A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 7

Well I soldiered on, of course, my heart beating wildly out of rhythm, like a toddler dropping marbles or Lincoln Logs¹ onto a toy drum, sounding more of a horse-gallop beat than a regular metronomic beat. Why am I too prideful to pull out of this race when my heart is literally -- medically -- not in it? When it makes no conceivable difference to anyone on the planet whether or not I finish? In fact staying in the race probably redounds to my discredit, not only if I expire on Telemark Road alone in a lycra costume and clown shoes, but if I do survive and finish, for anyone later scanning the results – a friend, someone who scanning the results has typically found their name somewhere near my name in a weird sort of Baader-Meinhoff² that’s actually fully explainable, because the two of us ride at roughly the same pace at two or three races each year, and we may be complete strangers, but we often find ourselves in each other’s general proximity on the computer printouts and PDFs.³ So as far as this particular race goes, one of those strangers might be mildly pleased to see that I’d fallen out of contention, but what are the chances? Pretty much zero, and this raises the interesting sort of epistemological question of : How do people use race results? Of course, they obviously wish to have the best possible finish, represented by the highest placing in the overall results as well as the secondary markets of age and division, no question about that. And the regular mid-pack racers who will never be contenders, many of them (us, me) are also spectators, observers, we take an interest in the top 100 places, say, or the top 10. We recognize the same names – I was surprised as hell that Jonny Page won the FT40 this year, that’s a great sort of consolation for his crap year in European cyclocross last year, and pleased to see that Jeff Hall nearly won but at least got second – and then running my finger further down that hallowed first page of results see the Oftedahls, the Eppens, Brian Matter, Jesrin Gaier, Marko LaLonde.4 And the truth is, we fantasize a little bit about what it must be like to be that strong, genetically gifted, underemployed, single, young. So yeah, the immortals get due deference, but it's sort of cancelled out by schadenfreude too, as I'll get to in a moment.


We each have a constellation of friends that we ride with, and in those constellations there are always one or two brighter stars and a bunch of much weaker stars – me, I’m more of a small satellite or moon that merely reflects the light of much better riders, not to be maudlin about it, but that’s a fact Jack —but that’s just the immediate guys and gals that you run with socially, and then beyond that, you can see other constellations and recognize other stars, and they don’t know you or give a shit who you are, you’re just pack filler to them. Not that they’re mean or even aloof, at least not meaner or aloofer than any other cycling scenario, you just don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. And not that they really matter in the grand scheme of things, either, because of course they don’t. Or rather, it’s all relative. It matters what your POV is, where you want to put the lever of your attention. I mean, look: there’s a pretty good chance Jonny Page, the freaking champion of the 2008 FT40, won’t even put it on his racing resume, because he’s a professional athlete who normally races World Cup CX, so not that he doesn’t get bragging rights of course, because he does, and by extension it sort of rubs off on all of his buddies locally. (Page’s a friend and occasional ride-along of the Larson guys, since his wife is from that neck of the woods, and I’ve been known to sport that LCR kit and chum around with a couple of other LCR fringers including the namesake and team sponsor himself, Mike Larson -- a great guy — and on top of that I’ve had a chance to interview Page a few times for various VeloNews magazine gigs, so those are factual situations that sort of create awareness, connections, interest). But you know it’s a point to point citizens mountain bike race, not even a USCF-endorsed event. So but what I’m saying is that we’re all the stars of our own movies, check, and occasionally one of our friends or acquaintances or even just a name that we recognize in the results, one of these folks has a cameo in the movie of our lives, so the point – and here I’m going to apologize for constantly insisting that there is a point, it sort of begs a tautological question— the point is that we (1) read the general results to see where the immortals finished, and always take a moment to indulge in some schadenfreude because you know only one person can win and therefore everyone else, even those Grand Stay and Flanders snobs, is by definition a loser just like me but more important, we (2) look for our friends in the results, and of course naturally compare times and paces and try to gauge that way whether our race was a success, whether it aligned with our expectations. And when the hard fact of our finish time is really disappointing, and can’t really be rationalized away – very slow course this year, everyone was five minutes slower than last year, crash right in front of me on 77, flatted at Martell’s Pothole, extreme cramping at mile 34, had a GI tract issue, etc. — then we say merely that we finished, that it sort of sucked, that the experience did not meet our expectations, and you know, I think I’m just going to bag it on this race, it’s a bad time of the year in my normal circadian cycle, I’m always on the backside of my conditioning anyway, blah blah blah, and yet like geese flying south every fall, or you know we find ourselves back up there in September, doing the same thing with roughly the same people for what turn out to be the same reasons. But so I often shift emotional gears so as to preserve my fragile self-image5 that I learned from the little lady, my dear non-cycling, non-racing wife who in her wisdom and decades of yoga practice, reminds me to be “good in the middle,” which sounds like maybe good dietary advice, or advice about sportsmanship in the trenches of those who will place in roughly the middle third of the entire race, but it’s actually this idea about managing your performance from an emotional point of view. I’ll try to put it simply here, if I can: It’s about riding well, not necessarily riding fast. In a race, of course, riding fast factors into riding well, and I’m not really talking about riding in a technically adroit way, but riding… just riding well and feeling good about it, especially in the toughest middle parts of a race when you’re equidistant from start and finish, when it seems like a miserable and relentless thing that you’re doing, and you maybe allow yourself to wonder why you’re doing it. Good in the middle reminds you – reminds me, a pretty much ignorable weenie on a bike, no threat to anyone at all – why I do this outwardly idiotic and irrational thing, and how the answer to that question is of course not unrelated to but at the same time isn’t entirely dependent on what my finish time is.

1. The smallest ones, about the size of Chihuahua turds
2. An interesting factoid about Baader-Meinhoff: Not exactly synchronicity, but when you learn a new word and then you see it everywhere, with seemingly paranormal frequency. The phenom got its name from a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, who described having that experience when first learning about the German communist guerillas of that name. It got coined in the newspaper's reader bulletin board, a sort of potpourri of non sequitrs and anecdotes and general reader junk-drawering.
3. From photographs, I'm fairly certain that exactly the same person was skiing behind me at the Birkebeiner for about four years in a row, when I got my little package of event-endorsed photos, and I'm pretty sure the person in those photos, over my left shoulder wearing tinted glasses and a knit headband, was Greg Marr, the founder and editor of Silent Sports magazine who died tragically of a heart attack. While skiing. But not during a race.
4. Just a random list from memory. I think maybe I've met one of the Oftedahls once, and I mention Marko probably because his brother Jesse won last years FT40 on aforementioned torture machine, a singlespeed -- don't even get me started on the 29er fad -- but DNS'ed this year due to the flare up of an apparently chronic illness.
5. One might justifiably ask what purpose ego and self-image and dignity really play in an average rider in the middle of the pack. Vanity, all is vanity.

