That old cyclo-crossin’ gang of mine, following a 1990s race in Fort Collins.
A long time ago, in a peloton far, far away, when it got to be too cold or sloppy to train on the road bike one of the Dogs would invariably propose, “How’bout riding mountain bikes on the road?”
It makes sense, if you think about it. Big ol’ tires for traction. Closer to the ground for purposes of falling onto same. Lower average speed and thus less wind chill. Add fenders and you don’t even get the deadly Brown Stripe of Shame.
So that’s what I did today. Dug up a pair of strap-on, zip-tie Planet Bike fenders for the DBR ti’ and went out for my second mountain-bike ride of 2014. That’s about two more than I did in 2013*, and it’s only Jan. 7.
This also means that five — five! — of my bikes now sport fenders. A sixth has a set, but isn’t presently wearing them. And I have an extra pair in case I feel like going for Lucky No. 7. You can’t stop me!
And to think I once lived for cyclo-cross, the entire purpose of which is to get cold, wet and filthy dirty, all at the same time. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
*Purists will note that I rode a buttload of 29ers during 2013, but that doesn’t count. I’m talking 26-inch hardtail here. Who rides one of those in 2014? Besides me, that is?
Cheech and Chong* must be laughing their asses off.
“By a 3-to-1 margin, journalists inside 3D Cannabis outnumbered customers waiting outside before the shop opened,” reports The Denver Post in its coverage of today’s first sales of legal recreational marijuana in Colorado.
“This is history I just made,” crows a Georgia gent who slept in his car, with his dog, in order to spend $180 on 6 grams of smokable herb and some munchies.
Well, Stoney, let’s get real here. Buying a legal bag of shit is not quite up there with integrating a redneck lunch counter, landing on the moon or inventing the Internet. But we take your point. Folks in Colorado — certain parts of it, anyway — can now purchase the fabled Whacky Tobacky over a counter instead of under the radar, and from someone who doesn’t look the way I did when I was selling $12 lids in Alamosa, too.
Bibleburg, naturally, decided not to participate in this making of the history. Retail sales of firearms, tattoos, payday loans, superstition, fuck books, tonsil polish in a thousand-and-one flavors, and all manner of other smokable products? Fine, fine, go about your business.
But the recreational mary-joo-wanna? Nossir. Might set the younguns to rubbing theyselfs in public, cause the Army to make bongs of its M203s, maybe even lead to dancing on Sunday.
So Manitou Springs, Pueblo and Denver will get the mota-related jobs and taxes, and Bibleburg will get the mumbling stoners. Assuming said stoners have recourse to money and reliable transportation, anyway. So we got that going for us.
Pretty silly, hey? But not as silly as the 62-year-old masters racer who just drew himself a two-year ban for using amphetamines, testosterone and EPO. Talk about hitting the trifecta. It’s a wonder the cup didn’t dissolve when he pissed in it. Doping to win masters races is like standing tiptoe on a stack of prescription pads to make yourself the biggest midget in the room.
I found Crusty County a tough spot for road riding, if you define “road” as “pavement.” We lived 10 miles east of town, up a dirt road in the Wet Mountains, and said road was basically impassable on a road bike even in good weather. The drop from our house to the county road was a winding, rapid 430 vertical feet in one mile, and what went down eventually had to come back up.
Your Humble Narrator, enjoying a brisk workout on his private cyclo-cross course back in the day when he could still squeeze into a skinsuit without a tire iron and some lubricant.
So, since I’ve always hated driving to a training ride, I mostly rode cyclo-cross bikes everywhere, and a guy could piece together one hell of an eclectic workout that way, especially when the ride started at 8.800 feet.
That said, there was some stellar paved-road riding in the vicinity — the old Hardscrabble Century used some of it, as did a century out of Pueblo and a comparative newcomer, Ride Westcliffe. And it sounds like the state champs would like to use quite a piece of it.
If the organizers get to lay out a road-race course that includes McKenzie Junction, Wixxon Divide, Bigelow Divide and Greenhorn Divide en route to Bishop’s Castle and back, well, there will be fun for all, excepting the fat bastards, like yours truly. The only flat spot on the course is likely to be the start/finish line.
I always wanted to put on a Three Peaks-style cyclo-cross at Bear Basin Ranch, but we had enough trouble persuading the Boulder fairies to drive to Bibleburg. Throw in a couple thousand more feet of vertical, another 75 miles of driving, and the chance of meeting an actual bear on course, and the moniker “Wet” Mountains would have taken on a whole new meaning.
