The biggest mountain bike race of the season was Sunday (ORAMM) but Tipper (sales) was busy with a road race of equally intimidating proportions, the French Broad Classic. After a thorough and exhaustive interview, I’ll try and encapsulate Tipper’s race report as his original version in the spirit of the great oral folklorists was somewhat circuitous if not completely off-topic at times (and wildly inaccurate). Saturday’s road race: 40 miles of vertiginous climbing in the Mt Mitchell area. Much to Tipper and his teammates’ chagrin, the masters 50+ were grouped with the Cat 4s. Tipper, with wild hand gesticulations and dilated pupils, recounted to me how the pace was off the charts for the first 15 or 20 miles as he was summarily dropped like a baby on a freshly scrubbed tile floor. Bloggy’s knowledge of amateur road racing tactics is rudimentary at best, but having masters in a Cat 4 race is a recipe for disaster and goes against the laws of nature and/or human decency (Tipper’s words). Tipper also informed us that John Patterson was in his race and he was a former teammate of Greg Lemond at the Giro so therefore in the spirit of the most disjunctive syllogisms, Tipper competed in the Giro Saturday morning. He’s the fresh faced fellow on the far left. The scurrilous knave on the far right could be Teenwolf’s father:

Continuing with Tipper’s weekend of racing, Sunday offered a chance for redemption at the always treacherous River Arts District criterium course. Coupling a white knuckle descent and a cantankerous climb sprinkled with a few hairpin turns thrown in for good measure and you had the makings for racism at its finest. Sadly, Tipper would be dropped by the lead group and confused by the splintering of the field, racist officials would ask him to leave the course prematurely (perhaps thinking he had been lapped?). More wild gesticulations followed from Tipper (he was seated at his cubicle wearing his traditional post-lunch kimono, Verdi’s Requiem blasting from his Zune) as he tried explaining to Bloggy possible reasons for being jerked off so quickly. We can only wonder! After a few more minutes (what seemed like hours to cubicle-mate Matt Tag), Tipper wrapped up his weekend of woe and I vanished from the sales office in a most Nosferatuian manner. Let this be a lesson to us all, road racing can and will most likely be a very unfulfilling experience. To cleanse our collective palates, let’s see what those spitfire Danes at Bicycle Innovation Lab are doing with bicycle loan programs (The Bicycle Library) and all that junk…