By: Andrew J Bernstein Wednesday April 21, 2010

Early on Sunday morning I was standing amidst an impossibly large fleet of parked motorcycles with Embrocation Publisher James Morrison. After taking in the scene for a moment James turned to me and spoke words that had been bouncing around my own head all week: “Kinda gives you motivation to upgrade, huh?”

Yeah, I’ll say.

With only hours before the start of the Tour of the Battenkill Pro Men’s Invitational, a first-year UCI race, James and I were attending to various administrative duties – James for the magazine and me for the press corps covering the race – none of which had to do with either of us racing bikes that day.

You see, we’re both cat 2 racers. Reasonably fast ones, even if I do say so myself, but cat 2s nonetheless, and the word had come down from on high earlier in the spring: the Pro Men’s Invitational was strictly for pros and cat 1s, leaving me on the sidelines, even though my team, Champion System Racing, had secured a coveted invitation to America’s Queen of the Classic.

I begged Dieter Drake, the race’s creator and promoter, for him to grant me an exception, arguing that I was a local guy who has done a lot to help spread the word about Battenkill, and that I deserved that chance to race with my team. But he wasn’t giving an inch. So it goes.

With my team’s roster split between twos and ones, we needed a few extra riders to fill out a team for the Battenkill, and James’s Embrocation squad, lacking its own invitation, stepped up, loaning us two of their cat 1s. So, that was great, but it still left James and I contemplating how much we’d rather be riding.

Instead of racing, James spent the day running around the course taking photos. I spent the day riding in the caravan, twittering, facebooking, posting to my blog, and taking photos and video. It was kinda fun, I guess, and it was very cool to see the race come unhinged on Meeting House Road when Caleb Fairly, of the Holowesko Partners U23 team, and Bahati Foundation’s Floyd Landis streaked away to wrap up the top two spots.

Best of all, when the skies opened and a driving downpour turned the 30 miles of dirt roads to peanut butter, the Nissan Xtera was warm and dry. There were lots of muddy faces at the end of Sunday’s race, but I wasn’t one of them.

Still, when asked by a friend at the end of the day if I’d had fun, I had to answer honestly: “I’d rather have been racing.”

By: Andrew J Bernstein Wednesday April 7, 2010

Bikes and beer. Bikes and pasta. Bikes and granola bars. Bikes and bagels. Bikes and bananas. Bikes and energy gels. Bikes and peanut butter. Bikes and matzah?

We certainly associate certain foods with racing bikes, but sometimes, for some people, a preferred diet gives way to religious beliefs. I will never forget watching my then-teammate, now coach Scott Cole cram a shingle-sized rectangle of the Hebrew’s unleavened bread into his jersey pocket shortly before the start of a collegiate road race back in 2006.

It was Passover, a week-long holiday memorializing the Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt, and during which observant Jews deny themselves “leavened” bread – or, basically, any carbohydrate but matzah in solidarity with our desert-wandering ancestors. If you’re unfamiliar, matzah is basically a giant saltine, with none of the salt and all of the mouth-binding pastiness. Imagine a linoleum flooring tile about a foot square, and enjoy.

This Jew has never been one to observe the strictures of Passover, at least not when Grandma and Grandpa weren’t looking, although I do certainly enjoy some of the more delicious Passover foods such as brisket and matzah ball soup (a distant cousin of the aforementioned building material – think of the difference between Luke and Owen Wilson – one is kinda endearing and likeable. The other just has a big bump in his nose). But beyond that, I observe Passover by continuing to start my day with un-kosher cereals, and often enjoy a delicious sandwich – on un-kosher sandwich bread – at midday.

Does it make me a bad Jew? Who cares, especially when it comes time to racing bikes?

See, back at that cold, windy race in Vermont, while Scott was struggling to fish playing-card sized chunks of hardened plaster out of his pocket and then hoping he’d have enough water to wash it down, I was easily enjoying – such as it is – a nice apple-flavored energy gel. Now, I’m not going to start pontificating on how much I love energy gels, but I’ve never met a bike racer who doesn’t appreciate the efficacy of consuming them on the bike.

