Another year of riding with one of the teams from work – Go Team!
After all the setting up, and excitement, and hoards of lycra-clad fools running in bike shoes, it was back to the same old rhythm of sit and wait. And cheer. And eat food. And catch up with people. And get ready.
I was up third in the team order this time round. The weather was ok. A bit warm and dusty during the day, but a little rain late in the night and early in the morning settled the dust down.
By the time each of us had done one lap, we had settled into second place in our category. By the end of the night we had even more definitely settled into second place. First was out of reach, with quite a few riders who could put down faster times than us. We were equally comfortably ahead of the third place team though. As a result, the whole thing was a lot less tense than last year, where we were hanging onto first place by just minutes. It also helped that the race hadn’t come on the back of one month of fairly intense flood disaster and recovery.
Thanks to the quirks of fate (involving peanut butter cookies, and perhaps insufficient peanut butter cookies) I ended up riding five of the 22 laps our team finished with. But thanks to the lack of immediate competition, I got to slack off a little on my last lap, so this year I was able to walk around and function like a normal person-coloured human being when I was finally done.
No tragedy, no drama, just a fun bike race. And I didn’t win the slowest lap award this year!
