Pong'd

The AVC is only a couple of weeks away, and I feel very slow right now. Like not Cat. 4 slow, but definitely not nearly national-level fast. Which is slow. I think. I dont know. Rode a 12.01 at sprint night last week, which was a perfect example. All day, all I was thinking was "must go sub 12... sub 12... sub 12." I was visualizing and aligning my chi and keeping my positive ying balanced with my negative yang and when it came down to it, I missed it by 2 hundredths of a second. Bummer.

I kept thinking about it all weekend, and when I finally got back to the gym on Monday I went way beyond what I have been doing lately, which made walking around for the rest of the day a bit tough. Also made PIR a bit harder than it should be. PIR was pretty classic. Super windy, small-ish field and a single inhumanly strong pro in the field equals big splits and probably a solo or small group finish. And it did. Tuckerman, Ping-Pong and yours truly rode the entire race battling for last wheel. The only exceptions were the hot-spots before the break got clear and the final, in which cases I did the last half-lap blast around the field to get in position for the long tailwind sprint. This final was good fun. Three guys were away, but we wanted our money's worth, so I found Richard's wheel with a lap to go and got a pretty sweet ride in. Dude's got a great motor, and everything was going perfect untill we got to about 400 meters to go, I saw a bunch of shadows jumping around on both sides, but instead of doing the smart thing and hopping on somebody and popping them at the line, I dropped into the 11 and went from waaaay too far out. I held it, but barely. I saw stars. Went cross-eyed. Lost all function. Cramped big-time. It was hard.

I recovered the next day by lifting like a madman and trying to race Tabor. Makes sense, eh? Went Mano-uh-Mano with the Pong on the big Volcano. Long story short, I cracked hard after 10 laps or so and while riding by myself some friendly spectators at the top corner handed me the March 1987 Playboy to keep me motivated. Apparently while I was riding around staring at 20 year old pictures of naughty bits, one of Tabor's hippie longboard skater chicks did a pretty impressive digger into non-soft pavement. She was carving some sweet turns heading directly at a cross-eyed pack of bike racers, when she suddenly realized the magnitude of bummer she was about to enter by nailing 20 bike racers head-on, so she swerved out of the way and put a foot down at 30 miles an hour. I hear she didn't handle it so well. Everyone seemed to have thier own story about the aftermath, but all agreed she was unconcious, bleeding and not looking so good. Medics were on hand before you could say "what the.." and off she went to Emanual. Big drag for sure, but proof that common sense is not something we're all born with.

DT