Tennessee State Championship Race Report

Tennessee State Championships Chainstay Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo.


I am way behind my 2010 racing pace after missing an ENTIRE weekend of race potential this week. Luckily I have sweet chainstay cam action from Tennessee to give me sweet, sweet content.

After the bigtime UCI race on Saturday, about half the field headed to North Carolina for a different race on Sunday. I stayed with Adam and The Wilcox in Tennessee to race again the next day -- but first, we had to have an ADAM MYERSON PERSONALITY CULT MEETING with the locals, which was awesome, mainly because my table kept buying pitchers and not letting me pay for them.

And then the next morning I felt not so awesome. But! A fake-pro must rally. We had a 2pm start, so it was totally doable.

This is what rallying looks like:

Rallying was not helped by the fact that the course was the EXACT same as Saturday. Clearly down in Tennessee they don't know about the whole run-it-backwards trick for lazy course switchups. It would've totally worked, too! Anyway, combine that with the lack of UCI points and I was antipumped. But then we lined up, I turned the camera on, Jonny Sundt started talking trash, and I was pumped! Bike racing, I can't believe I thought you weren't gonna be awesome for a second there!

Jonny rode around behind me for a while, and I put myself in the tape to save him the trouble, but I did it so smoothly you might never even notice it on the video. Thank god for single-wrapped tape that comes off the top of the stake!

The Wilcox initially went up the road with the lead group, but then he got dumped into no man's land, and then he got gobbled up by my chase group on lap three. Exciting! Due to some shenanigans I somehow got off the front of the group with another crazy-strong dude and went into lamprey mode.

This gentleman was, unfortunately, stupid-strong and probably not still reeling from several pitchers of free beer the night before. With four laps to go I rocketed backwards off his wheel and discovered that I couldn't pedal to save my life with the wind in my face.

So The Wilcox caught me. Which was a bummer. But the Wilcox was also feelin' it, and not in a good way, and weak Colin can stay on weak Wilcox's wheel exactly as well as strong Colin can stay on strong Wilcox's wheel. No, wait, I don't think I stayed on Dave's wheel to the finish line even once this year. Until today!

My inability to pull led to us getting caught and passed by another guy, so we were racing for 7th, which just happened to be the last paying place. And even though Dave is my friend, my ride to the airport, and the guy who would be driving my bike back to New England -- I still had to come around him in the sprint because BIKE RACING IS SERIOUS BUSINESS.

2011 season over! Stay tuned for the next installment of my race career, "how discovering indoor climbing ended my ski season."

Comments

Aaron said…
Indoor climbing or no, you better be at the Flying Moose Classic. I don't want to be the only one who has rockstar kick on the first half of the course and then can barely move the second half.
1/26/2011 9:44 AM
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