And that certainly includes Coach Scott. But he’s a better Jew than me and feels the need to endure the Israelites suffering, even while racing his bike.

Now, it’s Passover again, and I happened to be talking to Scott about the restful week that he has planned for me leading up to the Tour of the Battenkill. In the course of our conversation, Scott mentioned that he is, once again, keeping Kosher for the holiday. The natural extension is that he’s feeling like crap on his rides, as matzah really isn’t a great fuel for riding. I believe his exact words were: “Passover is God’s way of telling Jews that we have no business being athletes!”

I don’t buy it, and I don’t buy matzah – I just choose instead to take part in only the more-delicious holiday foods, while being sure to tell the Passover story at every opportunity. That accomplishes the same thing, right? And, happily, I’ve never felt like crap while riding due to undue matzah consumption. Now who’s the coach?

By: Andrew J Bernstein Tuesday March 23, 2010

I have a really hard time saying “no.” Whether it’s walking my friends’ dog when I’m already overbooked, taking on additional projects at work, or dinner plans with family at inopportune moments, I tend want to make others happy, so I just say “yes.” It’s an easy answer to give, often harder to deliver. Occasionally, an ill-conceived “yes” can even turn into a painful, bloody experience.

I realized I should have said “no” to racing the March 13, 2010 Grant’s Tomb Criterium when I merged from the George Washington Bridge to the Henry Hudson Parkway and my car was jolted sideways by haymaker-esque blast of wind, just as a bow wave from a van in the next lane washed across my windshield, making it momentarily impossible to see through. Fortunately, I managed to keep the car on course, surviving the rest of the drive to the racecourse.

Then, I compounded the error of leaving my house by getting dressed (while the car stood swaying like a wind chime), getting out of the car, registering for the race, and starting a warm up, such as it was. It was during my warm up that I really should have said “no.”

I was rolling around on a viaduct that carries River Side Drive when sunglasses, expensive ones that I’d worn nearly every time I rode my bike since 2005, lifted off from my helmet like a parachute exploding out the back of a drag racer. Accelerating like a baseball headed for home, they took off bound for the Hudson River.

I watched them go, feeling momentarily sad over the loss of a key piece of equipment. I shouldn’t have allowed myself the momentary distraction – while I was saying goodbye to the glasses the wind was driving me straight into a curb, all those fancy bladed spokes on my race wheel were transformed into svelte-but-efficient sails, pushing me toward the downwind mark.

It was a tall curb, so I didn’t have far to go when I fell over onto the sidewalk, but it was enough to tear the brand new knee warmer I was wearing and the flesh beneath. Before I even stood up, I realized that the bloody wound make me that guy on the start line – the one who had crashed before the race. Nice work, slick.

So much for doing something impressive at what was supposed to be a big season debut for my new team, Champion System Racing. Some debut.

Like I said, I should have realized by this time that this was a good time to start saying “no.” But I was already dressed, so thoughts of hunkering down in the car didn’t even occur to me. I’d driven nearly the entire length of the Hudson River Valley to race in this event, and damn it, I was going to race.

Besides my own stubborn bone, team management had called Grant’s a mandatory race, and I was determined to show that I was a team player. So I went to the line with the other racers foolhardy enough to show up in the awful weather. Of course, despite the conditions, I was the still only person with blood dripping down my leg.

I put in an honest effort for a couple laps, once the race finally started, then water started coming in under the collar of my racing cape, instantly soaking everything that wasn’t already saturated and causing me to lose any motivation I’d been able to muster. The effort I was putting out suddenly began to decline.

