Why Bother?

I went into Saturday morning’s race with a plan. If there was one thing I took away from the coaching session I attended earlier in the week with Deirdre Murphy Bader (who you can read about by CLICKING HERE), it was that I had to make sure I had a plan.

“You always need a plan,” she explained, and on Friday afternoon, as my fiancée and I walked through Central Park, I asked her, “Do you want to know about my plan?”

“What plan?”

“The race is five laps,” I said. “The plan is to hang back for the first four laps and stay in the draft. Once we get over the big hill on the final lap, I’ll start moving to the front and I’ll stay as close to the front as I can without knocking myself out. If that big guy is up there, the guy who won the last race, I’ll stick to his wheel and see if I can follow him all the way until we’re near the line and then try to fly around him.”

Doesn’t sound bad, right? Sounds like a decent plan for a guy out there on my own without any teammates and it might’ve actually worked if it wasn’t for the fact that I got dropped halfway through the fourth goddam lap.

As embarrassing as that is to admit, I admit it. I got dropped. Spit out the back like a piece of unwanted trash.

And there I was, thinking I had a plan. There I was thinking, “Hey, I didn’t do so bad the last race. Maybe I can do better this race.”

But no, like a total punk, I got DROPPED. Ugh. How utterly depressing.

How does that happen, though? The last race, I felt good. Felt like I could’ve cracked the top ten if I had paid more attention at the end, so how did I get dropped yesterday?

The field seemed mostly the same, so I was racing against the same guys. Whether or not any Category 4s dropped down to the lower class, who the hell knows, but something odd did happen yesterday morning.

The Women’s class started behind us and apparently a women’s breakaway of four chicks caught and passed us while we were on our third lap. Somehow, this sparked a reaction from the front of the field and from that point on, all the guys on the front of our field seemed intent on keeping up with those four ladies who were hammering the pedals something fierce.

After a lap-and-a-half of having my heart rate pegged at 185 and after watching a few other guys peel off the back, I realized there was no way I could keep up that pace for another twenty minutes, so I sat up and soft pedaled my way to 72nd Street and went home.

That was a seven in the morning. I didn’t have much to say for a few hours afterward considering how pissed I felt at not having finished the race. After a three-hour visit to the beach at Robert Moses State Park with the good-looking Jewish girl with the diamond ring on her finger, we were driving home when I mentioned, “I think I might go for a ride when we get back to the city.”

Which I did. I went out for an hour to dodge the gazillions of ignorant tourists and asshole pedestrians walking in the middle of the street in Central Park. I just cruised. I was the guy who felt like he had been thrown off the horse and then wanted to get back on. Sounds retarded, but it’s true.

Then, while riding over the bridge into Jersey this morning, I had to ask myself, “Why bother racing?” I’ve never been a good endurance athlete, although I do enjoy riding the bike. I enjoy the occasional group ride, but at the end of the day, I’m just not that great going uphill on a bike. I can’t keep my heart rate at 190 for hours at a time and when push comes to shove, my sprint isn’t all that fantastic either.

So why bother with the racing? Why spend the money on the USCF license and more money on joining the CRCA? What’s the point of trying to win a local Category 5 race? I understand the desire to be competitive. That part I get, but why put myself through the disappointment? For the most part, we set up our lives to be disappointment-free, so why go through it?

Despite all my rhetoric, I’m sure I’ll continue to put myself through the disappointment time and time again.

Or maybe I won’t. Who the hell knows.