A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 6

So the last time we checked in, your noble but somewhat battered and gastrointenstinally chastened correspondent had made it past OO, prudently avoided the panther sweat in paper cups, but also feeling a little nauseated from (1) the apparent bug in my gut, sort of turbo-charging the normal pre-race squirts and (2) the cheap gatorade, purchased at 4:00 AM at Marketplace, a store that is suspiciously cognate with Rainbow foods in the Twin Cities, same signage and color scheme and fucking lame organics department -- and answer me this: why is a state known popularly as "America's Dairyland" seemingly devoid of any good decent cheese, I mean doorstoppers of fake orange Colby and Cheddar? And like generic Land O' Lakes butter? And Kemp's milk? Seriously, that's effed up -- so but the Gatorade, I mixed it way too strong, thinking I would be compensating for a lack of any sort of powerbars or goos on my person, but instead feeling it get kinda gummy and backuppy in my stomach, so grabbing water just water at every stop whenever it's offered and convenient. And you know, Firetower Hill is always a bitch not because it's insanely long or even insanely steep, but it comes after roughly 25-30 miles of 18 MPH tempo riding, so the legs are pretty softened up, and maybe even getting crampy, and it's hard to keep spinning up that long somewhat baby-heady climb, with its three or four steep almost technical ramps, but most self-respecting MTBers who consider themselves technically sound riders consider it a point of pride to ride the thing no matter what, and so here is another place on the long route from Hayward to Cable where, if you're wanting to spectate at a place where racer emotions run high and hot, this is a good place to hear a blue streak of simple expletives, and occasionally riders yelling at each other impulsively, pissed to have some roadie doofus pick a bad line and spudlock and fall over and forced unclipping and a walk of shame. I was sure I heard the voice of Hollywood Henderson at the top of the climb, a traditional gathering spot for ne'er-do-wells, beer drinkers, well wishers, dogs. But no. I believe I later saw photographs of him in his HWood kit there at the start and later looking very much distressed at SkinnySki.com, and in any case, it was not him hooting and hollering at the top of Firetower hill, but a group of regular-looking yuppie locals who were offering sincere encouragement but alas, no beer or cigars or any other gaggy kind of thing like that. And from here, a pretty decent fast and non-technical descent. But I'd pretty much given up on plan B at this point -- which, if you'll recall, was to start pouring on the coals in the last third of the race, where I've traditionally picked up 20 or 30 places by virtue of all that mind-melting road mileage I banked in the Spring. So Plan C, which is really no plan at all but more of a primitive survival mode, is to sit in and keep a respectable steady pace, not blown up by any stretch of the imagination, but just not feeling all that great either, and not long after making this decision, I felt my beating heart go into a cycle of arrythmia, which is bit like getting lightly punched in the chest every so often, and not always accompanied by what you'd expect would be a serious sudden decline in general perception about well-being, and the actual performance of the "engine." Worst case of arrythmia I think I'vve ever experienced, sustained and repeating and just really a bummer. Did I want to die alone in the gravel on my back on Telemark Road? Sure, there are worse ways and places to die, but there are lot better ways and places to, y'know, shuffle off this mortal coil -- like for starters, say 20 or 30 years in the future, in my bed, surrounded by like grandchildren or great grandchildren or something. So: When do I drop out of this thing, and swallow my pride and just sag-wagon it back to the beer tent?

A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 5

I want to take a moment to consider the clunker toss, a very much underappreciated event on Sunday Funday at the FTF, and this year that was a criminally under-attended thing, the whole day I mean, so including the clunker toss, the “hammer jammer” hill climb – which inexplicably this year was turned into an uphill MTB time trial instead of the traditional, more absolute competition to see who could make it the furthest up an impossibly steep former ski hill, so steep in fact that even if you put the nose of your seat at the uncomfortable threshold of your anus, and really get your center of gravity low and forward, you still could end upside down even if you did have the slow-twitch muscle fibers, the raw sort of Russian weight-lifter power to keep forward progress—the log pull, the “Cable Crit,” really an insanely short short-track event that tends to be dominated by the showoffs who finished top 20 or so in the FT40, each heat taking roughly just 2 or 3 minutes. The whole thing has a heavy cloud of sadness to it, an anti-climactic, morning-after feeling like we’re all desperately clinging to another few hours of “fat tire fun,” the smoke from the hamburger grills wafting around, the guys at the beer truck looking sort of abandoned, me with a bottle of beer that I don’t feel self-conscious about uncapping at about 11 AM, and weirdly about half the porta-potties gone from the site, as if (1) there was some desperate collective GI-tract event going on somewhere else that required immediate relocation of half the biffs, and (2) sadly acknowledging, maybe even contractually between the festival and the biff providers, that just not that many people are interested in hanging around for the Sunday events. But I for one am and do, because my seven-year-old boy plans a lot of his long long long year, cognitively speaking, around how/when he will completely dominate the kids’ bike rodeo events, such as the very short XC event (like about not even 1000 meters of grassy racing around a copse of balsam firs next to a weedy old Telemark parking old, put down I suppose way before the original chalet burnt down in like '78), the kid’s log pull, which I think it would be safe to describe as more of a yule log pull; a “slow race,” which would normally be called a track-stand competition, except even the most talented kids seem to require a tiny measurable forward progress to stay up, like a lot of their dads do; and some other sundry events like usually a weird relay or shuttle-run type of thing involving piles of discarded dress shirts or rolled up newspapers. Next year, I swear, I’m going to get the boy into some real bike races, and maybe forego the kid’s events at Sunday Funday unless or until they are a little less infantile. I mean infantile is fine, if you’re an infant, but the boy has been dominating this stuff for like three years now, and he’s clearly a cut above a lot of the other kids who are wearing street clothes and riding one-speed Magnas (Magnae? Magni?) and like 10 year olds with baskets and training wheels. One year, there was an awesomely passionate girl about his age, and she even had a little kid-sized CamelBak on, and grip shifters, and I think her name was “Reese,” which was a name the boy had never heard before, and he thought it was “Grease,” and this girl was pretty good and gave him a run for his money in most of the events, most notably the lame XC race. Though he won, I persisted for the following three years (and counting) in badgering him about how he needed to “figure out a way to beat Grease this year,” and that was one of those little Tourettic cruelties I allow myself because he’d naturally get a little pissed that I was either too addled to remember that he’d actually won the race, or that her name was actually “Reese,” and/or more likely both at the same time, his goofball pops just fucking with him, though not in those words of course. So but the clunker toss. How do you throw a very heavy bike, with a goal of maximizing the distance between yourself and the very heavy bike? Would you pick it up by the wheels and spin around and throw it like a track & field hammer? So the FTF has had the same yellow Schwinn Varsity for this event for years, and I've never attempted it, have no desire to attempt it -- it has a slipped disk written all over it -- but I am slightly obsessed with this whol idea of the best, most efficient way to throw a bike the longest possible distance, and I am quite certain that the majority of people are choosing the wrong angle of attack when they pick the clunker up by the wheels, that is with one wheel in each hand, and it would be a different story if the bearings were seized or the brakes were permanently engaged, but with free-rolling wheels, I am convinced that you don't want to throw the clunker by the wheels, but maybe get a hold of the seat and really get cooking in a tight circle like a whirling Dervish, and then a perfectly timed release to send that Schwinn Varsity, I don't know, 25 or 30 feet. So but my point is ultimately this: I know there are reasons to have the FT40 on Saturday. Having it on Sunday would be a little like a Jewish wedding -- no one can really hang around and drink and really sorta go off the rails on a Sunday, with work on Monday. So but: Why not have the kids races and all those other events either on Saturday afternoon, or maybe even Friday?