Then, a monstrous blast of headwind, larger than any other we’d yet experienced, ended the peloton’s carefully-choreographed dance; cyclists careened in 19 different directions, resembling a fleet of sailboats tacking across the wind. With that, something finally clicked. I was back in the car, shivering and stripping off wet Spandex while the leader still had half a race to suffer in the rain. Sucker.

Oh wait; I’m the sucker who needs to expand my vocabulary.

Thanks to Michael Koschara for the photos.

By: Andrew J Bernstein Tuesday February 23, 2010

In college, we called them meatheads or jocks and avoided them easily by steering clear of the fitness center and business classes – or, if those avenues were impossible, we minimized interaction by making a bee line for the front row of class, the racquetball courts or lap pool, each haven guaranteed to be jock-free.

As an adult, I’ve mostly gotten over the need to assign pejorative labels to people whose interests are different from my own, but I still feel uncomfortable when confronted with a muscle-bound man or woman who bears the countenance of a person who could — and might like to — take me in one skillet-sized hand and crush me like a canned tomato headed for the sauce pan. Call it my own personal emphasis on the second half of fight-or-flight, or call it me being a bit of a pussy – either way, I won’t deny it.

Fortunately, avoiding such characters and such labels for myself wasn’t much of a challenge after college – you don’t run into to many body builders on the Tuesday night World Championship ride, and there aren’t any in my work place. For some reason, journalists tend to fall closer to “flabby” or “twiggy” than “hard body” on the fitness spectrum.

But, thanks to my coach’s plan to help me ride faster than I ever have this season, I’ve been spending more time than I ever have in my life in the company of these non-endurance athletes at the local YMCA, where I’ve been dispatched to lift weights, do plyometrics, and even to make use of some of the more-medieval of the weight machines. It’s been a real change for me, who, for years, swore that the only exercise I needed was to ride my bike.

Just for the record: I don’t have anything against anybody working out in a way that suits them; and I’m generally the last person to make generalizations about any group of people; and I’m sure that many weight lifting enthusiasts are kind, interesting individuals who I am not giving myself the chance to meet because of my own preconceived notions about the kinds of people they are. Shame on me for writing this essay.

But, all the same, those stiff-walking gargantuans make me feel rather foolish when I go to the free weight section of the gym, to do my dead lifts with a 55-pound barbell. Dumbbell presses with a scant 25 pounds in each hand make me feel pretty good about myself, even while the thickly muscled-gentleman on the next bench is staring through the wall while judging me and curling what appears to me to be about 100 pounds. Then I glance at my own, puny, bicep and shrug.

On to the squat rack, where I load up a reasonable 115 pounds – and struggle to complete three sets of 10.

But looking and feeling like a weakling in front of the Ephedra crowd is one thing. The “dry land” exercises that keep me up at night wondering just how much like a fool I seem to those around me are the plyometrics; Swiss ball back extensions, squat-thrust-to-jump, planks, single-toe touch downs, and all the rest. Even though I know the very good reason behind all of these exercises, I can’t help but be overly cognizant of how silly they look.

The thing is, even if I’m only pressing 25 pounds with each arm, at least a bench press is a recognizable exercise. Swiss ball Hamstring curls? That just looks odd, like I’m preparing for a role as an sex-tronaut in an upcoming adult film set in space. Most young people think the worst horror of going to the gym is encountering older, naked folks in the locker room. Clearly anyone who thinks that has never been subject to beads of sweat flung from my brow as I jumped up and down on only my left leg. That is the real horror show.

But there’s a good reason for these odd-looking exercises, of which I try hard to make sure everyone is aware. I make an effort to wear t-shirts that I picked up at races to the Y, to let anyone paying attention know that I’m a bike racer, and just as I shave my legs for a purpose (to look good), there’s a good reason for all the odd-looking exercises. But I worry constantly that the signal is too subtle. Hell, I know the signal is too subtle from the number of sidelong glances I get while doing push ups on the Swiss ball — my body shaking as I struggle to keep the ball underneath me. Yes, it does look rather odd, but it’s also hard as hell, so it’s got to be doing something good for me, right?

