Prospect Park and Wells Ave Race Reports

are not really worth getting into.. but I will give you the readers digest versions:
Prospect: Trusty tubular front wheel goes flaccid about 40 seconds before the start. I go screaming back to the car for my spare wheel- ref said I had "one minute", I'm back in one minute. Field is gone. I take pursuit on the rolling 3.4 mile course. The first lap was supposed to be neutral but apparently my cold-engine five minute TT at 26 mph was not fast enough to close the gap. Go figure. I sit up after 3 miles. I wait. I jump into the race for the next 8 laps. I'm feeling good- I'm feisty- I'm attacking and covering all the eye-popping moves up the big ring power hill. But I can tell that I'm an un-marked man. I didn't sneak into the race- I made sure everyone saw me.. It just felt like everyone dismissed me as down a lap and didn't really care what I did.. Whatever. There was a nasty crash right in front of me- a total freakshow the way these guys started knocking into eachother and tightening their death grip on the handlebars. I was forced to swerve left pretty hard and even then one of the bodies would have had me go ass over head if it had shifted just a few inches to the left. In the closing 2-3 laps, 5 guys were up the road, followed by another 3.. With about 2.5 miles to the finish, final lap, I accelerate, I detach and I try to make it to the end solo- not really sure how I'll be ranked. It's too early. I'm swarmed with still about 500m to go. I shut it down and ride to the finish in the right hand gutter, kind of pissed.. in the mood to actually punish my tubie front wheel a la the black guy with the pliers in Pulp Fiction. After a change of apparel I set out to do about 2 hours of tempo in the park. There's some kind of duathlon going on and there were tri-folks all over the place with their tongues hanging out. I'm using them as carrots as I pick them off one by one and lap some of them repeatedly. I think I did an extra 10 laps after my race so it eneded up being a 70 mile day. It was misty, drizzly and foggy at the start of my race and it stayed that way all morning until the moment that I finished cleaning the bike and placed it in the car. Effing sun finally breaks out at around 11:00. I'm very encouraged by my form on Saturday, which followed a couple days of proper rest Thurs/Fri. Racing on wet roads at 6:30 am in Prospect Park wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. The coolest thing was seeing all the locals riding towards the race from different directions, kind of like gang members descending upon a pre-determined war zone. The really cool thing about racing in New York is the diversity. Fully 1/4 of the fields are black guys and another 1/4 of the fields are Latinos. It's a different world and it gives the race a completely different flavor- I like it. As a matter of fact, there were a couple of other Turkish guys in my race- one of whom I know personally. What are the odds?
Wells Ave- all I will say is that yesterday's Wells Ave race was by far the hardest A/B combined race I've ever done. Maybe this is relative to the amount of time I spent sucking wind at the front, maybe it was the very windy conditions, not sure.. but I've never worked so hard and felt so tired with so little to show for it. I attacked a few times just to make it into a workout and on one occasion I was followed by someone with no real intention of trading pulls, even though we had a monster of a gap built.. Oh well.. I think my legs were a little bit cooked from Saturday, but the two main insigators of the winning break- Marvin and my team mate Adam- they both raced Sterling on Saturday! Go figure. Maybe I'm just a sissy-boy weenie who needs a nice tall glass of TTFU. Oh well, we got our man Adam up there and he was good for 5th at the finish. Plus of course our Matt K took the 1/2 way prime and we had our boy Brendan in one of the chase groups up the road as well. Nice work team.. Thanks for reading.