Two Very Different Brooklyn Bike Races
I put it off for as long as I could, but after over a decade of racing bikes, life finally came for me. Despite a decent winter of miles, work and personal stress hit me in the face this spring. Last week, I lined up at the first women’s Prospect Park race of 2025 on the back of one of my lightest ever months of training.
Instead of actual intervals, I decided to take my lack of fitness head on and race through it, so I did three races in 8 days: Lucarelli & Castaldi PP series last Saturday, followed by the Chain Stretcher mountain bike race the next day, then the Verge PP series this weekend.
I survived, but I got put through the wash, at first figuratively and then quite literally as the rain poured down throughout the Verge series race.
The thing that sucks about jumping into racing after having ignored training peaks for months is that my head and my legs were in two different places. I’m extremely sorry to the person I cut off heading up the hill on the last lap of L&C last week. I could feel the momentum shift and knew I needed to be further toward the front if I wanted a shot at the sprint. But that acceleration to get into position was sadly the last one I had in me for the day and I, uh, maybe stood up and went nowhere and then you had to come around me. That’s racing, but also, maybe I could have had some self awareness. By the final sprint both weekends I was so far from the pointy end that I couldn’t even see who won the field sprint.
That said, in just a week I went from no sprints in the legs to one in the bank. Wisely or not, in the Verge race I spent it on the first QOM sprint, which I woulda won if I wasn’t quite so far back at the bottom of the hill and also if I hadn’t been getting edged out of sprints at the line by w.0’s Lucie Vagnerova since the beginning of time, regardless of my fitness level.
Luckily for me, Leah was there to save me from the consequences of my poor tactical choices, because she was able to follow the move that the rest of the QOM sprinters put together when they kept pedaling over the top of the climb, as I wheezed my way back into the chasing field, 15 or so wheels back from where I finished the sprint.
I’m not sure who had it worse: Leah, who suffered in a dwindling break that ultimately had her doing four laps solo in the rain for a podium spot, or me, who collected road grime coming off 25 people’s wheels in my helmet over the next 12 miles as I sat in the back pretending I didn’t feel like death, very slowly recovering from my one little intermediate sprint to roll in for 16th.
In my defense, there was a crash in front of me up the last climb, which had me putting on the brakes less than a kilometer from the finish, and spent my last match to make contact with the field again over the top, only to get gapped right off as everyone else started their sprint. I definitely woulda won but for that. And the fact that I came into the climb in the back, again. And also maybe because I haven’t put in the work….
The good news is that post-race coffee is always downhill from the finish.
A few photos from the 2nd of the two races by Matt, scroll down for more complete galleries from each
