Chapter 36: National Championships

Mark

It was a good thing we had properly relaxed during our second holiday at the Baltic sea, because the end of the year was going to be hectic. Lydia was going to close out her cycling season in September with the US championship competitions, followed just two weeks later by the Pikes Peak race, followed by the Berlin, Chicago and New York marathons, all within seven weeks. That was going to be the most grueling schedule she had done since 1991, and I remembered all too vividly how that had ended.

Her form was good, so chances were she would make – to use a technical term – a shitload of money, but she could just as well end up falling flat on her face from exhaustion, as she had done during the London marathon three years ago.

Right now she was asleep, gloriously topless as most of the time when we were traveling aboard our plane. Since she had worn bugger all for most of the year, there wasn’t even a hint of tan lines on her perfect skin. What a difference that was to two years ago, when she had to roast herself on the deckchair in the summer every day to get rid of them. They now just never developed in the first place.

Fred and Jack, our pilots, took her habit in good spirits, no doubt not exactly unimpressed by what they were seeing. One would have thought their need to fetch a coffee would increase, but they were consummate professionals and took their job really seriously. They had also given us a definitive date for when they would be leaving – December 31st 1995, so we had a bit more than a year left to enjoy their excellent piloting skills. One thing that both Lydia and I were in full agreement on was that we would be investing in their company when they would open it in 1996.

Today though, we had a full complement of passengers. All four seats had a bum in it, as Meri and Femke were with us. Most countries ran their cycling championships as exclusive races, so the Dutch championships had only Dutch riders competing, the German ones had only German riders in it, and so forth.

The US being the US, had to do things differently, of course. While only American riders were eligible for the time trial, the road race was run like any other road race and the Championship was handed to the best placed US athlete. That meant Femke could participate to support Meri.

Unlike Lydia though, Meri and Femke were fully clothed. Meri knew that our Dutch friend wasn’t quite as much into nudism as everyone else, and by staying clothed she avoided putting pressure on her. Although, knowing Femke, once in the sanctity of our home in Pasadena, the upper half of that frock was going to be ditched, if not all of it.

The whole operation had presented us with a logistical problem though. Getting the bikes to America wasn’t much of a problem – the cargo compartment of our little plane was surprisingly spacious. Two team mechanics were flying over on a commercial flight, and I had by now enough practice to stand in for the team’s physio and team car driver, but we didn’t have a team car.

The solution came in the form of an idea from John. Since all our cars were in Germany, we didn’t have one in Pasadena. That had not been much of a problem during summer. We had just hitched a ride with Jonjo whenever we needed to go somewhere, but he was now back at university, so John had gotten some additional sponsor money out of his friend, and team co-sponsor, Bill O’Connor, who couldn’t withstand the temptation of having a car drive around Pasadena with O’Connor logos on it, as the headquarters of his rival company Bond Consulting were literally just a couple of blocks from our home.

This was why I would get to decorate a brand spanking new Merc with the team’s official paint job that would double as team car in future competition on US soil and as our personal transport for when we would be in Pasadena instead of Emden.

Femke

Marc had done an excellent job on the car. As had become the norm, the car wasn’t actually painted. The logos, stripes and other ornaments were made from foil and affixed to the car’s body. That way one could still sell a team car when it had become a little long in the tooth.

It was amazing to see how a guy, who looked like he could punch a nightclub bouncer into the weeds, was so nimble with his hands. Of course I knew that from first-hand experience, but he wasn’t only good at playing with his favorite toys – our tits – but he was good at artistic endeavors too. In a way he reminded me of that guy who had done the body paintings the year before. That too had been a rather hunky bloke with a knack for really good handiwork.

For now, however, I did enjoy the Californian sun – naked on a deckchair. Since I had only been an occasional visitor to Emden, and therefore worn clothing a hell of a lot more often than Lydia and Meri, I did have tan lines, and I wanted to get rid of them.

The ‘problem’ with that was, that you could occasionally nod off and wake up to a very busy tongue in your pussy, and it wasn’t always Mark’s. Of course there was no way I was going to say no to a damn good orgasm. I had had way too many missed ones in my life.

But that was small fry compared to watching the spectacle of Mark and Meri double-teaming Lydia in the evening. Damn what a ride...

Yes, life was good in California.

Lydia

Of course the fun and games were short lived, as we had to race for a national championship a week after our arrival, so we had to cram all the naughty fun into the first two days, and keeping it to slowly roasting ourselves in the afternoons for the rest of the week.

Like always, most of the day was taken up by training rides. At first I wasn’t too sure about it, after all the driving standards in America where nowhere near what was common in Europe, but we had found a good solution by sticking to rural roads outside the city and John had given Rhonda a week off, so she could drive her car ahead of us with a big honking sign saying ‘Cyclists! Stay in lane!’ on the roof of it, while Mark drove behind us in the Merc.

