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