Tagged

So they tagged Iban Mayo for EPO. Yeah, it’s true. I saw it on the front page of Velonews.com yesterday afternoon so it has to be true.

That’s too bad. I remember writing about Iban Mayo not too long ago and, honestly, I get this odd sense of satisfaction every time I log online and see another headline for another top riding testing positive for either testosterone, EPO, or anything else they’re not supposed to be taking. In other words, I enjoy reading about the cheats getting busted for cheating and I would have to imagine a fair amount of other people probably feel the same way.

Strange, though, how much of the media keeps their heads in the sand. Also in Velonews.com yesterday (I’m not the biggest fan of the pub, but they do keep their news up to date faster than most other sites and you can’t really beat their video footage) were a few rumblings as to how Alberto Contador had originally been implicated in the Operacion Puerto bust but then had been cleared by Spanish authorities, yet most of the media chose to hail Contador as a new hero, a great, young, clean rider to pave a new path in the future of cycling.

Give me a frigging break. Contador was one of the few people who were able to challenge Rasmussen in the mountains and Rasmussen was kicked out for lying about his whereabouts which most likely means he was doping. I mean, let’s put two and two together here:

Rasmussen = Yellow jersey / KOM jersey

Rasmussen = kicked out for lying and/or alleged doping

Contador = contesting Rasmussen--an alleged doper--in the mountains on the hardest climbs

Contador = Discovery rider

Discovery rider = Johan Bruyneel

Johan Bruyneel = his riders always seem to win yet never test positive

Do you think it’s Johan’s secret training program? Or do you think it might have something to do with the fact that the former US Postal and current Discovery riders tend to take about thirty needles in their asses every night during a stage race? How in the world any journalist could consider Contador the hero for clean racing is beyond me.

Speaking of which, I wonder if Lance takes the occasional syringe of EPO just for laughs? I wonder if the guy draws and then transfuses the occasional pint of his own blood just to make him feel like he did in the old days? Talk about drug addiction. Can you imagine retired racers handing around Blood Drive trailer units, twitching and scratching their necks, begging for a few cc’s of Type A or Type B?

Hill Repeats

Yesterday, I drove to Bear Mountain to do hill repeats. Hill repeats suck, of course, but like they say, you have to do what you have to do.

So I did what I had to do and I did it four times. That was all I could manage. From 9W to the top of Bear Mountain is a 4.5-mile climb at an average gradient of 4.5% (according to Bicycling magazine). 4.5 miles may not seem like much, but when you can barely manage more than 10 MPH or so on the way up, 4.5 miles feels like a long, long time to be heading uphill.

For any of you who have ridden your bike up Bear Mountain, I’m sure you’ll agree that the first half of the climb really isn’t bad, or at least it’s not that bad compared to the second half of the climb. It’s when you make that right turn to continue heading toward the top that the road begins to kick up. It’s at that part of the mountain that the heart rate begins to climb and it does so damn fast. It’s that part of the road that causes your mouth to drop open and your breathing to go into labor. It’s then that you might try to stand on the pedals to let some of your bodyweight do some of the work, all the while the sweat dripping from your chin and landing on your front tire.

For me, that’s the part of the road that gets me the most. It’s then that I glance down at the crank and witness my feet turning, wondering if they can manage the entire climb. And if the road turns steep enough, I’ll begin talking to my legs and, eventually, once I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, I’ll even talk to God. As religious as I’m not, I’ll ask Him for a hand in getting to the top.

More Of The Same BS

Is it just me, or is professional cycling not getting any better whatsoever? And it’s not that I expected all the top riders to just stop what they were doing--meaning the drugs--because I realize there’s a ton of money on the line, but come on. Reading through the stories on Velonews.com, the scenario is simply growing bleaker and bleaker with every passing stage.