A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 4

As previously mentioned: If the length and rambling nature of this enrages you, well, you know you're getting your money worth, you're getting good value here, not something to be taken lightly in these desperate times, if you can't shop on price, at least shop on value, and make your dollar -- or the cognitive equivalent, your attention -- stretch as far as it can. Also, stock up on staples like rice, flour, bottled water, and solid gold. Conversely, you can continue in your restless quest for instant gratification, for self-realization through high-volume, low-density data, goods, services, ignoring all the warning signs, rushing headlong into better, faster, lighter, pithier, by going ahead and reading the extremely shorter version here.

There are very few times in the flat Midwest when you need your granny gear of course and in fact the Fat Tire 40 rarely requires even a middle ring, and it's tempting to think therefore that it’s a great race for a singlespeed, and maybe it is but not for a person with knees like mine, which work just fine but have to be sort of babied/pampered in specific ways such as not trying to spin at 120 rpms, egg beater fast, or conversely grinding at less than 10 rpm desperately clawing my way up a ramp like a spider in a wet sink. Those two scenarios -- precisely the two scenarios played out beautifully in the FTF -- are hell on the knees, my collateral ligaments or ACL, maybe a medial meniscus, whatever, it’s like a steak knife stuck into the side of the knee, which is weird because otherwise no problem riding (with typically, but not always, a geared bike) in the 50-100 mile range, or XC skate skiing in the 30-50K range, but jogging 1 mile would put me out of commission for a day or two waiting for that painful inflammation to die down a bit, gimping around grumpy but refusing to see a specialist, have it scoped at least. It’s worth noting that my father has bad knees and also refuses to see a specialist, which is funny since he himself is a specialist (retired), though an OB-GYN, and therefore not the sort of specialist he’d go see anyway, but the difference between us is that his bad knees keep him from doing several things that he used to love to do – alpine skiing, jogging, tennis – whereas my knees prevent me from doing things I don’t actually want to do anyway. Like jogging and skiing classical, and even now that I think about it backpacking, which like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer feels really great in the moments immediately after a cessation of the activity. Thus riding the FTF on a singlespeed, a very stylish and manly thing to do for sure, but maybe something to do with more of a touring mentality rather than a racing mentality. So but why? The singlespeed in theory is a kind of subversion of the industrial bicycle complex, you know more/bigger/faster/lighter especially expressed in more gears – I can’t even keep track, but I assume there are now mountain bikes with 30 gears, as there are (theoretically) with a road bike equipped with a triple chainring – but the metaphysical idea is to get back to the simplicity and joy of riding, the silence of the lambs, getting away from being wrapped up in the equipment and financing it on an annualized basis, the extraneous moving parts, and sure the excess weight of gears and gear ratios that are simply overkill, and less about improving the quality of the ride and more about improving the revenues of Chinese and Japanese manufacturers, and the supply chain leading from them to us. But then of course the singlespeed idea itself has been widely commoditized and fetishized, and now it’s entirely possible to commission the creation of a singlespeed worth many thousands of dollars, which is part of why Keith Bontrager, once a remarkable anti-consumerist champion of improvised junker singlespeeds has come in for some low-flying subcultural derision being what most assume to be a massive corporate sell-out as if anyone cares about that sort of simple moral calculus anymore, so you have basically a polymorphous anti-consumerist consumer subculture, and one that BTW I think is on the verge of jumping the cultural shark, as it were, and the early adaptors and contrarians and frankly punkrockers that “invented” singlespeeding will move on to whatever is next, probably Dutch commuter bikes with fenders and kickstands and platform pedals and even old-fashioned Sturmey-Archer internally geared hubs (and the bitching modern Shimano versions thereof) are already displacing fixed gear setups on urban bikes, or more probably the whole utility bike Big Dummy/XtraBike scenario and Christiana trikes and whatnot. Cyclists like every other living and breathing member of an essentially Godless conspicuous consumer culture want to belong to a tribe, not too big please, because we want to feel special vis-à-vis others showing the outer trappings of a similar passion, hence the hostility between roadies and mountain bikers, between geared mountain bikers and singlespeeders, between cigarette smoking hipsters on fixed gear bicycles and lycra-clad leg shavers on the idiotic quest to actually ride to the suburban Velodrome through a hell of pickup trucks and crap-tastic trunk highway shoulders, between Hairyleg Baggyshorts and Nuthugger Leghorn. This subcultural hair-splitting is maybe the natural result of too much information in an environment of self-identifying that is basically competitive; the availability of information devalues it unless or until you find rarified, counterintuive information to take on board, to install as personal preferences, even (what appear to outsiders as idiotically) self-annihilating fads like brakeless fixed gear urban riding, the cycling world’s equivalent of being Goth. So but my point was that there is something internally contradictory about racing a singlespeed bicycle, something logically inconsistent about it, if the idea is to strip the experience of riding off-road down to its bare essentials, not to negate speed but to negate competition from the deal, like how you just don’t want to see plaid zipper pants and Misfits tee-shirts on the runway during Fashion Week. But maybe I’m not fully understanding the component of masochism in consumer trends, the incidental stylishness and credibility of crashing without a helmet and “walking it off” and posting snapshots of garish face-plant injuries on Flickr, or the whole fetishistic snuff film phenom on YouTube, the kids knocking their own teeth out and the guy behind the camera says “Oh” and “dude” a lot and then laughing nervously, then almost crapping his pants in mirth, when the kid who just crashed his BMX directly into a concrete abutment can’t form fricatives and is thus reduced to mumbling the word Huck. Hucking shit. And that’s nothing compared to the sort of merit attached to the crashes and injuries of fixie riders and messenger “culture,” and it becomes another signifier of membership in a tribe that any normal person in his right mind would not or could not want to join, thus self-excluding and self-selecting, and racing a singlespeed in a marathon bike race seems to me a sort of weak, watered down version of that same sort of subcultural anti-meritocracy, but dang it is fun to ride silently through the woods feeling unencumbered by complexity, redundancy, &cet. So but here we are at highway OO upwind of Seeley, Wisconsin, and this is not actually the halfway point as it is literally in the Birkebeiner ski race, but it really begins the period of attrition, and smart to take in the crowd and grab a banana and a cup of water, I never take the generic “energy” drink these kind people are hawking because, again, that’s gastro-intestinal Russian Roulette in my experience, and I’ve finished races with Enervit or some other space fuel doubled over with backed up flatulence that took 9 days to fully work itself out. It has started to rain, full on. A cold rain. I’m still not feeling too good, but I’m looking forward to the long sections of gravel road that give offroaders an annual taste of roadie mentality, planning and executing the perfect bridge-up, negotiating for pull throughs, looking back into eyes of ignorant MTBers who don’t understand the basic concept of drafting and spontaneously self-generating teamwork to improve the prospects of a temporary alliance.

