Subject: army race weekend: the full monty and the death of the vanagon if you ever get bored talking on the phone with me, you should probably skip or skim the rest of this e-mail... here's the quick results. road race 4th, won field sprint team time trial 5th out of 8 points race 6th omnium 5th for the rest of you, here's the story of my extremely eventful weekend... -------- i was sick all last week and took four days off the bike--bad idea, but i was tired and dizzy all the time so i just spent a lot of time sleeping. i did some sprints on friday, felt a little weak, but okay. we drove down to army in dan's mom's vanagon. the drive down was uneventful. we stayed at the house of a former teammate and got to enjoy home-cooked meals and some mothering, always nice. tried to sleep downstairs, someone was snoring, i moved upstairs, someone was snoring. bad sleep. on saturday i declared the creation of a "snoring ghetto" for that night. road race. felt nervous starting out. the pack broke up a bit on the first climb; those of us that remained stayed together on the second lap (9 or so from the original 18). the course had a 45 mph downhill, 3 mile climb, lots of other hills, 14-mile laps (did 4 of them). on the second lap the two uvm girls got away with the uconn girl. we didn't stand a chance against the 100-lb wonders. i was in a chase group of 6, which went down to 5 on lap three. we had a good double rotating paceline going. fourth lap we almost lost someone on the climb but she stayed on. we stayed together through the rest of the lap and i won the field sprint, slightly downhill at 40 or so mph. i spun out my 53x11. we made a futile trip to the mall to try to find gutter feet for the roof rack so we'd be able to get everyone and the bikes back to boston. no dice. second night i didn't get any sleep either, even though it was quiet. maybe i'm getting too old to sleep on the floor. raining sunday morning. the team time trial didn't go as well as i'd hoped. i think karina and i need to practice drafting some more. i'm not very good at getting right up on a wheel. rain stopped. i'd e-mailed a high school classmate, braden camp, in the hopes i'd see him during the weekend (he's a senior at west point). he ended up showing up for the points race, which i was pretty surprised at. hadn't seen him in 5 years. had a nice talk while i was warming up. i remember him being sort of gawky, but now he looks like a model. my legs were dead for the points race, and mina pizzini showed up (a cat 1, practically a pro) which changed the whole race. it was 21 miles with a wall and a long downhill with a downhill sprint after a 90 degree corner--not a great course for me. i would get ahead on the climb, lose a few positions on the downhill, scream through the turn at 30+ mph, and still lose out... i was 6th a couple times, not good enough for points, but i did manage to place 2nd once and 4th so i finished 6th overall. i had an awesomely huge cheering section with my team's coach, my team, the mit team, and braden. felt like my legs had been ripped off, it was so hard. the first four women did not do the TTT, so that probably helped them feel a little more fresh. afterwards, we were packing up the car to go and four unh guys exposed themselves (!) across the parking lot. i thought it was sort of generally aimed at tufts but mark told me later that it was for me and that i've developed "quite a following," although if this is true i don't understand why they won't just come and talk to me, which would be far more effective than dropping their pants and gesturing toward their, um, equipment. finally got ready to go back at the house where we were staying. by the time we had dinner, it was already 9:30 and we had a 4-hour drive ahead of us. we all got into the vanagon, with 5 bikes tied on the roof in a fairly sketchy manner (we borrowed some gutter feet), and started heading back to boston. just past hartford, the van thumped mysteriously and then stopped working. one of our team members had a AAA plus membership (i'm definitely getting one when i have a car) and ran across I-84 to call someone to bring us gas (we thought we'd run out). in the ensuing hour, we all had the pleasant experience of going to the bathroom on the side of I-84. at this point it was 1:30 am. the gas didn't help, and so we decided to stay over in a hotel. we got towed (with 5 of us still in the van!) to a hotel. we put all the bikes in the car, which got towed to a garage, and we all stayed in one room. so after my two previous nights of bad sleep, i got to sleep in a full-size bed between our two A men, dan and tom. as much as it has been my life dream to sleep between two such fine specimens of american manhood, it was a little crowded and i didn't sleep very well. all the people at the garage did was try to put some gas in the van. so we ended up having the van towed all the way back to boston. (this service was included in the cost of the AAA plus membership!) i called several friends for rides but all of them couldn't make it out for various reasons, so we ended up squeezing into karina's roommate's car. the two dans went with the tow truck, karina got the passenger seat in her civic, and me, aj, matt, and tom sat in the back. which meant i sat on tom's lap for about 2 hours, during which both of our legs fell asleep in spectacularly painful fashion. so that was my weekend. a really good team bonding experience, to say the least. luckily i got back in one piece and i'm trying to tell myself i'll do better next weekend when i'm over my cold. we'll see.