Pictures above and below- Written post to follow….

I arrived early at 135th street. I was cold and I immediately went over to the stone wall at the edge of the sidewalk to hide from the wind screaming across the Hudson. I looked out over the river, and then sat on the ground, out of the breeze, to wait.

Niko was the first of my teammates to show up, rolling up Riverside. He didn’t see me sitting there until he came to a stop across the street and slowly looked around. When his eyes landed on me I waved, but he didn’t wave back, he just pointed west, slightly over my head. What he could possibly be pointing at in the air over New Jersey I couldn’t imagine. Captain Sully doing a repeat for Hollywood? I thought it might be some kind of practical joke, so I didn’t get up.

He kept pointing with his hand, and then with his chin, for emphasis.Then I recalled hearing– sort of in one ear, before I left the house– Brian Lehrer talking about the Space Shuttle flying into JFK on the back of a jet.

The thing was pointed straight at us. I thought you’d have had to go out to the airport to catch it, but here it was, this American icon, flying right over our heads, on a freakin’ tour of the city, apparently.

It was like traveling through the history of my lifetime, watching this ship travel by so close. The advent of the shuttle eclipsed the era of lunar missions that I watched on our black and white Zenith as a tyke, skipping school for the morning (displaying an early predisposition to the sort of hooky I was playing today). It was the big science of it’s day, the continuation of the space race, part of the last act of the cold war. Was it the Reagan Era when we first saw this thing, or one of it’s sisters, take off? Carter?

Then there were the plumes of smoke in the sky on the TV setup specially outside the media equipment dispensary at the Art School. Repeated over and over and over. A communal sense of tragedy and loss.

And then there was the Canadarm, lifiting payload from the payload bay, over and over on the nightly news in Canada. (OK only Canadians remember the Canadarm.)

Of course, a jet flying low over the city always touches a certain nerve. But this was clearly not just a jet. It was a jet with a jet-like passenger. This thing flew into space (or: was the prototype for others that did). Amazing. Now it was headed into a new phase- retirement.

Ahem. Well I’m not there yet. So let’s just think of the shuttle living in dog-years, while I spend this portion of my human years still working and doing the occasional interval workout, and, ideally, not exploding.

Portions of this post brought to you by:

I mentioned Jeff Goldstone, The Cambridge NY local (from Los Angeles) who drove Press 3, in my Battenkill write-up.  I didn’t mention that his friend Ben Shapiro, from NYC, was in the back, just along for the ride. I sent Jeff a link to the post. Ben emailed me a compliment when he got the link and had looked at the pics. Then he wrote “Maybe will run into you again sometime in the city…”.

It took a day. Not even 24 hours, really. I was riding back home from Central Operations, up First Avenue, and I came across Ben, toodling up the bike lane on an old 10 speed, on his way to the Starrett Lehigh building. He was going to pick up some Blue Ray copies of his documentary on photographer Gregory Crewdson, and then he was off to New Orleans to show the film there.

He told me the documentary will be at Film Forum in the Fall. I’ll be looking for it.

Thanks to our friend the talented, prolific, and apparently very lucky (he got tickets!) photographer Wolfgang Wesener for this picture freom the recent Kraftwerk show at MoMA in NYC.

This year, once again, I raced the Battenkill Pro-Am race on Saturday. And I felt great. Until I didn’t. Then everything was one big cloud of dirt, as a good portion of the pack went by me. The course was dry, dry, dry this year, and super loose in places. Golf-ball-size rocks were flying up and smacking into down tubes and chain stays, making nasty cracking noises. I juggled one on my thigh for a few pedal strokes, while spitting out some dust. I kept thinking of a line from the movie “The Road to Roubaix”, about the lead-up to that race: “None of these bikes will ever be race professionally again”. Personally,  I’ll be checking my frame for cracks for at least a few months.

Every year I do a little worse, it seems. It’s a good thing the cyclist’s book of excuses is so thick. I will have no trouble finding some for next year, too.

The hardest part, for me, was the hour after the race. My wife had done a spectacular job of shepherding two very small children between feed zones, passing me a bottle, and moving on. But somewhere in that dirt-road scramble on the older child lost, apparently, everything he had eaten in the previous month. The car clean-up fell to me. I was lucky the hotel had a hose.

We drove- windows down- to Saratoga Springs to celebrate a friend’s birthday that night. The first words out of the Trooper who stopped me on the way back were: “Your tail lights don’t work!”. Then he discovered the car was due for an inspection– two weeks earlier.

The second cop to stop us, yards from the hotel, took a few moments to come to terms with the paperwork the first had left me. “You’re a hot mess”, he said.

We stuck around the next day for the Pro race, or most of it. We left before the finish so we could get back to Manhattan in the last glow of daylight, without any additional forced encounters with law enforcement officials.

Thanks to Jeff Goldstone, who piloted Press 3 around the course on Sunday, like a pro himself.

Z on the way to meet his 4PM coaching client (and 2032 Olympic Pursuit hopeful) in Central Park.

The new mags- Issue Number 3- arrived today from the amazing Hemlock Printers in Vancouver BC. They look amazing. There’s a little story inside the mag about this very same FedEx counter….

If you haven’t heard, the launch party is  tomorrow night- see below.

Out drinking with teammates Crashed in Race and Slammed by Cargo Van. Fucked Up Knee and Pneumonia couldn’t make it.

Our local may be “The Largest Bicycle Racing Club in the United States”, but, after a lot of noise about enforcing field limits, it was rain and cold that kept the numbers down in Central Park this morning. Just a handful of the truly committed (truly nuts?) rolled up for the season’s first Power Points race.

The Power Points format means a sprint for points on every lap up Cat’s Paw. Best done with some mud in your teeth.

It’s coming! April 6th at Ground Support Cafe in SoHo. See you then.