Second Church of Gravity

I'm back---sort of

2006-09-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

I just marched through Gateway hell week and did a couple cool little races down in Ark and I have a few things to say about them, but I have been incommunicato--and I'm not sure if that's the right spelling of that word, because, no shit, I'm writing this from my new laptop while I sit in a freakin' coffee shop. I'm smack in the middle of a yuppie scene if ever there was one and, really, I don't dig it too much.

It was okay until a couple of assholes came in with a camera and started filming some kind of interview about Iraq. The worst part is most of the folks in here seem to be digging this shit. And some chick is talking freakin' Chinese behind me at like about a hundred miles an hour--pretty fuckin' loud, too.

See, I left my job a couple weeks ago and now I'm doing everything from this laptop, which is all new to me and will take me a while to get up to speed on.

I'd like to write more, but these interview assholes are talking really loud-and-proud and if I stay here much longer I'm gonna find myself in the middle of one of those scenes from Animal House where Belushi smashed that guitar--and a video camera would be really expensive for an unemployed bike bum to have to replace.

So I'll re-cap the racing soon. Later.

I knew this before Butthead did

2006-08-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: Both Butthead and Porkchop, possibly using variations of anonymity, will accuse me of going on about this race only because they didn't go. But this isn't about them, cause, basically, they weren't there.

Although Butthead and Brad Huff are friends, Butthead has really only seen Brad in his disguise as mild-mannered Clark Kent. Oh, sure, he's raced with him a couple of times this season, but it's like how Kent's colleagues knew he could type about four hundred words a minute and somehow always knew exactly what color Lois Lane's panties were. Butthead, like them, knew the boy was good, but he, like they, really had no idea that the boy was from a different planet.

Butthead's gonna put a comment in here something about being in a break with Huffy and knowing how good he is, but come on. Butthead did not see Brad get called to the line in the season's only pro-only national championship crit. Hearing Eddy VanGuys announce the names, Frazier, Henderson, O'Bee, McCormick, and you just hoped your buddy, mild-mannered Brad Huff, was gonna be okay after sixty-two, eight-turn, one-mile laps with the best professionals in North America.

Butthead did not see the look of composure on Brad's face as he calmly sat at the back of the pack through the entire first half of the race. On every pass down the long hill someone attacked out of the pack and snaked the entire pack back and forth at what had to be around 40 mph. Brad's teammates covered all of these early moves while he sat about three saddles from the back gulping food and pushing fluids. At one point it looked like he had to take a piss on the fly and then did the old water bottle douche--but like a gentleman, he was off the back while attending to bidness--and he accomplished all of this with absolutely no experssion on his face. I'm not even sure he ever opened his mouth to breathe or even raised out of his saddle, while all around him pro riders wore death masks and blew snot like they were grasping at the last chance.

Butthead did not see Brad's steady progression to the front at almost precisely the halfway point. He was an absolute machine. For thirty laps he sits third or fourth saddle from the broom. Next lap, he's ten up. Next lap he's 20 up. Next lap he's mid-pack. Next lap he's top 20. Next lap he fires a warning shot and opens up a fifty-yard gap with a HealthNet guy on his wheel and holds it for two solid laps, like he's just stretching his legs and checking out how much faster he can take some of the corners if and when he really wants to. Two laps later he jumps out of the pack to snag a $100 preme, again, just to polish up on that last corner before the stakes go into the stratosphere.

If Butthead would have seen this he would have thought it looked a lot like how Brad handled things at Webster Grove---but this was a Grove on another planet.

Butthead didn't watch Brad calmly reel in counter attack after counter attack--from the top professional teams in the country. These attacks were not coming from Mesa, Dogfish and Big Shark. These attacks were from HealthNet, Navigators (a lot from Navigators!), Jittery Joe's and Kodak.

Butthead was not standing in the next-to-last corner with me when there was ten laps to go and a different team was launching an attack down the backstretch on every single pass. If he had been, he would have seen how hard Brad's team worked to help him bring these back. But he also would have been concerned when, with about five to go, it was very clear that Huffy was all on his own. Several of his top teammates, like Michael Creed, had cruised to the side and chosen that corner to watch the end-race craziness.

On the last lap, Butthead did not see the pack round the third-to-last corner so spread out across the road that at least ten guys were sitting in the national pro crit jersey with nothing in the way but three hundred meters and two tight corners.

If Butthead had been standing there squinting 100 meters up the street he would have seen one rider jump hard from the middle of the pack in an audacious early first-or-last Ricky Bobby move. Had Butthead been there, it would have taken a couple of seconds, but then he would have heard Brad's teammates yell and he would have seen that it was Brad who had just thrown it down and was now flying through the next-to-last corner with the pro peloton spread behind him like a big human funnel.

How they got through those last two turns is a mystery to guys like me and Butthead. I mean, I saw it and I don't even know. They were fucking flying and nobody was backing off, cause every single one of them had to be thinking there could be a total pileup that only he could find a way through and then he'd be standing on top of that podium. This level of racing requires a different mindset. I remember Joe HIll once told me that he loves it at the end of a race when it gets really crazy in the last lap. Joe said the first thought that comes to mind is, "I could win."

Butthead did not see that they were so tight heading down the last stretch to the last corner that no daylight showed between them as they rounded the turn. Somewhere between the next-to-last corner and the finish line, only one guy managed to get by Brad--Hilton Clarke, an Aussie, which meant that Brad Huff was the new U.S. National Professional Criterium Champ.

Butthead knows this now. Can't you see him sitting by the phone, speed-dialing Huffy's number from about the time he could calculate that the race might end? So he may have heard sooner than most, but he didn't see Brad on the podium--just the biggest crit podium of the season--and he didn't see the way Brad rode that race. He didn't see Brad working those professionals, not so much like he is one of them, but more like he owns them.

Butthead, I know you're out there and you are constitutionally incapable of acknowledging that you missed something. But, dude, that was sure enough a sight to see. Later.

Rosie

2006-08-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

All I can think is there are a lot of folks who have yet to discover some of the better features of a racing license. It's mid-August, yet this season somehow represents the winter of discontent for far too many. Here in the great Midwest, it's hot as Hades in the waning weeks of a long season, and bike racers are dropping like flies. Honestly it would take abstract calculation to count just the ones I know---and all that means is that I need more than my fingers to count 'em. A few of the biggest races are left, but there is no more time left. At this point, if you're not where you want to be, every race is too far to drive, too hot, too wet, too sketchy, too expensive, too much---wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. At this point in the season, if you're not where you want to be, you hate life and you blame bike racing for it. Stop reading this Goddamned column right now. There's still time to sign up for a team triathlon somewhere and find some of what racing that bike is good for.

This month, I'm turning 55, I'm retiring from my job of almost 20 years, I'm moving all my wordly possessions to another state, I'm saying so-long to many 25-year friends, I'm homeless, I'll soon be jobless, I'm contemplating new career moves, and, no fucking shit, the only thing on my mind this morning is that I need to do some big miles on the bike this week to get ready for the Hotter-N-Hell road race that's coming up. That, and I need to get a CB radio installed in the flamin' van so I can jaw with the truckers on the way down to Wichita Falls. And man, that's what I love about racin' bikes. If I wasn't starin' down both barrels of the hotter-n-hell hundred, I'd be totally freaking out about shit that don't get fixed by freakin'.

This occurred to me when I ran into my buddy Ronnie Sapp yesterday at the bike shop--he was walking out when I was walking in. He told me when he got back from the tour of KC the day before, the stresses of raising a teenager had sent him back out on his bike for four hours. So after driving four hundred miles and doing two hard races in two days, the bike was still there for him for as long as he needed it.

And this would be another example of when I'd have to resort to cognitive function to count the number of times the bike has been my personal therapist. It starts with the reality check of an upcoming race and really wanting to make, in fact owing it to, some people go as hard as they possibly can in order to beat my ass---this is called being a playah. So like one of those times when things aren't making you happy and you'd like to put on a good buzz and find somebody to kick your ass, or drive your car 120 mph, or kick your dog, or kick your girlfriend/boyfriend, or kick yourself, instead you throw your leg over that bar and you pound those pedals until the world looks straight again. When it's rainy, or cold, or hot, or the day's been a long one, you might need an upcoming race, or an upcoming season, to remind you that the bike is always there. The bike don't nag you to ride it. And it don't tell you how long or how hard or how far. The bike only listens and does whatever you tell it. Later.

Down By Law

2006-07-31T06:34:00.000-07:00

I've got a great idea for reality TV. It will be called "Profiled." You get an old van with out-of-state plates, tint all the windows rock-star dark, put on chrome mag wheels and paint big red and yellow flames down the sides. Then you load the van with a bunch of sweat- & gatorade-soaked bikes, several bags full of sweaty & stinky clothes & helmets & shoes, one woman college professor, one high school student, an insurance claims adjustor, a utility lineman who's also a Viet Nam vet, and put a 55-year old state worker behind the wheel wearing a t-shirt that says "Party Oganically" and has a small marijuana leaf graphic symbol between the words. Oh yeah, you also want to put dual exhaust on the van, make the day really hot so that the AC is running full blast, turn up the tunes to a listenable volumn, and stack enough shit on top of all the bikes in the back so that it's not all that easy to see out the back.