Of course, since her ass didn’t need no safe-keeping for no stenkin’ championship, Rhonda had made the best of the rare opportunities to have her rear-end properly seen to by my lover boy on two of the evenings.

In true team tradition, Mark boinked both Femke, Meri and me silly through the front door the evening before we left for Seattle. Why change a method that has worked before?

Mark

We all knew that the ‘good luck fuck’ was more of an in-joke than anything else, but I almost started to believe it. The time trial was held first and Meri took part in it more for lack of contestants than any chance to win it. This would also double as her training ride for the day.

Since we only had one car at our disposal, the organizers had scheduled Meri very near the start of the list and Lydia towards the end. That way Meri would be home before Lydia even started.

Seattle isn’t really a flat place, so there were quite a few sections that went uphill. They weren’t really long enough to emphasize Lydia’s knack for climbing, but what I could definitely see was that Meri was struggling with the cumbersome time trial bike on the hills and descents.

Now I had to make a call. Would I suggest that Lydia starts on a TT bike and switches to a normal one along the route or would we do the same that we had done in France the year before – letting her use a normal bike with aero extensions on the handle bars. Since I was essentially standing in for the sporting director, I didn’t want to fuck this up.

In the end the decision was taken off my hands when Meri rolled up to me directly after finishing.

“Put the extensions on her normal bike,” she urged me, still breathing heavily.

Hectic ensued. We only had ten minutes to get the job done, so we had to mount the extensions to the handle bars of Lydia’s bike while she was warming up on it on the roll.

Driving behind her I was still not sure we had made the correct call. Due to not using an aerodynamically optimized bike, she did of course lose time in the initial flat section of the route, only posting the sixth best intermediate time at the first checkpoint, but a gap of forty-two seconds was definitely not an insurmountable deficit as the road got more hilly.

I soon saw that she was in her usual flow – going at exactly the speed she was comfortable with and it proved to be good enough. Only twenty-six seconds of deficit were left by the second checkpoint and turned into an eight second lead by checkpoint number three. Two more hills and a short flat finish later, Lydia crossed the line, 33 seconds in the lead.

Femke

I wondered if my hotel room was sound-proof enough. I was pretty sure Mark and Lydia would celebrate that victory their style, with a wild boink. This meant our pokey little Dutch team had now two national time trial champions in it. There was no way we would be overlooked for bigger races from now on. I actually wept a bit when Lydia donned the stars-and-stripes themed national champion jersey on the podium, remembering how emotional it had been for me when I had won the Dutch championships in late July.

And I sure as hell had taken a long celebratory roll in the hay with Mark during that night in July.

Of course the really hard work was yet to come. The road race course was not much different in profile from the time trial course, so Lydia and I would have to get Meri over quite a few hills if we wanted to have her take part in a bunch sprint finish.

Lydia

Best laid plans and everything...

Our whole plan was basically pointless from the word go. We were three riders from our team, while some of the domestic teams had up to eight riders in the field, which made it clear that we could do little more than react to whatever tactic they were dictating.

And their tactic was obviously to hand out pain by the bucket load. The pace was murderous from the very start, with some teams obviously eager to get rid of any sprinters with fancy ideas. Meri had dropped back twice, but Femke and I had brought her back every time, but by now a group of four was out at the front with nearly a minute on the main bunch.

“Don’t have the legs,” Meri shouted at Femke in German, obviously to prevent people around us from sniffing out our plan B. “Go after them!”

Femke, who spoke decent German like most Dutch people from the border regions, cast a confirmatory glance at me and I nodded. She took off immediately.

As she wasn’t American, and therefore played no part in determining the national champion, the other teams were mostly indifferent to her shooting out the front of the pack in pursuit of the breakaway group. The last we saw of her was trying to bridge the gap to the escapees in full time trial mode.

Mark

Now I was in a veritable conundrum. We only had one car. I could stay behind the main pack, or overtake them to drive behind Femke when the organizers indicated her gap was big enough to allow me to do so. In the end I decided to rely on my instincts. If both Lydia and Meri had let her break away, that could only mean they weren’t confident that Meri would make it and had gone for overall position instead.

I carefully made my way past the main bunch and quickly caught up to Femke, who was in full time trial mode again. Since she didn’t have any aero extensions on her handle bars – those weren’t allowed in road races – she simply rested her forearms on the handle bars to assume a more aerodynamic position. Frankly, that wasn’t the safest way to ride a bike, but it was an effective one. She easily hit 30 miles an hour on the flat sections and eventually caught up to the four escapees after a very long chase.