DSGP Round 1: NOLA

How much of New Orleans is below sea level?  If DSGP round 1 in Behrman Park is any indication, I'd say the answer is "everything except the fire ant colonies." They promised that There Would Be Mud, and there was:

Little did we know what was to come...no, scratch that...we knew...

The course was a mostly flat, winding course that would have been fast and grassy had any single blade of grass been able to survive longer than five minutes of 'cross tire slipping and sliding.  It went out, the wide start/finish straight giving traction for two inches down each side, narrowing to some marginally higher ground, a one-eighty that put you right back in the slop, Belgian gates in six inches of water around to the canal (faster but harder to run, every time), where an ever-softening gentle slope led racers ever-farther to the left in search of a solid line; back along the canal, up a runup the consistency of a forty-foot-long cow-patty, over the canal, along a long sloping verge to the head fo the canal, and twisting back to the start-finish through the ant hills and a sand pit that seemed marginally easier to ride than the mud...

It was a typically creative DSGP course with the mud negating the usual fast sections.  I wondered if fat bikes were going to show up and shred, but apparently not...I think it's a plus that, pushed by a combination of CX peer pressure (the best kind!) and course design, the league has largely graduated to dedicated CX bikes without needing rule restrictions...it's a good thing to remain open to riders who haven't yet jumped in and bought a CX bike, but it's also a good thing to not become a fat-tire short-track full-suspension league (there's a reason the officials at UCI races put calipers around everyone's tires!).  As much as my handling skills suck, I'll go on record supporting skills over suspension any day.

But back to the races:  as they told us on the start line of the 1/2/3, the cat 5 race had remained the fastest average times on the day, with every race getting progressively slower.  I believed it.  I had struggled to a second place behind Kupp in the 40+, where the slop made it a threshold effort just to stay upright.  That was too much, and I would pay for it in the 1/2/3 race.  A fast start saw Zach Thomas bolt out, chased by Ben Allen and Kupp, and although I redlined it in pursuit and stayed close for a bit, I was out of podium contention in no more than two minutes.  The power demands were relentless, and the first race had taken a lot out of my legs.  I opted for squaring off corners through most of the twisties, rather than risking the trenches, and I'm not sure if that was a good strategy or not.  On top of that, nervous or tired feet gave me consistent clip-in issues, and I ended up pedaling unclipped for maybe a third of the race (which difficulties would persist for the season, whenever I get a lumpy or rushed remount...I may have to go back to SPD pedals, but I'm a little concerned about mud buildup).  Toward the end, a consistently steady Stewie Pat caught me and went on to take fourth, leaving me to suffer it in for fifth, my first drop race in the series.

I'm pretty sure that's not a smile.

Afterward, as the temperature fell, Wes and crew did instant podiums and we all scuttled off to do snow angels in the standing water over in the middle of the park, trying to get the mud off our bikes and ourselves, out of our shoes, kits, earholes, butt cracks...Scott and I ended up filling gallon jugs with hot water from the stadium bathrooms, taking open-air showers and peeling kit gradually as unspeakable amounts of mud continued to emerge from everywhere mud could hide.

Five hours later, I'm home, to spend the next week cleaning and doing inventory on bike parts that need replacing--that one race came close to freezing up a bottom bracket bearing and chewing up a chain.  CX isn't the worst, but it's not super cheap either. 

Next up, Round 2 in Monroe, which would prove my theory that a two day race with reversed course will favor me one day, but not the other.  And my other theory that crashes are a great source of calcium.

Machines of Loving Grace: DSGP Round 2, Monroe

Sometime in the first lap of Delta States Grand Prix round 2, after my third startling and near-catastrophic crash in no more than two minutes, I began to understand in new ways some of the lessons of cyclocross.  CX giveth, and CX taketh away.

Saturday's course, along the banks of the Ouchita River, against the backdrop of a capsized boat on the far shore, featured an out-and-back along the river, four trips across the width of two diabolically repurposed volleyball sandpits, a fair amount of scrabbly sandy dirt, some pavement riding, and a couple of short steep jump-ups over a geologically inexplicable mound at one end of the park.  All in beautiful cool fall sunshine, as if to make up for DSGP round 1 in the swampy fire ant soup of New Orleans's Behrmann Park.

Floating in fourth in Sunday's race.
Pictures by Robert Lee (thanks!)

Capsizing in the distance (and in the foreground)

In that first lap on Saturday's race in Monroe, I was:  on my bike, off my bike, under my bike, standing on the back wheel, and at a few choice moments completely lost in space relative to the bike.  It was a comedy of errors, a slapstick episode nearing sublime proportions.