Once you've got everything all set up, then you want to have these folks just leaving a race so that they'll all be talking about it as they head merrily home. Then you've got the bait ready and you hit the road fishing for an encounter with Missouri's finest. It shouldn't take long.

To really set the hook, you take extra long to pull over when the Holstein finally takes the bait and gets behind you with his lights flashing. Every encounter from here on will be great for viewing as the trooper will do all in his power to be so patronizing and irritating that it will take Herculean restraint on the part of all the van occupants in order to stay out of jail.

Trooper: "Did you know you were speeding?"

Me: "No, I really didn't."

Trooper: "Why is that, do you have a speedometer?"

Me: "Yes, I just didn't realize I was speeding."

Trooper: "You don't pay attention to your speed?"

Me: "I try."

Trooper: "Who's the owner of this van?

Me: "Me."

Trooper: "Please step out of the van and stand at the back while I ask your passengers some questions." Then I hear him ask no one in particular, "Who's the owner of this van?"

He tells me to get in his car. Once there, he makes me empty out my pockets, then he reaches over and pats my pockets getting a little too close to the boys in the process. Then he starts running a check on my license and peppering me with questions.

Trooper: "Why'd it take you so long to pull over?"

Me: "I pulled over as soon as I saw you back there."

Trooper: "Was something impairing your senses, cause I was back there a long time with the lights and siren on."

Me: "Well, the van's loud and we were talking and we just got done with a hard race and I guess I just didn't know you were there."

Trooper: "Was something impairing you?"

Me: "Nothing more than old age, I'm kinda hard of hearing."

Trooper: "When's the last time you smoked marijuana?"

Me: "Oh, I don't know, I guess back in the sixties."

Trooper: "Oh, come on, it's been since then hasn't it?"

Me: "Well, racin' bikes in 100 degrees and smokin' don't really go together."

Trooper: "Oh, I don't know I've busted a lot of bike racers."

Me: "They were probably mountain bikers."

Trooper: "What am I gonna find in the back of the van?"

Me: "Stinky bikes and even stinkier bikin' clothes."

Then he tells me we're waiting for his backup cause he can't unload everyone out of the van by himself. I ask him what he means by that and he says, well, there's five of you and only one of me, would you like those odds? I say, I guess not. I ask him why he's gonna unload everyone and he says, too many things don't add up here.

Then he re-asks about why I didn't pull over sooner and he asks me about ten questions having to do with the OK plates and why I have the van and why it's not licensed in MO when I live in MO. I tell him I just got the van in OK and I'm moving there in a couple of weeks. He tells me it's illegal for me not to register it in MO even if I'd be doing it for less than a month. I don't say anything back.

When the 1-Adam-12 backup unit arrives, they both pull on evidence-handling black leather gloves. Then he opens the side doors and starts talking to everyone in the van. At this point, the retired utility lineman and Viet-Nam vet is making it a point to listen intently to what the trooper is saying, and this unnerves the trooper who tells the guy, "I don't like the way you're staring at me." And really this guy who we all know as one of the most solid citzens, a father and grandfather and a credit to his community, actually does have a stare that will incline a circumspect person to feel like they should not fuck with this guy. But my buddy simply tells the trooper that he was only trying to pay attention to what he's telling them.

Then the woman professor further unnerves the trooper by telling him she needs to go to the bathroom (right there in front of God and everyone). He doesn't realize how many miles this woman rides a bike with mostly all guys. He tells her to go ahead, but to just get out of sight and makes her empty her pockets first.

After searching everyone and running their licenses and searching the van the trooper comes back to the car. And I couldn't help myself from offering just one smart-assed comment.

Me: "How'd it go?"

Trooper: "Pretty good" And he hands me my license telling me he's not giving me a ticket. He tells me to slow down---as if that had anything at all to do with why he pulled me over. After all this, he says I was doing 71, which is way slower than I'm usually driving in my unmarked, shiny clean late-model yuppie-mobile that never gets noticed by the man.

And then our intrepid public servant ties it all up in a neat package with his parting salvo:

Trooper: "Mr. McDonald, can I give you some advice?"

Me: "Sure, man."

Trooper: "Don't wear that shirt."

What I wanted to say was, "Dude, now I know to only wear this shirt when I'm this clean." But what I really said was, "Well, I bought it at a garage sale and thought it would be real funny to wear to a bike race, but I guess it wasn't such a great idea."

So Jelly Roll Hill will be glad to hear that I now have a new lucky race shirt. Later.

My Gateway Cup Runneth Over

2006-07-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

So, brother Moses has returned from his journey up the stormy mountain with the stone tablets and the word is---no masters races at Gateway this year. The old folks have been shoved aside. Jettisoned. Some people are really pissed off at race director Tim Ranek. But I'm not one of them.

Sure, I'll miss doing battle with all the St. Louis teams and even helping them chase down Doering and his team Mack hired guns. And I'll offer a couple of valid reasons that including masters classes makes local races more vibrant and in fact are important for the future of the sport. But the people who made this decision are the people who assume the risks and responsibilities of putting on this race and that gives them every right to do things as they see fit. They are privy to information, considerations and constraints that none of the rest of us will ever know about or have to deal with. Plus, as I said, it's their money. It's their race.

But let me say this about Tim Ranek: I have never known of any race director anywhere who has ever risked more, or worked harder, to stage a race than has this man for this race. Most sane people would never, ever have risked as much to stage a race as I personally know he has done on numerous occasions. I won't go into details about how much this guy has done, but suffice it to say that he made the Gateway Cup what it is. This race is his baby. So you can bet the farm that any, and every, move he makes with this race truly represents what he sees as making it a better event. Period.

And here's the thing. Although saying this is gonna piss off some people, masters racers really can be a bunch of cherry pickin', sandbaggin' prima donnas. We love our smaller packs of guys who, for the most part, ride nice straight lines and don't dive into corners, mostly cause they don't desperately need either the money or the upgrade. Here's the classic masters race tactic: Make the first five laps the hardest of the race, thereby blowing at least half the field completely off the back---and if this sounds like a pro 1-2 tactic, guess what?

I mean, really, the fuckin' USCF actually print up a comprehensive list of riders who can't race masters races. I know some guys who gave up a pro license just so's they could keep their names off that list and do a little cherry pickin' whenever the opportunity presented itself. And I can't tell you how many times I've raced against a guy who won the masters race then jumped in the pro 1-2 and hit the fuckin' podium in that one as well.

But in my opinion there are two valid reasons to always include masters classes at races, and especially at the larger events such as the Gateway Cup.

One reason to include masters classes is purely economic. If the masters classes are set up properly, they will attract enough entry fees to provide a net gain in revenue---this year regional races both north and south of St. Louis proved that. Quad Cities and Tulsa Tough both saw50-60-rider masters fields this year. Doing the math on those numbers demonstrates that a one-hour investment in schedule time can net an event somewhere between $1,000 to $2,000 per day. That's cash money.

The other, and actually the best, reason to include masters races has to do with the vibrancy, and the future, of the sport. Having champions and fast guys at the peak of their physicality will always be the feature of any athletic event. But cycling is not like the mainstream sports such as B-ball, football, baseball or even soccer. Cycling is a participation sport such as running, golf, or even tennis. The future and viability of cycling as a sport (and by association all its grand events such as the Gateway Cup) depends on its heterogeneity.

That being said, the future of any cycling event is probably directly proportional to the extent to which the participants of said event mirror the general population.

Now my good buddy Butthead believes that spectators only come out to watch the fastest guys race. He believes that spectators don't care about the old guys, the women, the fours, or even the threes. Like a lot of cyclists, however, Butthead is self-absorbed when it comes to cycling. He thinks only of his race and only of his part in it. That's understandable and it's probably a requirement of racing well, and it also totally makes my point. So the problem with Butthead's theory is that it ignores reality and demonstrates the thought process that can occur when a head gets wedged up an anal orifice.

Like other participation sports, the people who watch them are the people who participate in them. So, let's have a show of hands here---how many of you believe that most of the people who participate in bicycle riding are fast twenty something dudes with tattoos and ear-rings? So, have you ever rode on the KATY trail? Have you ever worked in a bike shop (Butthead, et. al.) ?

When racing a bike looks like it can only be done by strapping young dudes, that would be terrible for the bike business. And that would be terrible for bike racing. Later.

Soulard Sucks

2006-07-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, technically that title is not correct and I was going for shock effect, mostly. The Soulard race is one of the St. Louis classics. It's just one of the ones you plan to do every year even when you know that the organizers and officials have planned for your race to end in a clusterfuck.

