I've come to the conclusion that when you're at work (the kind that pays the bills -- that you don't really work at, but where everyone thinks they're doing something) it's not the work you do, but the people you're around that make all the difference. Bike racing is the same way. I really like to look around at the start line and see familiar faces. Guys I know take a good line, keep their mouths shut, and do the work that needs to be done.
Now sure, some of these new faces are absolutely wonderful bike handlers, are strong in the pack, and take solid pulls. Then again, some aren't.
It seemed like there were a lot of the latter out there at Crystal Cup. And when you're working with people that you'd rather not be so close to in a corner and the work sucks ... Well ...
I guess it all comes down to safety pins. It bugs the hell out of me when a promoter buys the big box of "Variety" safety pins. If you're not one of the first to get there, you're stuck with either insanely small or cartoonishly large pins.
So the pins bent and because useless when I put my fat ass into my size Large jersey. Then I asked a guy for help that was parked fairly close to me. I say fairly close because we weren't all parked in a parking lot like normal. Instead, we were parked all over Crystal City. Some of us managed to find parking fairly close, but knew damn well we may have to pay an extra "entry fee" that would be stuck under out windshield wiper. I asked the guy that helped me pin my number back on how the course was. He pointed down to a now-tireless Zipp 404 with a crack straight across it. Sooo ... Great.
There was pretty much nowhere great to warm up, so a lot of us ended up battling with city traffic and trying to pretend we weren't warming up with sprint intervals. But we got to the line on time, and had enough time to watch like 6 laps of the Women's race before we could get going.
Most of us having no prior knowledge of the course, we just lined up. No sighting lap, no idle chit-chat, just straight to the line and punch that damn clock.
Once the clock was punched (in the form of an air horn) I'm pretty sure the guys on the front row attacked as soon as they had clipped in. Which is cool. That's racing, and sometimes it can be a lot of fun to go super hard right off the bat.
Did I mention many of us didn't know anything about the course?
Let me enlighten you about the course. There were 7 turns, a long straight, and a tiny bit of elevation change. But only just. Of the 7 corners, 4 were off-camber. A couple had manhole covers in a key point (like the apex), and one was a 180-degree fairly tight corner with a big divot right at the first quarter of the turn, gravel, poor quality in general, and off-camber. On the straight parts there were manhole covers, potholes, and manhole covers encircled by potholes.
The first crash was a simple bunching-up that turned into wheels touching down the straight toward the start/finish. I think only a couple guys went down, but they looked like they went down pretty hard. I know because I was really starting to feel like hell and with every hard acceleration I was loosing a place or two. So the crash kind of happened right next to me. And I had to catch on. Which I hate doing.
Then we rode around in circles some more, my teeth nearly cracked, and the pucker-factor was through the roof. On the last lap we came around the 2nd turn (Which was off-camber, had a pothole, and featured steel manhole covers) and a bunch of guys all decided they wanted to be in exactly the same spot. As the Japanese have known for years, the only way to get more out of a piece of real-estate is to pile things vertically. Which about 8-10 guys did very well. I thought I could get around on the left side, but so did 3 other guys. And they crashed into one another. So I did what any really tired racer does: I unclipped and pretended that I could be of some assistance so I didn't feel quite like I had outright quit. I mean, I could have just come around and finished DFL, or I could try my hand at geometry with a shift lever/spoke problem.
There are a lot of races that I walk away from really not feeling good about, and saying I'll never come back, but a bit of me knows I'll be back next year. This, my friends, was not one of those races. For the pro guys, I'm sure it was a pretty good event. I'd bet there was someone they could call and say "So how do we get the truck into the parking area?" and they could get an answer. For the amateur race, it was an event with barricades and a lot of police, and it seemed to be worse-run and with less info than we get at most of the races put on by a local team.
Then there's the racing. The course sucked. Through and through, it was absolute crap. Because the pro race had such a big draw, the amateur race seemed to have a big draw as well. A lot of guy from hours away, and some that only raced a few races a year showed up. That combination made me seriously consider dropping out of the race a few times so I could save my equipment (I don't have the kind of money to replace my Zipp rims) and my body. I got lucky and I wasn't taken down by the crash, but a lot of guys weren't nearly as lucky.
So in the end, I won't be doing the Crystal Cup again. And not one of those "Until next year" type of things. Unless someone wants to pay me heaps of money to go there, it's not happening. And given my fitness level today, no one will be paying me to ride a bike for a very, very long time.
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