Why do I care what others think of my workout routine? Well, isn’t it obvious? If I so easily ascribed the “meathead” label to those men and women looking only for the perfect muscle tone, I can be sure that someone, right now, is looking at me and thinking “spaz,” or worse. I can only look forward to the day all this weight training is behind me, and I can focus solely on the important thing – obviously, riding my bike.

By: Andrew J Bernstein Tuesday January 26, 2010

Another elite-level cyclist with whom I’ve had the pleasure of racing with – and learning from – over the past couple of seasons gave me some valuable advice as the 2009 season rolled to a close.

“Andrew,” he said, “the best thing about serious riding is not riding.”

Granted, this conversation was held as I was lamenting to anyone who would listen how poorly my late-season campaign had gone and how burnt out I was, and granted his comment was geared more toward resting than alternative exercise, but I like to think that I’ve taken his advice to heart.

Sort of.

The next words off his keyboard were “beer, girls, ice cream.”

The point he was trying to get at, I think, is that all of us in the elite peloton are so deeply entrenched in our training routines that we can sometimes lose sight of the other good stuff that’s out there. Cycling is awesome, it’s a sport that I hope will be a life-long hobby for me, but even I know there is a time when you have to step away, and take your helmet off. Or, at least, trade your bike helmet for some other kind of helmet – a pith helmet, for instance.

As the off-season winds down and I segue into an intensifying training load that will occupy most of February, I’ve just taken a moment to evaluate how effective I was this year at wearing different helmets, after trying to take at least part of the advice offered to me by my brother-in-spandex.

BikeSnobNYC is fond of poking fun at the alternative training fads that seem to come along each year, be it roller skiing, speed walking, Jell-O wrestling Hungarian midgets, or whathaveyou. He may poke fun, but I think it’s valuable to spend time doing things that are good for your body and soul, and that don’t involve your bike.

For me, this winter, that’s meant trying to get up into the mountains, for some good, old-fashioned, bipedal locomotion, sans wheels. Also known as hiking.

Schlepping a heavy pack up the steep side of a mountain does not relate directly to race situations, but the exhilaration of standing on a rocky summit, on a clear, cool day is pretty much unbeatable, and totally unparalleled. So far, I’ve stood atop five of the Adirondack high peaks during this off season. With a little luck and some creative scheduling, I’ll get a couple more in before racing starts in earnest.

And even if you can’t work on leg speed while wearing snowshoes (trust me, it doesn’t work), few other things that I have done have left me with such a complete, satisfying sense of being truly worked.

It’s a feeling that always reminds me that I may be a fit bike racer, but there are other measures of fitness – just as there are other ways to fill your days. I’ve been glad to be reminded of this world beyond bikes, and I highly recommend others give it a look.

And with that, it’s time to hit the rollers.

Oh, and we can talk about beer, girls and ice cream another time.

By: Andrew J Bernstein Friday December 25, 2009

Immaculate pain: pulls at the soul, body contracting to tiny ball. Everything at the pit of the stomach. Everything pale white, can’t look. Can’t think. Everything pulling.. pulling.. pulling toward the center. Lungs won’t work. Can’t scream, no breath. Can’t cry, tears frozen. So miserable.

Shut eyes. Squeeze eyelids. Tighter, tighter.

Everything frozen; hands, feet, ears, nose.

Drops of water cling to skin, stuck between freeze and thaw. Shower was a bad idea, can’t stand on frozen feet, nearly fell. Stumble to bed, wet. Window open. WHAT THE FUCK?

Club hand, close window, retreat under covers. Imitate ball. Squeeze tighter. Pulling closer.

Core shaking. Shaking. Trying to warm.

Then burning. 10 fingers, 10 toes; all on fire. Still no scream. Now shivering, powerful twitches.

Lungs expand. Head under pillow. OH MY GOD THIS FUCKING HURTS.

