Piece of Shite

Got up at 530 this morning and hit the road at 615 to go race the Piece of Cake up in Woodland. Flat. 68 miles.

It was pretty windy up there, as always, and CMG pretty much just shut down anything that moved off the front. My longest break was probably 10 minutes, with Paulie and Hibbard after my original break companion missed a turn and rode off down a road somewhere after I made the correct right. Stupid corner marshalls. Then, about 3/4 of the way through the 3rd of 4 laps, some dude in the middle of the pack crossed the centerline and smacked into a mini-van. Carnage everywhere. His front wheel and fork launched probably 12 feet in the air and sailed above the pack to land in the right ditch. His bike went straight up, and landed in the left ditch. Dude was on the shoulder of the left lane. Bike parts everywhere. It took down several other guys, but only one ran head on into the car. Of course, being the nice assholes that they are, about a third of the field just drilled it. The whole race was eventually neutralized, we rode 6 miles to the start/finish, waited for the cat 3's to finish their race, then re-started for the remaining 17 miles.

Sweet.

After re-starting, CMG resumed chasing down anything that moved yet not putting their guys in line for a sprint. About 8k to go and we are riding fast, finally not all bunched up so I am moving up jumping wheels and figuring that I'll at least try to get into the top 20 or so (if you haven't raced it, there is a 90deg left hand turn with about 400m to go) before the sprint 'cause it's getting ugly. At 4k I'm sitting maybe 25th-30th and still trying to move up, jumping wheels no trouble, this is exactly my kind of tempo, then suddenly the whole Rubicon team is on the left side of the road and riding hard, along with who knows how many confused Turds. Rosenberg is gesturing and yelling, half the pack is screaming at them, they're screaming back, it's all hunky-dory then there's a big bang! from about two or three riders up and then two guys (one CMG, one Therapeutic) are headed backwards towards me, somewhat hooked together, Therapeutic with his rear derailer dangling from his chain where apparently the CMG guy ran into his rear wheel. Sweet. Everybody hits the brakes, I'm just about fishtailing trying to not hit these guys who went from 30 to 0 in a heartbeat, and I lost 30 places like effing that.

Race over.

Then Rosenberg protested to the officials, and Matt Ritzow went and had some hard words with the CMG guys, since apparently Hosmer grabbed his crotch and to push him out of the front line, or something. Donal Reed used the word 'fuck' a lot... delete my thoughts there. No need to get heated.

Absolut Bullshit.