A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 3, my gawd still not even to OO

Rather than wasting a lot of your time reading this ventilated twaddle, perhaps you'd like to scroll down to the shorter version for the attention-impaired.

SO the idea of sitting in is that you find a comfortable pace that’s somewhere between pretty hard and not hard enough and mentally a place you could stay in for a long long long time, and damn it there goes another train of pot-bellied men in tee-shirts and tennies and a girl with a wicker basket on her handlebars and you know there are some very strong citizen racers who, yeah, never were smokers through college, but who were born with good strong lungs and hearts and if they cut down on the chips and dip would tear the legs off guys like me who spend all of our time just training up to the level of a regular fit person, working against formidable genetic deficits, paltry VO2 max, lactic thresholds that barely register as a bump in the floor, wattage that could barely light a candle, but awfully nice/light/expensive/durable bicycle equipment and pro-sumer grade shorts and shoes and a $200 carbon fiber helmet, and number plates cut into trapezoids to cut wind resistance, and so on. And while it’s true that only one guy, a pro or semi-pro, gets to win a race and therefore 1999 losers, there are other consolation prizes along the way like best of age/division/class such as the clownish tandems and the chic singlespeeds, but also Back East you might notice that overall results are downplayed and age class results are sorta more prestigious and played up, Back East they seem to take more seriously the idea that age is an important distinction, the most important distinction between racers, that it is almost immoral to compare the competitive prowess of say an 18 year old with a 30 year old with a 50 year old, that they're almost not even the same species and if you must compare them, if you insist, then you'll have to parse the age/division results to determine the actual overall winner, if that sort of thing matters to you as a lower/less evolved/literal minded sort of person who needs just one winner, although I would add that we’ve seen some pretty wacky results over the years – thanks primarily to Steve Tilford – who as something of a freak of nature has won the race numerous times well into his fourth decade, and continues to be considered a threat and a rival by those in the lead pack, and this is actually true of a lot of marathon events in the Midwest, where you see the 40-50 year old crowd dominating the overall results, probably the toughest age class at the FTF or, say, the Birkebeiner. And maybe that’s a socio/economic thing more than anything else – men and women in their mid to late forties having peaked career-wise, with stable family situation, good income, some money in the bank, an IRA coming along, some time and interest and need to invest in training, plenty of dough to buy the gear, an appetite for socializing with like-minded people, even your occasional millionaire early retiree who rather than squandering away his health on the casino boat of the pure leisure class, decides to get obsessive about bike racing in the summer and XC skiing in the winter, and these sorts of obsessions are perfect for the rich and retired, because they are great sinkholes for the two things this sort of person has in excess (and the things everyone else has too little of): time and money, and the only emotional thing a rich person and a poor person have in common, relative I mean to emotional worries, stress, regardless of how much money and time you have, when you think about it under the cold light of reason, the only commonality is that we all worry about our health as we get older, become hypochondriacs and start to consider with every little ache and pain what we never considered before, that my God, life is literally half over, I am according to the US Census now exactly middle-aged, half way to life expectancy (if I’m lucky) and it’s a downhill slide from here, so I’d better start digging in my heels, eating better, drinking less, accentuate the positive/eliminate the negative/cut ties with Mr. In Between, start opening those envelopes from the brokerage, those shysters supposedly “managing” my 401K and SEP-IRA.

So this is what I am doing/thinking/experiencing pretty much for the middle 9/10ths of the race. The Birkie ski trail from Hatchery to Mosquito Brook is what I think of as my backyard, cuz this is where I ski all the time, and it’s the closest trailheads to the cabin, and I know the terrain almost better than anywhere else on the planet (other than the almost endless singletrack of Woodstock, NY, Jockey Hill, Ohayo Mountain, Wilson S.P., Overlook, which I can still ride entirely in my mind’s eye, having ridden it [irresponsibly, selfishly] every day all day for the better part of summer 2001).

I know a good So-Cal Cat 1 roadie who discovered road racing in his mid-40s (after he'd made a cold fortune in Silicon Valley, semi-retired into posh consulting gigs just for fun-- for fun, ish!) and he excelled at it, quickly climbed through the ranks from Cat 5, won every race handily, the upward curve of his trajectory was a surprise to everyone around him, and he did well even as a cat 1 in semi-pro races, finished top third of class, but he peaked and plateaued, and even though he was still getting great results – possibly blunted a bit by too much training, though of course that’s a controversial thing to say these days – he was so disgusted with the limitations of his body/training/pain threshold whatever, that he hung up the bike. Literally did not ride a bicycle, for like 10 years. And I’m thinking about this now, as I get the relative hole shot onto the ATV track at like mile 10, because that summer of I think 2006 was the stressful angry summer where I was 10 pounds lighter than I weighed when I was 18, and all I ever did was ride my bike, including some pretty targeted training with a heart rate monitor, I mean trying to be smart about it, right, coach myself and not just waste a lot of time, but see you know if that sort of approach would have any effect on results – again, never with the idea that I’d ever be a racer to strike fear into anyone else – but just to test personal limits, and I guess that’s why a lot of people do this sort of thing, and of course the whole endorphine-junkie thing too, the whole sado-masochistic biology of marathon training, and the mental cob-web-clearing that regular exercise, induced by the threat of an eventual race, brings. So but we have our peaks and our plateaus and then our valleys, and I guess the only thing that ties it all together is the plain joy of riding the bike for whatever reason, for no reason at all, but with a number of excuses at the ready to explain what is essentially an irrational and childish way to spend so much time, like say collecting beer cans or shooting clay pigeons.

