Discipline prevails as I pass on the "Lobster Dog Ride"

So my friend Marc, who has a long history of bashing parking lot crits, went to Belgium and France to race and ended up concluding he was a "cycletourist." So now he lives in the Pyrenees and rides his bike a ton. I sometimes wonder about myself. Skipping a big money crit last weekend in Philly in favor of riding my favorite rural roads in the Berkshires certainly reflects the cycletourist urge. I'm skipping Nationals right now - at this point I don't need to do big races for experience, and I am not strong enough to go and really give it in either the TT or RR - so I am staying home and getting ready for Altoona. But this leaves a lot of time for training and I almost caved to the cycletourist urge, joining some friends for a 106-mile ride along the CT coast to buy and consume (yikes!) a "lobster dog." I also resisted the urge to attend the mountain bike festival Pedrosfest, where I could have gone and crashed a ton and had equal volumes of fun. But instead I went to a bike race, the Owasco Stage Race, and I am glad I did: it was good training and a reminder of all I love about grass roots racing. I raced hard and remembered what it is to call the shots myself, to do a decent job with this after Fitchburg. I have reservations about my racing in a women's open field (ever since I showed up to a crit as a cat 4 and raced the New Zealand national team), but I think it was ok. Many thanks to the promoter, Dean Furnia, to my last-minute host family the Carrs, and to the racers in our small but determined women's field.