Dear MIT Cycling,
Today was the road race. As the automatic doors of the hotel lobby slowly buzzed upon at 7AM this morning, we were greeted with slightly colder temps than expected, and much higher winds. The weather, and particularly the strong, gusty winds (which lasted all day) made it much more critical to ride with a pack. The women stayed in their little group until the end, with all four of MIT’s ladies heading into the sprint and finishing in the top 12. In the men’s race, the wind blew apart the field into smaller groups. Tim and Jose managed to stay in the largest group, while John decided to strike out on his own to bridge (and pass) smaller groups later in the race.
Semi-official results: Laura, 5th; Martha, 9th; Yuri, 11th; Zuzka, 12th, Tim, 23rd; Jose, 29th; John, 54th
But that’s all boring race stuff. (The kids can give you updates at some point.) What you’re here for are the enthralling details of the race atmosphere, in which I give you four of my favorite moments from the day:
1. Race announcer, just at the start of the D2 Men’s race, referring to the gusting winds: “Gentlemen, prepare to get guttered!”
2. The pizza place where we went to dinner, where after parking the car I couldn’t find the other guys. I saw a table where two guys were sitting with their back to me, talking to a cute girl, and walked right on past… “Our guys wouldn’t talk to a girl, they must be sitting on the other side,” I’m thinking. It turns out I’ve never seen Coach Nicole without a hat or helmet, even in my dreams. (Amy, it’s nothing weird, those dreams are always about ice cream.)
3. The feedzone was just a few yards down from The Mercantile, where Bob has reserved parking for himself and his truck. Steve H from Union asked him if he owned the shop. Bob’s response: “Son, I *own* this town.” Yes, we quite possibly fed from Bob’s feedzone. If we stayed too long, he would have run us out of His Town with an authentic gatling gun. Even though I’m in the hotel right now, I still fear Bob.
4. The award for the best feed goes to the Air Force Academy (and yes, I saw some great feeds, all of them from MIT except this one). Imagine if you will: a 3 inch diameter by 12 inch long summer sausage, wrapped in a porno magazine, stuffed down a Gatorade bottle. “How’s he going to use that feed?” asks a teammate. “Well, he can find a nice place along the side of the road and just enjoy life.” John reports that the feed did get “picked up.”
Tomorrow: early morning crit-on-crit action, finalizing the TTT gear, running the final computational fluid dynamics codes to chose the appropriate height for gluing numbers for optimal aero advantage given the TT course and our measured wind patterns (after extrapolating using the National Weather Service’s 22:GMT predictions), and more cookies. For other teams: we recommend using Javascript for TT-CFD simulation code for easier integration into the NWS server system. You can then get results pushed to your iPhone without too much work.
Monkeys and cogs, and rambling because I’m tired,
Loomis