North Jersey

Oh where to begin?
I guess I will skip the details from last week. I worked, trained, and prepped for the Memorial Day race weekend in NJ. Relative boring shit.

We had a great weekend of racing in NJ. We had one good result (Stanimal was 12th at Tour of Somerville) and a bunch of hard racing. Saturday was the Tour of Somerset Hills and it is by far the sickest race I have done to date. It is an 80+ mile single loop race that winds thru 13 counties in NJ with 3 (?) major climbs. It was insane. We had a true rolling closure (a first for me) with literally 20 police cars, a dozen motos, sag wagons, etc. I can’t emphasize how well organized the race was and how crazy it was tearing thru towns making lefts and rights that you didn’t know were coming, etc. Frattini and Walters rode away from the group on the last climb. Only Jon and Tom made it to the finish, but it is a race that will be in bold letters on next year’s race calendar.

Sunday was Bound Brook. Not too much to say. I sucked. Not sure why, but I had nothing. It was hot, the pace seemed ridiculously fast, and I got dropped half way thru the race. Jon, Stan and Tommy made it but no results worth writing about.

Monday was the Tour of Somerville. It went much better from a team standpoint as we were all in the race and racing hard. Our crit “tactics” are still lacking, but at least we were in there racing and mixing it up. I felt much better, but still not good enough to make a difference in the race. With about 5 laps to go Tom and I found each other and tried to get to the front to help Stan. I dragged Tom down the home stretch trying to move up, but we never made it to stan. Stanimal surfed the front solo and was able to to just miss a Top 10. A totally solid result in a race that had 150 dudes.

Other than the racing, we had some quality team bonding. We watched WAY too much MTV, drank a few beers and busted on each other constantly.

A few awards from the weekend:

The Koolest Women’s Team Award goes to the TravelGirl Squad for pounding beers after their race even before they took off their shoes or got out of their chamois’

The Hottest Groupie Award goes to the Rite-Aid squad for having a super model bottle biatch.

The We Got Game Award goes to the Puerto Rican Masters/Cat 3 squad for swilling and singing at night, kitting up before breakfast and then showing the goods by being in the money every day in their races.

The Tom Boonen Faux Hawk/Mullet Award goes out to all the Juniors rocking the Boonen-esk hair-style. Seriously, every Junior I saw was rocking the Belgian’s Doo. Maybe it does make you fast.

The You Have to be Kidding Me Award goes to an unnamed teammate that “has never used” chamois lube. Maybe we need to up the budget next season to get that boy a tub Of Assos.

And finally a little crack at myself . . .
The TV Time Award goes to myself for spending more time on my socks, booties and wrist band than I did at the business end of the race on Sunday! Doh!