It's almost like you could set your clock by it--yeah, it's a couple laps to go in the masters race at Soulard; time for one big pack to merge with another big pack; time for three or four sprints to go off in different directions all at once; time for some guys to turn right and some to go straight and some others to go down; time for the "officials" to ask the racers who placed where; time for the protests; time for an "official" vague interpretation of the rules and reality; time for middle-aged guys to dispense with their dignity and argue for their just deserts even though they may have taken absolutely no pulls in the entire fucking race; time for Jimmy to go sit in the shade and drink a cold one.

Soulard is a crit-lovers crit---except for the lack of prize money, but crit lovers have always ignored that. The thing about Soulard is it's a very cool course in a very cool venue and always with good competition. The prize list has always been shit, but you never raced Soulard for the money. The fields have always been good there because of the setting and because the course is fun. Soulard is about the funkiest neighborhood in St. Louis. So while you're tearing around this course that makes about ten 90-degree turns, the locals, who have been up all night partying, are continuing their revelry with sidewalk BBQ's, or maybe just draining the keg and cheering you on.

Soulard is held in conjunction with Bastille Days, which is a big neighborhood party time. So Budweiser always has a few tents set up on a ball field right near the start/finish line. They sell beer, burgers and brats and have competitions that people who have been up all night drinking can do. It use to be big games of volleyball, which was cool because all these hot, half-drunk chicks would be out there in bikini tops jumping up and down trying to volley. But now volleyball has been replaced with washer-toss. Either the hard-core St. Louis drinking crowd is getting older or they're getting redder-necked, but washer toss is not nearly as fun to watch while you're warming up or waiting for the pack to come back around.

And what happened to the Bud Light girls? Honestly, I can remember when you were thinking that they might have to rope off the entire racing area and check ID's, only allowing adults. They always had one of those dunking tanks where you could throw a softball and if you hit the target, a Bud Light girl wearing the briefest of briefs would drop into the water then slowly climb back up for another--and for the angry women, they had it so that you wouldn't be able to hit the girl with the softball. It was all for charity, of course.

Soulard is a perfect amalgam of Midwestern American culture---there's either a bar or a church on every corner. The churches are the really stately kind with tall bell towers and lots of stained glass---no flashing signs out front with idiotic message like, "Hello, this is the Lord and I'm really pissed off." The bars have personality, too. After the masters race fiasco I finally found Ricky, my teammate, in the one that is just across from the start line. He was about four or five beers into his self-medication after crashing out in our race. He'd already had time to make several friends in there, one of whom was very proud of her augmented breasts. He introduced me to all of them.

Did I mention the fucked-up masters race at Soulard? Happens every year. I'm thinking maybe they could conduct a clinic for new officials so that these people can get an idea of what it's like to have absolutely no chance of picking who is finishing where and just be standing there with a clipboard in hand and be totally overwhelmed cause people are sprinting in all directions and there are crashes and near crashes and people protesting and other people doing another lap then sprinting again.

Here's what they do. They seperate the 40+ and the 50+ into two different groups with different numbers and a different prize list and different start times, and everyone is instructed that racers from one group can not work with racers from another.

Right. Does this remind you of another head-in-the-sand, in-denial scenario? Hint: yellow-line rule.

What happens every time they do this is one pack mixes with another, and always at a very dangerous point. Did I mention the ten turns? For the past couple of years it has been on the last lap when members of both packs are driving hard for a placement.

This year, my team had controlled our race from the start. We were the only attacking team and we had two good guys left in the chase group and one guy away solo. We were looking to do more damage in the final lap, only we were denied the chance. As we headed to the line to get the bell for the final lap, we were absorbed by the finishing pack of the other group. Some in the our pack went ahead and made the turn to head into the final lap for us, but for the rest of us turning to make that final lap would have meant taking down half the 40+ finishing pack who all were finishing straight (they open the barriers to let the final sprint be straight, instead of having to negotiate a hard right turn). So essentially what happened is that some of the riders in the 50+ pack who had been responsible for animating the race got screwed out of a final lap.

The officials assured all that the finishing order was correct, even when half the field didn't get to do the final lap. That's like awarding the world series trophy to whoever is ahead in August. But then, these are the same officials who didn't even know that there was a 50+ guy away solo and that he was lapping our pack along with the rest of the 40+ guys on that last lap.

The officials wanted everyone to come over and tell them where they think they finished. I saw lots of guys over there like a bunch of vultures feeding on some slimy road kill. For the past two years I've asked why they don't race us as one pack. I've never gotten a lucid answer as to why they continue this kind of bullshit, which makes racing more dangerous than it need be. It's fucking stupid. To me, being 55 years old means that you should have more dignity than to have to argue for table scraps. I know some good men were over there doing that, cause they felt forced to. I went to the bar and had a beer with Ricky. Later.

Dope

2006-07-14T07:17:00.000-07:00

I just read a great article about Floyd Landis in the NYT. Reading this article, I got the same feeling I got reading a lot of what I've read about Lance and, really, a lot of what I've read about almost all of the so-called greats. And that feeling is this: you could endow most people with "both" the same raw physical talent of these athletes "and" a fuckin' boatload of performance-enhancing drugs and enter them in the TDF and they might last three stages. Maybe. It reminds me of a couple of my racing home-boys, who truly believe they are very different people. And in many ways they truly are. But if the topic is how they race, they are the exact same breed.

I believe this is why people are so eager and open to believing that all these TDF guys are dopers. To believe otherwise is to believe that normal people just can't do this stuff--it simply isn't physically possible. Waiter, I'll have another caramel mocha latte, please, and could you hurry that 'cause my beemer is double-parked.

All elite racers are just freaks. Not normal. They take drugs to do that stuff. I don't have to take drugs to to ride my wave runner, so that's why I do that instead of SuperWeek or the TDF. That shit's stupid. Anybody up for 18 holes?

So 99.9% of the population succumbs to the existence that our forefathers earned us the opportunity to live---to live a life where no pain means no pain. And what this amounts to is a society where obesity is at epidemic proportions, where spectating equates to participation and where the attainment of a category two racing license is the equivalent of an AARP card.

Whoa! Did he just bash the venerable cat II license?

Yes. And I meant it.

I'm sorry, but I know a lot of guys for whom the attainment of a cat II license is the beginning of the end of their racing. They have the ability to upgrade, but it's little more than a penile extension. They lack either, or both, the time or the commitment to train and race as a two or a one, yet having that license means they gotta line up against people who make both the time and the commitment.

Guess what's gonna happen?

So what we have here is what you might call a conundrum. And what's the logical extension? Talk---and quitting. You hear a lot of talk about how racing is not important. You hear a lot of talk about priorities. You hear about "expenses" you hear about "wrecking" you hear about "burnout" you hear about how racing is fucked up and anybody who's successful "must" be a doper.

I have two home-boys who outwardly seem as different as night and day. But when it comes to training and racing these two are the same animal. They start with not bullshitting themselves and then they don't have to bullshit anyone else--all they have to do is race. Yeah, Butthead and Dino have different styles, sure enough, but when it comes to racing those boys both are bona fide. Later.

RX: Sweat some small stuff

2006-07-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

I recently heard about an old friend who is not doing real well. Outwardly this woman appeared to be one of the blessed. She had striking good looks, brains, common sense and an innate drive to succeed. Anyone who knew her never worried about her welfare. She was gonna do just fine, come what may. Now I hear she is suffering from debilitating migraines, apparently brought on, or at least exacerbated, by stress.

I'll spare you all the details of what week- and month-long migraines are like, but suffice it to say, it's one of those conditions that would make a person burn all three magic wishes just to feel normal again. Naturally, this reminded me of a story.

I attended graduate school in a program that took itself way too seriously. And by that I mean all the administrators, the professors, the students, the clerical staff, maybe even the janitorial staff all just really saw themselves as larger than life. They had what you might call a mystique.

Which is a fancy expression for bullshit.

To be fair, this mystique brought students and lecturers from all around the world to this particular program, which brought in hefty endowments and inflated out-of-state tuition fees. And all of that is money in the bank, sure enough. But this mystique also created an aura of competitiveness that was nurtured by the administration and the professors, but mostly existed in the heads of impressionable young students. So a lot of them spent a lot of time worrying themselves sick over shit like adverbs, adjectives, word-counts and deadlines.

I had a roommate who was one of these worry warts. This guy desperately wanted to be a big-time journalist and he had come to the forge to be pounded into the kind of steel that could get the job done. Or, at least, that's the way he saw it. And to his credit he hit it hard. Many a night he'd bust through the door and sprint upstairs slamming his bedroom door behind him and then you'd hear him yelling every insult he could think of at himself as he read one of the papers he'd just got back or some piece he just had published in the paper.

It'd be stuff like, "You stupid fuck, can you not write a coherent sentence? This shit is lame, you fucking dumb fuck." All of it behind his closed door and very near the top of his lungs.

I remember glancing over at him as our class took our comprehensive exams. Comps were, like, four hours of constant writing using nothing but one of these big electric typewriters and really thin, cheap paper that you could not erase or use any kind of corrective fluid on. I glanced over at him cause I could hear him muttering as he typed and X'ed through something, which was no big deal cause everyone had to do it. But when I glanced over I knew what he was muttering cause his teeth were clenched to the point that his jaw muscles were about to explode. He was muttering, "You stupid fuck, can you not write a coherent sentence?"

