Winning doesn't suck.

So last night I managed to do something I rarely do. Win.

Yup. I won a bike race. Well technically I won the series (although in doing so I did actually come in first one night). Sure it is a $6 a night weekly training time trial series, but hey. It is a win right?

Fortunately the guys who ARE faster than me didn't show up enough to qualify for the series win. And this year they didn't break it down into categories. It was just simply overall.

I won. For winning I got a helmet exactly like Solobreak's new one. And upon my collecting the prize for winning he took his old meteor 2 back. Hell I couldn't easily take two aero helmets back in my backpack.

So yeah, Jonny Bold showed up last night in his captain america skinsuit. He talked the super strong Bill Shattuck into coming down too. Dave Potter showed up even. There there was the rest of the regulars. Jack Tickle, Gary Stafford, Dave Foley, Kyle Morrell and Kirk Samuelson. Scott Glowa showed up to give his legs a test rounding out the light attendance for the night.

Average speeds for the night on the course ranged from 29.3 down to 19.5.

Bold obviously set the fastest time of the night, followed by Bill at 27.5 and potter at 26.8. Times worked out to be 16:35, 17:42 and then 18:09 for those three.

The next finisher was me. 19:00. So wanted to be under 19 but i just about puked on reynolds and lost focus and speed just before the turn onto peck, and I hadn't ridden hard all week. Barely at all even (lots of driving into the city this week). I did give it everything though. Prep was sub par but still good enough to beat the rest of the mortals. Solobreak set a time only 3 seconds slower than the one i laid down. That was the closest he got to me all summer on that course. And yes, he is way old and stuff, but he's not slow.

Jack Tickle crossed in 19:11 followed closely by Stafford at 19:13 and then Burke at 19:20. Chris Burke pulled all the stops out for last night. Pulled his Pinnarello bike with the TT bars, aero front wheel, disc rear wheel and Campy Delta brakes out of the rafters and slapped on an aero lid to boot. I didn't lose to him this summer either.

Glowa came in just under 20 at 19:55 and Samuelson just over 20 at 20:03. Kyle lead off the night and posted a solid PR of 24:58.

If anyone wants to see the full results and avg speed and what not let me know (email or comment below).

The series standings was compiled based on those who attended 5 events and then sorted by their average times (it appears that Dave V complied the final avg based on the 5 fastest nights - which is nice because that first one was a significant deviation in avg speed). And checking total avg and five fastest the results seem to be the same.

And now that I have a USCF/UCI legal aero helmet I can head down to the old Bob Beal road course and give it a go at the 2011 New England Regional Time Trial Championship. The course isn't flat but not terribly hilly. Just enough elevation change to mess with you.

Anyway. The series was great. Huge thanks to Dave Varney for coming out and timing us and getting results emailed out. Thanks to Bob at Bikeworks for the prizes. Word has it that Dave is retiring from timing and scoring. Hopefully the Bikeworks club can pull together some folks to make it happen next summer.

We did the whole bike thing this morning. Camp drop off with the little on on the trail-a-bike and the tandem. And then traded trail-a-bike for the trailer and booked it as fast as I could move that giant road train into the city (which wasn't very fast but hey my legs are still dead from yesterday).

Oh and now it looks like a few CX Pros are going to hit Nor'easter, Midnight ride cx, and Gloucester, toss in Night Weasels and PVD and what you have here in New England is what you have in Belgium after Christmas. Okay not quite but find that caliber of races in that time span somewhere outside of Beligum that time of the year.

Okay... i have coffee to drink and microscopes to check over. They are going to have to survive most of next week without me. Staycation week. Maybe get some canoeing in, hopefully I'll manage to make it out to the Fall TT series (different course than BW but near there, i'll bring the stopwatch if others want to come out.

heddwch
G aka Big Orange