Back On The Horse - September 1-2, 2001



This weekend was cool. 

Thursday practice again, which wasn't as good as last time, but was still
very good. (Maybe I didn't have as far to go this time?) I was trying not
to drag my feet (so to speak), so I don't think I went as quickly, right
from the start. Ted didn't separate amateurs and experts this week, so I
was out there with some fast guys some of the time. I had to remind
myself to stop and take breaks, because I was dogging it over and over
and over around the track, never getting anywhere, because I was so tired
and hadn't eaten. Made myself sit down and have a sandwich and take a
solid half hour off the bike. I got faster after that, thank heavens.

Dane finally got the TZ running, so I had my bike for Friday's open 
practice. That was... not as bad as I remember it being before, the time 
Ann and I went and did that together. Being faster helped, I'm sure, but 
I still didn't feel as fast on Friday as I did on Thursday. (And I didn't 
feel as fast this Thursday as *last* Thursday. Annoying.)

The Rock & Roll Welder had more good advice from Thursday: more gas out
of 2. I like the simple advice, not the "you could do a lot more of X
coming through Y" kind of advice, which doesn't take into consideration
any of what you might already be doing in Y. That kind of advice is
largely useless to me at this time, and as soon as I can figure out
*why*, I will tell the people who usually give me those kind of pointers.

Met friends of Galen's and Bruce's on Thursday night, because they were
up for Penguin. Friday night they begged us to take them out to dinner
(they were short on street legal vehicles that weren't staked down), so a
big group of us went to dinner in Scott's pickup and the Fuck Truck.  
Wound up with a failed u-joint coming back, which threatened to ruin my
whole day. However, we made a plan for fixing it (well, Dane and Scott
did), and that chilled me out some. JP slept through the whole thing, and
most of the ride back from Concord. Next time he's driving; he doesn't
get to have dinner coma in the Fuck Truck's cushy nest area.

I didn't write down my practice times on Saturday because they weren't
even ballpark of what I expected/wanted them to be, but I came to my
senses on Sunday and wrote 'em down anyway. At least I'm getting closer
to comfortable going faster in practice. I had to remind myself once that
riding the way I was riding wasn't going to take 8 seconds off my lap
times. That seemed to help.

The weekend schedule was all messed up because of the endurance race, so
the two races I entered wound up being back to back, almost, on Saturday.  
Once in practice, and once in Race 11, I got behind Debbie, who has more
motor than I do (Monster 750), but was going really slowly this weekend.
(I think it's her first weekend back since her crash.) Second practice I
got ahead of her early on, which helped, and Race 13 I don't think she
was in. I had another slow guy on an SV650 ahead of me that I finally
outbraked in Turn 1, but since I suck at passing I guess I'm going to
have to deal with people slower than me holding me up indefinitely. Or
maybe I'll grow more stones by the last weekend of the season.
Hahahahahaha. Right.

Finally corner worked again this weekend. I tried to stand in Turn 3 last
weekend, watching a race, and I realized that I was totally not ready to
do it yet. This weekend I worked in Turn 1, and it didn't suck too much.  
Ang showed up with her coworker who races (#85), and she corner worked
with me, so that was pretty neat. There were no crashes while I was
there. Of course, as soon as I left for my races, they had a 2 bike
crash. Wups!

I didn't know there were any races I could enter on Sunday, so I didn't. 
Boy was I bummed out after second practice when I was *just* starting to 
get into the groove and now had to stop. Arrrgggggh! Even worse was when 
I realized there *was* one race I could have entered. Wah!

JP had asked me to run the pit board for his endurance team in the
afternoon, which was a pretty unreasonable request. (3 hours in the hot
sun throwing numbers that nobody looks at out onto the front straight.
BORING!) I recall thinking something like, "Not if you were the last cute
boy on earth." but I wound up doing it anyway. JP and Lex were going to
ride Lex's bike, and JP had ridden it in practice. At the endurance
practice, however, I couldn't find the guys anywhere, at their pit, or on
pit row. I rode my bicycle back and forth, looking like a stupid tourist,
until about halfway through the practice, when they came rushing up to
pit row with... two more guys and a totally different bike. Now they were
on JJ's ZX-6 and had gotten Eugene in on the action as well, and had been
replacing the clutch until halfway through practice. Boy, oh boy. The
guys went out for practice, and somehow before the race I became "Team
Manager" because that's what they called it over the PA when they asked
for at least one rider and one non-rider on the endurance team to come to
the riders meeting. Somehow a whole lot of chaos distilled down into a
somewhat workable plan, and the race started off pretty well. People took
turns helping me run the board, but disaster struck when Eugene went down
in Turn 9. It took forever to get him across the track into Turn 10, and
then the truck stopped and picked someone else up before delivering him
back to us. All in all, with delivery, damage assessment, and half-assed
"repair", we were out for an hour. Eventually, though, we got back on the
track after a red flag, so JP got to ride a few laps and cross the finish
line. Yay! We were a very happy endurance team. 

Went and had dinner with JP and his family afterwards, and when we came
back, almost everyone had packed up and left, and all the vintage guys
had moved in. I was kind of sad, because it was dark early, and it feels
like the season is ending way too soon. But it was a really nice full
moon, though.

Sunday I packed up early to go home, to meet a man about a Blackbird. JP
took me out for a fab breakfast in the Checkered Past, as a thank you for
my endurance race contributions, and I did the longest loadup I think
I've ever done. I was constantly interrupted by fun and sociable people,
but Galen wound up helping me with the bikes, and that made everything go
a LOT faster than usual, so maybe it evened out after all.

I hate leaving the track early. Everything seems so... unfinished.




Sunday		Race 11
--------	--------

2:11.038	1:42:548
1:50.564
1:48.980
1:49.277
1:48.143
1:47.855
--------
1:52.643

1:54.931	Race 13
1:43.279	--------
1:43.876	  98.991
1:43.536
1:41.883
1:40.411
1:40.124
--------
1:44.006