The Week That Was: Maybe Spring is Here?

After spending much of last week's TWTW complaining about about the thirty-third snowstorm to hit New York City we were somehow blessed with actual Spring-like weather for a busy Saturday of racing. Was it a coincidence that this blast of warm weather coincided with Easter and Passover? A blessing for all of the crazy NYC cyclists that brave awful early season weather to ride in circles in Central and Prospect Park? Who knows - we're just happy to finally be racing in semi-pleasant conditions as the 2018 road season somehow hits week five (yes, we have been racing since March 3rd). On Saturday the team kicked things off at the Castelli Series in Brooklyn where despite Erwin taking home second across the line we walked away with zero series GC points thanks to a messy neutralized, not neutralized, neutralized again and then not-neutralized last lap. Confused? Because so were we. But we'll have a more thorough race recap in the coming days, until then a few pre-and-post race snaps with the usual bike race rituals: 

Immediately after that successful (but in hindsight less successful than expected) finish and the prerequisite post-race team coffee most of the squad headed out to Rockland Lake State Park for the collegiate Metro Showdown race that happened to feature a handful of USAC fields. Stay tuned for Ted's race report but the abbreviated summary is that despite racing in Prospect Park first thing in the morning he quickly jumped in the decisive early break that ran away with the race, eventually finishing fifth. Meanwhile the rest of the boys back in the peloton (several of whom also spent the morning racing in Prospect Park) did their best to squeeze in some training once it became obvious that the break was long gone. Though our designated sprinter did make sure to express his feelings at seeing his lead-out man on the side of the road midway through the race. 

With holiday festivities drawing a good chunk of the team out of the city, Sunday was much more low key. We spent the morning screaming at the TV to encourage Mads Pedersen and his 50rpm cadence to get to the finish line at Flanders after spending the final few km's in no man's land. Once the second best bike race in professional cycling was finished (FYI #1 = Paris Roubaix, #3 = Strade is the correct ranking) we headed across the bridge for some low-key training miles with our friends from CityMD Women's Racing. After a tough week of training including our first set of 30/30's from Jacob at Cycle-Smart (more on this in The Daily Grind soon) and an equally tough day of racing on Saturday it was just what our bodies needed to close out the holiday weekend. Though we could have used some of the blue skies and sunshine from the day prior. 

READING, LINKS AND RANDOM FACTS

• "The winner in Flanders, 27-year-old Dutch racer Anna van der Breggen, took home $1,415. The winner of the CVR World Cup, Carey Conabeare, a 42-year-old professional gardener from the UK, pocketed a cool $7,800. Yes, you read that right: A recreational rider competing on a gaming platform earned more than five times the prize money than a pro who won a notoriously grueling World Tour race. In fact, Conabeare won more money at the CVR World Cup than the combined women’s prize purse in Flanders." This Woman Won $7,800 in a Zwift Race (Bicycling Magazine)

• "Eventually investigators obtained Moorcones’s customer list of more than 8,000 names. It was a rich hunting ground. Investigators found the names of pro athletes and forwarded the information to their leagues. Major League Baseball ended up suspending two minor leaguers. The National Football League was another matter. The Al Jazeera documentary had named six players as likely dopers, and the N.F.L. penalized not a single one. The Moorcones investigation yielded more names, which were shared with the league. The N.F.L. has penalized none of the players." At the Heart of a Vast Doping Network, an Alias (New York Times)

• "Q: Is Campagnolo a market factor? A: Not really a competitive factor. They are really a great brand, a classic brand. They're probably about $100 million in sales, with $60 million of that in wheels and $40 million in drivetrain. They are the historical, classic brand, but they're not really on the competitive or performance curve of what we and Shimano are producing." Inside SRAM (Business Insider)

• "Duke argues that we bet all the time: on parenting, home buying, restaurant orders. Betting is merely “a decision about an uncertain future,” and our opponents are not other people but, rather, hypothetical versions of ourselves who have chosen differently than we have. Her most urgent message is that we should all be more comfortable living with self-doubt—not for ethical reasons but for intellectual ones. Embracing uncertainty, she argues, makes you a better thinker. “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” she writes, quoting John von Neumann, the father of game theory." Annie Duke Will Beat You at Your Own Game (New Yorker)

• "Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does." Spent (Geoffrey Miller)

Parting Shots

We'll end it with some of our favorite shots from an Easter Sunday at the the Tour of Flanders:

Ignore the eurobeats and make sure to stick around for the last 15 or so seconds of this video....