So the rollers of the Birkie are a bitch on the upside, and a hoot on the downside, with long runouts and plenty of room to pass, which you're going to need considering that you're not really going to get separation at all until, say, Gravel Pit road. And the grass is wet, and the single snake of dirt down the middle of the trail is not necessarily the best place to be, although you feel like you have a little less rolling resistance than in the deep wet grass, and I'm going to be generally happy all day that I didn't mess with the tires that are presently on the bike, that have been on the bike, really, since last year's Dakota 50 -- which is just pure, hard, hot hell on your whole bike, but especially tires, tubes, wheels and any other moving part and many non-moving parts, like last year when the course rattled the rivets right out of my brake levers, and I had to jerry-rig my Juicy 5s with a bobby pin procured from a buxom and vivacious young lady at the feeding station below Hobo Camp-- relatively too knobby for normal XC racing, a mud tire on the rear I think maybe a Bontrager Jones XC, and maybe a Michelin on the front and BTW like why are bike tires almost exactly the same price as car tires, does that not give anyone else pause? It sure keeps me from buying tires as often as I probably should, but so these knobbies are really made-to-order for this year's FTF because even though alot of the course is sandy and rocky and drains well, it's been raining off and on all week, and the grass is greasy, and the mudholes that are always there will be especially dicey when you come screaming into them at 15 MPH boxed in and forced to take a terrible, life-threatening line. So but this rubber is holding the edges pretty well, even though I'm feeling a little sketchy in the first miles up to Mosquito Brook, because even in a dry year, I've seen racers low side on tight steep corners, and instantly take out nine or ten pins, a perfect gutter-to-gutter strike, leaving a wake of destruction and indignation and accusations, racers throwing their wrecked bikes into the woods disgusted, crying --grown men crying! or begging passing racers for parts or tools or maybe just a gesture of sympathy.

For those of you with short attention spans and no love of unfootnoted David Foster Wallace tributes

Chequamegon shorter version:

• Diarrhea and nausea, followed by light rain and cardiac arrythmia.
  
• A slow erosion of will power. Demoralization at mile 33 not as bad as previous years.
  
• Jesse LaLonde DNS--apparently sick.
  
• World Cup cyclocross dude Jonny Page wins--nice guy, to boot--spoiling Jeff Hall's best shot at winning a second time after 13-year drought.
  
• Cold downpour at the finish, two beers and a bratwurst. Blistered the roof of my mouth.
• Made aware that taking a year off from Interval Tuesday not an especially good race strategy.
  
• Wish to God I'd made it out to the Dakota 50 or Laddie's Loppet.

A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 2

So with a lot of time spent (more than usual) in both toilets at the cabin, sort of crop- dusting the whole place, there was nothing more to expel or express as far as I could tell, but I've learned through bitter experience to bring a wad of T.P. tucked into a pocket somewhere, and I've learned to keep the suspenders of bibs down, until I'm on the start line counting down and it's out of the question to try one more time. This year I'd not arrived from Minneapolis until late late late, kids snoring in the car, the dog filling up the minivan with dogbreath, so I had to pick up bib and bag and timing chip at the start line. So now I'm back there on Main Street and getting the usual appreciative smiles and stares from people who erroneously think I have the nuts or hubris to ride a cross bike, but it's just my warm up ride. Not a lot of other folks warming up today. Coming in on 77, I usually see pairs and triplets of nervous legshavers reconnoitering Rosie's field, spinning, surveying the 3 miles of fatal asphalt, you get a polite nod from the one or two stragglers, but mostly it's the race-face thousand-meter stare, not in my own experience intentional aloofness, just the cyclist's natural introversion and narcissism, the same disposition that makes most racers spend a few minutes after every ride quietly admiring in the full-length mirror the shapeliness of their quads, glutes, and calves, pledging to do something about the soft mid-section, the spare 700c around the waist &c.

So not that many people warming up on the radio tower hill either, the weather coolish, a few drops of rain in the air, an unusual number of anecdotally younger/newer riders, lots of wool jerseys and baggie shorts and even some street shoes and rat traps, and the usual garish kits of Riverbrook, eMag, Grand Stay, and a particularly ugly new hot peach and turquoise number from something called the “Ride Club,” some strong riders, even preferred, looking like they’re wearing bib-overall shorts (peach colored) over a turquoise pinstriped shirt, I’m guessing this is some sort of nod to Super Mario/Donkey Kong? all courtesy of champion systems, and they seem to know and enjoy the fact that theirs may be the single ugliest cycling kit to ever line up in Hayward, there are strangers asking to take their photos, and they dutifully smile and tuck their thumbs under their pits. The usual appalling soundtrack is playing over the PA, and there are variations and extensions on the usual announcements, for example, a rational explanation as to why riders need to be with their bikes 30 minutes before the start (last year it was 60 minutes, if memory serves, and so you know what’s the point of warming up?) because it takes that long to find unattended bikes and extract them and the last thing you want is 1999 bikes trying to make their way around one that isn’t moving, there are too many other things that can go FUBAR without having to deal with that, and also no announcements this year about urinating on the lawns and in the yards of the good citizens of Hayward—one year they claimed they’d disqualify racers if caught, including a certain previous champion name of Geno—so they have either got us trained well, or finally brought in enough biffs to handle the volume, the demand (or would it be the supply?) &c.

But so announcements made, national anthem sung, unusual number of de-helmeted riders evoking maybe a surge in patriotism or at least respect for the guy they keep calling Bobby “Mudcat” Johnson I think who sings the anthem and flubs just a couple of lyrics and hits all the notes, and the cannon goes off unexpectedly, about 10 seconds to 10, and the rollout is pretty sane, but it’s hard to believe how many riders are somehow ahead of the front line where I started, there must me at least 350 bikes in preferred, which would put me at the absolute back of the pack in any other major citizen’s race. I do love the spectacle of riding down Main, even if it’s abs. mandatory to watch the wheel (or two or three or four) ahead of you and keep a hairtrigger finger on the brakes, the crowd roaring and ringing their Norwegian cowbells, and the scaffolding with the guys taking the photos that will be on next year’s poster and handbills. We roll out, the pace is slower than usual, we make the corner on Railroad Street and the speed picks up, I notice singlespeeds all over the place, their butts bouncing comically on their seats as they try to spin their gears at 18 MPH, and I’m regretting that because I’m going to be see-sawing with them and the tandems on the hills for the next 2.5 hours and then midway down Railroad the inevitable major crash comes early before we’ve even hit 77 at top speed, one of the Race Club dudes I think is sitting on his ass in front of his bike looking like he has no idea how he got here, what he’s doing, a handful of other riders are clipping back in, arranging themselves, and as the peloton parts in an organized and genteel way, I hear the guy ejaculate “Fuck!” just as I pass.

