Now that we've taken care of that business:
Typically, the most exciting thing I do in a week will come between the finish line and 200 meters before said piece of red duct tape. The sprint is one of the coolest things in bike racing, and to be quite frank, it's one of my favorite parts. There's a level of control that you have given your training and form, but there's a lot of unknown going on at the same time. For example, I have no idea if the guy next to me will become the guy on top of me in under a second. And that's happened before, so I feel like I might have a knack for spotting it in advance. Maybe.
That wasn't the case yesterday, however. Driving down the beltway at 7 in the morning on Sunday is probably the only time that the road is anywhere near lightly trafficked. After the notoriously bad "270 spur" the road straightens out, 4 lanes on each side, and keeps going in its infinite loop of the nation's capital.
It was this combination of many easy driving features that made it so amazing to round a bend and see the very final stages of a car flipping, spinning, and generally getting screwed over.
I have to admit that there was a split second where I thought Dude, I'm headed to a bike race. I promised to lead my teammate out ... That thought didn't last long, though, and I slammed on the brakes.
To make a long (and pretty scary) story short, I was the first one there, and ended up in shin-high brush and undergrowth doing everything I could to hold a passenger-side door all of 8 inches open so that a 10 year-old boy and his sister could get out of the overturned, backward, and in-a-ditch car that was now a complete write-off.
A few other people showed up and helped get the boy down off the hill and to the shoulder of the road. We got everyone to a safe location, and I treated the boy for shock (using the term loosely).
In the "Wow, it's a small world" category, one of the guys that stopped was actually headed to the same race I was. Interesting how that works out. We were both looking at our watches, and by the time it was all said and done, we decided to be spectators.
Until we got there with like 40 minutes before the start. Then we decided we'd do what we could. So once the kit was on, I was registered, air was in the tires, etc. I had a whopping 5 minutes of warm-up, 2 minutes of strategy discussion, and then a couple laps of the course before we lined up.
The general plan was to get Tim the W and myself and Eric would work our asses off at the front and then lead-out. The problem is that all three of us race with a nervous disposition. If one guy goes up the road and looks weak, we'll still hunt him down. Even if we're the protected rider. It was for that reason that Eric and I had to really police the front of the race. If Tim felt like we were letting something go, he was going to chase it down. Which doesn't help win the sprint at the end. I did a ton of work on the front, and it was good to know that the race averaged 25.9 mph. That made me feel at least a little better when in the last few laps I wasn't exactly charging along with the surges that kept coming.
Eventually I think Tim figured out that he was behind the wrong horse (me) and he came around to try and get some position. I was completely cooked, and once I saw my 2 teammates safely up the road and sprinting, I sat up.
I finished in the pack and shortly called it a day. Driving home I realized that I had done more before 11 on Sunday than most people had done all weekend. That's a cool feeling to have.
When it was all said and done, Eric came in 6th and Tim came in 9th. Both of them got boxed in on the last corner before the sprint (I'm not a big fan of corners that close to the finish.) Sarah and Daniel both made it into the ambulance safely, and the EMTs said they were fine, but they wanted to take precautionary measures to get them to the hospital. I came home and took a nap while I "Watched" the Philly race.
Here's to hoping next week's Air Force race is significantly less exciting.
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