Then warm. Breaths slow. Calm. Sleep. Dream of spring.

By: Andrew J Bernstein Tuesday December 15, 2009

I regularly spend time admiring my legs, gazing at them through a mirror, transfixed by the twined, muscled visage. Sometimes I like to lie on the couch, put my feet up on the arm, and take turns flexing each leg: first the quadriceps (rectus femoris, vastus intermedius, vastus medialis, and finally, the vastus lateralis), then I roll my legs a little to the outside to get a better view of my calf as I engage the gastrocnemius and then the soleus. Each bulging muscle reminds me of some heroic racing moment: an attack, a counter, a Porsche-like ascent up a mountain while whipping through switchbacks.

By June, a deep tan accentuates the sharp angles of my toned and rippling muscles. These are legs, I think to myself, which could be used to illustrate a training feature in any cycling magazine, or in Men’s Journal.

I like to remind myself that there’s nothing women love more than a guy with great muscle tone and a tan to accentuate said tone. Then I start to plot new ways to publicly display my legs more fully. Women have it so easy with their mini skirts, I think to myself.

Just as I’m drifting among images of myself slathered in baby oil, posing for a photographer in a fitness studio, mugging faces of fake strain for the camera while flexing each strand of raw brawn, my boxers slip a little farther north, and I’m brought back to reality by the jarring border of my mid-thigh tan line.

Yeah, you know what I’m talking about; the line where your bibs end and your tan takes over.

As a bike racer, getting a good tan is pretty much inevitable, and since I’ve always been an everything-in-its-place kind of a guy, the hem of my bibs have to go in their right places too. The result is a night-and-day, black-and-white, Florida-Alaska disparity between the tanned lower portions of my legs and the alabaster skin above the demarcation lines.

A tan line like mine is fun when you can use it as evidence of how much you ride, or to show off the level of your commitment to the sport. And since pretty much every bike racer has a similar tan line, comparing them, talking about them, and admiring them is not unusual at races, group rides, and other places where cyclists gather.

But every once in a while, bike racing gives way to a real life in which tan lines are not points of pride, and where the goal is to get rid of, not to enhance, such features.

Recently, I was lucky enough to be getting into bed with a very attractive woman – the kind of woman who could do much better than a bike racer with tree-trunk thighs but a stick-figure waist and toothpick arms – who, for reasons unknown, deemed me worthy.

She was no stranger, and she knew – at least in general terms – about my cycling habits. After years of missed connections, the timing was finally right for us, and everything seemed to be going perfectly; we’d had a great time together over a few days, I did a reasonable job convincing her friends that I was nice, funny, but not creepy, and now we were getting into bed. I took off my pants. Suddenly she was staring at my thigh with a befuddled gaze that reduced my most-most admired body part from a rippling mass of bounded muscles to a strand of limp linguini.

While I’m no Hugh Grant, I like to think that I have some charm, and that I’m usually fairly smooth in intimate situations. In this case, I had nothing.

“Is that a tan line?” she asked, clearly mystified. Apparently my tan lines are so “impressive,” even after two months of covering my legs to ward off cold, that they can still be mistaken.

I had warned her about my shaved legs before taking off my pants (women love this too, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day), but I hadn’t thought to prepare her for tan lines. Advice about sunscreen ensued.

In the end, the tan line conversation was nothing more than a momentary distraction during an otherwise wonderful evening, but boy, that stare was a rock thrown into my pond of narcissism. No, they do not want to do a tan line feature in next month’s Details Magazine, but they do carry SPF 45 at CVS, freak. Remember this, next time you’re tempted to compare tan lines at a race.

By: Andrew J Bernstein Tuesday December 1, 2009

Ah, Thanksgiving.

My favorite holiday for so many reasons: food, spending time with family and friends, and lots of time to ride during day light hours while off from work.

