not nearly as exciting as army... no cars broke down.

short and sweet: williams crit 1st, cornell rr 5th.

-----

drove out to williamstown, ma (almost in ny) in the big 15-passenger   
van.  tom, who has never driven anything but his "little subaru" was at
the wheel.  (he did fine.)  on the way i introduced him to cracker.  very
exciting.

we got almost all the way there when i started laughing for no apparent
reason.  when tom asked me what was so funny, i told him that i'd
forgotten my bike shorts.  (and i'm usually the one that has everything!)

dan took me to a shop called the spoke and i bought the only pair of
women's bike shorts there--some crappy 6-panel bellweathers.  the inseam
was quite short and i said to the owner, "so these are the slut shorts,
are they?"  and it was by this name they were known for the rest of the
weekend.

at the last minute tom decided to go to cornell with me and brad (the rest
of the team was returning to tufts) and needed a toothbrush.  i bought him
a barbie one which he displayed in his front overall pocket that day, the   
next day after cornell, and (i heard from my roommate, who has a class
with him) at school on monday.  very cute.

so got back to williams, did my race.  field exploded on the first lap
(there were 7 of us).  four of us were together--the two uvm girls and the
uconn girl (cat 2 who rides for IF).  we stayed together, although i kept
getting gapped on the one right-hand turn, which happened to be right
where the guys on my team were standing.  they screamed for me on very lap
and at one point, in grand UNH style, all dropped their pants (but not
their boxers).  i returned the favor a few laps later by showing them some
skin =).

anyway, i took the first and fourth primes and got second in the second
and third primes.  if the three girls had been smart they would have
dropped me on the semi-technical downhill (a significant part of the .9 mi
course) and the chicane but they didn't.  and i came around before the
last corner and beat them.       
                     
men's a's went okay.  dan dropped out early on--he'd been doing wheelies
in the parking lot and bruised his tailbone quite badly.  tom hung on and
got 15th or something like that.

we didn't know anyone in ithaca but the harvard guys offered us a free
place to stay.  they waited around impatiently as we packed up to go and
we followed them up.  we stopped at a truck stop at one point and got a
chance to talk.  i knew brent (student at kennedy school getting a
master's in public admin, and a jd at berkeley) from before.  i was
talking to nikki about english and mentioned i like early 20th-century
american authors and she said, "do you like ayn rand?"  and then the other
harvard guy, a guy named dane who's studying to be an oral surgeon, came
up and said, "that's my favorite author."  now those of you who remember
my car in hawaii know that i've been on a quest to meet people who know
who john galt is.  what are the odds, in a group of 6 people, that 3 of
them will like rand?      

we got to ithaca.  called brent's roommate for the results of the amstel
gold race.  went to sleep.  thankfully it was the last night for a very
long time that i will have to sleep on the floor.

next day was extremely cold and rainy.  skipped my warm-up to stay in the
car.  unfortunately the slut shorts wouldn't hold up my leg-warmers so i
had to go with the knee-warmers (tighter elastic).  i hadn't brought my
booties and so was just generally underdressed.  11 of us started; 7 of us
got dropped on the first climb, five miles in.  i could not feel my legs,
but not because of the cold.  in any case it was me and a girl from
cornell in the 5th and 6th spots.  we stayed together for the next 40
miles, although she dropped me on the second climb on the second 22-mile
lap.  i got back on though and stayed with her to the finish, beating her
in a steep uphill "sprint" at approximately 10 mph.  at that point my feet
had been completely numb in the sub-40 degree weather for over two
hours.  i couldn't see anything.  i was wicked cold and hungry.   i   
somehow got ahead of her but was in so much pain that i just watched my
front wheel waiting for the line to pass underneath it.  this was the
hardest race i've ever done.  i kept on wanting to quit but wanted to
realize my two goals for the day: scoring points in every single race this
season and breaking 300 points.  (check out www.eccc-info.com and you'll
see that i did it.)  and it would have sucked to tell everyone back at the
shop that i quit.

anyway, it was too cold to cool down so i changed.  in my haste i think i
flashed the parking lot but i don't think anyone was watching.

brad got super motivated by the weather (cf 99 fleisch-wallogne, or
however the hell you spell it) and went off the front on the last lap,
finishing 7th.  tom, who did some blocking for him, finished 11th.

it took me about an hour in dane's car to stop shivering and it wasn't
until 2 hours later that feeling returned to my feet.  we stopped to eat
(second bacon cheeseburger of the weekend--plus i ate half of tom's
spaghetti) and headed home.  after our second stop i joined nikki and dane
in his car and we had a bit of an objectivist salon going until
boston.  traffic was pretty bad so we had a few hours to talk about tons
of stuff.  at one point dane asked us what we thought of the sex scene in
_The Fountainhead_.  if you haven't read it, i can't explain to you why
this a weird question to be asked by someone you barely know.  anyway, it
was an interesting discussion.  and it was kind of fun talking to dane,
who sort of made me think of a rand character and thus in certain ways was
kind of predictable.

i hopped out at the toll booth at the end of mass pike and got back into
brad's car.  got home.  wanted to burn all my clothes because they were so
nasty.  and so the season ended.

we got a big write-up in the school paper.  we led division 2 in the eccc
in A points.  i won overall and division 2 for women.  it was a good        
season.  we'll be at natz may 12-14.  www.ohiou.edu/bike