With no exageration, your average eighty year old woman who has never ridden a bicycle has better descending skills than yours truly. You see, I have a mental block due to past crashes on descents. I figure your average old lady, particularly if she has Alzheimers, wouldn't have a bunch of mind games playing through her noggin as she takes a steep descent. She would just say, "Let her rip, baby!" and be done with it, even if she does end up doing a Sonny Bono into a tree. Not me. I mean to tell you, I am so chained down by mental stigmata, so irreparably scarred by Sports Traumatic Stress Syndrome, that if Taladega Nights had been about bike racing rather than Nascar, I could have played the Will Ferrell part, running around the race course in my helmet and tighty whities and begging for someone to hose me down with a fire extinguisher. So on the first descent down towards the covered bridge, despite having one rider in front of me to help guage the line to take, I freaked out that I had too much speed coming into the unanticipated sharp right hander at the bottom and locked up my rear brake which then sent me headed right towards a steep drop off with big trees so I laid the bike down at maybe 15 mph and bruised my ego more than my left thigh.
So on this day of dropping temps and gusty winds and threatening clouds and long grinding hills and a long into the wind straightaway that hurt worse than the hills, I started out very badly. I got back on and a hundred yards later weaved my way through a gaggle of fifty or so mountain bikers and their camel backs herding lazily across the road like cattle and chased down a couple of guys-Scott Young and Mark Corrato and rode away from them but never caught TyTy cause he had dutifully latched onto the Cat 4s (all five of them) and rode their wind breaking front to the finish. Tym was all smiles at the parking lot afterwards despite the low turnout and the fact that I had trashed the gloves he so kindly lent me before the race began, so either he was just in a good mood or he took delight in triumphing or both. This is another great course that deserves far more participation than it received. Assuming it remains and I remain for another year, I'm laying back the first lap or two.