About now you're thinking this guy must have been a real loser, although in reality he was anything but. He was a very good writer and an even better reporter, which made him a very good student. He also was a world traveler and a very good athlete--the guy had even run with the bulls in Pamplona and actually beat them into the stadium, no doubt knocking quite a few of those little Spaniards out of his way in the process, cause this dude was built like a bull himself.

But by his own admission he just got way too stressed out over his career. We'd talk about it occasionally and I'd just ask him, really, man, what do you have to look forward to? He knew it was a problem, but he didn't see a way around it. As he saw it, if he failed in his career his life wouldn't be worth living anyway. And believe it or not it was during one of those conversations, that he had as much to do with why I have kept racing all these years as anyone or anything I can think of.

It was this statement by him that struck a cord with me: "Man, I stress out over my career and don't worry about athletics, while you stress out over your races and don't worry about your career."

And for the most part, it was true. I don't know, maybe there is just a certain amount of stress that we must burn off and when you can spend it on shit that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, then, maybe you won't get so uptight about the bigger stuff, which, in reality, you really can't control for the most part anyway. Now that's a rambling statement that would've netted me a red mark or two back in the world's oldest J-school, but maybe there's enough logic in there to help you better appreciate your next racing fuckup. Later.

Who loves ya?

2006-06-20T08:02:00.000-07:00

A column by 'druber got a couple of my home boys restarted on their eternal teammate payout debate. To protect their anonymity, I'll refer to them with fictitious monikers--I'll refer to them as Fish and Butthead. Fish's position could be described as Marxist--an even split for all team members in a given race. Butthead's argument runs more along the lines of a feudal or caste system--the bulldog feeds until he is full then the mongrels scrap for the rest, or you're either in or you're out.

Both arguments have validity and, like all rules governing human behavior, both arguments have an arbitrary side that ignores reality. Like a lot of things, this debate reminds me of an incident.

Long, long ago in the grand ballroom of a Hilton hotel in a city far, far away, my doubles partner and I had just stepped to the number one pit table at a national-caliber fussball tournament. First place for this tournament was several hundred (1970's) dollars--a decent payday for a couple of Gypsies. This particular match would decide the winner's bracket, which meant the winner of this game would advance to the finals with a huge advantage over whomever they met there as the winners of the loser's bracket--tournaments were double-elimination, so if you lost once you played through the loser's bracket and could still win the tournament, but you'd have to win all the rest of your matches beating the winners of the winner's bracket twice in the finals. So this match was big. It was doubly big, however, because we had history with our opponents--we had bad blood.

In the fussball world, these guys were a big deal. Between them they had, like, three national championships. They had factory sponsorship with matching polo shirts and nary a hair out of place. They were the consummate tournament professionals.

We were not.

We were back-alley professionals. We made most of our money gambling in bars before, during and after the big-time tournaments. During one of the more memorable of these nefarious gambits, my partner and I ripped those polo shirts right off the fucking backs of these two big-time players. We did it by exploiting the very thing that was their trademark--professionalism.

My partner was what is technically referred to as a real mouthy piece of shit. He had a real talent for quickly finding ways to get under people's skin and then he'd go there to the breaking point. It wasn't just a talent with him, it was pure genius. It came naturally and flowed freely. He had what you'd call a rapier wit. And he got to these guys. He got to them in a big way. It took him just a few seconds to figure out that these guys were not only used to deference, they needed it. We made more than money that night. We made a couple of life-long enemies. They made sure we understood that things would be much different the next time we met in a tournament. You see, in sanctioned tournaments you really had to behave yourself--cursing, taunting or fighting would get you DQ'ed, sanctioned, suspended or banned from the tour.

When we walked to the table to start the match, I knew we could beat these two, but I knew it would be a fight and I wondered why my partner had such a big shit-eating grin on his face. I was just glad to see that my forward was feeling good and feeling confident--turns out, he had already hedged our bet.

No sooner had our opponents won the opening coin toss than the referee had to quiet a loud and jeering crowd--from both ends of the table. The pit matches always had bleachers at either end of the tables, so the faces, and voices, of a lot of people were literally right in the faces of the players. And the hooting, jeering and cat-calling was at an all-time high that first game. Every time our opponents started setting up for a shot, I could hardly hear myself think for all the noise, and I could see our volatile opponents' faces getting redder and redder--especially since the louder the crowd noise got, the more my partner chuckled this little cackle that he always used when he really wanted to annoy the hell out of someone.

We won a hard-fought first game and there was just a bit of body checking as we circled the table to start the second. Ever the showman, my partner did the equivalent of an NBA flop looking in the referee's direction with palms upturned and that exaggerated wounded look as the more tempermental of our two opponents wouldn't give an inch and actually gave him a little shoulder push when they passed.

Two possessions into the second game, the referree stopped play and summoned hotel security, who escorted the more vocal of the two hooligans from the stands and right out of the building. This quieted the crowd, but not the chuckling from my partner. The rest of the match was played in stony silence (except for my partner's constant irritating little giggle), but it was a done deal. We took that game, the next and the match in quick succession, then met the same two in the finals and, again, put them away three games to one. In other words, we owned their fucking polo shirts once again.

Turns out, the two hooligans from the crowd were a couple of brokedick home-boys who had traveled to the tournament without much of a chance of winning anything. So about the only chance they had of buying any gas for the trip home was the $50 apiece my partner paid them to yell what he told them to yell, at exactly the point he wanted them to yell it, and as loud as he wanted them to yell it. Like I said, the man was a genius.

Moral of the story is if you want to play as a team, then you gotta pay as a team. And that's an easy little aphorism to remember, but like a lot of these universal principles, sometimes reality keeps them from being as universal as you'd like. Currently I have a teammate who has the annoying habit of chasing down his own jerseys. He's a strong guy who is just converting from triathlon. In the past, when confronted with this transgression, he has pleaded ignorance. After this past weekend at Winghaven, however, that excuse has worn thin. So now I gotta jump ship from the Marxist camp to something that has a little feudal and a little caste. I think this might be what they call realpolitic. Butthead, look that word up and comment. Later.

Super Freaks

2006-06-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

So I'm perusing the latest VeloNews the other night and came across a reference to John Frey's U.S. national record for a 40K TT. It was 47:35 set in Moriarty NM, where most of the national marks have been achieved. I wondered if the record still stands and was thinking that it had to be a venerable mark if it did--Frey and his buddy Kent Bostick were TT terrors back in the 80's.

Several people I asked were sure that someone else must have eclipsed Frey's mark by now, and most thought maybe Dave Zabriskie had it since he so dominated the last national championship and has gone on to demonstrate his TT prowess at the next level across the big pond. But Butthead found the numbers and, sure enough, Frey is still the U.S. TT king, although he set the standing mark late in his career in 1990, which gives him both the overall elite men's record and the record for masters men 30+. And while obviously this is gonna be a tough standard to overcome, in my opinion it pales by comparison to some of the others.

Frey's accomplishment speaks for itself, having stood for almost 16 years. But when he clocked the fastest 40K TT ever turned on American soil, he obviously was in his early 30's. A glance a little deeper down the well and you'll read that in '99 a dude named Scott Hennessy turned in a 40K time of 50:35--for his age group of 50+. In 1997, Scott Tucker rode a 51:56 in the 55+ age group, then two years later, Tucker slowed just slightly to do a 52:42 setting the new standard for men aged 60 and over. Oddly, and almost unbelievably, as at least it seems to me, these marks are way more obtainable than is the one at the bottom of the list. In 2003, the man whose physiology should be studied by scientists the world over, a dude named Jack Pardee pedaled a bicycle 40 kilometers in 57 minutes and six seconds, to set the U.S. national mark for men who are at least 85 years of age.

Talk to me about how fast you are. Why are vitamin companies not beating down the doors of these dudes? And a better question is, how the hell does an 85-year-old dude go that fast for that long? If and when I'm able to make 85, I hope I'll know my name and be able to feed myself. Going three minutes under the hour for 40K? Hell, I know some pretty salty cat two's who would be happy with that.

Another glance at the list give a clue as to the future racing plans of one of the fastest bike racing baby boomers ever--Mr. Kent Bostick. I've raced against Bostick a couple times and let's just say that oddsmakers heavily favored him and that he definetly covered the line, by, like, a lot. Bostick owns every age mark but Frey's (30+), at 35+, 40+, and 45+, that he has attained, and all his times go under 50 minutes, the last being 49:57. So, it'll be interesting if he can continue to go under 50 minutes to take over Hennessy's 50+ mark, which I'm guessing he'll be shooting for very soon. And as for me and my national TT-record aspirations, they stand somewhere between hoping to still be riding a bike and just being alive if ol' Kent is lucky enough to go after the mark set by the true king of all U.S. national time trial riders: Mr. Jack Pardee. Maybe for once I have better odds than Kent Bostick. Later.