Gapped off the back of the small field, I fought back around a few other riders and after a few laps of massive efforts, rejoined the chase group.  I perhaps got lucky that Scott Kuppersmith had set a blistering pace off the front, and while the rest of the field was chasing in earnest, Scott's early jump may have also forced the pace behind to lower a bit as racers had to settle their heart rates, find their speed limits, and race each other smart or risk getting attacked.  That allowed me to regain contact, and once I ran out my initial crash quota, I only ate a few more dirt sandwiches and slammed my bike into the volleyball poles only a few more times.  It was far from a clean run, as Wes's commentary helpfully reminded me each time past the registration tables.  With fresh legs, and running on a potent concoction of crash adrenaline, desperation, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I managed to recover some, and in the last third of the race, surge past the chasers to establish myself in a safe second position, which I held to the end of the race.  Go figure. 

Second in Saturday's race, fourth in Sunday's, and sitting third in the season series.

In Sunday's 1/2/3 race, the course was reversed, and I had a similar, but far less catastrophic, first lap.  After a few bobbles, I made a big surge on the road section, charged up the hill, and led through a lap and a half or so.  Quickly, though, Scott and Ben Allen came around me, and my legs not recovering quite as well as I hoped, I had to settle for fourth position on the road.  Over the course of the race, I paid--either for my early efforts, my old age, or both, gradually falling off a smooth and fast Zach Thomas's wheel, and then, when a fresh, calm, and workmanlike Stewart Patrick steadily brought all the watts back up to the chase, dropping the rest of us chasers to take second, leaving me in fourth behind Zach.  I was a little deflated, and frankly wondered if a few more crashes would have helped me keep the intensity up.  But on a more serious note, clearly a first-lap massive attack will cost me big when the chasers gradually ratchet up the pace later in the race.  It seems like a lesson that should be obvious to a roadie, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how racing 'cross is not like racing road--you *do* need a fast start, you *can* just ride people off your wheel gradually, and chasers behind cannot work together nearly as effectively as they can on the road.

More than that, this weekend taught me some fairly clear lessons about the differences between cross and everything else I do on the bike all year long.  On the road, on the time trial bike, I'm sweating tiny adjustments, working on squeezing out marginal gains as much as any forty-year old MAMIL amateur racer can do.  On the road I'm always trying to fine-tune my suffering for the maximum output, all governed by a power meter, carefully measuring incrementally changing average speed, average heart rate, and normed and average watts.  Counting a gradually accumulating pile of kilojoules.

All watched over by machines of loving grace.   But rather than being freed from our labors by the cybernetic ecology Richard Brautigan's poem imagines, I'm hooked up to the machine, laboring under its benevolent dictatorship as it draws out my physical, emotional, spiritual potential--my very humanity--in units of energy expended and work performed.  It is, all the same, all very civilized, the suffering all very purifying.

But cyclocross admits nothing of the roadie's façade of human exceptionalism or exceptional humanity (doping aside, of course).  There's no velvet on the iron fist.  Cyclocross is frankly, baldly, and viciously red in tooth and claw, a desperate race for survival via suicide, an effort to redline your heart rate and destroy your equipment as quickly as possible, suffering harder and uglier than the rider behind you.  And the supple all-terrain beauty of a winning ride is just an illusion produced by nothing other than winning itself.  That is to say, the faster I get, the more I realize I need to practice, and the rougher it will be when I next eat dirt.

If I started thinking that cyclocross was the diametrical opposite of road riding, it's also entirely possible that 'cross is simply the savagery of road cycling laid bare, stripped of its thin veneer of civilization.  In Cyclocross, Bike Rides You, but instead of hooking you up to digital technology and lovingly coaxing the watts out of your legs, cyclocross beats them out of you, spraying them wastefully across the turf in an hour-long analog old-fashioned full-contact steel-cage death-match.  There's no power meter on my 'cross bike, and if there were, it wouldn't matter.  All I have to chart is the wavering red line, graphing my cardiac distress, and that's not good for much except for some compensatory TSS points as the stiffness and bruising drains gradually out of my legs and I get ready to do it again next week...

Next Week:  DSGP Round 3 in Natchez!

BAMACROSS DIRT CRIT

I'll get back to this past season's road racing momentarily, but for now I want to jot down my thoughts about cross, since I'm elbows-deep in it at the moment...

I'm just going to throw it out there:  there's nothing better for me, a roadie, than a cross race that is not really a cross race.

Cue BAMACROSS Dirt Crit 2015.

Bamacross, if you don't know, is a great series, full of cool people, and with exactly the kind of fun you'd expect from fall racing.  This year, I've moved on from the old to the new, giving the old Cyfac a chance to bring someone new into the sport, and moved on to a Trek Crockett 7, experimenting with CX1 and a tubeless setup.

I usually try to make CX a low-cost endeavor, in past seasons racing just a few times and spending something like $100 on nonperishable equipment:  2 new tires, say, or new bar tape.  This year, with unloading a bunch of old garage bling and selling the Cyfac, I moved into a new Trek with minimal wallet pain.  Set up ably and quickly by Marx and Bensdorf's sponsoring shop (Peddler in Memphis), the Trek was not the high-end carbon-frame disc-brake CX stallion on tubies that some people are riding, but then I'm not the rider that some people are.  And with SRAM 1x and tubeless tires, I figured I was paring a few ounces off the rig compared to the Cyfac.