Of course, any racer worthy of the title obsesses about the first and last items in my brief list. The food on Thanksgiving is delicious, and often consumed in disgusting quantities. Sometimes, food is even accompanied by alcohol for racers who have really fallen off the wagon. Riding over Thanksgiving, as a result, although fun as always, falls squarely in the middle of a rest period for most of us, and is therefore done at least partially out of a sense of guilt for many of us.

Such was the scenario on Friday morning, when I rolled into Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and immediately found a 20-rider peloton already doing laps. I hoped right in, joining what turned out to be a growing group of cyclists anxious to work off the previous day’s gluttony.

A day earlier, while riding with a similar group in the same park, there was talk of riding extra laps to build a larger calorie deficit. There were people representing three perspectives on Thursday’s ride. First there were men taking advantage of a day off from work, while their wife or family slaved away in the kitchen at home. Then there were people so genuinely excited about turkey and candied yams that they truly wanted to make “extra room,” silly though the notion may be. I generally try to avoid generalizations, but I will divulge that most of the riders in these first two categories could have been safely labeled “recreational.”

Then there were others, myself included, who were more concerned about the long-term ramifications of overstuffing on stuffing, and were thus willing to stay an extra hour in the park before our holiday meal, with the goal of minimizing holiday weight gain. I would say that each of these three attitudes is fairly common among cyclists, as we’re always obsessing about a few extra grams of body weight.

Yes, we cyclists can be somewhat nuts when it comes to food.

A high school health teacher might say that this constitutes disordered eating or compulsive exercise, but I prefer to think of it as calculated indulgence. It’s the off-season and eating pie and drinking are supposed to be OK — in moderation — so I, and many other cyclist riding loops in the park on a Thursday morning, probably shouldn’t have been connecting miles ridden to potatoes to be consumed later, but it’s impossible to turn that part of the brain off, at least for me. The key is that you can’t let your mini mania get in the way of your holiday fun.

Does that mean the high school health teacher is right? Yeah, maybe, but I believe that doesn’t make us unhealthy, it just adds a dimension to our healthy cycling enthusiasm. Besides, comparing holiday meals is infinitely more fun than comparing wattage.

By: Andrew J Bernstein Tuesday November 17, 2009

I was just re-reading the last essay I posted here on Embrocation and realized that I might be giving readers the wrong idea about the kind of person I am. Yes, I probably could have accurately been described as a surly motherfucker on the night before Spa ‘Cross, my first effort at promoting a cyclocross race; but I could also be accurately described as wearing the day’s biggest grin the next morning when the first of 6 races launched onto our course.

Here’s what I didn’t tell you last week in my essay about Spa ‘Cross: when John, my co-promoter, and I designed our course, one key feature we both knew we wanted to include was a giant “shame spiral.” We both shared a vision of racers spiraling in tighter than the whorls on a snail’s shell, than pinning a 180 and spiraling all the way back out before heading to the next course feature.

Spirals, AKA crop circles, AKA Cinnabons of Death, AKA the Magic Swirly, have long been my favorite feature in any ‘cross race. Not only are they cool for spectators, who can spend countless minutes trying to figure out who’s leading and who’s been dropped, but they’re cool for racers who have to try and figure out the same thing, only the racers have to do it through the red-line haze and the specter of other racers flashing by them in every direction. So, we proudly announced the spiral’s location on our course diagrams.

On the Friday before the big day, I went over to John’s house for pizza, beer, and to collate and staple release forms and numbers. I wasn’t at all surprised to see that he’d broken out his full architect’s tool kit to draw dozens of diagrams of the Shame Spiral. Each sketch was to scale, and showed exactly how we could economize our scant supply of caution tape. I chalked the obsessive schematic-drawing up to a touch of perfectionism and a pinch of good foresight, then we got on with the night’s business, fortifying ourselves for winter’s cold with pizza and beer. And collating.

As the sun rose behind an angry sky on the next day, a crew of volunteers helped us lay out the course in the driving downpour. The spiral, which occupied the entirety of a ball field’s outfield, looked good, but the rain kept us from riding it. Despite careful planning, I was worried that for some unknown reason, the course wouldn’t function as designed.