Whaleshit

2006-06-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

Whooooo, boy, I really sucked this weekend at the state RR's. But that's not the topic of this piece. Although, really, I raced like a total bonehead and I paid for it by having a total spinal tap about thirty yards from the finish line. I was almost like that chick at the Ironman that time who spent the last 50 yards of the race crawling and crapping all over the place--I would have wrote shitting, but it wouldn't alliterate with crawling, okay? But I wasn't that bad, I just could not bend my fucking leg anymore. Talk about a total bitch slap. When your legs seize, you could be just inches away from an Olympic Gold, or (insert name here) could be laying there naked with arms outstretched and there is no way you could make it to that prize. If Fish hadn't appeared out of nowhere, pulling my lame ass back onto the saddle and pushing me and my bike across the finish line, I'd probably still be out there. But that's not what this is about. What this is about is another kind of breakdown--a lapse of self confidence by none other than-------drumroll, please, and I'll just state what you never thought you'd ever hear, so here it goes . . . . . Butthead has given up beer. . . . . . due to shitty racing!!!!

He revealed this revelation to me the evening after stinking up two races in a row. And he unveils this personality quirk when we're in a perfect Butthead situation--looking down our noses at a pack of redneck, greaser parents who are celebrating the fact that they are convinced their double-wide contains the next Carl Edwards cause their kid just won a gaudy, cheap-ass trophy at the soap box derby. So these cretins are on the outside patio of a local yuppie micro brewery--which I'm sure they think is called "micro" cause they allow all denominations to drink there--celebrating the only thing they've won in about forever, and Butthead can't even get drunk enough to look down on them. I swear he kept making excuses for them and ordering more lemonade.

It seems that the cockiest bike racer who ever stuffed toilet paper into his chamois bulge is having a crisis. This is the guy who once offered drunken racing tips to Roberto Gaggioli. This is the guy who swore that Steve Tilford would be his cyclocross bitch one day. This is the guy who calls Joe Hill, "Little guy." This is the guy who wrote the book on psychological warfare in bike racing. This is the guy who would taunt the current MOBAR champion for every one of a sixty-mile training ride and then be incredulous when the guy cracked and wanted to throw down with him. This is the guy who once forced an elderly, peace-loving X-hippie to slug him in the gut because he was being so fucking irritatingly obnoxious (and the showpony is my eye witness on that one).

I think I heard him say he was gonna try it for a week. What I'm hoping is that he'll see the light well before then. If you ride your bike as much as Butthead does, there is no way you could drink enough beer to harm your racing. The thing he has forgotten is that occasional shitty racing is just a part of the game. Hell, without the shitty races, how would you truly be able to appreciate the good ones? Besides, a little shitty racing just helps you keep your perspective in line with reality. You have to learn to embrace an occasional shitty race or three. Lift a pint or two in their honor--it only means you know the difference. There's no reason to let shitty racing turn you into whaleshit--that's the lowest thing on earth. Later.

Tulsa Knows How to Throw a Party

2006-06-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

One of the things I have come to realize about bike racing is that getting your ass kicked in a really cool race is way more worthwhile than dominating a shitty little race. What I'm talking about here is pageantry--after all that hard work and winter, when you go why not go carte blanche, baby? The folks who organized and staged Tulsa Tough had it all going on. It was amazing to see. This was their first year and you'd have thought they'd been doing it for 20.

Tulsa Tough's well-chosen venues were ringed with cool restaurants and bars and big crowds of spectators. There's something about an atmosphere like that that just makes you want to launch a suicide attack for nothing more than just hearing your name blasting out of that huge, professional stage and sound system. And it's quite cool to see tents stocked with plenty of energy schwag that is only for entry-fee-paying folks---"sorry, mam, this is reserved only for the racers--No, you can buy some right over there." I'll swear, I heard that exact quote.

Also very cool is when there is no waiting at the long line of sparkling clean porta-johns, or for one of the many wind trainers positioned near the start/finish line. And anyone who has ever traveled with teammates who all need to pack spare wheels can truly appreciate full-service neutral support--and by full service, I'm talking about a pro mechanic and a full rack of spare bikes in case you should need more than just a wheel change.

The Tulsa Tough organizers know the value of entertainment and they had a completely separate sound stage set up each day for live music. After our race on Saturday, Jeff Chattin and I sat down to a fine meal right along the home stretch and had slightly more than a few pints of some very nice micro brew while we watched the entire men's and women's pro events and listened to a local band that was several cuts above what you normally hear at outdoor festivals like this. It was appropriate, however, that the live music would be that good as one of the Meccas of country music was located right along the race course--the famous Cain's Ballroom, the very building where none other than the legendary Bob Wills honed his licks and created Texas swing.

And talk about accomodation, just for this race the city of Tulsa completely paved about eight blocks of streets. That's what you call service. From the prize list to the atmosphere, the Tulsa Tough organizers put a lot of thought and energy into what many race organizers ignore--having a good time. Later.

Tulsa Time

2006-06-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

It could be very interesting down in Tulsa this coming weekend. I'm gonna predict that some unknowns will have a very big weekend, maybe the biggest they've ever had. Things can change, but a glance at the start list so far makes it look like a wide-open race for a whole lotta cash.

The promoter of Tulsa Tough is a friend of mine and he told me that they did it the right way from the get-go. They had all the city's big hitters on board from early on and consequently raised a lot of greenbacks--almost 75 large. They hope to have the race on the national calendar by next year. If so, with the plan to have even more money then, this will be one of the larger pro turnouts. But this year, with a couple NRC events pulling the pros elsewhere, the Tulsa race will be a showcase of regional talent, which means that some of the working boys and girls will be taking home a lot of cash.

In the pro,1-2 men, ABD looks to be the powerhouse team with guys like Reid Mumford and field sprinter John Puffer being the odds-on early favorites. But there's plenty of room for some lunch-pail teams to squeeze into the right break or leadout train and take home some serious loot. Both Mesa and Mercy have to like their chances and count on guys like St Louis' best opportunist, tough-guy Kurt Fletcher, to put themselves in position to grab while the grabbin's good.

The women's pro, 1-2 is probably even more open than the men's. Big UCI races around the country and in Canada will draw off all the pro teams and even the stronger regional teams. Without any strong team presence, the women's races will come down to the inevitable field sprints and favor someone who is good at putting herself in the right place at the right time. This is one of the strengths of Molly Vetter-Smith as she proved last weekend at Quad Cities under similar circumstances. Mercy Fitness' Stacey Bertsch is another rider with a nose for a good position and a sprint to do something with it. Supposedly one of the courses has a "sharp" hill on it just before the finish. If it's "sharp" enough, this could work in the favor of Columbia's own ProPam (Hinton).

With the way these fields are shaping up, and no big pro team presence, I'll predict that each day will have a different winner. And on a given day, that winner could be someone who's never been within eyesight of that much prize money. Should be interesting. Later.

A kindergarten lesson

2006-05-31T11:43:00.000-07:00

There are lots of great books for which it truly can be said, everyone should read this. But honestly, unless you plan to live in a cave and have no interaction with your fellow man, then one little book you should definitely commit to memory is entitled, "All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten." It is by Robert Fulghum, and if you take his book to heart it will make you a happier person. You will get along with people much better, because you will be shown that it's really very easy to not be an irresponsible lout. Bike racers could really use the wisdom of this little book. If being more popular could make your entire trip (60's slang for entire experience) more enjoyable, then this little book could even enhance your racing. Either that or it would just point out to you that you have little, or no, class, which might just make you angry and even more obnoxious.

The book is full of reminders of good rules to live by such as, "Clean up after yourself," and "Share." Bike racers could really use message such as these.

Here's a scenerio I've lived through many times: A dude asks if they can ride with you to a race. Then, when you stop at a gas station to fill up, not only do they not offer to pay their fair share, they don't even bother to clean the fucking windshield while they're letting you pump the gas. You're doing the driving, paying the insurance, buying the tires and oil and making the payments, you've got less room for your shit due to hauling all their shit, you had to wait for them or go by and pick them up, and then they're gonna make you tell them how much they owe you--like they can't even read the fucking pump and not make you do the collection agency thing. Not only that, but assholes like this are also the ones who leave all kinds of food wrappers and empty Coke cans laying wherever their princely ass was parked.

Here's another: Your teammate has asked if you've got floor space in your motel room. They'll stay there with their shit all over the place, watching the cable, using the shower and towels, taking up space and adding one more normal load of body heat and exhaust to the room, which is more strain no matter how otherwise considerate they may be. Then when they have made you tell them how much their share of the hotel bill will be, they'll give you some form of, "Yeah, I'll get it to you later."

After just such a recent accomodation to a dude who was in need, he had the gall to ask if we needed him to pay a part of the bill. I'm guessing this dude understood that this was not our home we were welcoming him into and that someone was charging us cash for it on a daily basis. So you have to wonder what his point was--did we need him to pay his part. Give me a fucking break, already. Guess what that dude will hear the next time he asks if we have floor space?

I don't know, do these people often tell the waiter at a restaurant that they'll pay for their meal after their race? Do they get to make their rent payment whenever it's convenient? Do they not understand that someone had to dig down and pay for their shit at the time that they used it?

