Icecapades

Well, the last race of the season was yesterday. Soon we'll be back to reports of my running up stairs and complaining about the cold, and maybe some more boxing or P90X (...we'll see...), but let me just tell you about this one last race first, m'kay?

In classic Pittsburgh style, it couldn't decide whether it was a warm day or a cold day, so it did what any decent weather pattern would do, and gave us the worst of both. Freezing rain, ladies and gentlemen. At 32 degrees, it was the warmest day we'd had in about a week and a half. The course was frozen in unexpected ways for me, being only my second muddy race and my first totally frozen race. The grass, as usual, was as close to velcro as one could find on that course, but it was still slick with the dew that was slowly melting under our tires and the frozen mud we tore up as we skirted around bends.

There were two technical sections of the course, both of which caught me by surprise and one of which caught me by the skin of my knee. There was a felled tree right before a steep run-up. Ordinarily, the slightly more skilled riders could have easily ridden over this tree and maneuvered the sharp right turn to ride up the hill, but the dirt in front of the tree was rutted and frozen, the tree itself was covered in a slick glaze of ice, the dirt that would have been the sharp right turn was an icy sheet covered in a thin layer of deceiving dust, and finally the run-up was slick, frozen mud that denied any cleats from digging in for a firm grip. I saw skilled rider after skilled rider race in front of me, only to get taken down by that sorry piece of dead wood. The very skilled managed to ride halfway up the dirt slope. But if anyone managed to ride it successfully, I wasn't around to see it (and therefore it didn't really happen. I didn't hear that tree fall, by the way, so I think JR just placed it there when he made the course.).

The second technical part of the course was a series of tight switchbacks on pavement. As the rain came down, it made an increasingly slick surface on the pavement. People were falling all over the place. Along my personal journey, I passed riders peeling themselves off the pavement, looking baffled at how this typically trustworthy surface could prove so two-faced and hurtful, or using a chainlink fence to stumble up from the grass, unsure how they managed to get so far off course. In particular, by the pool, we were herded in and out of a gate system. As the race continued, the weather seemed to warm up and the rain let up a bit. It felt in the clear, which is always a bad sign, I now realize. I tried to sprint a bit harder on the straightaways, dig a bit deeper in the grass, and by that dreaded pool entrance, I was cautiously optimistic as I took turn number three. It was my last lap and I had nothing to lose.

Sure as I knew it, I, too, was peeling my own sorry self off the pavement while the single speeder were lapping me for the eighth time, this time instead of cutting me off at a steep and muddy descent that fed onto more pavement and a steep ascent (idiots), they were asking if I was okay (thanks, fellas). I was, but my bike wasn't, and I rode awkwardly the rest of the lap as Mary Boone, whom I'd managed to keep behind me since she was flung like a star across the parking lot earlier in the race when she slipped on some icy grass, passed me and kept me in her metaphorical tail lights.

I didn't win the race, but I tied for fifth in the series with my Scurvy Dogs Racing teammate, Kitaira. I left before the podium, but she was nice enough to hold up a shirt in my honor.

That night, I wore the lowest cut dress anyone has ever owned and went to my friends' beautiful wedding. I drank, I stuffed my face with cookies and salad (I'm a complicated woman), and sure, I was celebrating the brilliant love of two amazing people who were destined for each other, but also, secretly, for my first full race season, my first bike race crash, and surviving my first ice slip of the season with no more than a scabbed knee and a swollen leg.

Today, of course, is 67 degrees.