The flier for the 2000 Mad Dog Cyclo-cross in Bear Creek Regional Park.
Bibleburg has never been a hotbed of cyclo-cross. Oh, sure, nationals was held here once, back in 1980, and shortly after I returned to town from New Mexico in 1991 we got a small local scene rolling, mostly because driving to the Denver-Boulder clusterplex was something of a pain in the ass come wintertime. Or any other time, come to think of it.
Also, the U.S. Cycling Federation required a racing club to promote at least one event per annum, and back in the day there was nothing easier to run than a ’cross. Find yourself a venue, mark it casually with some red and blue flags, install a few homemade wooden barriers to force the roadies off their bikes, and by golly you had yourself a race course.
So we put on a couple races per year, in Palmer Park or Monument Valley Park — host to that long-ago national championships — until some turd in the city government who lived nearby took an infarction about people racing bicycles in “his” park. That we were donating the proceeds from our events to park maintenance was immaterial. Sorry ’bout that, said the parks people, but we have to deal with this asshole all the time; you we only have to see a couple times a year.
Thus we shifted operations to the county parks system, putting on races in Bear Creek Regional Park — where, as a precaution, Team Mad Dog Media-Dogs At Large Velo formally adopted the section of trail that included our course — and in Black Forest Regional Park.
Your Humble Narrator on the job during a rare soft day at the Bear Creek Cyclo-cross. As you can see, I am a veritable blur of activity.
Ours were fast, simple courses, suited to beginners and roadies in need of an early season refresher, in part because the county was not interested in our veering off established trail, and in part because we were not exactly the most vigorous of race promoters.
In fact, we were about as lazy a crop of bastards as ever marked a course. Our northern counterparts, among them Chris Grealish, Lee Waldman and John Vickers, were more imaginative when it came to locating new venues, negotiating with their overseers, and designing interesting circuits.
At our peak, we were getting just over 200 riders per event, which wasn’t bad for being outside the Boulder-Denver velo-ghetto, whose more sensitive communards either feared getting born-agained or libertarded if they dared cross the Palmer Divide or didn’t like driving south any better than we liked driving north. We also were working with our northern cousins on a statewide series that included events from Pueblo to Fort Collins.
Eventually, inevitably, we Dogs flamed out. I peaked as a ’cross racer in 1999, and shortly thereafter started dialing it back; by then, Herself and I were living on a rocky hillside outside Weirdcliffe, and Bibleburg was a 90-minute drive in good weather. The last Mad Dog ’cross at Bear Creek may have been in 2000, though I still raced occasionally until 2004, when I finally gave it up for good.
Another club picked up where we left off, drawing OK numbers and getting progressively more creative with its courses, including one last year up near the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs that I heard good things about. Alas, they, too, seem to have flamed out for now — for one reason or another, there seems to be nary a cyclo-cross in Bibleburg this season.
It’s a pity, really. ’Cross has been the biggest thing in bike racing for quite a while now, and last weekend’s Cyclo X-Xilinx in Longmont drew more than 650 racers, a number unheard of in my day. Surely we could get half that down here despite the Lambornagains and various other socio-political impediments. Tap a medical marijuana company for sponsorship, donate the proceeds to the Society for the Preservation of Steel Bicycles and Cantilever Brakes.
I may not race anymore, but I’d still like to watch now than then.
The colors are changing, fast and furious, as fall descends on Bibleburg.
Cyclo-cross weather here in Bibleburg today. And yesterday, too; it was the first day I wished I’d fetched arm and knee warmers along on what proved to be an abbreviated ride.
It rained a little — naturally, since Herself had just bathed and groomed Mister Boo — and this morning with temps in the 40s the uniform of the day is pants, socks and a long-sleeved Ten Thousand Waves T-shirt. I wish I were wearing it there.
The ’cross this weekend is up north, in the People’s Republic. I will not be in attendance, alas, but one of my bikes should be there, under the narrow booty of Dr. Schenkenstein, who has been taking the thing for an extended test ride and promises to buy it from me sometime.
Another purchase stolen out from under the noses of the local bicycle shops, which are less accommodating as regards pre-sale product evaluation. But then their stock is a little fresher than mine and probably moves a little faster, even in this economy.
Whether it might move faster under Dr. Schenkenstein will remain a mystery, as the man does dearly love a bargain on a used bike. If he eventually writes a check for this one, he will have three of my castoffs in his garage.
And I will have an unoccupied hook in mine. Oboy, oboy, oboy. …
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