Not much irritates me more than when someone forces me to ask them for the money they know damn good and well they owe. If I'd wanted to do that, I'd have gone to law school.

So here's another rule for Fulghum's book--this one for bike racers:
If you have the cognitive capacity to realize that you need to wipe your ass until the paper is no longer brown after you take a shit, then you have all the brains required to realize that you owe someone money---they have done you a fucking favor, so don't make them ask you for what you owe them or, surprise!, surprise!, that favor won't likely be there the next time. These are words to live by, brothers and sisters. Later.

Record Snake Bite

2006-05-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well, this is the earliest I have ever been snake bit. The Snake Alley race still is a day away, but last night I got snake bit. The first few years I raced the Snake I had nothing but good luck. But the past several years I can count one broken stem bolt, one dropped chain, a stretched cable, a bad choice of gearing and one sinus infection that all knocked me out of contention. And all of these conditions almost perfectly coincided with the race--as in, all systems were go until either right before or shortly after the start of the race. And there's not much room for recovery at Snake Alley. Be assured that if you have one square inch of exposed ass, the Snake will bite it.

Things were just looking too good this week. Training just right. Equipment perfect. Travel arrangements accounted for. Plenty of time. Then comes the last ride before packing up the bike and one last incremental adjustment---two hours later the heretofore perfect shifting of the top-of-the-line equipment is, and I'll use the French expression here so as not to offend anyone, but the bike is shifting like a big ol' stinkin' turd, a total piece of hammered shit. Did I mention that you can't have any failures on this course, which is also my favorite race of the year? I kept my cool, however, and only yelled fuck! about ten times. I didn't break anything, though. So I really think I'm handling it well. Problem was I still had to make a grocery run, pack and load all my shit, eat dinner and do all the other little things you must do before taking off on a long weekend.

Then, no shit, I couldn't sleep for thinking about what the hell could be wrong with that damn Dura Ace piece of shit derailleur. The only thing that sustains me in times like these is an anecdote from my past.

I literally grew up at drag strips. Dad loved his racing, and he was good at it. In the parlance, he hit it hard. It was about 1964 and we lived on a farm in Arkansas. Dad would work late all week getting his car tuned, packed up and ready to go. On race Sundays, he'd get up way before dawn to milk our old Jersey cow, then wake me and we'd make the 75-mile drive up to Springfield, MO, in his '56 Chevy race car, which also was our family car. We'd always be the first in line at the drag strip--cause we had a lot to do once we got there. As soon as we got signed in, the work began. We'd jack up the car on both sides, stick jack stands underneath, pull down the drive shaft, pull out the axles, drain the oil from the rear-end (also called the differential, the box full of gears that turns the axles that turns the rear wheels and moves the car), take out the high-geared rear-end, stick in the low-geared posa-track racing rear-end, stick the axles back, bolt the drive shaft back up, hand pump the oil back in, pull off the street tires and slap on the racing slicks, then jack each side up again and pull out the jack stands and let it down. All of it was done on the bare ground using only hand tools.

Dad would jam gears all day in the sun and heat (no AC, no fancy tent for shade), then we'd do all the work in reverse order for the drive back home. Many, many times we'd be the first to arrive and the last to leave. As I remember dad never raced for much more than trophies, and those long drives back home were sweet when we had one of those golden beauties resting on the seat between us. Now that I think about it, I suppose I'll make it just fine on the Snake this year. Later.

The hay is in the barn

2006-05-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

This is the week before the biggest race series of the season--at least as far as I'm concerned. This coming weekend is Memorial Day weekend, which means it's time for the Quad Cities races. It starts with Snake Alley on Saturday, then Sunday is Melon City followed by Quad City in Rock Island on Monday. There are bigger races throughout the year, but to me this one is the crown jewel, the one I aim for during the entire winter and spring. This is my Tour de France. And this is the week that I am either ready to go or not, which means this entire week I can't really do more to get ready to race than rest, have a few beers, eat a lot of good food, rest, go for some easy spins on the bike, rest, hang out with friends and rest.

During this week I try to not get too much done. I fight it. Chores? They can wait. Finishing that big project at work? Nah. House cleaning? I'm homeless. Grocery shopping? This is support your local restaurants week. Catch a movie? I'm in.

In short, this is the one week I can be more like my non-believer friends with one notable exception. Twenty miles is a long ways to ride a bike this week, and chemical enhancement actually helps to keep the pace down--right where you want it this week. So, yes, I'm a slug on the bike this week, but I feel good about it, cause I got some fitness. I'm sluggin', but I feel fit. Sure, it's an illusion, but at least for this week it's like living the best of both worlds.

All that freezing my ass off on the bike all winter; all that clean living and hard work; all that fighting the hawk on those long-ass training rides--so here is the payoff. The feeling of this week followed by doing some stomping at my favorite races of the year.

This kind of high. Depending on your outlook, either it only lasts a couple of weeks or it lasts a lifetime. Dudes, you just gotta learn how to really lay back and drink it in, 'cause the hay's already in the barn on this one. Later.

Just give us our dignity

2006-05-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

The Joe Martin Stage Race has always been one of the best bike races in the region. The race, however, has a history of problems with results that they really need to get a handle on. After this year's race, and a VeloNews article that gives precious props to a rider who wasn't even there, I would say the Joe Martin folks need to invest some real PR effort into letting everyone know that getting the results right will be a major focus for them next year--and then really do that.

Luke Musselman made the classic gut-check bike racer move jumping into a suicide break on day one. It was the classic balls-out move that every bike racer dreams of. You fire all your guns in an 80-mile break knowing you're probably committing suicide, but what the hell, maybe you'll get your sponsor's jersey into the bike mags or get a mention in an article alongside the famous names of your famous breakmates--you can live large for a while rather than not at all if you just sat in the pack and tried to finish anonymously.

It was the kind of classic bike racing move we don't see enough of. All too many times, people just want to finish with the pack, or worse, they sit in the pack all day and then sprint wildly for something very near dead fucking last.

So Luke pulled it off. He didn't stay out there for just a jump and a few pedal strokes, he was away in a freaking balls-out, Euro-style throw down with guys who spoke with foreign accents. Then the article in VeloNews credits a guys who wasn't even there. Honestly, that makes me want to puke.

The worst part is that the guy they credit is also the kind of a guy who would take a courageous chance like that, and he's a friend of mine. If he had really done that and I was reading the VeloNews blurb it would have been so cool. But he wasn't even fucking there. That's not even funny. That just fucking sucks.

In years past, I can remember standing around for hours at Joe Martin waiting for results that were hopelessly screwed up. I've long realized that you really needed to keep your own time and make sure they have it right, but that only brings me to another problem, which is a certain loss of dignity.

Every stage of every category of Joe Martin is tough. There are no gimme's. And when you've invested that kind of energy, the last thing you should have to do is hang around for the undignified pushing and shoving at the feeding frenzy around the posting of the results. But if you don't, you risk being listed wrong or being completely missed. And the only thing more undignified than taking part in the results hog trough would be having to chase down an official and whine that you got screwed in the results.

This year I flatted in the RR, but then rode myself back into the money in the TT and crit, only to fall out again when a rider who no one remembers being anywhere near the front got scored higher in the crit. I heard many similar stories of messed up TT results, incorrectly scored RR finishes, minute-by-minute changes in GC, etc.

Joe Martin is a great event. The weather is usually wonderful. The scenery is absolutely beautiful. Every stage is a natural selection venue that rewards the fittest, and toughest, riders. Dickson Street is a great place to party. Joe Martin is one of the coolest races of the season, but they really need to get their shit together with the results. Later.

The final race prep

2006-05-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

So, do you have some races that, whenever you think much about them, I swear to God you have to take one of those race-day shits? You know, the kind that is induced mostly by some kind of nervous house cleaning action. There are two races in particular that do that to me--Joe Martin and Snake Alley. I'll be toeing the line at both of them inside of the next two weeks. You may wonder, is this good or bad? I'm going with good.

I think this reaction is something that is basic to all warriors. It must go all the way back to the caves. Probably a preparation mechanism. It stands to reason that the cavemen would be able to hunt better after a couple of righteous BM's. You need blood and energy going to muscles and brain to fight, run and think instead of the bowels to herd turds.

I can see Trog sharpening his spearhead and thinking about the task at hand. Where he's headed ain't nobody gonna be doing him any favors. He'll get whatever he can kill or take from someone else. Absolutely all he can get is what he can win in a fight. He's going after the one thing that can keep him alive and the task could kill him. Definitely a thought that would send you out behind the ugly bush.

When man evolved to the point of learning it was way easier to kill other men and steal their food, then the race-day shit was born. This was more calculating and required more thought. They had to visualize their quarry and mentally stalk them. And of course these kinds of thoughts triggered hormonic activity--and rumblings in the nether regions. The body preparing for battle. Purging. Getting leaner and quicker.