First, Vinokourov tests positive for blood doping. People still do that? Wasn’t blood doping the big thing in the Olympics in the 80s? Then again, the guy’s Russian. Yes, I realize he’s technically from Kazakhstan (and I know I didn’t spell that right, but so what?), yet when you really think about it, they all sound Russian when they talk, so what’s the difference? My point is, Russians are crazy, so why would Vinokourov give a rat’s ass about infusing blood that isn’t his into his vein in the middle of the race? He wouldn’t. Wasn’t there another crazy professional racer from Russia who, after winning a few races, took his money and opened up a Mercedes dealership as selling Mercedes had always been his dream? See what I mean about crazy?

(Then again, selling top-shelf cars compared to racing bicycles with a needle hanging out of your ass? Maybe that guy wasn’t so crazy after all.)

Anyway, too bad for Andreas Kloden. Dude was in fifth place when Astana pulled from the Tour.

Then Cristian Moreni of the Cofidis team tested positive for testosterone, so Cofidis has pulled from the Tour. So much for that.

And Sinkewitz from T-Mobile also tested positive for testosterone. Didn’t T-Mobile force their riders to sign the UCI anti-doping agreement? Does this mean Sinkewitz is going to have to pay UCI a year’s worth of his salary? If he does, that sucks for him. Big time. Then again, if you cheat . . .

Finally, there’s Rasmussen. When I logged online last night to check the latest Tour news, there was the headline staring me in the face: Rasmussen Pulled Out of Tour, Fired by Rabobank.

That’s even more big time than Sinkewitz. Here’s a guy who’s a few days away from most likely winning one of the biggest sporting events in the world and Rabobank tosses his skinny ass not because he actually tested positive, but because they learned he had lied about his whereabouts to allegedly dodge off-season blood and urine tests.

Regardless of whether Rasmussen is innocent or guilty, put yourself in that chump’s shoes. Can you even begin to imagine how utterly enraged he must feel at being canned after more than a week in the yellow jersey and only a few days away from the finale in Paris?

Not that I blame Rabobank, either. They must have been rather convinced that Rasmussen had done something wrong considering how close they were to winning the Tour. If not, if there was even a shred of evidence pointing to Rasmussen being clean, they never in a million years would have done what they did: too much to lose in terms of sponsorship and media exposure.

In my opinion, the best part is the response from the other riders, specifically David Millar. There’s a great interview clip with him on Velonews.com where you definitely get a good sense of the guy’s frustration via his candid comments. You can check it out by CLICKING HERE.

Poughkeepsie Critierium

Another big race this morning, or big for me, at least. I had a choice between racing in Prospect Park for the second time this season or trying something different in Poughkeepsie. For those of you who live south of Westchester (which is probably all three people who read this page once every few months), Poughkeepsie probably sounds like a long haul for a bicycle race, but it’s only fifty miles from Pleasantville, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Big mistake. Huge. Gross tactical error, although I’ll take my beating like a man. At nine this morning, roughly twenty Category 5 riders handed me my ass in a 20-lap criterium in downtown Poughkeepsie.

About a month ago, I raced Category 5 in Prospect Park and did well enough to stay with the main / lead group for the entire seventeen miles. After a year or riding and training, I was happy with that, so I felt good about doing well again today up in Poughkeepsie. I trained hard all week and expected things to go well this morning, yet as I stood on the line waiting for the race organizer to finish his speech, I noticed almost all of the other riders around me not only sporting team kits, but shaved legs as well. Maybe that’s how they roll up here in Putnam County, I thought, eyeballing the Sasquatch-thick fur covering my own legs. Maybe that’s just how these guys roll.

