the IDIOT

i’m on blogger already, so i’ll leave a quick post on my ride/race the other night that i was worried about.

had a blast. was hammered on the first climb, as predicted, but not as badly as i figured i’d be. at the end of that bitch i was riding solo between the “A” group and the “B”, having just gotten dropped. a lone dude passed me slowly on the hill, so i hooked onto his wheel and we started grinding. i took a pull for a bit, then he passed me quickly in a mild attack — an odd response since i’d obviously pulled in front of him to give him a break. so i accelerated and we were stuck trying to bridge to the lead group of 3 (out of sight by then on the hilly, curved roads) when…

… you guessed it; a bear cub ran out in front of us!

we slammed on the brakes while processing what had just happened. strangest thing i think i’ve ever seen while cycling. playing it cautious, i doubled back to warn the B group, about 3 minutes behind us. doubted we’d see the mama bear, but it didn’t hurt to keep an eye out.

one other strange thing: on informal race rides, it’s common for leads to change continually. typically, on a hill, the guy in front will set a pace, and maybe someone catching up will be feeling good and passes. the usual reaction for the former lead guy is to haul ass to the new pace and latch on to the passer’s wheel — or even accelerate past him, even though it doesn’t mean anything. it’s just a constant “let’s push each other” behavior that’s not threatening at all. hard to explain.

anyway, we had a cute young woman on our ride, and on one slight hill i was leading our group (means nothing; i just happened to be in front) when she passed me. was a normal lead change on a hill like that, but i did something distorted in reaction; instead of latching on to her wheel as i would were it a guy, i consciously continued the same pace because i didn’t want her to think that i was insecure about being passed by a woman, even though — again — it means nothing in that relaxed dynamic where we were all pacing ourselves to keep from losing the slowest rider (a retread who’d trained even less than i had lately).

seems like so much of human interaction is misunderstanding, and worrying about somebody misconstruing benign behavior.

the end of the ride was trippy. three of us were in front on the final flat, and i asked if anybody wanted to hammer through to the finish. one guy did, so we pulled away and kicked it hard in our biggest gears. i pulled off and he did the ultimate dick maneuver, which i gave him good natured shit about about after i caught up (he knew what he was doing, BTW). in normal rides where you’re trying to stay together for efficient speed, when one guy signals he’s pulling off, you let him slow and the guy pulling through maintains the same speed at least for a few seconds, because the lead guy’s often toasted and needs a brief respite. this guy immediately accelerated to a super bitch pace, while i cursed him in my thoughts. hung on for about 30 seconds, but recognizing we had a few more miles left and that i wasn’t up for killing myself at that pace, i dropped.

he slowed a mile later and i caught up. after i bitched sarcastically about his “bad form”, he laughed and told me that he was one of the slower guys on the team, and often gets dropped on that same section when riding with the A group.

“even if you just suck wheel the whole ride?”

“yep.”

oh lord.

Posted 20070712 23:45 under cycling. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.