On 77, the lead ATV has pegged it to say 50 MPH, because the field is already strung out I’d say at least 1000 meters, we’re still moving at a good pace but too comfortable, and I’m boxed in as solo fliers come steadily up the sides. Incredibly there’s a lineup of incoming cars in the left lane, so for the first mile on 77, we’ve got just one lane to divide 2000 ways. What’s more, I can see that there is already a break at the head of the field, probably 40 rides have split the field, just 2 miles into the race, and they’re a good 20 meters already ahead of the chase, and my main thought is that the geared fellows are going to punish the singlespeeders, having regretted humoring the Lalondes last year, and saying to themselves never again because yes brains can beat brawn in any race, true, but there is simply no excuse for bringing along a 52/11, say, and not using it to flog the piss out of a one-geared wheel sucker in the flats of Phipps and Janet Rd, God bless you.

A few drops of precipitation. Glad to have put the brimmed cap on under the helmet, and the glasses are already useless, and I realize I’m going to have to red line it here a bit to get position before Rosie’s field, this is the place to gain say 20 or 30 positions, and then maybe sit in a bit. I usually hit it pretty hard all the way to Mosquito Brook, finding that people mid-pack are often too conservative on the early hills of the Birkie trail, especially the climb up to the 42K trail marker ahead of Bitch Hill, and often if I’m riding my personal race pace I’ll pick up another dozen riders, but today is not that day, and I’m hoping that sitting in and riding easier and holding position will pay a dividend in the last 8 miles, where in the past I’ve felt strong anyway but crampy and capricious—feeling strong for a mile, then feeling terrible for a mile, and yo-yo’ing between extremes like that. So yeah. A spontaneous new race plan. When the facts change, you change your policies, adjust to new realities.

Tomorrow: Part 3, the exciting conclusion (probably)

A Supposedly Fun Thing : Chequamegon report, tribute to DFW, and a lower GI tract issue, Part 1

My friend Colbert had inveigled his way into a preferred start and thus had no need to park the Pig Tank at the start line, sleeping in compartments with ingenious little portable stove burners and a refrigerator and a chemical head. My wife on road trips used to think of variations on what the abbreviate “RV” stood for, these reflected her low opinion of them when we were stuck behind one on a long climb up say the Wind River or Monarch pass, like “rancid vomit” and “really vulgar,” but I know now that was wrong and culturally bigoted, and besides Colbert’s Pig Tanks are always ingenious – the mid-70s Winnebago, high-torque diesel and wall to wall carpet the color of watery Ovaltine and window screens and breakfast nook was a hoot -- and I envy him for having always y’know the right tool for the job. I mean, the dude carries two spare Dura-Ace chains in his immaculate toolbox at what, like $160 a pop. But since he was preferred, he’d be parking at the cabin with us, Dawn and Adam in there with him, and that meant an early wake-up call for me, alone, at a fallacious 4 a.m. – fallacious, because no bikes down on main street until 5 a.m. officially but that was OK because I still had to get oatmeal—easy on the stomach, traditional—and Gatorade—Cytomax too expensive, wallet too light, planning too shoddy; my first race in many years without some sort of intentional, expensive astronaut food in pocket— and milk at the 24 hour grocery. When my headlights raked the staging area, and there were a few dome lights on, but nobody yet stirring, maybe a lanky guy in sweatpants and adidas shower sandals fitting a front wheel into a fork, but basically no one making a move yet, I UE’d on Main, worried around the new chicane at where Main connects with the Armory street (I mean this is another one of those WTF civil engineering questions where y’know the people who plan the streets of Hayward have apparently not yet gotten the memo that one of the nation’s largest mass-start bike events takes place through the heart of their fair city once per year, roughly second week of September, even three days after 9/11 with much conflicted rationalizing about how the terrorists weren’t going to stop our fun, dang it, and even checking IDs at the door of the Armory of the 99.9 percent Caucasian male crowd in many cases breaking only the rules of good taste by wearing just a thin layer of lycra and clownish velcro shoes and bulbous helmets and little backpacks filled with sugared water, and even the most obsessive dudes cutting their number plates into little trapezoids to fractionally cut down on wind resistance. But so anyway, in the years since then, they’ve added a beautiful and deadly concrete median, with steel signs, where Railroad feeds onto 77, that must this early in the race split the squirrelly hairy legged peloton into at least two long strings and almost always forces a wheel touch, sometimes much worse at the originating event, the sick smell of burned rubber, skin, the hollow sound of aluminum grinding into concrete, bodies hitting bodies and bikes pinwheeling in the air, the terrified cries of riders fallen, falling, or barely shooting into new lines, the sympathetic/selfish bellowing of rider down, rider down! exaggerated finger-pointing and hand-waving from those with experience riding in a pack indicating where to go, where not to go with alarming signals and gestures. So the city seems hell-bent not so much on accommodating these events—which, true, if you’re standing as a pedestrian at Railroad and 77, last about 1.5 minutes per 365 days, you’d be surprised how long it takes 2000 cyclists moving at a pretty good clip, say 18 MPH at this point, before the gutter-to-gutter redlining that takes place on the 77 run out to Rosie’s Field—but with impeding them, or at least keeping things interesting.

So yeah. New chicane that starts at the back of preferred staging, so while most people are still sort of pedal stepping for the first 60 seconds as preferred rolls out, then there’s also a bottle-necking going on, literally making the first 1 miles of the Fat Tire Festival the most treacherous and nervous and nausea inducing and maybe the best justification and explanation for the normal run of diarrhea that attacks many racers, as they queue up in the dozens at the long row of green plastic biffs, sitting down over the blue water and disbelievingly take yet another paltry, watery crap and hope to God once the bib shorts are up this time, and the jersey zipped and arranged, and the Camel-bak in place, and the door slamming behind you as you look into the middle distance and avoid eye contact with the masses of similarly bowel-challenged cyclists patiently waiting their turn, trying not to move too much, a little rictus on each face, a clenched/clenching look, you don’t want to look too deeply into anyone’s eyes, although, true, there are plenty of hardbodied women who simply have to pee, but you don’t look at them because you’re not supposed to.)

