Race: Tandemonium!

As you might notice from the ol' weekly synopsis post, I was in PA for a few days.  This is because there's a car show/flea market that my family goes to each year.  This means that I was up by 7am (hey, it's early for me) with a quick hotel breakfast and then it was off to walk around a few fields in the sweltering heat for five hours.  I did have some cool finds though, so I'm certainly not complaining.  I'm just saying it's not the best thing to do if you're planning on racing against world level competition later in the day.

Around 1pm, we saw all there was to see at the flea market, so we decided to head back to the hotel.  I got a call from Steve that tandemonium might not actually be happening for us as he had miscalculated the time it would take to get to t-town from where he was upstate.  A bit later he called again and we agreed that I would head to t-town to register the team and see if we could at least just do the final tandemonium event and skip the sprints.

In the meantime, I took a dip in the hotel pool in order to relax a bit and more importantly cool off.  I then headed over to the track to see what our options were.  They said just racing the final event would be fine, so I registered us and went to dinner.  A burger later, and I was back at the track at a little after 7pm.  I started to bring my gear to the infield when Steve drove up.  Somehow he was able to cut off at least a half hour of drive time.  We rushed our gear to the infield to see if we could still get in our flying lap TT for the sprint seeding, but it was not to be so.  That's fine, so we just sit around for a while.  We spun around the infield trying to warm up as we both forgot our rollers and watched the rest of the racing.

Finally it was time for tandemonium.  A 12 lap scratch with 12 tandems on the track.  whooo boy.  Our first neutral roll around was given the double gun as someone had spilled a beer between turns 3&4.  Getting back on the rail and we heard that the tandem of Diefenbach and mini-Nothstein had a front flat.  A quick change later and we were finally good to go.  Steve and I decided that the one strategy that would not work was a full 12 lap TT off the front.  Particularly since neither of us were warmed up.  We decided to take a couple of little attacks to get the legs going, then see how it looked.  Of course, just as we were going to sit up for our first attack we hear a prime announced for $40, so we decided to give it a go.  Then a couple of laps later another $40 prime.  Funny, this is exactly what we said not to do.  Standing on the back stretch was Marloe Rodman of Jamaica cheering us on.  Finally around turn 4 with 2 or 3 laps to go we got caught and passed by a good amount of teams.  In turn 1 of the next lap, the bike got real squirrely for some reason and I was deathly afraid we were going down, but Steve was able to keep it up.  We kept the gas on to roll across the line in not dead last place.  By the end, my legs felt completely dead.  It was a dull kind of dead.  A not properly warmed up after spending all day in a hot field kind of dead, you could say.

Still, I'd call the event a success.  It cost $65, we won $80, got our names announced a lot, had lots of people cheer for us and Pink Rhino.  Yeah, not bad.  We'll be back next year.