Excitement: Results and Potential

The weather has been ridiculous lately, with rain all month long, and so even though the sun is shyly, tenatively shining from behind thinning clouds I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that track racing will not be rained out, like it's been for the past two weeks. Track racing is an hour of hard training, guaranteed. A good warm-up ride out to the track, a few races with regular hard efforts, sprints, and, if I'm lucky, a long race made up of constant suffering.

If you're lucky, or if you live in New York City, you can have all of your training take place in racing. It's a little bit more expensive, but a lot more fun. To that effect I've had a good week of training via racing: Saturday was a Prospect Park race in which I planned to spend the first half going off the front and the last half watching from the start/finish, saving my energy for Housatonic Hills on Sunday. That race tested the legs in the hills and found them sufficient for the task of staying with the front but not for whittling it down further - it came down to a sprint of about two dozen. A fast, technical end - a downhill false flat flying toward the start finish, a ninety degree corner, and a 300-meter sweeping uphill sprint. I took the corner third wheel but missed the wheel of the attack going up the inside, jumped into the wind with 200 meters to go, and watched, sprinting and cramping, as two more racers came around me, knocking me down to fourth. A fine finish nonetheless.

Thursday, I plan to ride up to Rockleigh, New Jersey, to give the crit there another whack. Last time I had a whopper of a sprint but poor position and only managed eighth. I've got an odd habit of either having the sprint or the positioning but never the two at the same time and I'm trying to rectify that - I wouldn't mind a win. On Sunday comes one of the races that I've been enjoying more and more throughout the season - the Cadence Cup Series at Prospect Park. My club has been showing out in full force for these, bouyed by some good results early on and the very compelling promise of increasingly adept teamwork. In the second race we put our teammate Yack into the Green Jersey for sprinter's points, and in the third and fourth we've kept him there. While I'm generally on the lookout for results I know it's time to lay it down to keep Yack wearing that jersey, and I'll be a part of our large, guns-to-a-knife-fight leadout train for him.

Now that, my select and loyal readers, is exciting.

Leading up to Housatonic Hills I was excited but nervous. Could I do well? I should improve on my results from my last major road race, and if I don't it's an opportunity wasted. Fourth is good and I'm pleased but I saw second place tantalizingly close (first place was taken with a commanding sprint from a BVF rider).

But with the prospect of laying it down directly for a teammate the nervousness of letting myself down dissipates, and it's not replaced by nervousness about letting somebody else down. Why exactly I can't say - maybe because it's all still pretty new to me.

Sunday - I can't wait. And speaking of excitement for things to come, good things are in the works.

photo above by Marcia Van Wagner.