A Summer Without Racing
2020. What a year it has been. Looking back at the “Countdown to Racing” Journal entry that I wrote in February its almost laughable how naïve I was about what was to come in the months that followed. From the early days of “COVID will be short-lived, right?” to the depths of the crisis in New York City, this year has been nothing like I expected.
While our collective focus has rightly been on more important topics than bike racing, I recently realized that 2020 is now officially the first time in the past decade that I haven’t completed a bike race. Sure, I technically started one early season race, but it ended with an early DNF and just a few weeks later racing in NYC officially halted. Needless to say, this is a big change from recent years where I pretty consistently ticked out 19 odd races per year, plus a few gravel events and other adventures:
My road results for the past decade, with some remarkable consistency in recent years.
All of which made for a very different kind of summer. Gone were the team road trips halfway across the country to race crits. Gone were the heckin good days of gravel adventures on the East Coast. Instead of hanging out with the incredible NYC bike racing community I somehow spent my days in the Spring riding every route on Zwift. And when that wasn’t enough, I ended up riding a virtual Everest and then some on Zwift.
I very much missed weekends on 9W with the squad, but in their absence I was fortunate to spend a good chunk of the summer riding trails as my lone socially distanced outdoor riding. And it turned out to be enjoyable enough that I may be picking up a MTB from our friends at Moots in the near future as I look forward to partaking in a whole different style of bike adventure going forward (especially as the outlook for racing remains uncertain).
But in the interim as we prepare for Fall’s arrival in NYC, I wanted to take one quick look back at a very unexpected summer. It was a summer where my camera probably saw 1/100th of its normal use given no events, no team rides, and no racing. But I was still fortunate to create a few memories along the way:
A New York City based cyclist and sometimes photographer. Part adventure rider, part crit racer, and fully obsessed with an English bulldog named Winifred.
Instagram: @photorhetoric
E-mail: matthew@tobedetermined.cc