So I go back to Marketplace, walk the aisles, they’ve got half the lights on and a guy in a moustache reading PEOPLE at one lit-up checkout, get the stuff, hear a floor buffer whining. And at 4 AM, I suddenly need to make a visit to the public restroom between the liquor store and the pharmacy, and I quickly goosestep into a stall, and drop trow, and I’m thinking this is not the normal pre-race, revving metabolism skitters, this is something a little more insidious, something I’ve been sorta monitoring all week. I go through the indignity, which you can skip by going to the next paragraph, and the weird thing is my whole ass feels really hot, potentially wet, and I think my God, what just happened? and I tentatively reach down there and lightly pat around, but things are dry and copacetic, and it turns out that the plumber has routed the hot water line to the toilet, and it's almost boiling hot, and the whole bowl has sort of steamed my butt, which I suppose would feel kinda good, in a spa sort of way, if I weren't feeling rather sick. For the third year in a row I seem to come down with something the week of the FTF40, and it’s a low-level gut thing but it also fatigues and worse than anything posits that big question mark over your head: So like no personal record this year or anything, but should I just bag the race entirely? Can’t do it.

I’m strange that way, obsessive – between the Birkie and the FTF40, they're like my secular high holidays, and I’d feel terrible about bagging rather than at least touring the thing. Why should it bruise the ego to finish the thing feeling OK and down by about 100 places, when I’m only ever middle-of-the-peloton cannon fodder – muzzle pack, wadding -- anyway? No where near challenging for position or arguing for preferred and all the rest? I won’t go into the metaphysics here, but suffice to say I like the event and the course for reasons other than what my time at the finish line is, though that hangs over everything else like an albatross for sure, but OK, the metaphysics of it is this: I never otherwise ride that hard for that long, and while it sucks, it also evokes a certain sort of irreproducible ecstasy too, and besides, I always like to say that my goal is to ride smart for sure. Ride fast if possible, but ride smart at any cost, and the FTF40 is great for that, because not only can you strategize where you want to pour on the coals and where you want to conserve and not pointlessly burn matches, but also taking incidental advantage of fast trains when they come by, sucking wheel behind a huge Clydesdale-class dude on a hardtail driving behind a snowplow, then pulling through. And I get that right in some parts, wrong in others every year, but it’s still a fun internal chess match against your own body. D’oh, why do I always try to bridge on Telemark Road right before the rocky rollers at Lake Helane? Gain three places to lose 10 &c. So, I’m feeling like crap, go back to the start line, drop the Stumpjumper off in the second row – I’m not convinced the dozen yahoos now milling around with their ghostbikes actually know where the line will be drawn though one fellow with an unlikely huge beer belly seems to know what he’s talking about, seems to have done it in the past, and there’s a sort of comraderie among this small crowd of guys, and even a couple loyal wives putting bikes down for slumbering fantasist husbands in their dreams pistoning through chainless to a top 100 finish and a supposed ticket to preferred, though one local guy is saying to another guy in spontaneous conversation that Gary didn’t give him preferred even though he finished in the hallowed top 100 last year, he’s not bitter about it, I mean here he is at 4:45 AM with his bike on the line, effectively at the back of preferred start anyway, so what’s to be bitter about anymore? So there is a certain honor in being up this insanely early to put your bike down, and there is a superangry bandit patrol dude in a red pinny who will show up later to be the instrument of righteous indignation for anyone who shows up even at 5:30 or 6 AM and tries to thread through the already astonishingly huge crop of upturned wheels and aimless pedals, the mine field of bikes turned upside down on saddles, to cheat a place they didn’t earn with an alarm clock and a nervous disposition. The bandit patrol dude will publically and loudly excoriate anyone caught doing this, belittle you, may even get in your face and make contact. One of the dudes is talking about how last year this bandit patrol guy ran over a woman who was trying to weasel her bike over the plastic fence. “Unctuous,” is the word he was using, a great word.

But so back at the cabin, Colbert and family are sleeping still in their RV, bikes and wheels littered around the driveway, and I sneak back into bed and fitfully piece together a few more half hours of sleep, and then up alone by 7:30, start to get things together, it’s high 50s and grey, looks a little like light rain, there’s a little chop on the lake, a SSW wind which is a tailwind if you’re riding from Hayward to Cable though you won’t feel it in the woods, put on a base layer and longsleeved BPB jersey, I’ll be the only one from the team this year since everyone else is working or parenting or splitting loyalties with LCR or POS, hit the road on the crossbike for the 7 miles to Hayward, another inscrutable tradition even when I have to do it alone and even after countless offers of a ride in an auto or an RV, bringing everything I’ll need in the mess bag that will barely fit inside the cheap plastic drop bag the hempy string of which will always always tear free of the bag and make the whole thing useless. A couple years ago, I had like 10 pounds of air in the crossbike’s wheels, and flatted less than three blocks from the cabin, pinch flatted on a huge rock in the middle of the well paved road because my mind was already rolling out, and Hartney laconically said, “no problem, plenty of time,” as I sweated through a quick change, thanking God I had a spare 700c tube in my bag. The real race – who among the pros and local heroes—really have a chance at a podium is never further from my mind, and won’t come back to mind until hours after the race is over for me, if at all. Selfish, of course, we’re all the stars of our own movie right. Some years, I’ve been home for days, my singed lungs and sledged legs fully recovered, before I think to look up the official results to parse through the first page to see whether Matter or Hall or Tilley or Swanson managed to repeat, whether local new blood like Gaier broke through, or whether the occasional carpet-bagging pro stops by for some cherrypicked regional glory that will still look good on the race resume.

Tomorrow: Part 2: Can Pinchie keep his breakfast down and his dirt up? Where was last year's winner? Who is this year's winner? Despite the legion of singlespeed racers, can another SS ever win the FT40 again? And other erudite observations, excuses, complaints, and situations

Breaking! Huge marketing/PR opportunity for a sold out event!

We emerge from our summer break to give you this breaking story.


Famous, nacho-eating Texan -- first place loser at Leadville -- is rumored to be mulling a run at the Chequamegon Fat Tire 40 this Saturday! But will he really do it, if the Wayzata Course Chief shows up again this year to ride with his unholy offspring?

Reasons Lance and/or Greg might show up in Hayward this year:

Pro: Trek is the Wisconsin-based title sponsor of the FT40, and owns a significant share of Lance Armstrong's dark soul.
Con: Trek has been the title sponsor since John McCain was middle-aged, and Lance has never showed up before. And Greg would love to see the company burn down, then get trampled by a herd of incontinent Guernseys, then get bombed from outerspace. Trek feels the same way about Greg.

Pro: Lance is in good shape, and just rode the Leadville 100.
Con: Lance may not be allowed to ride because he failed to select a Sunday Funday event.

