My Race Is Run

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In these turbulent times the headlines may be frightening, but sometimes regime change is exactly what the world needs:

With the old mayo finally toppled and a new recipe recipe taking its place I look forward to a new era of peace and prosperity in the Kingdom of Burgers.

Meanwhile, ice still sits atop the surface of the Hudson:

Yet it feels like winter’s back could finally be broken, as the oily mesomorph that is spring descends upon it repeatedly from the top rope:

Oh, there’s still plenty of snow on the ground, and no doubt winter will roll out of the way at least a few more times. But like professional wrestling matches, rest assured that the seasons are fixed, and ultimately the outcome is never in doubt. So between this and the new mayo I begin the week brimming with optimism.

Saturday in particular brought very pleasant weather, and so for the first time in many weeks I headed over the George Washington Bridge and onto the Fred circuit:

I badly needed the change of scenery, even if it’s scenery I’ve seen thousands of times before, and as groups of roadies in their matching team kit passed me I realized that the start of the local racing season is very nearly upon is. There was once a time when I would have been among them, “training” with teammates in anticipation of the big day. Insanely, the racing season in New York City begins in early-to-mid March, when it’s still like 20 American Freedom Degrees at the crack of dawn, which is when the races start. “What the hell am I doing?,” you ask yourself when your alarm rousts you at 4am, and you still don’t have an answer as you clip in and ride shivering and under-dressed to the park, where you soon find yourself among a hundred or so other mental cases, and you come face to face with the fact that this isn’t even remotely about “fitness” or “health,” and that really you’re no different from all the other bizarre subcultures that give expression to their bizarre urges during this most depraved portion of the very early morning, when it’s still dark, the normal revelers have finally stumbled off to bed, and the decent people of the city have yet to awaken. This is the Hour of the Wolf, a Bergman-esque fever dream and a time reserved for the twisted, the unfortunate, and the insane, whom you’ll now find in places such as hospital emergency rooms, police stations, bars with the metal gates down, or else writhing and grinding in underground sex clubs, or perhaps gathered in the park clad in stretchy clothes and preparing for a bike race under the soulless glow of an energy efficient LED streetlight (in my day they were still a sickly and inefficient yellow), indulging in an activity that has more in common with any frenzied horse tranquilizer-fueled EDM bacchanal than most of the participants are willing to admit.

Yet it’s not surprise that road racing continues to thrive here, generation after generation, for it combines the sleeplessness of having a baby with the powerlessness and self-destruction of having a drug habit, only without the joy of parenthood or the cool factor of debauchery, respectively. This makes it an ideal pastime for the type-A masochists who choose to live here. Still, I’m glad I put my time in, because thanks to years of racing I don’t really mind getting up early to ride my bike, nor am I particularly averse to doing so in the cold.

Of course, fenders do help:

Hell hath no smugness like a rider fendered, and as I rode I contemplated the packs of riders who passed me, the backs of their matching jerseys splattered with road grit like the aftermath of some mud porn money shot:

Hey, I get it. In my racing days I too would have been putting in my early season miles on a fenderless road bike. However, it seems to me the one thing the plastic dick-breaked blobs everyone rides now has going for them is that they could potentially be very easily fendered. Back in my day a race bike wouldn’t accept fenders at all–or if it would there was no way you’d go through the trouble of installing and removing them on a weekly basis. (What, race with fenders? Think of the weight penalty!!!) Couldn’t some bike company design a frame with teeny little brackets that accepts flexible crabon fenders that you just slip in and out of there there like the filter of a window unit air conditioner? They’d barely add any weight, and better yet they’d be proprietary to the frame and exactly the sort of thing people would have to keep buying over and over again when they get lost or break, like those downtube storage compartment doors. Maybe someone does offer such a frame and I just don’t know about it. Anyway, it seems to me like it would be attractive to people, but what do I know?

Fortunately I’m old and slow and I don’t have to worry about any of it anymore: