2012 Racing Season—01.22.12

The 2012 Racing Season is upon me. I got out today for my first race of the year, race number one of the CBR (now renamed “SoCal Cup”) Criterium series. It was my first race as a Category 4 Road Racer, and even in this ‘tougher’ field I placed in exactly the same place as I did in Category 5, 13th place…

The actual race is not what I want to write about though. There are plenty of “race reports” and you can try to explain how a race feels, but anyone that doesn’t race just won’t get it. What I want to write about is race preparation.

The day before your race you take note of when you have to get up. Today I had to get up at 5am so I could get out of the house at 5:30 so my dad would have time to warm-up for his race at 7am. Knowing you don’t want to have to get all your stuff together in 30 minutes you get ready the night before. In the middle of January this means working at 9pm to get yourself ready. Even in California this means it’s cold. Really uncomfortably cold.

Cleaning bikes at 9pm is a joy.

I don’t claim to know how my dad was able to stand being out cleaning his bike in the cold with just a t-shirt on (I cleaned my bike too, you have to before a race! but I did it with 3 shirts and a sweater on.) For reference, this is what it looks like when its slightly more bearable to work on a bicycle.

I was working on my dad's shifting the same day I had my own derailleur problems I talked about yesterday... [taken by my dad on an iPhone]

Once I’ve got my bike ready, I have to get all the clothes I need for a race together. There are quite a lot:

What's most exciting about this is my new team Jersey!

Of course this all has to get packed up to, and that ends up looking like this:

And now I'm all ready.

I’m all good to go. All this stuff goes in the car and I all I have to do the morning of the race is wake up and eat… Except that in reality I forgot to bring my Garmin with me. All this effort and preparation and I forgot one of my most important training tools. Oh well. That’s what all this practice is for. Hopefully I don’t make the same mistakes for my weekend of fun next week, with Poor College Kids and two races at Mothballs…