Alley Cat Relay

No pics yet... working on it.
I had a lot of fun last friday... first I set out to do my workout.
I needed to get some stuff at the bike shop so after I ran a short errand I rode over there and got some new tires and a couple other things.
While I was at the shop some friends of mine convinced me to come with them to an "outlaw" race in downtown L.A. I was told it would be some sort of relay but I had no idea what to expect and I didn't commit to actually racing but I said I would go and check it out with them.
When we got there it took quite a bit of time to navigate all the one way streets and dead ends of downtown L.A., but we finally found the "registration" area... someone just wrote "registration here" with chalk on the sidewalk!
We registered our team: Dick "Danimal" Neptune, Chegemelion(?), Doyle Diamond, Chet Bearclaw...It turns out that this was kind of a bike messanger race. You had to ride through downtown on open streets, navigate cars and stoplights (I was very conservative and safe, other riders not so much), pick up an envelope, race back (any route was OK!) to the Start/Finish area and hand off the package to your teamate who raced back to the pick up area and got a 2nd package, handed off both to the 3rd rider who got 3rd package raced back and gave all 3 to the 4th rider, who raced down, got 4th package, raced back and traded all 4 in to complete the race!
I realized that this race required lights, so I borrowed some from a friend who I met up with at the race (thanks Scott).
Our first rider, Dick "Danimal" Neptune hustled back to us in 3rd place. Our second rider, Chegemelion moved us into 1st. On my leg I dropped the guy who was right behind me in 2nd and came in with (reportedly) a minute and a half lead.
Chet Bearclaw rode a conservative leg to take us in for the win!
We won 260 bucks, which came out to be 65 each. Not bad for a night of fun, and I would even do it again but I would have to ride safely again too, which means that if someone is crazy enough to blow all the lights and they are also fast riders they would probably beat us... or get a ticket... or road rash/bruise/other.
I have been searching the web for pics but so far I haven't found any. As soon as I do I will add them to this post.
The next couple of days I'll be prepping for the race at Castaic this weekend, pre-riding, etc.
Ciao