The Barely 100

Feeling like a piece of fridge, watching emotional embrace

As everybody knows, (where everybody means the literally dozen-ish people who have viewed this blog) I raced the Bailey 100. Needless to say, I didn't take any pictures because of the off chance that I could accidentally document myself incoherently weeping to myself while spending most of my mental energy trying not to 'toss cookies.'

Therefore, I intend to tell the story of what I do remember via unrelated pictures.

The story starts mostly the night before where the most notable thing that happened was my interaction with Dave Wiens.

Dave is a "bear" of a man... HAHAHA

The extent of my interaction was two fold. Firstly, he gave me my doubled pay that my boss offered. This occurred through a sophisticated procedure as illustrated thusly.

Dave Wiens pushing my visor over my eyes

Dave is represented by the giant prairie dog and, to keep our statures in proportion, I'm represented by the small stuffed bear wearing a visor. Dave's hand motion is represented by the red arrow and my subsequent visor direction is illustrated by the blue arrow. The magnitude of my visor's fall is represented by the blue hatch mark in the left directionway of the bear.

After that and some senatorial meet 'n creep, which I'm assuming will set me up with a job as long as Colorado has a state senate, it was bed time. At first I thought that 4 wake up meant in the afternoon, but apparently not since I found my self trying to stomach breakfast burritos at roughly 4:15 am (mountain time, opposed to my original guesses of east coast and Greenwich mean time). After some prerace shenanigans and a dose of my secret PED (performance enhancing drug), we were roused to race with the traditional call, of iPhone to bull horn amplified national anthem, and a starting gun that actually means bidness, we began riding.

Among some of the other things me and my riding buddy learned, we determined that some of the bicycles in the race cost more than $1000! We learned this from a Scott sponsored riding who claimed her bike cost six thousand dollars (thats 18.72 in Euro), and that she had nine. Wow! Can you imagine...

Then there was a while where we rode some sweet sangle tarck. And about 3 hours in that same ride came up from behind us and informed us that we smelled poorly (which took some clarification to determine that it wasn't our skills that stank).

The Charmin Bear: Would you ride behind him?

The next thing I remember is noting at about 4.5 hours that "this is the part where things get less fun." And I'm no amateur at determining parts of things. I've also successfully determined when it was the part where we go off the road, and the part that happens after the drums stop (bass solo).

Then there are spots that don't stand out, learning at mile 65 that the winner (JHK) was in, changing chamois, and reapplying my PED

How does you're chamois-saddle interface feel?

Then there is some really low points and I won't bore you (or embarrass myself) with the details, but I did manage to finish. I will confirm rumors that it was indeed my second worse day on a bike, after...