If you're calling bullshit right now, then you've never glanced into the abyss of a race site porta-John (Sorry, Rinesy, I know you hate that term). You won't see many solid logs down there and you won't see only the color brown, either. And when racers are standing in line at the village hole, they don't stand way, way back only to ward off the smell. The sound of race-day bowels is a sound that no-doubt reverberates across the eons of time back to when getting dropped was for keeps.

I remember once standing in line at the porta-Johns and laughing my ass off when a dad took his toddler into one and you could hear him loudly admonishing, almost scolding, the boy. You could hear the kid whining about something and then the dad starts yelling, "Don't look, I told you not to look!" I have to be honest here and admit that ever since then, these things have been like car wrecks to me--I really have to make a conscious effort not to look.

And here, I must point out, is a real indictment of triathlon. Triathletes are very serious athletes. Honestly, as a group I believe they are more serious than bike racers. So when they have all that gear to tote and arrange in the transition area, then get warmed up in not one but three disciplines, and the start time is usually around the fucking crack of fucking dawn and there's a long line at the porta-John and the first event is the lake swim . . . . . . . I think you can see where I'm headed here. All's I can say is, be assured that the next time you do a lake swim tri, the energy bar you see floating past your face is likely of the re-cycled variety. But for every Caddie Shack Baby Ruth bar you think you see, you have to know that most of them didn't make it into solid form. I'm thinking a round of anti-biotics should be the prophylactic prelude to every lake swim triathlon.

But we've come here to praise the race-day BM, not disparage it. It's a good thing. Really, I know a dude who was so serious about his racing that his doctor told him he gave himself hemorrhoids from straining so hard to dump before each race. Obviously he wasn't visualizing enough and letting nature take its course. Yet another example of patience being a virtue.

So, if you're headed down to Fayetteville to do Joe Martin, or up to Burlington to do the Snake, maybe I'll see you in the war-preparation line. But remember, don't look. Later.

Paddle this, muhfugger

2006-04-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

When my brother sent me this pic, my first thought was that it would make the perfect Missouri River outfitter. But then I noticed there is neither a Stag Beer sign nor a Copenhagen sign. That being the case, the biggest river rat I know, and probably the only one who has ever won a bike race, Erik Feather, wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near this dump, no matter how clever the marketing scheme. But how about the Shit Creek Bike Shop? Now there's an idea. Later.

Whose butt is it, anyway?

2006-04-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

So I'm perusing the flyer for a local race and I notice that first place for my class pays $5 less than what the entry fee is. I don't know. There's probably a good reason for this, but it sure seems like a good old-fashioned dissin' to me. Yeah, I'm happy that they are listening to physiologists and giving us geezers a class we can be competitive in. But more than likely they're also listening to pollsters and they know that enough guys my age still want to mix it up at something besides bass fishing. But here's the thing: USCF entry fees are spiraling out of control anyway, especially when they are exploitative by their very nature. My thesis here is that entry fees are a user tax that is being levied upon racers for stuff they have already paid for: bicycles & gear, roads, and a race governing body and we're not getting our money's worth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. If you want to race for money, be realistic, asshole.

But come on. The industry passes along all their costs: manufacturing, research & development, advertising, promotion and retail profit margin. We pay all of that. Then the governing body, the USCF, passes along all their costs, which we pay in the form of dues and per-rider fees at races. And after paying out all this money, we allow ouselves to be mini billboards riding around with logos pasted all over the place. Then we go to races and pay entry fees to race all this stuff we've already paid for on roads we've already paid for through taxes.

All I'm saying is how come the folks who are making a living off of this industry (bikes) and this pursuit (USCF) aren't sharing the wealth a bit more? I don't want money from them. I want them to do a better job of promoting this sport so that local folks will see it as what it is, which is a public service. And maybe then local businesses will be more likely to pony up some cash for really cool races with all the trimmings.

Basically, bike racers have a bad image. Bike shop people even hate us. What's up with that? When's the last time you saw a USCF-sponsored ad or a bike industry-sponsored ad in your local newspaper that extolled the virtues of bike racing?

Here's one they could do: A picture of a couple of our juniors (Luke and Jan would be good) and they're leaning on their bikes and looking directly into the camera and they're looking tough like you always see guys on promos for rock bands looking. You know, like they're trying to scare the old folks or get some chick to think they're deep and brooding rebels. And the headline will be something to the effect of, "These guys have to spend 20 hours a week riding their bikes so they can race. Do you want them to stop?" Then down below, it would say, "Support local bike racing--it keeps kids on the streets."

You know, if the USCF and the bike industry did stuff like that, I wouldn't mind paying those damned entry fees and rolling around with logos plastered all over both my bike and my butt. Later.

Mom's Day

2006-04-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

Last week was Hillsboro and Tillis Park. People won and people lost, and those stats are as ancient as the names of yesterday's pop stars. What always stays with you, however, are the little stories and images. Here's one of mine:

There's a young man from Columbia named Zach Hockett who crashed out in the threes race at Hillsboro. Apparently it was a pretty spectacular crash--as most road race crashes are (why do people think they are safer than crits?). His was an over-the-bars, equipment-thrashing, ride-in-the-meatwagon affair. Might as well do it up right, right? Anyways, needless to say, his parents were horrified. And well justified. Not many positive post-race scenerios include trips to the ER. The real bottom line here is that Zach walked out of the entire deal with no more than some cuts and bruises and a couple of trashed wheels, but as always there's more to the story.

What a lot of people outside of Zach's immediate race circle don't know is that the kid was just picked to race in Europe with the U.S. National Junior team. He's scheduled to leave in a few weeks. So naturally everyone's first thoughts, understandably including Zach, were, damn, ain't that just the luck, to crash out just before you get a big break. And so it was that the next day Zach awoke telling his mom and dad that he just felt too beat up to do the crit that day. He had planned to do the juniors, then double up in the pro 1-3. Now if you're a bettin' man, how do you think his mom is gonna handle the news that he doesn't feel like doing the crit after crashing out hard the day before? Well, you'd probably lose that bet.

Zach's mom, Sherry, recounted the story to me after Zach had won the junior event, including a preme of a new wheelset. "You know, the mom in me wanted to tell him, that's okay," she said, "but I remember my dad always made me get back up on that horse when I'd been bucked off, and it always made things better in the long run. So I told him, No, Zach, you're a little shook up, but you're okay and I just think you need to go ahead and do what you had planned to do."

She told me she thought that as much as feeling beaten up, that Zach was really bumming about ruining his new race wheels. "I know," she said, "that all that worry about wasting money can make you feel conservative and you just want to pull back and not take any more chances, but if Zach really wants to be a bike racer, he's gonna have to race."

Zach finished the pro 1-3 race, and finished the haunting thoughts of his crash right along with it. All I could think was, damn, girl, I can think of a lot of cat ones who could use some of that kind of mothering. Later.

Credit

2006-04-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

The Hillsboro-Roubaix race is tomorrow. This is a hard race. This race encourages more excuse-making and embellishment of personal experience than just about any of the year. Most of the finishers will not win anything of material worth. Some of the also-rans will gain confidence and self-fullfillment, but others will be consumed by bitterness and self-doubt. This race in particular would be a good one for all competitors to work on their dignity game. So if you get a self-indulgent urge to whine, you need to just say "No." This is an acquired skill that you have to work at. Mastering this aspect of your game will make bike racing infinitely more enjoyable.

If you don't believe me, you should go to this race and afterwards just stand around the parking lot and listen in on a few conversations. Some of them will be the weirdest you've ever heard. Racer A will walk up to racer B and start talking about why racer A got dropped. Racer B will seem to be listening, but then B's response will be about B's race. By then you'll notice that neither of them is really listening to the other, but is instead gazing around presumably for someone else to tell their story to.

And here is the point: no one really cares about your race except you. The only exception might be found in the junior ranks, but the rare moms and dads whose first concern is their little angel's win-loss column are truly weird individuals, indeed.

This is a very difficult concept for bike racers to grasp--that no one beyond them really cares how their race went as long, that is, as they can walk away from it. This phenomenon is best illustrated by the experience of one of my old touring buddies.

One July day a few years back, my friend was riding his bike across southern Missouri. He had full paniers loaded down and was in the midst of a 100-mile day in 90-degree heat and humidity when he pulled off the road and leaned his bike against the railing of an old country store. Sitting on the porch of that store were three old-timers who had not much more to do than spit, whittle, tell stories and ask people what they were up to on such a hot-as-hell day. My lycra-clad buddy must have been quite a sight, and the story of what he was up to was no doubt equally incredulous. As my friend tells the story, however, one of the old boys didn't miss a beat in astutely summing up the venture: "I guess," the old sage drawled, "a feller just don't get much credit for that sort of thing."

So true. Later.

Survival of the Wittest

2006-03-31T12:30:00.000-08:00

This time of year reminds me of when you're eating ribs. You know how when you're eating ribs, you do so much gnawing, wiping, gnawing, wiping, then runnin' for more napkins, then more gnawing and wiping, so it's like you really never get full so much as at some point you just get tired of eatin'.