Clearly, I was kidding myself. The race in Poughkeepsie turned out to be a far cry from your standard Prospect Park criterium where the organizers (whoever they are) set up a table on the side of the road and use a bullhorn that needed new batteries in 1985. I’m joking, but apparently in Poughkeepsie, when these Putnam Country organizers roll, they roll big. (If I use the term roll one more time in the course of this update, feel free to slap me right across the face.) Take a look at the Start / Finish line below:



The organizers had an open-sided trailer upon which they sat during the course of the race. They had set up bleachers across the street for spectators. They had porta-a-pottys. They had a hospitality table set up under a tent. Around the mile-long course, they had not only piled hay bales around the poles in each corner, but they zip-tied squares of plywood over all the sewer grates to ensure no one’s wheel got caught up. And you know that orange plastic fencing they use at construction sites? They wrapped the outside of each corner with that stuff to ensure none of us went slamming through any storefronts if we overshot a turn.

I mean, these guys were taking their shit seriously. While warming up, I had to swerve around more than a few street cleaners as they went over every inch of pavement on the course.

As I said, the organization behind this criterium was rather serious, so the team kits, the shaved legs, and the expensive aero rims really should not have surprised me. I shouldn’t have been surprised one bit, but what was I going to do? Myself, I don’t see much point in going to line and thinking anything other than, I’m the baddest motherf*cker out here. If you can get yourself in that mind frame (or something similar), at least you’re going out there with confidence and based on what I saw in my first true criterium, you’re going to need some confidence when negotiating 45-degree corners at 22 MPH surrounded on all sides.

When the whistle blew, the sprinting began. In the space of two laps, I quickly learned how important it is to stay near the front as the pack approaches each turn considering once the first few riders cut through the corner, everyone hammers on the pedals to get the speed up again. With that said, I used the tailwind on the back stretch to jump out of the draft and position myself within the top ten and sat there for the next two or three laps. The accelerations out of the corners were taking their toll on my lungs, as was the headwind on the finish line stretch, although the group seemed to take a breather for a few seconds each time we had the wind behind us so I figured we’d settle in until the last lap or two.

Another gross tactical error. It was around lap six or seven that the pace shot up a few miles-per-hour. Someone must have took the lead and decided to shake things up a bit because until that point, things were tough yet manageable. With my heart rate already up to 185 - 190, the pack just spit me out the back and left me for dead.

How embarrassing.

Actually, a big guy (wearing a team kit, of course) who must have dropped back initially came barreling by a few seconds later. Hopping on his wheel, I proposed we work together to see what we could do, but after two laps of sitting behind He-Man, I told him I was doing everything I could just to stay with him and let him go off on his own.

And that was it. I sat in no-man’s land all by myself for a few laps and the worst part about the rest of the race wasn’t getting lapped. Rather, the worst part about going out and getting dropped on that kind of a course is when people clap and cheer as you’re passing the bleachers. I know they mean well, and encouragement should always be considered a good thing, but I knew that they knew that I had been dropped, and when I get dropped, I’d prefer invisibility. It’s surprising more bikes don’t come equipped with reliable cloaking devices for such situations.

With one lap to go, I rolled up next to a guy who had been dropped before I had been dropped. I was a lap down and he was two laps down, so rather than bust our asses to get over the line, we put the pace on cruise control and chatted for a minute. He had driven up with a friend from Virginia Beach, which struck me as a long-ass ride for a 20-lap race, but he did mention a night out in Manhattan tonight, so who can blame a few southern boys for wanting to hit the Big Apple for an evening?

Changing out of my riding gear, I rode back to the Start / Finish line to (a) check my placing, which was 14th out of 17, and (b) snap off some more pics as the Category 4 riders were getting started.





P.S. I witnessed another crash this morning, this one fifty feet ahead of me in the middle of a corner. Both of the guys who went down seemed all right as I rode by, but golly, for such light machines, bikes make a hell of a lot of noise when they hit pavement.

P.S.S. And if it wasn’t for those two guys who crashed, I would have finished 16th out of 17.

Again, how embarrassing.

From Lance to Landis

About a week after Floyd Landis’s book hit the shelves, the Irish sports journalist David Walsh released From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France. A day or two after it came out, I took another trip down to the Strand in Union Square and picked up a copy of the hardcover for the low, low bargain price of $12.97.

