154: shake and bake

There is this sweet little dinner/café around the corner from our place. Although it’s not in Newark, it does rank up there on Monkey and my list of favorite places to eat. The Cricket Café delivers fair prices and good portions. Following today’s race at Sewell, we treated ourselves to a couple of good meals.

I had the meatloaf dinner with mashed red skin potatoes :

And a side of fries. Yeah that’s right double starches tonight.
Monkey had her favorite: the buffalo chicken wrap, but tonight with fries instead of a side salad.

Summer Sizzler- If my race today was three laps long, I would have finished in 2nd place behind my team captain Kris Auer by about 2 seconds. Sadly today’s race was four laps, and I finished in 2nd place 2 minutes down on Kris.

Our plan was pretty simple go hard from the gun, work together to get clear, and keep rolling. I got the hole shot, and Kris and I took turns on the front working together for 3 laps. Then at the start of the fourth lap I shit the bed.

I felt goosebumps all over, and then wave a nausea rushed over me. I expected to blow what GU and gatorade was in my stomach all over my top tube. I was cracked. Trying to keep the C3 Sollay.com express rolling, Kris backed off and was waiting for me on the tops of each of the rollers. I told him," get your ass moving, we worked too hard to let someone else steal the win, because your busy waiting for me!" Kris nodded, as I looked bad, but gave me strict orders, “you better finish up in second! ” I gotta do what the captain says you know!

I’ll be honest I was worried, I felt really rough. I had visions of the 4th lap collapse I had a couple years ago in the single speed class, where Topher and Maurice came around me in the final half lap. Luckily, Kris and I had build a pretty nice lead, and I just tried to push hard on the ups, and anywhere I could let the bike roll, I did. My core temperature seemed to drop a bit, and my head started to feel cooler. Finally in the last section I started to feel good again. I had just enough to hold off a hard charging Rob Campbell, one of my cross rivals. Good to Rob.

At the end of the day, it was 1-2 for C3-Sollay.com, that last lap I just kept repeating in my head “my bag of courage is deep, my bag of courage is deep, My bag of courage is deep”

For what it’s worth I’ll be Cal to Auer's Ricky any day. Shake and Bake baby, Shake and Bake. That was a very fun ride.

Perhaps better than my ride, and something I am really proud of was Monkey’s ride.

Sure enough as the sport field staged, the skies opened up and poured on them. A course that puts emphasis on bike handling when dry, was now a muddy, slippery challenge of a race. This is all Monkey’s fault.

What Monkey's fellow sport riders fail to realize is that in the past two years every time Monkey raced mountian bike in New Jersey, the skies have dumped on her. Buddy T Kegbreaker has taken to calling her the rain goddess. It's pretty funny.

Luckily for Monkey, she is a pretty damn good mudder. Following two laps of slick, muddy, slippery racing, Monkey ended up in 4th place- Her best finish since graduating to the sport class.

Monkey will qualify her result saying Sewell is a great course for her, and that she is good in the wet stuff. I however know how hard she has been working, and I am super proud of her ride. Rule number four of the DCCoD is "never accept a compliment, answer with standard verbiage as such: I have a lot of work to do still" Damn crossers and their rules.

Now I know she’s happy too, because she ordered fries tonight and not a side salad. So all in all it was a good day for Monkey and I.

one more quick one:

Kris on cell: "where are you parked?"

Monkey: "next to the the C3 Building, where else?"

Wes and Auer congratulate Monkey- without getting too close...I’d like to give some props to the Loweriders, freaking stand up guys, one of my favorite Super Series team’s for sure.

Thanks to the promoters of the Summer Sizzler, who have always treated me with great kindness and generosity.

Best to Kim who broke her hand today in a nasty stack- lets hope for a speedy recovery.

Thanks for reading.

respect.
faticus