Author: Tom Saccone

A few of us headed down to Evansville this weekend to race the River City Criterium, a 2 hour drive but into the Central Time Zone, so we gained an hour of warm up once we arrived.  It’s in a nice venue in Garvin park sandwiched between the industrial part of the city and a middle class neighborhood.   The park plays host to a number of baseball fields on its perimeter, named after the New York Yankee and Evansville native Don Mattingly.  He played 14 years with New York and averaged .307.  That’s like you and me getting into the break at least 3 out of 10 races.  He signed in 1982 (the year I graduated from UCONN) for $30,000 and when he retired in 1995 he was making $4.5 million dollars.

This area has a gritty, working class feel that resonates with me and would  permeate the event.

So I lost a race last week.  Well, about 30 of us did.  But I was one of them and it’s been sort of bothering me all week.  It was the Speedway criterium in Indianapolis.  It was a fairly large Masters field of about 30 riders in the 50+ group, and no team had more than 3 riders in it, so there would likely be no dominating squad establishing the race pattern of attacks, counter attacks and parrys. It was fast in the final analysis.  21 miles in 48 minutes for an average speed of over 26mph. But that’s not so remarkable.  Anyone, well not anyone, but most of us can turn that over on our own and certainly in a group without too much trouble.  It’s the attacks, accelerations and their frequency and the math that create the chaos.    While I am not a disciple of numbers I am certainly a believer.    It was a relatively benign 4 corner course, most wide and sweeping.  You could pedal through them, but we didn’t really have to.