Co-ed Bathrooms

I overheard the following in the women’s bathroom at Mt. Sunapee today:

Maryann: “The women’s bathroom is empty right now.”

[cue mass influx of guys desperate for the bathroom]

Joe Random: “Oh man, I thought I was going to die. Umm, you OK with us using the bathroom, Kerry?”
Kerry: “I don’t care if you use the bathroom. It doesn’t bother me.”
Ryan Kelly from the internet (from the stall next to Kerry): “Hey Kerry, you’ve been in the vans, you should be used to this shit.”
Kerry (from the stall next to Ryan): “Yeah. It’s just really weird sitting in the stall seeing feet facing the wrong way. That’s just wrong.”

And that was the high point of today’s race. After that things rapidly started going downhill, only I didn’t know that they’d gone downhill until about 1/2-way through the 2nd lap.

In case you haven’t gathered yet, I’m new to bike racing. Which means that I suck at it and have little to no idea how to successfully complete a bike race. But I’ve really only done two bike races – the two I did in April last year don’t count because those were really just training rides. So really, today was race #2. And I learned some lessons today that I thought I’d share with you.

Lesson #1: Bike racing is hard. Not just because you ride hard, but because that is almost secondary to the strategy, positioning and timing of things.

I got dropped again. And this time I’ve got a different excuse than the Turtle Pond Debacle. Since I apparently had poor positioning in that race, Kerry explained to me some of the niceties behind positioning yourself in the peloton. She said something along the lines of “in a race of about 50-60 people, you want to keep yourself in about the top 15″. She said other things too, but my mind had hit saturation point.

I’m an overachiever. So if top 15 is good, top 4 is better, right? Oh yeah. Andy the overachiever dug his own little grave in quite the typical wannabe-overachiever fashion. Staying in the top 4 is probably not a good idea if you’re going fast and expending a lot of effort for 35 miles while those behind you are happily drafting off you and expending much less energy than you are. Unless, of course, you’re capable of staying ahead of them for 46 miles. I’m not.

And therein lay the problem: today I was determined to not get stuck at the back again and get dropped because some dumbass couldn’t get out of his own way on a hill. No, today I was going to stay much closer to the front and help everyone else destroy me without me realizing what I was doing.

Lesson #2: Don’t ride at the front for extended periods of time unless you’re freakishly strong or the field is stupidly weak. Neither of those are likely to be true.

Somewhere around 1/2 way through the 2nd lap (2×23 mile loop) the thought that I’d been going rather hard for quite some time slowly oozed into my addled little brain. That made me smarter, but only in the way that hindsight makes you smarter – basically just in time to realize that you’re screwed but not in enough time to do anything about it. I wised up and tried to bury myself in the pack for the remainder of the race. That worked fairly well until about 6 miles away from the finish when we hit the last moderately nasty hill and my eyes started to go blurry and my body said “Fuck! No way. Not any more. Just sit down, STFU and pedal slowly to the end because you’re about to die.”

So anyway, I clung grimly to the task at hand, pedaled my ass off trying to catch back onto the back of the group and failed spectacularly at that too. I did, however, manage to keep them in sight until they rounded the final rotary at the end of the ride, earning the “you kept them in sight so you’re not a complete loser” award. And that was the Mt. Sunapee bike race.

Oh, we passed the field in front of us shortly after the first lap. Losers.

… and Lesson #3: Getting dropped doesn’t get better with more experience.