Staying on the bike this time of year is a bit like that, except you just get tired of the gear. You get so tired of pulling, zipping, tucking, strapping, zipping, adjusting. And you get tired of the cognitive process part of it all as well. What's the temp now compared to what it'll be two hours from now? Is there a chance of rain? What's the wind? How much daylight? So it's like with eating ribs. It's not that you don't want to ride, you just don't want to have to fuck with so much shit. You just wanna go fer Chrissakes.

So this time of year, you find yourself either over- or under-dressed about half the time. And just when you're sure you've thought of everything and you've got it about right, you reach down and there's no water bottle. But if you had a water bottle, you'd get exactly halfway around your loop and sure as hell that's the time you'd remember that your seat pack is on the other bike.

All of these things have happened to me at least once in the past few weeks--even the getting tired of eating ribs part. I even forgot my license on the way to a race in Lawrence. Luckily the registration people were hooked up online and they whisked me right through. And that's the way things should be. For bike racers, March and April should be the forgetful months. We should get a pass on remembering anything during these months, cause we're just worn out from having to remember so much shit during the winter.

During March and April, we should get a pass on birthdays, anniversaries, appointments and staff meetings. Our minds are on detail overload. We have to rebuild our bikes. For months we've been remembering all the gear and all the stuff to avoid colds and flu and stress. In March and April we need to make an effort to forget more and remember less. It's self preservation kicking in--survival of the wittest.

This way, you'd forget how much certain people have their little irritations. You'd forget that the dude already told you that story five times and you'd appreciate his fresh approach to it this go-round. You might actually ask Josh to do his billy goat imitation or put you down just for old time's sake. You'd see Tracy and yell, "Haaaaay." You might feel compelled to buy Zoom a tank of gas even though you didn't ride with him. You might just keep on talking to Fish even when he got that fifty yard stare about halfway through your second sentence. You could actually laugh when Luke shows up for a ride and going on and on about how tired he is and then immediately dropping the hammer. You wouldn't be a bit bothered that Beefcakes looks so much better than you do on the bike--even before he clips in. You'd be glad that Andy doesn't talk on the bike. It would be no biggie that Pam does not take a pull until you hit the biggest hill at which point it's like she's pulling your lungs out of your nostrils. You'd listen closely to one of Nolan's diatribes, you'd let Luke Jr. con you out of your last pack of GU, and you'd make Jan say something.

See? Here in BOCOMO we really do have a lot to be forgetful for. But what the hell, it's springtime and I ain't forgettin' that. Later.

What don't kill ya

2006-03-14T06:10:00.000-08:00

Man, I use to hate springtime racing. Trying to do a warm up ride is the definition of an exercise in futility. Freezin' your ass off on start lines while they do shit like call the roll--like they'd ever miss you if you didn't make it back. When they can't determine who got fifth place, makes you wonder what they could do for a straggler who got sucked up into either a spaceship or the grill of a Suburban. And don't get me started on cold morning sit-downs in porta-johns and public outhouses--the cold seat is nothing compared to the wind that whips up from some indescribable location and homes in on your brown eye, which then puckers up so hard that it almost defeats the objective.

And springtime races are usually always road races. That means they are way the hell out in the middle of nowhere at some half-ass lake or church with enough parking for about ten cars. So you pull down gravel roads or out in a field where you might get buried up to the axles in mud. And you do all of this so you can suffer on your bike against the absolute worst element you ever encounter on a bike--the hawk. The all-mighty hawk. The wind.

So this past weekend an entire vanload of us chose to spend half of our weekend in pursuit of all the afore-mentioned amenities. To make matters worse, we headed out to the spot where all killer wind is born. When someone talks about tough wind in some race in, say, Germany, then the wind they are talking about probably was born in Kansas.

So Sunday morning we lighted out for one of the annual spring races over at Lake Perry (really, a pretty nice course and event, thanks Trudi) just north of Lawrence. It was the inaugral trip for the flamin' van. It was Ethan and his band of guerrilla juniors, Pam and me and her friend Jessica. Jessica is just starting to ride for MU and this was her first away game. And this is one of the things that was cool about this trip. Jessica and the juniors are all new to the game, so everything is novel to them. Hence, they don't bitch and moan like seasoned cat I and II racers, whose egos won't let them stay at home, but who would really rather still be in bed curled up in a fetal position with a little warm drool falling on the pillow. But these kids were so ramped up that Jessica chose to go even though we told her there wouldn't be room for her bike. She wanted to go just to check it out.

Ethan had torqued his back and wasn't racing, but he wanted to take his bike anyway just to stay loosened up while everyone else raced. So he insisted that Jessica use his bike for the women's fours race. She had brought her cycling shoes on the chance that there would be a bike she could use. So Ethan unscrewed his cleats and screwed them onto her shoes and set his bike up for her so she could do the women's fours race (who said he was an asshole?). She got second and probably could have won if she'd just known how to do that sort of thing--when they topped the hill on the first lap, the girl out in front looked like death while Jessica was actually managing to smile, which is something all beginning racers think you must be able to do when you go through the start/finish line, and they're positive the people dropping them are doing it easily.

The BOCOMO Jr's were the only ones to line up in that race, so Ethan stepped out in faith and signed them all up in their first 3/4's event--a decent-sized field of mostly three's. We really didn't know what to expect from these boys, given the fact that all of last year they sort of needed training wheels to stay upright. But the days of looking like bear cubs with boxing gloves on are now past for these little dudes. They took it right to 'em. After several attacks, Nolan and Luke got off with a pretty strong VeloTek guy and they stayed away for the win. I'd have to say that anyone from BOCOMO would have been proud of the boys. They all rode a good race. Nolan won, Luke took third and Jan did his part back in the pack and finished with the leaders in the top ten. Ethan was so consumed with pride that every picture he took he tried to include the entire state of Kansas in the background. I gave him shit about it, but his boys came through for him and in a big way.

My race lasted about two laps. They put the girls in with the masters and part way into the second lap, I heard Pam saying something in distressed tones. Turned out she had a flat. She was in the running for something akin to some decent shwag, unlike me, so I told her to pull over and I gave her my rear wheel. Then I gave her a totally shitty wheel change, which necessitated her stopping and straightening it out a couple hundred yards later. But she managed to chase down second place and take that, so it wasn't a total loss.

Luckily I'm really cynical when it comes to road races and I always pack a spare tube and CO2. That's one of the things I've learned about road races, especially in the spring. Nothing's worse than freezing your ass off in the middle of nowhere waiting for the follow vehicles of another category. Better to busy yourself changing the flat, cause half the time there's never any room in one of those wheel vehicles, anyway. The other thing I've learned about these springtime races is that you just have to learn to appreciate all the uncomfortable aspects. You just give yourself over to them and realize that they define you on this particular day. It is those irritating conditions that make you a player. The dudes back in their warm beds? They also get defined by these conditions: posers, pussies, wanna-be's, has-beens, spectators, couch potatos, etc. Take your pick. So when you look at things that way, then the springtime road races are tolerable. Hell, they may even be valuable. Later.

A one-hand standing O

2006-03-06T07:54:00.000-08:00

A ride of note took place in BOCOMO this past weekend. This ride pointed out many of the more vexing questions confronting the empirical, the theoretical and the paranormal scientific communities. It is rare that any phenomena ever unites such diverse, some say complete polar opposite, schools of thought. What happened was that Butthead was the only person who showed up for a noon ride, and he did 4.5 hours alone.

Such an event just may have made BOCOMO the focal point of the cosmos this past Sunday. If any of you dudes or dudettes suddenly felt a jolt in your lower regions and found yourself looking for something to do with the uncontrollable urge just south of your belt buckle, then now you know you have Butthead to thank for it. If dogs began howling, fire alarms tripped, or the lame bolted upright and started sprinting, then this would explain it.

Even stranger than those things, however, is that all over the county, no doubt guys on computrainers started spontaneously doing Beavis impersonations. As their wives got struck by a randy urge to wander into the garage where their man was doing intervals, they saw their man's nostrils flared out and heard him doing that crazy nasal laugh: Uhh-hah hah hah, hah hah hah, hah hah hah. Then the guy'd say something like, "Power--TAP," with the emphasis on tap, then the laugh again.

All this was set in motion by a tsunami wave of cosmic debris washing over the county from the wake of Butthead's silence vacuum. If Arjuna was here he could probably describe this, but basically nature abhors a vacuum and loves predictibility. So all the natural forces depend on things happening naturally, which is to say, as they naturally do.

So essentially when the noon ride went off with no one for Butthead to yell at and no one to drop, it was just fucking unnatural. If those assholes at FEMA had any sense, they would be on this in an instant, but of course their incompetence is legendary, so it is up to the BOCOMO peloton. It is encumbant upon all of us to make sure that Butthead has someone to razz, belittle and poke fun at for every ride. So if you can't make the noon ride, at least call him on his cell phone and offer up a really lame excuse why you need to ride rollers or train alone. Only through such vigilance can we ever expect to keep this from happening again. Remember, a one-handed standing ovation is a terrible waste to mind. Later.