Understandably, I realize my previous book reviews tend to be a bit long-winded (because I feel it’s important that if you’re going to review a book, you might as well support the review with actual information), so I’m going to attempt to spare everyone from dozing off while I do this.

When it comes to this read, my humble opinion is, if you’re at all interested in the professional side to cycling, go out and buy the book. It’s almost long at 334 pages, but those 334 pages are interesting pages. Will the book convince you that both Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis have doped (meaning they cheated) during their professional careers? I believe it will. It sheds a lot of light on their individual careers, although most of the book is dedicated to investigating Armstrong.

For example, the book starts out by highlighting the early career of a teen cyclist by the name of Greg Strock. The kid had talent, rode for the national team, and then was doing amateur stuff overseas while working with a Belgian trainer and his buddy soigneur who gave the kid lots of injections along the way. Eventually, Strock became way too sick and stayed that way long enough so that he returned to the States. When his doctors here in the US figured out what it was, they realized it was something that almost everyone gets at one point in his or her life (think of it as something like a cold), but it affected Strock so much worse than usual--exhausted all the time, constantly sleeping, joint and hip pain, etc--that it basically ended his cycling career.

So why does David Walsh open with a chapter about a guy you’ve never heard of? Because while Greg Strock was a year younger than Lance Armstrong, they were both riding for Chris Carmichael on the national team at the same time. Armstrong was on the A team and Strock was on the B team. They rode under similar supervision for years and later, once Strock was sick and decided against a future in cycling, it’s noted that his condition, as serious as i was, typically produces a high incidence to testicular cancer in other men who have suffered the same condition.

It’s not hard to put two and two together.

Then, while it’s circumstantial, there is evidence that is quiet damning. Frankie Andreu, Armstrong’s former teammate on the Motorola and US Postal teams, makes this statement: “God knows what happened during that winter, but Lance came back the spring of ’96 and he was frickin’ huge. He looked like a linebacker. It was ‘Holy sh*t, man, he is big.’ Obviously, we all noticed it and he knew we did. He said something about [Dr. Michele] Ferrari not realizing the effect the weight room was going to have . . . but with Lance it was more than just seeing him big. I mean, he was big, but he could now rip the cranks off the bike like never before.”

Dr. Michele Ferrari is the Italian sports doctor who I believe is now in jail for helping athletes dope. Maybe he’s not in jail, although I do know an Italian court found him guilty of unethical practices in his dealings with athletes. And this is the doctor Lance chose to hire after a few seasons in the early ‘90s after EPO hit the peloton. Walsh explains that it was mostly the Italian teams doing it and they were destroying everyone, including Armstrong and his teammates. The rest of the riders knew what was going on, but most of the team doctors, especially on Motorola, weren’t advocating that kind of “medical program” for their riders. But then Lance hooks up with Ferrari and he starts trouncing everyone . . . convincingly.

The list goes on and on. In the end, the evidence is circumstantial and based mostly on depositions during civil lawsuits, testimony provided by Lance’s former teammates, his former soigneur, and others who have contact with him within the realm of professional cycling.

It’s also interesting to note that during a deposition, an instant message conversation between Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters was entered as evidence. During the conversation between the two former teammates, Vaughters explains to Andreu that Landis told him that on the second rest day of the 2004 Tour de France, both Armstrong and the team’s director, Johan Bruyneel, called Landis to the bathroom so he could watch as the two men flushed his blood refill down the toilet.

By that point in the race, Landis had already signed with the Phonak team for 2005 and if anyone isn’t aware, Armstrong never handled defections from his team in a very professional manner. So if Armstrong was confident he could win the Tour that year without a ton of help from Landis, why not mess with him a bit?

If you ask me, it’s all rather f*cked up, yet somehow believable at the same time.

Again, it’s a good book. Well worth the time to read it.

And apparently it’s impossible for me to write a review under 850 words. That’s my bad.

