Welcome Team Patterson Dental: Hillsboro-Roubaix & Dirty Kanza

It looks as if this could be the year of the bike. On Friday, we (Jeff, Marucs & I) had lunch with a branch manager from Patterson Dental--a national dental supply company--to start the formation of our new cycling team. Patterson has committed to be our number one sponsor and we also have commitments from a few other businesses. The new team jerseys will be ready by the middle of the summer. As Jeff put it, "this is the first time that being a dentist has really paid off." It's hard to believe that people are going to actually pay for us to ride our bikes.

But before we hit the streets in our official garb there are a few early season suicidal races on the schedule. Jeff and I are going to take our first serving of humble pie this coming Saturday at the Hillsboro-Roubaix Road Race--a 44 mile ride over cobblestone and rolling hills. The beginner's category, aka cat 5, was already full by the time we signed up, so we have to race with the cat 4 men. This is bad for a couple of reasons. First, the last race Jeff and I were in was the Tour of Kansas City, where we both raced cat 5. (That race was before we even knew each other). We were both dropped from the peleton about 1/4 of the way into the race and were left to fall embarrassingly far behind. I was so slow that Ginna was worried I had wrecked. The other reason for concern is the fact that we are certain to be racing in a field of cat 4 riders with a significant number of cat 3 racers, taking it easy early in the season. Our stated goal is to finish with the peleton. Secretly, we'd love to win a sprint for the finish and take home a trophy, but just as much as we want this, we also fear we could once again get dropped and forgotten about.

The next race on the suicide list is the Dirty Kanza. This is a 200 mile adventure endurance race through the Flint Hills of Kansas. The race has a 24 hour time limit and the goal is just to finish. The course is entirely on service and access roads. I've heard it is going to be very steep and difficult. This could be a punishing ride.

It's going to be a hard start to our first season with the new team, but the transition from almost sedentary dental student to amateur bike racer can't be easy. We've already began by taking long training rides, mimicking race situations. In the next few weeks we are going to incorporate some long, late night rides on dirt roads to get ready for the Kanza.

Still, with all of this, we still have to get through finals.