Its Not Over till Sue Says Its Over

Ft. Ord Race Report, August 4

The invitations went out last week, Warrior Sue threatened to spank any of us if we dared DNF or DNS for her hometown race. With our leader going batty and our bunny playing doctor our sextuplet was down to a quad squad.
Sue was not letting any of us bail.

As soon as I arrived it became evident she not only succeeded getting us to the start she intimidated any other team from registering in our category. It was at the start line that our warrior’s master plan was unveiled...she planned an end of the season party for our own Kitty cat, Erika.

Yeah, don’t be fooled by how cute Sue is...
She made the soldiers stand to attention in mutual respect.



Grinning from ear to ear, we thought of endless possibilities we could do today. How often do you get to race with ONLY your teammates? How do we do this? I just couldn’t get my mind wrapped around it...this momentary celebration was squashed by the news there would be only 3 prizes...3 velo promo tees were in our 4 lap future. No worries being the Latina fashionista that I am, I mentally recorded an image of 3 cut up tees resewn to create 4. I may have to enlist the help of a bunny.


We entered the 30+ W event mainly because I am a lightweight and could not possibly handle 6 Heinekens of this race, Hennekens is Ft. Ord’s make or break climb that lasts 3- 4 minutes and after a few of them I just get woozy. Besides it was the only category we all could compete in together. I just couldn’t believe our luck you mean all other women were up for the 6 pak? Dang...that’s tolerance.

So...
how do you race when all your teammates are in the same cat? We discussed this at length, we could do all those things you wished you could do but were too afraid of the drop page factor.

Oh...with endless possibilities our quad squad began our list. Linda crossed the double line, with no screaming nor protests from our opponents. Erika wished for a pee break where she could read the daily paper and take her time pulling up her drawers. Sue wanted to call the winner by unsprinting, I brought my camera and perfected the technique of “non climbing” dedicated to the climbing challenged cyclists...imagine a race where you wouldn’t be dropped on the main climb, that was my wish.


I wish I could show you more pictures but I dropped my camera
and somehow after 3 Heinekens, the manual control went wacko...

But I got a picture of this lovely bum...

Guess whose?

Anyway as much fun as we wanted to have the weather was very uncooperative, the refs had no idea it was a Bella bash, and we spent most of the time getting whipped around by the headwinds pretending to race lest we get pulled from the event. With the early warning from the officials they would not wait all day for us, we figured we only had to NOT be the last cats out on the course. Thank God those 3’s had to do 6 laps, way to put it out there for the Bella quad squad, we barely managed to unsprint our finish when they rolled around for their final lap.

We did have one eventful inSUEdent (its not a race with Sue unless there is an incident.).
Her cosmic red target knee attracted a bee. While celebrating our victories, eating killer burgers and fries her knee just exploded in size. Sue is an anti doping activist and refused to get on the Velobella “medical program”, but with the three of us pinning her down, we managed to pop some benedryls into her mouth.

Check it out.

Oh and the doggies thank the kitty people for the killer burgers leftovers.

Happy End of The Season to Erika. You are an awesome teammate!