Group Riding Basics

Get this. We’re all of five or ten miles into a B ride in Westchester this morning and already the group of twenty-something riders has split. I’ve noticed this tends to happen on B rides on those mornings when no one’s scheduled a B+ ride. What happens is, all these people show up for a B ride and within minutes, those guys who you know can hold a B+/A- pace just go off the front, and that’s exactly what happened not long after we left the parking lot at 8:30 this morning.

Then, not long after the group split, this one guy decides to hit the gas on a long downhill, so most of us grab his wheel once the downhill turns into a flat. We reach a short hill and still we stay behind the same guy who went nuts going down the last hill, but on the next hill, that same guy seems to be running out of steam, so most of us go right around him. Reaching the top of the hill, I didn’t see much point in slowing down to wait for anybody and neither did the other guys behind me, yet a few minutes later, I hear a voice behind me and this particular voice--it’s a woman’s voice, mind you--is all but yelling at me for dropping so-and-so after he so graciously pulled us all along.

I turn around and there’s this woman behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses and she’s pointing her chin straight at me.

“You mean the guy with the red bike?” I ask. I know what she’s saying and I know who she’s talking about because there’s only one guy in the group who’s gone way so far off the front.

Rather than answer my question, she says, “Now I’m going to sit on your wheel and let you pull me around the next thirty miles.”

I guess this is supposed to be something of a threat, but it’s Sunday morning and I left my anger management toolbox at home. I’ve got half a mind to stop, fish my cell phone from my bag, and give Dr. Rob a call and ask him what “Martha” looks like (I’ve never met Martha, although I’ve heard the name on various SIBA rides).

Considering I don’t really know this woman from a hole in the wall (and I would have been content if she remained in anonymous status), getting on my case because I don’t wait for some guy who likes to blast down hills but can’t hold the pace when we’re going up the same hills sort of brings out the motocrosser / asshole in me, meaning I’ve got half a mind to toss in a brake check just to f*ck with her. I won’t, of course, but one of the things I’ve learned from the Staten Island crew is that if you’re going to go screeching downhill, you might as well have the balls to keep your speed up when you start heading the other way. Otherwise, you kind of look like a jackass (as I certainly have in the past), so glancing back, I extend an invitation. “You want to sit on my wheel, lady, you be my guest.”

“Don’t hit too many holes.”

Now she’s pushing buttons. “I don’t hit the holes--just follow my f*cking line.” And shut the hell up, I wanted to add, but what good does it do to get angry?

A few miles go by, I’m on the front and as soon as we reach the next downhill, guess who goes blowing by? And I don’t mean he charges to the front and gives me a break. If I was in the front doing 20 MPH, this guy goes by at 25 MPH and just keeps going . . . until we get to the next hill.

Eventually the pack slows down as we’re making a turn and I let the little lady go by. A few seconds later, just as we start going uphill again, I pull up next to her.

“What were you complaining about?” Before she can answer, I follow that up with, “What?”

She tried explaining that if Mr. Downhill is going to have the decency to pull us along for a while, we should at least have the common courtesy to wait for Mr. Downhill when we reach the top of an uphill.

“Well, for starters, I wouldn’t call what he does pulling considering no one’s on his wheel,” I say. Mr. Downhill is only a few feet ahead of us, so I’m hoping he’s getting an earful. “Second, no one asked him to go charging to the front. No one told him to put his nose in the wind. He can sit in the draft as long as he likes, but if he’s going to go nuts on every downhill while the rest of us save a bit for the hills and he gets dropped, that’s not my problem.”

Then, just to be a dick, I stayed right on her wheel as she stayed on Mr. Downhill’s wheel. Halfway up the next hill, me and everybody else pulled around them and just kept going, yet sure enough, once we reached the top and started drifting downhill and I sat up to let the rest of the group catch, guess who went barreling past me until the next hill?

