Katie Kelly

My dad’s standing outside my bedroom, but it’s in somebody else’s house, a farm house, really, and the sun’s shining bright through the window, and I have no desire to wake up, and he’s saying, “You’ve missed your appointment with your career counselor. But it’s okay, she’s here, now.”

But he is otherwise very disappointed in me.

And it’s Bo Derek, but without the corn rows. And now we’re in a barn, and there’s hay, and sheep, and she’s disappointed with my career choices, she tells me. Al this exercise is a waste of time, she says, and now we’re in a shower, and it’s a co-ed shower, and all the men can’t take their eyes off of her, and she tells me she’s never worked out a day in her life.  See? It’s a waste of time.

Is it worth trying to understand what it all means?

—

I’ve raced four times so far this year, including the Menlo Park Gran Prix, the Berkeley Bike Team Time Trial with my friend and teammate Ralf, the Zamora Road Race where I swear I was almost blown off the course, and now the Orosi Road Race, which was last Saturday.

Orosi is my new favorite road race. It’s east of Fresno, in the Sierra foothills in the spring time, on sketchy roads, but the course is surrounded by fields of green grass and dancing cows and wildflowers, and 28 mile laps, and twenty of those miles I’m pretty sure are uphill.

My friend Richard let me borrow his carbon wheels. I think that this might have influenced my bias towards this race. I do not think that carbon wheels are fair, and so as soon as I get my braces off, you might imagine what my next self-improvement investment will be. Who cares if they’re not fair, as long as they’re legal.

I kept up with the climbers. I really can’t believe it. Only one got away, Rebecca Riser, at the beginning of lap two. And I’m laughing to myself, because as she started to ride away from us — and this is after pulling us up the climb on lap one, and down through the flats, and everywhere, basically – I thought, “You are crazy! Don’t you know we are going to eat you alive?!”

Anyway, we never saw her again, and then she won the Hanford Crit the next day.

I can’t believe I told myself that “letting her go” was a conscious choice, and that we’d ever catch her. Oh, the silly things that pop into my head!