck behind some other dweeb who went down in turn 6 so we were left with Cam and Brad. Lap 2 was uneventful except for it being a prime lap that no one was gunning for, although I totally would have jumped for it but I was stuck in the middle of 5 other guys who didn't really have the guts to go for it. Finally, on the last lap Brad went WAYYY early on the outside of the back straight and I got on his wheel. We ramped it up the little hill and I was screaming at him to keep going as hard as he could until we got to the line. That's when everyone else woke up. Junior ABRT and guy in blue who just sits in all race long in every race then jumped, Will and Jose jumped too and it was a drag race to the line. Brad got 6th, I was bout an inch behind him (almost got him at the line) and got 7th, Cam was coming right around and managed 9th. Thanks Brad for that last effort, wish we could've stuck it.

THE PRIME:
So before the race the sponsor announces that they have some way cool primes, including a mag trainer. So, I officially won one prime. You'd think that being off the front for the rest of the race I'd get all the rest of the primes, much like a breakaway gets all the bonus points in the TdF, but nope, jose got prime #2 and guy in blue who sits in all race long got the last prime. OK, I can SORTA see that you can give the primes to the pack or something (whatever!) but it would have been nice if they'd given me the actual nice prime. Instead, I got a water bottle, a pair of socks and Hunter Allen's "How To Train with Power". This has got to be the GAYEST prime ever.

Other Birfday Activities:
I got laid more times this weekend than most of you get all week (and no, not because it was DC Pride). Boyfriend Paul was the perfect partner this weekend and did everything right. You're the best!