From now on, I’m leading my own rides. If I get lucky, all of three or four guys will show up, so I won’t have to deal with the kind of stuff I had to put up with this morning. I looked at one of the guys next to me, this guy Glen I had met a few weeks earlier, and asked, “Why am I getting yelled at because someone else can’t keep up?”

Later, to cap off an obviously perfect afternoon, I drove to the other side of Pleasantville to attend my first-ever session with a mental health professional. I know, it’s hard to believe I’m as angry as I am, but it’s true. Figured it was high time to talk to a professional to figure out what the problem is, so I make the appointment, show up a few minutes early, and when I ring the doorbell, I hear a window slide open and someone say, “What time is your appointment?”

“3:30,” I answer.

“You’re ten minutes early. Wait outside.”

“No problem,” I said. Walking back to my truck, I got in, turned around, and flipped the doctor the bird when he opened the door and waved to me.

I need attitude from some jackhole psychiatrist when there are a million of them out there I can go see? I think not.

1-Year Anniversary

It was exactly a year ago today that I walked into R&A in Brooklyn with Mr. Picco and bought my very first bicycle (not counting the BMX stuff when I was a teenager), the blue Giant OCR2 sports touring bike, for $600, water bottle cage included. From there, Mr. Picco and I drove the few blocks to Prospect Park for a few laps, spinning through the tons of foot traffic carrying coolers and beach chairs on their way to Independence Day cook-outs. Little did I know at the time that in the space of another two months, I would move to Brooklyn Heights and spend almost every day riding in Prospect Park, enough so that I’m now intimately familiar with every inch of that damn 3.4 mile loop.

A lot happens over the course of a year. I had been riding barely a month when I was dense enough to try and race in Prospect Park. In hindsight, it might have been one of the best things I could have done so early in my riding career. Those seventeen miles were quick to prove just how far I still had to go on the bike and, rather than demoralize me, rather than turn me off from the sport, the experience only served as motivation.

Not long afterward, the fall arrived and weather began to turn, meaning it was time to begin investing in things long-sleeve jerseys, tights, wool socks, booties, and a garish neon yellow windbreaker that would eventually fail me on a chilly day all the way out near JFK airport, although it turned out as a good thing as its failure (failure as in the zipper on the removable sleeve came undone) forced me to buy my first piece of Pearl Izumi apparel, a much more aesthetically pleasing black and silver winter jacket. Pleased with its quality, I now invest almost exclusively in Pearl Izumi apparel.

It was probably not long before that afternoon that I ordered a copy of Chris Carmichael’s training book, The Ultimate Ride. At the same time, I bought a heart rate monitor, did my first set of field tests (3-mile time trials), and began training within a specific heart rate zone while incorporating sprints and fast-pedal exercises.

That was when I still lived in Brooklyn. At the end of October (I realize the chronological order here is somewhat screwed up, but I just returned from mountain biking and I’m struggling to fend off a nap as I write this, so please, reader, bear with me), Mr. Picco hosted a terrific Oktoberfest party in his yard and it was then that I met Mr. Dr. Rob. Toward the end of the night, he mentioned a 100K training ride he had planned in Cheesequake the following day. I should have realized I was getting in way over my head by the way Dr. Rob sort of paused and smiled when I asked if I could tag along. A smarter man would have immediately picked up on the signal and took a rain check for another day, maybe after putting some more miles in his legs, but you know Dr. Rob, he’s a nice guy, so I got the invite regardless. I showed up, met Dr. Rob, Anne, Brent, and Joe C. and by the time we hit those three consecutive hills, I fell right out the back, thinking to myself, You are WAY out of your league here, kiddo.

Maybe two or three months later, after Dr. Rob introduced me to Ed Dalton and the SIBA group, Mr. Dalton invited me on the Cheesequake ride, to which I replied, “Honestly, I’m kind of scared of that ride.” And I was scared of the ride, the hills, the lactic acid that I knew would build up and stay in my legs as everyone just blasted away up every hill we encountered.

