Until the Snow Ends

I never even meant to do this race.  After Hopbrook, I was all like "alrighty, let's get down to business and train well for 3 weeks in the hope of being less embarrassing at the Fat Tire Classic."  And I did!  You could tentatively call what I started doing a "block," if you were one of those people. Obviously that lasted until I realized that there was a bike race I could fit into my schedule, because playing bikes is way awesomer than training bikes. Especially when it's a mere 25 mile road race with 20 cat 3s in it.  None of this riding-in-the-pack for hours BS, this was going to be an hour of action!  Or something.  Anyway, it seemed fun.  So off I went, with Steve , RMM and geewhits as gas money.  On the way down, RMM regaled us with tales of getting Curley'ed  in a past edition of this race, and filling our heads with lies like "the break will go on the first lap, so you have to cover everything."  As you might ...

It used to be that I did better at Hopbrook every year, but now that I'm in the twilight of my career (was that a joke?  I'm not sure either) I seem to always find myself behind the fitness curve come April.  This year's mild winter was especially bad for that, as I spent most of March trying to get healthy and patch my ego back together after the Birkie .  Meanwhile, everyone else was out DRILLING IT.  So I figured I would just go ahead and avoid Hopbrook, and buy 3 more weeks of secret training before I had to face the Pro/1 music. BUT THEN I REMEMBERED BIKES ARE TOTALLY SWEET!  Hmm. Christin was planning on skipping Hopbrook so I was like, yo, that's cool, I don't want to go either.  But then she was like, "wanna go race Hopbrook?" and my heart did a little flip and I was like YESYESYESYESYESBIKES, so I guess I really did want to go. No amount of wanting to ride fast will make you ride fast (well, ride fast for 2 hours...), so I knew it would be b...