davis: a race so expensive i had to take a loan out to pay for my entry fee

Last friday I made my grand reappearance onto the racing scene. Okay, so maybe I haven't been gone THAT long but it's sure felt like it. Anyway the Davis Crit proved to be one shitload of fun (where a shitload is somewhere in between one hell-of-a-load and one crapload). I think there should be crits on every holiday.

My sister (#1 fan extraordinnaire) and I packed it up to Davis, land of cows, college students, and heat. It was pleasantly warm with a light breeze and we found a nice parking spot in the shade across from a vacant lot in between a shady motel and an even shadier looking pub called Froggy's. I think that's a funny name for a pub.

I schooled the sis in how to properly pin a number and she sat loyally by my side as I warmed up and entertained herself by comparing the number of counted men who stared at my skinsuit-clad butt as they walked by versus the number of men who didn't. She also gave me all sorts of sisterly coaching such as

Coach Sister: "Close your eyes."
Me: "Why?"
Coach Sister: "Because you need to visualize yourself succeeding."

I closed my eyes and pictured sneaking up to Brooke Miller's bike before the race. I carefully removed the seatpost and poured a bag of sand down the steat tube. Then I put her seatpost back and didn't tighten the bolts all the way.

Just kidding.

Anyway the race itself was a little chaotic. With about 50 women including the likes of Kat Carroll, Mary Ellen Ash, Taitt Sato and other rock-hard-quads-my-sprint-is-bigger-than-your-sprint types, it got fast at times. The good news is that it never felt that hard. The bad news is that at my next race I feel obligated to wear a jersey with this silkscreened on the back:



Take special note in that picture of the car with the X through it that's getting all cut off and is about to crash.

I felt like such a sketchball!

Fortunately my competitors are a lot more forgiving than I am and when I blatantly pounded my petal into the road and bounced up into the air in corner 5 (luckily I was doing some sort of pseudo-bridge maneuver at this point and no one was near me) my friends said stuff like "nice save!" and "good job!"

GOOD JOB?!?!?!

I felt like one of those dumbholes that cuts you off on the freeway and then gives you a cute little wave like that's supposed to make it all better.

But despite my never-having-ridden-a-bike-before appearance, I actually had a blast, and found myself wondering why the heck I don't do this sort of thing more often.

Oh and Brooke Miller won. Was anyone really suprised? My claim to fame these days is that I'm a better dancer than the Brookinator.

Afterwards as I sat in my parent's back yard eating corn chips and drinking a malted amber beverage, I marveled at my ability to get COMPLETELY WASTED off of ONE beer after a race. I sat there in my lawn chair for a while with my eyes all rolled up in the back of my head hoping none of my family members would notice that my sentence structure wasn't exactly perfect.

"I, uh... pasta salad good - wait, I think yeah? uh..."

So I hope everyone had a good 4th, ate lots of sausage and beer and wore red, white and blue and acted independent. The highlight of my weekend was on the drive home yesterday, when we noticed a real-live horse in the back of a van. Not a trailer, or a moving van, or a truck, but a VAN. Like, the kind you put people in. That can't be legal?

Next up is Coyote Creek (where there is neither a creek nor coyotes) and the Lafayette Crit. See ya (wouldn't want to be ya?)