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I guess many of you didn’t know I was a racer. Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I do one race a year, the Senior Games (also known affectionately as the “Geezer Games”), held out in Springfield. To enter you have to be fifty or older, and you race against people in five year increments. I had never gotten into racing before mostly because of the fear of the agony of defeat, and my innate laziness and reluctance to train. I’ve never really understood training, this to me is something you do with your dog. Anyway, I reasoned, here was a race I could win. I had visions of competing against grandpas on Huffys, yes, victory would be sweet. Unfortunately, I really didn’t know much about racing. My theory was, you go fast, fast, fast, and then try not to fall over when you do the victory arm raise. What I didn’t realize was that my competition was actually people who had raced for many years, but just gotten older. And since I, too, had gotten older, which is how I got into this in the first place, my chances of winning wouldn’t really be that much better than before.
The races consist of 5 and 10K time trails, and 20 and 40K road races. The scary part of the time trial is the start, where someone holds you suspended in air on your bike until the starting gun goes off. Now this is a pretty casual event, most of the volunteers don’t know a lot about bike racing, and many times the holder is just some random person recruited from the studio audience. The last time I didn’t have a great deal of confidence in the holder, and decided to push myself off. Better to lose 1/2 second than suffer a painful and embarrassing FDGB right out of the gate. I do have the distinction of being one of the few (only) participants in the event to get lost on a half mile oval course. There are a few side roads, and despite listening attentively to the directions, I managed to deviate from the course a couple of times. One year, I was aided off course by the girl scout volunteers who were supposed to signal the way, but somehow got confused.
My real problem is the road races. I’ve watched the tour for years, and in principle know all about strategy, but somehow everyone else has more jungle cunning than me, and I always seem to get maneuvered to the front for most of the race. Then, there’s the final sprint, which always seems to take me by surprise, everyone blows by me and I come in last.
Nonetheless, I always manage to come away with a handful of medals. Since the field is split in five year slots, the number of people I’m competing against is pretty small. Added to that is the fact that out of state people are in a separate category entirely. Last time, someone was faster than me in all events, but I managed getting gold anyway since he was out of state. So everyone wins.
The 5, 10 and 20K races usually happen on Saturday and the 40K on Sunday, so I go out with a group from NEBC and we stay overnight. The high point of the weekend is not the bike race, but the apres race happy hour. There are some serious martini aficionados in the group, but they tolerate me anyway. Happy hour is spent analyzing the days events. There are a lot of us, so a good portion of the actual competition is intra-NEBC. Fortunately, we are spread out pretty well in age, so there are enough medals to go around.
Next year I’ve resolved to be more focused. It’s good to have goals. My goal is to not come in last in the road race!
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