American Road Cycling

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Members Mail Answered

Date:      04/12/2006
From:    
Honcho Supreme,
Pallet World Amusement Park
Subject: 
Joe Straub in his own words, altered by Palletman


Original Submittal:

Just thought I'd share with you a re-cap, straight from the horses mouth.

With the Bethel Masters Class crown up for grabs in the last race of the season Joe Straub needed just one more win to ice the title. Several other riders were in the same position, that is to say a win would get them the title and deny Joe his brag.

The race started cautiously but fast. Twenty minutes into the race Joe broke away with several other riders. The breakaway fizzled out, despite Joe begging in vain for the others in the breakaway to work as a team, and the peloton hunted them down. With two laps left Joe dug deep; and, with another rider, he accomplished another breakaway. But after establishing a gap that Joe thought they could well maintain, Joe was shocked to find that he had been had. The other rider sat up and stopped working, and the chase group began creeping up to catch them once again.

Joe was now left out by himself with the peloton bearing down on him. However, with the race on the line, as well as the title, Joe once again dug deep. When the peloton overtook him, he took a brief break to gather his wits. He had just decided all was not lost, because he was still within striking distance of the leaders. Then disaster struck! Some "asshole," as Joe describes him, tried to pass between Joe and the curb on his right, with only 12" of clearance.

Of course, the "asshole" hit the curb then careened into Joe's handlebars. From that point on, as Joe describes it, "it was like a game of pin ball...", with Joe being the ball bouncing off the riders around him. First he hit the rider to his left, then bounced back into the asshole on his left. Eventually, with all his upright bouncing and rebounding duties out of the way, Joe finally went down for a couple more courtesy bounces across the pavement.

Close to the end of it, Joe had become sure that somebody was going to go down, and he was also sure that he did not want to see it, so he just closed his eyes. When he opened them back up, he noted that no bones were broken (a big improvement over past performances), so he got up off the ground and finished the race.

Good thing he closed his eyes and missed how frightful the crash was. If he'd seen it, he'd have decided to take a DNF, and we wouldn't have much of a story here.

Yours in cycling.

Palletman

 

American Road Cycling Response:

Whew...that was close. Joe almost won. We should probably take this opportunity to pass around the American Road Cycling collection jar and gather enough money to buy Joe a kayak so as to distract him from cycling. If he starts winning bike races as consistently as he is known to win 10k runs and the like, everybody else might just give up and stop showing up for races. We owe it to the cycling industry to get Joe interested in something else.

 

Editor's Note: Palletman did such a great job changing Joe's words around, SlingShot smushed the resulting text around a bit more for his own amusement. He did this after a lengthy discussion with Joe and Palletman at the Chester Train station today, when he and the Black Widow (finishing their own ride) ran into the other two finishing up their sprint workout on the Heritage Trail. The resulting text is therefore fairly accurate overall.

 

 

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