For Jenks

So far I haven't spread the word to the world that I'm running this blog, which means that I'm pretty much writing for one person: Mike Jenks. So today's post is dedicated to this leader-of-men, the wonderful, talented, dashingly good-looking friend of friends.

Almost two weeks ago now I entered my first race ever, on the morning of Saturday, March 10. Being a novice racer (Cat 5) my race began at 8:00am, which necessitated a 5:30 wake-up. After driving an hour to the course, getting registered and warmed-up, the 45-minute race began on time.

It was incredible the things that I learned on the first lap. First, it's hard to clip into my funky pedals anyway, and even harder to do it under pressure. Second, being so close to so many other bikes is nervewracking. Third, turns are really hard. And finally, bike racing is a lot of fun.

The race was pretty uneventful - I stationed myself at the very back of the pack and stayed there for the duration. The reason for this was that 1) I don't really know how to move up in the pack yet, and 2) I am not good at doing these sweeping 90 degree turns without losing speed. After every single turn I fell off the back of the pack and had to catch back up.

However, on the last lap, I realized that I still had some gas in the tank, and so I started sprinting from about 150 yards away from the finish. Everyone else was going full tilt as well, so I couldn't catch up with the leaders, but I passed about eight or nine guys before finishing in 5th place. I was very pleased.

I did another race at 11am on the same day, and got dropped from the pack pretty quickly. I was tired and the other riders were faster than in my first group. I won't be doing two races in one day again soon. Despite getting lapped, the race organizers screwed up the results, saying I cam in 7th place, when it was probably more like 20th. I didn't get points or anything, so I didn't correct them.

Results are here. I'm doing another race in the same series in two days, so now it's all about getting ready.

Thanks for reading, Mike.