And instead of packing it in and taking off for a few months, we rode through the winter--long yet somewhat manageable training rides in Staten Island. Rides that started off with freezing fingers then ended up with okay fingers but freezing feet. And the hill climb ride on a Thursday morning, just Ed and I, avoiding patches of ice as we crossed over Rockland Avenue and worked our way up Manor Road to Ocean Terrace.

In mid-winter came a move to Pleasantville in Westchester yet instead of hitting the roads, I hit the trainer in the basement until the snow began to clear. Soon I bought a new bike, the Jamis I ride now and the switch from aluminum to carbon fiber was definitely a switch for the better considering the number of spokes I broke on the Giant’s rear wheel.

As soon as the temperature began to lift somewhat, I put the trainer away in favor of the roads yet riding through unfamiliar territory proved a major pain in the ass. Reaching the bottom of a hill, I had no idea how long the incline might continue, so I struggled and swore under my breath every time I came around a corner to see the hill heading up another quarter of a mile. Soon, though, the roads became more familiar, as did the sights, so now I know when to push and when to settle in to a friendly, seven mile-per-hour pace.

A month ago, my first time trial. Nothing too long, only eleven miles, but enough test myself. Averaging just under twenty miles-per-hour, I again realize how far I still need to go until my legs can handle more of a beating and get the bike going faster.

Two weeks after that, the second race of the year, a return to Prospect Park and since that experience has already been dissected and discussed, not much need to go there again.

And now here I sit, a year come and gone.

Name That Quote

Let’s play Name That Quote, meaning take a guess who said the following:

“God forbid anything happened to my wife, I think I’d get myself a little [derogatory term used in reference to a homosexual man]: someone to cook and clean around the house and, if he ever left, what the f*ck would I care?”

Do I even have to put a name to the quote? I think for most of you, the answer to that question is obvious, yet I titled this updated Name That Quote not just for that single quote, but to shed some light into what it’s like riding with some of the crew from the Staten Island Bicycling Association. And I’m not talking about the guys who show up every once in a while who aren’t really associated with the club. I’m talking about the guys who are there week after week and have been there week after week for years upon years.

Anyway, Name That Quote is a fun game to play, especially after a long yet terrific four-hour ride that both started and ended in Cheesequake on this beautiful morning (the kind of morning that reminds you just how sweet life can be when you’re with friends doing something you want to be doing under a perfect blue sky) with a small, select group. While the wind did pick up at certain times, I was only privy to snatches of conversation here and there, but I got enough to develop a sense of the overall tone. For example, here’s another one that references a wife:

“. . . it’s the psychological torture that drives me crazy. I’d actually prefer it if she just punched me in the face.”

Someone replied, “It’d be quicker.”

Ten minutes later I heard this one:

“So last night I’m sitting on the couch watching TV when my wife says, ‘We never go on dates any more.’ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘We’ve been married thirty-four years--why the hell would we go on a date?’ so I said to her, ‘Where we going with this?’”

And then there are the references to marriage as it relates to cycling.

“Every Saturday night my wife asks me, ‘You’re going riding tomorrow?’ as if it’s some sort of surprise. We’ve been living together for X-number of years and I’ve got the bike in the living room, the bike stand in the basement, the bike magazines on the coffee table, the jerseys in the closet, and I’m sitting there watching a bike race on TV. What the hell am I hiding?”

This is why I never spend money on comedy clubs. Sure, it cost me a couple bucks in gas to get from Pleasantville to Staten Island (or Cheesequake), but that’s not just gas money. It’s not even the comic value. At the end of the day, it’s terrific material for this, the blog in addition to comic value. I mean, who wouldn’t want to ride with these guys? I can tell you it’s not like that up here in Westchester. Speaking of which, what I should do is invite the SIBA crew to join one of the Westchester Cycling Club group rides so the guys up here can see just how interesting a 50-mile ride can be, hills and all.