The Highs and Lows of Racing for the first time in 18 months
“I raced bikes.” It feels a bit weird to say it after my longest stretch without racing since I first picked up this strange little niche sport back in 2009. But for the first time since August 2019, I raced bikes.
Going into it, was I ready to race bikes? Certainly not physically, with my fitness near it’s post-COVID nadir. And maybe not mentally after I spent the past few months saying that I would ease into racing, taking my time to re-adjust to the split second decision making a tight bike handling situations that come with road racing.
But then a brand new race venue popped up on the NYC road racing calendar and I decided that I couldn’t miss out (full disclosure: the linked post sparked a lengthy debate on social media as to what exactly constitutes a new venue, so maybe it was technically a quasi new venue, idk).
All photos by Daghan Perker
Either way, and ready or not, a few weeks ago I found myself driving to Flushing Meadows Corona Park to race bikes for the first time in 18 months. There were some tweaks to the pre-race process, in particularly the presence of masks, but ultimately it felt…. like the same old pre-race rituals? There were numbers to be pinned, last minute equipment checks, and some pre-race nerves. After a truly insane 2020, maybe not so much had changed?
As for that new venue… I took a pre-ride lap around the course and it was really something. Most of the tarmac was typical for New York City: a bit ragged in sections, but properly smooth pavement is a rarity for racing in the city. However, there were two notable exceptions. One stretch early in the lap was one giant puddle, and a 200 meter stretch of the finishing straight was a mixture of mud filled puddles and chunky potholes. As the race before mine finished, the impact was obvious: mud covered faces that are more typical to a cross race than a road race.
But before I had much time to reconsider these gnarly sections of the course, and perhaps some of my life choices, we were lining up. A few minutes later we were bombing through these wet and torn up sections of the course, sucking in some mixture of water and mud while sucking to the wheel directly in front of me. In hindsight it sounds miserable. And yet somehow, at the time, it wasn’t?
Rather, I quickly returned to the madness of bike racing — judging where in the pack to float, which wheel to draft, where to expend energy and where to save it. My fitness wasn’t sufficient to play at the pointy end of the race, but for the first time in 18 months I was racing bikes and it felt… good and fun?
In the midst of all of this, the first 45 minutes of the race were a blur. A break went fairly early, with a stop and start pacing to our chase effort in the pack behind. And then at some point it was absolutely full gas again, up until the point that a few more riders snuck up the road. All the while the water and mud was flying in each of the treacherous settings, my glasses becoming dirtier and dirtier with each passing lap.
And then at some point what was a mixture of fun and crazy just… stopped being fun? My legs started feeling less good and the treacherous sections of the course started to feel too crazy, especially with the race clearly going to the sizeable break well up the road. And so I decided to stop… I faded to the back of the pack and ultimately soft pedaled my way to a DNF.
Five or six years ago I probably would have plowed through the point where the fun stopped and the misery began. ‘Death before DNF’ or whatever. But after a decade of bike racing, and after the past year in particular, maybe that DNF was my own way of easing back into racing, and maintaining some semblance of balance with my racing. But regardless of the end result, it felt good to be racing bikes again, even just for a partial race. And I walked away from the race looking forward to the next one…
THE FULL GALLERY
A New York City based cyclist and sometimes photographer. Part adventure rider, part crit racer, and fully obsessed with an English bulldog named Winifred.
Instagram: @photorhetoric
E-mail: matthew@tobedetermined.cc
