Sunday, October 25, 2009

The Alleycat

Although it got shut down about an hour into it, this thing was absolutely crazy and I believe we all straight threw the city off it's rocker.

We had guys in attendance from Charlotte, NC all the way down to Hotlanta and from everywhere in-between.
I think in total there were eleven teams of up to nine guys, so probably around 100 people

This race was full of crazy reckless antics, but who doesn't love dodging roman candles shot down the street in one of america's most historic cities?

Rumor has it that two people got arrested for the fireworks/open containers charges, two other people ended up in the hospital, one girl got hit by a car, and I talked to at least 6 people who said they crashed somehow. I actually crashed as well, full speed, t-bone style into Zach. I shoulder-checked the asphalt and it left me with a blown out front tire and some sweet road rash on my knee; Zach knocked his hip pretty good and twisted his fork. But all that aside, here's a fact: the police station received 17 complaints in a 20 minute time period; like I said, we did some work..

The trick to this particular race was splitting your guys into multiple teams so you could get shit done on multiple fronts.

After the St. Phillips cemetery checkpoint, which was a full-team checkpoint, we sent one of our guys, Kip, on a obscure photo mission all the way to James Island for 150 points, while another two man team, with columbia local Nate Puza, focused on the close photo missions. Nate's two man team scored 430 points on photos alone before the race got called. Another one of our guys collected 55 to-go menus from the local spots for the most to-go menu challenge, beat that. Zach Mallard, Pete, and myself ran the actual checkpoints race and made it through to the Eastbay Playground checkpoint, and actually won the Wheel of Death competition with 15 laps just before it got called. I think the general consensus of everyone in the end was that we wanted to finish out the race, regardless of the negative police interaction.

But reluctantly, we all said screw it and just went to the after party at Ed's place. Overall the party was pretty fun. I got the feeling that a lot of the racers didn't end up showing, but it's cool, we still burned threw three kegs. At nine, we headed across the street from Ed's for some sprints. The sprints were going off pretty good; in one of the heats, the guys from Charlotte took first, second, and third out of five. I got a bad start in my heat, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise cause around the second turn of the mile loop the guy two riders in front of me got nailed by a car that blew through a yield sign. His name is Nate, and he's from columbia. He's going to be alright, but the paramedics that came to the scene said he might have a concussion and some possible back damage. After all that, we basically put an end to the nights events and went back to the party to give out all the schwagg raffle style and have a beer in honor of Nate. The DJ was happening for sure, the only downside was that he was upstairs in some backroom; so for all the party people outside, you couldn't really feel the music, but apparently the neighbors could because when eleven 'oclock rolled around, so did the cops. They shut down both the ride and the party that night, bastards. So the raffles were cut short, but word from Mr. Samford is that the rest of the kit WILL be raffled off by the spokecard numbers and people will be notified via internet if they win...So good luck to everyone, see you all at the next race.

roach

No comments:

Post a Comment