Pro: Lance could race against former Tour sensation and three-time gunshot wound survivor Greg Lemond.
Con: Lemond and Armstrong like each other about as much as Obama and that Alaskan Lipstick Pig.

Pro: The FT40 is a race that Lemond has won that Armstrong has not won.
Con: Lance is still the greatest man to ever invent the bicycle. In France. No matter what. He'll do it again next year, so there.

Pro: The FT40 course notoriously favors roadies and luck, not strength and skills. It's easy!
Con: You're a sissy if you line up with more than one gear.


OK, we're going back into summer hibernation until after Chequamegon. I think.

Don't hate me because my lungs are beautiful

I have a lot of respect for track racers. Or I did, until I read this morning that four tracksters on the US Olympic team arrived in Beijing airport wearing face masks -- before they'd even set foot outside the Beijing airport. I mean, wearing a mask before you're even through customs is a little like salting the food before you've tasted it.

Needless to say, the "gesture" was seen as a bit insensitive, what with the Chinese government, y'know, shutting down all the factories, limiting car driving to even/odd days, launching silver iodide rockets into the smog, and executing anyone caught on a 2-stroke motorbike.

The kicker of this is, of course, the fact that Laoshan Velodrome is indoors, too. So there's a pretty good chance the US track team can manage to get from airport to hotel to velodrome without ever having to breathe outside air.

I had no idea that track racers could be such weenies. But I do stand by an old adage: Never trust a person in a skinsuit.

Taking a break from the ladies -- and the low-brow commercial endorsements at least for a day

Maybe he's, um, tired of tired of being tired. (That's what, a triple negative?) After appearing on almost every web site on the entire internet in this ad...



...the Big Texan will finally be making good on his promise to ride the Leadville 100 this coming weekend. Presumably, a certain little Amish fellow will not be riding this year. That way we can all rest assured that nobody in the famous high altitude race is abusing, uh, Jack Daniels. Or Nacho Flavored Doritos.

How they roll in Prague

Here's some new footage from last week's Prazske Schody in Prague, a dicey urban mountain bike crit you just don't see the likes of here in the US.

I predict we'll see a few of these develop as outlaw races in great freeriding towns like San Francisco, Duluth, and Seattle.

I want to say the original organizers of cyclocross had this sort of urban race in mind, long before the bikes could take such a pounding -- thus necessitating all those nut busting dismounts and remounts. I always say: The only thing that's worse than running is running with a bike.

Local Intelligence: Is there a faux track event in your future?

Lots going on in Cycle City in coming weeks. Tonight, it's the final Cold Sprints at Grumpy's.

Tomorrow, a benefit for the NSC Velodrome out in Blaine. (So why does the NSC feel their corporate sponsorships stop at the edge of the soccer fields, and don't extend to the 'drome anymore? Discuss in the comments, if you can stay awake for it.)

Photo (cc) by http://flickr.com/photos/movingtarget/

Reality: Get me rewrite!

Aside from riders who dislike rain or cold, there was one other person who hated the AmGen Tour of California, last week's pro racing kickoff -- absolutely hated, the way Lance hates dopers. That person was Shirley Bianchi, a former San Luis Obispo County Supervisor. She stirred up quite a wasp's nest with an angry letter to the editor, because, you know, it was a pain in the ass trying to drive anywhere for a couple hours last Thursday morning.

Cycling fans everywhere are now protesting that such a dumb person has such a cool name.

Pinch Flat News, being in the business of providing solutions, suggests that going forward, we all refer to the Bianchi Tour of California, and its biggest opponent, Shirley AmGen.

Glimpses of Stupor Bowl XI

OK, so I've been too ashamed to admit it: I bungled the Stupor Bowl, only managed to make it to the awards ceremony. (Great to see old friends from far away, yay! Along with the usual suspects from the ranks of the Minneapolis Messenger community.)


I didn't even shoot any video, because it was just pointless, and reminded me how lame I am.

But I did find this video of the start. More than 350 racers this year, booya!

Not just any given Sunday

Just so you know, Stupor Bowl 11 is just around the corner, and pre-registration is open to what may be the biggest and longest-running alleycat in the country.

Fair warning: Last year's event took place in -2 degrees (that's Fahrenheit, doh!), and included a lot of dirty people tanked up on anti-freeze. So, you know -- rain or shine, that's how we roll.

Pinch Flat News intends to emerge from hibernation and put together one of our little video montages this year.

Topic for discussion: Should an alleycat be "big" or "long-running"? Doesn't that discredit the event and alienate real bike messengers, who are cooler than you?

Biking Blarney

Welcome to the next year of your life, and another 12 months of obsessive cycling!

You were wondering what to do with yourself in the heart of the winter, and you were glancing at that dusty old trainer over in the corner -- the one you use to hang-dry your wet snow pants and wool underwear.

This gets a guy thinking: Is there a mountain biking league anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere that's still riding and racing?

The answer is yes! And it's on a lovely emerald isle, and you'll want to tack on a "McEnery" or an "O'Neil" to your name before you join the ranks.

Five Minute Machine: Minnesota State CX Champs '07

The video is done!




And to reiterate the credits: A special thanks to Fred Feirn (interviews, "boom" mike, driving), Geno Oberpriller (bike cam, ecouragement), Hurl Everstone (interviews, moral support, close physical contact), Bill O'Reilly (the Word), and a cast of dozens.

There is some afterparty footage that I'll throw together over the holiday.

If you want a full-quality movie on DVD disk, you can drop me an email here and we'll work something out. If there's enough interest, I may put the whole series on a disk -- that would be Hudson CX, Powderhorn CX, Northfield CX, and States (mostly the A races).

A piece of the true 'cross

Because it's just been too warm and dry so far this 'cross season, and because my separated shoulder is just beginning to feel ready for more action, and because I love the sound of excited Dutch in the morning, and because 'cross riders need to stop being snobs and start spending some time on a mountain bike to learn some actual handling skills...

Sort of like getting an Almond Joy that you'll later be asked to trade for a Mounds

This is going to be a rough substitute for our Halloween Track or Treat Alleycat video, which I'll try to post Monday (if there's any usable footage). I suspect most of my footage is going to look like the first :60 of this -- badly exposed night shots of cyclists moving around like shadows on a cave, and way too much round-the-fire buggery.

Aside from the great costumes, one important contribution to Cyclocross videos goes on in this reel from Oregon: An awesome 24-inch jump that I'd love to see replicated at this weekend's local USCF 'cross events. (Call me mean, but it would be superfun to see a few Zipps and Eastons tacoed on a trick like this... not to mention a few heavily soiled fag bags.)