So with a new bike and some fitness from road season, I hauled over to Brookside to tear up some gravel and grass with Alabama's finest.  Since I really wanted the fitness and adaptation, I went in for three races, the 35+, the 3/4, and the cat 3 race run with the 1/2s.  It was a lot, and kinda warm out there, and so I was glad when they combined the singlespeed with the elite race and took that one off my plate for me.

In the 35+, I got my typical slow hole shot, but there was maybe 2-300 yards before drifting into an open right hand curve, and I had time to punch it again when I saw Omar going hard.  In the dirt crit, the most technical parts were slightly slidey gravel where the difference between the best line and the worst line was maybe 10%--you had to ease off the gas just a little if you picked the worse line.  Well, Omar didn't, and I hung onto his wheel for a lap or so, trying to hold his line with desperation leg throws while gradually redlining.  He popped over the hill on the backside, held pace to take the first lap hole shot, and then gradually pulled away from me.  I was happy at that point to let the speed do down a bit and not crash myself with two more races.

Grinding up the hill on the back side--pic by Sara Walker

Have to give credit where it's due :-) pic by Andrew Garza

In the 3 race, we got a fairly fast start, and the lead three or four guys all took turns attacking early.  I am always game to toast myself early, and after the ditch dipsy-doo on the back side, I knew the trail turned up for a bit, and I hammered a gap open that I held through the backside grass and the steep little kicker.  I took the hole shot and kept on the gas, gradually opening a substantial lead that I held to the end.  This was not an easy effort, since on this course, it seemed possible for chasers to cooperate, and I would have to keep going hard through the lesstechnical sections in order to stay away.

Chicken Dinner!  Pic by Molly Beth Shaffer

In the third race, after a lunch break, I jumped into the combined 1/2 and 3 race.  I felt okay, but as events would prove, "okay" only goes so far in the third hour of racing.  This was fast but also strategic, and super fun--the Infinity guys had enough strong riders that they could repeatedly push a rider up the road and let someone else chase or risk a real gap opening.  I was trying to pay attention to who else was a cat 3, but I was also a little too eager to close a gap or jump ahead.  I was hoping that by being ggressive, I could join a 1/2 rider (hopefully in a blue and black kit!) who would work with me and keep me ahead of the other 3s.  It got a bit rough, and I wasn't descending the big hill as fast as some guys, and in the end, I popped hard after one too many surges up the hill.  Riding the last 15 minutes at a more reasonable (cooked!) pace, I was passed by another cat 3, and ended up alone for 3rd on the 3 podium and something like 8th overall in the A race.  It was a tough way to end, but I definitely put some fitness (or at least suffering) in my legs, I hope.

The 1/2 race with the 3s: another cool race shot from Sara Walker.

At some point, yep, this was how it felt.  Pic by Molly Beth Shaffer.

And if you weren't sure how cool CX is, I'll just leave this here for your consideration:

The future of the sport is safe!

Resumption of Web-Based Hostilities

Because offseason means never having to say I'm sorry, I'm not going to apologize for an eighteen month layoff from blogging.  You didn't notice anyway, I'm sure.  But I'm restarting it; here goes.

Since the funnest cycling season is upon us, it's definitely time to give a little rundown of the past couple racing seasons and kick off some recreational writing that may or may not will definitely include humblebragging my meager but happy-making road results, celebrating the continued growth of cyclocross and collegiate racing in Mississippi, and occasional musings about the wider world of cycling that prolly will seem less profound as soon as I say them.  All in the service of avoiding writing actual academic paragraphs, of course.

I'll start with some of my cycling highlights of the last year and a half; the 2013 Springtime of No Results turned into a summer of good cat 3 LAMBRA results: 

2nd overall in the Tour of Louisiana, in a late breakaway with Andrew Hammond:

Indian Cycling Gettin Paid!

A second in the cat 3s at Rocky Mount, the LAMBRA championships:

I will probably never outsprint Sam, and I certainly won't ever match his tank game.

And a third in the LAMBRA 1/2/3 Time Trial, with a time in the low 54s:

Lots of strength and experience in this frame...then there's me.

And I raced a sort-of cross season, with some great races in Memphis, Birmingham, and down in Natchez:

Outdoors Inc.'s long-running CX race on mud island, complete with scenic backdrop and future teammates.

Natchez, 35+ win.  Sloppy and very fun day.  Slipping and heckling.

 If I had to sum up that year...on the road, I finally felt like I was good to move up out of cat 3 (with consecutive 6th, 3rd, and 2nd in the championships, a TT podium, and an open podium in a stage race, I didn't feel like I was being impatient).  In cross, I started over at the bottom, and while I had plenty of roadie power, the smallest dab of mud may easily send me into the weeds, and I got to enjoy working on my weaknesses a little and trying to prove to myself I was ready to move up.  Most importantly, the DSGP crew was tons of fun and totally resuscitated my offseason enjoyment of cycling, which never really goes away, but does ebb from time to time.

And finally, I'm just going to leave this here, without further commentary:

Matt Gandy, ladies and gentlemen.