Ah, Fitchburg…
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…
Yes kids, it’s that time of year again. No, not quite time for The Fitchburg Blog (click on the link to read versions 1,2 and 3). Nope, it’s time for the semi-annual decision of “should I bother to do this race because I am really not all that fit and don’t feel like embarrassing myself four days in a row.”
I love Fitchburg, but it’s the kind of love that I can only compare to an abusive relationship. You know, like where the husband starts off nice, then after a few years of living together in the trailer he starts to beat the shit out of the woman for not cleaning the ashtrays or deleting his porn from the TiVo. Then the beatings continue, the woman starts making excuses, thinking it really is her fault, and that if she could just remember to stir the gin and tonic before serving and do the laundry in a more timely fashion, the beatings would stop. “It’s my fault, I know he loves me. I can change him. I can make the beatings stop. I must deserve this.”
Like an abusive relationship, the woman somehow forgets the pain and suffering from the last beating (or simply blocks it out of her memory because the horror is too great to deal with) and keeps coming back. Oh yes. He beats her, she goes to her best girlfriend’s house to wait it out until her black eye goes down, he buys her flowers, says he’s sorry, had a bad day at work because Dale Earnhardt Jr. lost the race, and that it won’t happen again. I promise.
Yeah, Fitchburg is a lot like that. This year should be my 10th Fitchburg. I look back to the early days, and in 1999 the love affair began. It was new, exciting, different for me to be racing in the NRC stage race. Granted I was just a cat 4, but I was starstruck by the energy emerging from the pro peloton.
Years of mediocre finishes and DNFs brought on by crashes, mechanicals, and illness culminated in the highlight of my Cat 3 career - a win in the overall in 2003. While the early years of my Fitchburg career are marred with the typical ups and downs of a tumultuous relationship, 2003 was like the wedding day. And like anyone about to get married, I had second thoughts on previous occasions. I distinctly remember throwing my bike onto the front lawn in 2002 when my chain decided to fall off in both the time trial and the road race. I questioned why I did this. Why does he keep beating me? What did I do wrong? What did I do to deserve this?
After winning the race in 2003, I figured the beatings would stop. After all, this was love, this was marriage, marriage means commitment, right? We even registered at WalMart, for chrissakes.
But in 2004, the beatings not only continued, they got worse. Things seemed marginally better the year after that but he made it clear that the honeymoon period was over.
I must have done something nice in 06 because not only did the beatings generally stop, I earned myself a top 10 along the way. Maybe the husband was passed out drunk on the floor that night, or maybe he got a prostitute. Hell, maybe he was celebrating #8’s win at the NExtel Cup. Who knows, who cares? All that matters is he left me alone that weekend, and it was good.
So here we are, it’s 2008, and I am about to enter my 10th Fitchburg. Ten years in a row of pain, suffering, beatings, exhilaration, excitement, winning, losing, getting dropped, going off the front, crashing…
Is someone going to sit me down, make me come to my senses, and tell me to do what any self-respecting adult on summer vacation should do - leave the bastard! go to the beach - or am I going to blindly return to the scene of the crime, flinching when he raises his hand to hit me, hoping that maybe perhaps this time he’ll go easy on me? I believe there is a NASCAR race coming up soon - maybe I’ll get lucky and Dale Earnhardt Jr. will win. If things go my way, maybe he’ll go easy on me ’cause he’ll be too busy celebrating with a 12-pack of Busch and a carton of Winston Lights.
