Sorry about the posting drought, I hope I can make up for it with a long one. (ok so not that long)
I was in New York last weekend for the tenth edition of what has probably become the world's most famous bike messenger race: Monster Track. Had lots of fun while I was there, put a bunch of miles (American miles!!!) on the bike and went for my first ride that wasn't for work or simply "getting somewhere" since the fall. That was awesome. I'm really looking forward to cutting back my hours messengering so I can do more of those.
The race itself was a mixed bag. I met a few guys who looked pretty fast and invited me to ride with them. When the race started, we got to our bikes and one of them said: "hey check out those guys getting on FDR Dr!" So naturally, we follow them trying to get ahead on our uptown checkpoint. What we didn't know was that there's no way to get on FDR from where we were and that we HAD ACTUALLY BEEN MADE THE FOOL in an elaborate hoax orchestrated by none other than famed bike-messenger-wannabe (can I say posenger on Blogger?), fixed gear aficionado and rival blogger PROLLY! Now, this wasn't clear at the time and for all we knew, we had just lost our time and ended up in a dead end because we followed some fat guy who didn't know where he was going. Were we ever wrong! It later came to our attention that this was not just some harmless mistake on our part but a CLEVER RUSE by the man who's very name is synonymous with "fixed gear lifestyle" to mislead Real Life Bike Messengers™ and inflict as suffering upon them by ruining their chance at a really sweet finishing position at Monster Track. The joke was on us! As the savvy culture vulture later explained, this wasn't done on a whim but had actually been in the works for about a year. Needless to say, I'm pretty devastated but I'm slowly getting over it by giving tourists wrong directions. SUCKERS!
Now about the race itself, as usual I lost my manifest. At least this time I got straight to business and dropped it between the start and the first checkpoint, crushing any hope of finishing "competitively" and at the same time liberating me of the constraints associated with doing so. I spent the rest of the race following a small group of riders who like me, had absolutely no clue where they were going. I thought the riding was really fast (considering my unfamiliarity with the city and traffic) but unfortunately enough, most of the time in the wrong direction! It seemed like we went up and down between the twenties and fifties about half a dozen times, hitting one checkpoint on the East side then crossing the entire island to the West. Pretty exhausting, but fun nonetheless! When we got to the finish, it had been about two hours, which would have meant about 50th place if I had completed my manifest.
Afterwards, there were the usual parties, sprints, fixie trix and associated shenanigans I won't bother boring you with. Blah blah back to work...
ps. Check out Boneshakers in Greenpoint if ever you get the chance.