The cough and Hollenbeck's

Then winter came back and I got sick....for a couple weeks. Really set me back. Had a fever and the works for a few days, but then the coughing dragged on for weeks. Real pain in the arse. I finally recovered and got back out riding in time to race the Finger Lakes Cycling Club's local race at Hollenbeck's cider mill. I dropped out of this race last time I did it. One because I was far from fit, but more because of rampant negative racing. Combine the two and I just had no fun. Well this time was no different. I was struggling to re-gain fitness after being sick and when the race got under way it was obvious that everyone was content to just sit around and wait for me to do something so they could weld the field back together and sit around again. The team present that had a good portion of the race wearing their jersey played the same game, except they employed some nice blocking tactics. I think there is a misconception about blocking. People think that's a viable tactic that pros participate in. It's not. Lower categories might do it because they don't know any better, and apparently it happens in the higher cats of local races when there are no other teams to do anything about it. Anyway, it's not a classy maneuver. It's like scratching and biting at a boxing match. Especially when you out number everyone. Man up and race. When you aren't fit enough to get rid of that type of stuff it gets annoying. So I failed to finish our little local race again. Oh well, as an old teammate used to say, maybe next year.