The next morning, the cat 4 and citizen’s race rolled off just a few minutes late at 9. It was the biggest single race of the day, and because of the weather, they were the first people to ride the course. The racers ripped down a short stretch of pavement, dropped down into the starting chute, railed a turn over a berm, raced around the back of a baseball diamond, then entered the spiral. I held my breath as the first rider arced into the swirl.

Completely forgetting about an aggravating morning when my registration volunteers (Mom and Dad) had arrived late, and the previous day’s toil in the rain, the subsequent, maniacal search for safety pins, I was the guy with the biggest smile when the leaders were exiting one end of the huge spiral, and every inch of grass behind them, all the way back to the spiral’s entrance, was filled with ‘cross racers, intent on nailing the next turn and advancing their position.

Why the smile? The course, Shame Spiral and all, worked exactly as designed, and the strained grunts and short, labored breaths from racers were testament that we had actually pulled our race off. Yes, the only thing better than getting to dictate the size of safety pins at your race is the satisfaction of seeing the race actually take place. Plus, it’s just cool to see bikes going in 16 different directions in the Shame Spiral.

By: Andrew J Bernstein Tuesday November 3, 2009

I thought the challenge of promoting a ‘cross race would be somewhere in the complexities of a USA Cycling permit, liability insurance, hiring officials, securing a venue, laying out a safe yet challenging course, or getting people to come race.

Nope.

It was 9:30 on the night before the big day and everything was set. Everything except safety pins. So I found myself running up and down the aisles at Target, trying to find a suitable box of pins, so that the 150-odd racers I had coming to slug it out in the park will have a means to affix their numbers to their skin suits.

Of course, I’d known that I needed pins for some time. Every bike race I’ve ever gone to has the same cardboard box of pins sitting on the registration table – you know the one, about five inches long and three inches wide, a piece of black tissue paper covering over the top. But where other promoters acquire this essential paraphernalia must not be revealed until later in your promotion career – like a pilot earning his wings only after completing innumerable practice take-offs and landings under the watchful eye of an instructor.

Surprisingly, the frustrating thing wasn’t that the whole enterprise, months of planning, hinged on me being able to find enough little bits of twisted steel. Instead, I was mostly just annoyed that the clerks at Target, AC Moore, Walmart, and about a half-dozen other stores where you would think you would be able to buy a basic item like safety pins looked at me like a crazy person when I asked where I could find the bulk box of pins. No, not the packages of 50, the box of 500, thank you very much.

Then again, maybe they were just looking at me that way because I did look like a crazy person; muddy boots that squished with each step, work pants soaked from a day spent driving stakes in a downpour, equally sopping work gloves hanging out of my pocket, wool plaid shirt clinging to my arms, my stubbly, bedraggled face framed by a damp mop of hat hair and eyes set deep in sockets of too-much-planning-and-not-enough-sleeping, the whole packaged wrapped in a useless orange rain jacket. Yeah, maybe now that I’m warm and dry I’ll forgive those clerks for thier taken-aback reaction to my demands for MORE PINS.

I never did find the pins, so I settled for three 100-count boxes of assorted size pins. Some racers thus wound up having their numbers more securely fastened than they might be accustomed too, but that’s OK, as long as the numbers stay in place, right? Right, because I say so. See, the nice thing about being a race promoter is that you’ve done tons for work – which you aren’t being fairly compensated for unless your name is Christian Prudhomme – everyone knows how hard you’ve worked, and is thus more inclined to listen when you make pointed “suggestions.”

So, when the registration volunteers ask where I’ve put the pins, and I hand them the assorted sizes better suited for stocking the family sewing kit than pinning race numbers, and they arch their eyebrows in question, I don’t feel any need to explain – after all, none of them were terrorizing Target employees at 9:30 the previous evening.