I checked the official results for that one. Apparently, they counted Len (guy on the right) ahead of me in the "sprint". They placed Dan after us in the standings, but he stopped racing sooner (29 minutes instead of 39 for me and Len). He won the Citizen's race!

You're making me hungry.

He told me that was his first race, and he had a blast.

Do they de-bone it first? :lol:

Only Starbucks leaves the bone in.

My cousin had this 45 the summer the song came out and he played it incessantly. As if the A side wasn't sufficient torture, he'd sometimes play the B side over and over. This truly makes the two minutes a toddler sits in time out seem short by comparison.

"Put the bone in she asked him once more." I am soooo trying to behave. :innocent:

I'm happy to say, I've never heard that one before.

That's a shame :/

Rode 40 miles out of Ocala, FL today on our tandem and I exhausted my stoker. Usually, it's the other way around. She wears me out.

Smoking seems popular in Florida:

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5627/...63c85040_c.jpgOcala, FL by trsnrtr, on Flickr

Rest stop in Fort McCoy, FL

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/752/2...b25cdba8_c.jpgOcala, FL by trsnrtr, on Flickr

That cyclocross stuff is fun, even if you're not good at it (like me). There's a single speed class. :innocent:

I've heard the opposite about Gimbels. Longer, harder, hillier at the end. Separates the men from the boys. Maybe there's a shorter wussier route you're referring to, but it sounds pretty gnarly to me. Never got over there to do it. Nyack's hard enough for me.

As for the comment about about 'that's how weekend rides are supposed to be', I don't know about that. I'd say maybe 5-10% of bike weenies have enough snot to hang on a ride that fast, if you're not an amateur racer you'd have to be awful strong. I survive through a little fitness and 25+ years of wheel sucking savvy. Nobody sucks wheel better than Pcad. I know where the surges are on that route, when you absolutely have to be near the front.

Pcad's #1 Rule of Group Riding/Racing: It's NEVER too late to get dropped from a ride or race. #2 Rule: The weaker you are relative to the group, the more essential it is for you to ride near the front as much as possible.

Cigarettes are obviously cheap in Florida. The young lady in front of me on line at the supermarket the other day paid $11.76 for a pack of cigarettes.

I knew they were around $9 and change recently, but $11 and change? :eek:

That's what you call seriously hooked. Can you imagine, a carton costs over $100. :eek: :eek:

This morning, I was in a gas station in Georgia and she had a $100 lottery winning ticket. She bought two packs of generic cigarettes and the remaining ~$90 in more tickets. :)

I remember checking them out when I worked in a supermarket cashier in high school. $2.00 a carton. Yup.

I started at 30¢ a pack in the '60s and quit at 66¢ a pack in 1982. I had a 3 pack a day habit, actually about 3-1/3 pack a day.

I smoked for about 43 years. Just thinking about that number helped scare me into quitting.

Been free of that monkey for 10 years, now. One of my proudest accomplishments.

I don't know if you've had a chest x-ray but I had one for a surgery 10 years ago and the anesthesiologist said I had the lungs of a pack a day smoker despite having quit 23 years earlier. :(

I agree about the free part. I also consider it one of my biggest life achievements.

I've done Gimbels, both regular & long. Long packs in an extra 10 miles of Westchester hill country but nothing ridiculous. It's a slower ride than Rocket just because of the topography. If they wanted to separate the men from the boys they should include Whippoorwill Rd, a famous training stretch around here that the Gimbel's route avoids, even though they go right by it.

I've jumped into the Rocket Ride on a few occasions typically on Knickerbocker on my way further North to High Tor for the free draft...Kinda like 20 miles of cycling mass transit on that leg. I find the Rocket crowd to be a far more competent lot in terms of riding safety and awareness.

The mechanical damage to the lung from smoking is permenant. The reduction in cancer and heart disease though is real.
Amazing that the young still fall into the trap.

Oh boy.

The Rocket peloton is mostly seasoned amateur racers (an awful lot of fast 40+ guys) but in the summer it's full of ay carrammba boys from NYC who bomb red lights, which leads everybody else to chase them, which makes the ride far more hazardous than is necessary. You'll need an interpreter on that ride between May and October. It's like the Washington Heights friggin Vuelta.

:(

That there's good to hear.

I quit by attending a 5-day stop smoking class at a local hospital and they explained that to us. Lungs heal but do not regenerate. Still, it was disappointing years later to be told that I had the lungs of a pack a day smoker. Of course, that was 10 years ago so maybe I've averaged out to a 2/3 a pack a day smoker by now. :D

Must be universal. My retired racer group attracts a similar crowd mid-summer.

There is a local ride in Dallas that is called the south ride, but it usually refereed to by the people that ride it at the south race. It's a Sunday morning beatdown. I would be destroyed if I attempted it. It's full of current crit racers and sometime earlier this year they actually broke the strava record for the route at 25.5 mph for about an hour and 48 minutes.

https://www.strava.com/activities/406230150#9745026098