Altitude sickness

October 25, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Well, that’s officially it for summer — I pulled the cover off the pergola and stashed it in the garage. No chance of cranial sunburn on the back deck for now, the skies being gray, the temps in the mid-30s and some nasty-looking weather to the south.

Still, it could be worse. My man Hal up in Crusty County reports thusly: “It’s snowing again. I’m moving to Pewblow.”

He’s kidding, of course. We have both lived in Pewblow, and the best that can be said for the place is that it’s 10 degrees warmer than where Hal is right now, which would be stuck in a steadily swelling snowbank at 8,800 feet just east of Weirdcliffe.

Pewblow makes Bibleburg look like San Francisco on a sunny day. My hometown has its faults — many, many of them — but at least here the cops don’t tase you before they shoot you just to see that look on your face. They just ask if you’ve found Jesus and then blow a great big .40-caliber hole in your heart so they can see if he’s really in there.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to work up the ‘nads to go out for a short bike ride, maybe a little cyclo-cross over in Monument Valley Park. Try that in Pewblo sometime. The cops will see you running with the bike and figure you stole it. Then it’s zap, bang, and hasta la vista muchachos.

• Late update: OK, I did it — sucked it up, pulled on the winter kit and went out for an hour of solo ’cross. Lord, did I suck, particularly on the running bits, which used to be my strength. But about 40 minutes in, it finally started getting good to me, and for a lap or two I felt marginally competent, if awfully slow. And now my back hurts. Mine will not be a pretty old age.

October surprises

October 2, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

It got good and chilly here last night — when I arose, it was exactly freezing outside. Now it’s 50-something, like me, and like me it took a long time to get there.

Last night I made another Martha Rose Shulman recipe, pasta with walnut sauce and broccoli raab, except I used broccoli florets. I had planned to do her stir-fried pork and greens, but Herself intervened on behalf of broccoli, and while I was surprised at her choice we were both pleased with the results. Plus there were enough leftovers for today’s lunch.

Tonight it’s back to caveman chow — a grilled flatiron steak from Ranch Foods Direct, some spuds and a vegetable to be determined by Herself, who is on a rare grocery-shopping excursion as part of a series of errands. I generally fetch the grub, since I do all the cooking around the DogHaus, but lacking any sort of work ethic I’m easily persuaded to sit on my ass and let someone else do the heavy lifting.

Outside the kitchen, meanwhile, Repuglican asshats and their enablers in the MSM are spastically jacking off over Barack Adolf Hitler Saddam Hussein Pol Pot “Uncle Joe” Stalin Mao Zedong Obama’s failure to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago and Steve Benen at Political Animal is predictably snarky.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about, frankly — Colorado voters told the International Olympic Committee to go fuck itself back in 1972, when a Denver group wanted to bring the Winter Olympics here, and we’re still on the map, albeit for all of the wrong reasons (Focus on the Family, Doug Bruce, Doug Lamborn — the list goes on and on). But at least we didn’t piss away 13 times the original estimate to host that frozen clusterfuck, the way California did in 1960.

Why, the Winter Games don’t even include cyclo-cross. That right there’s a deal-breaker as far as I’m concerned.

Retro-grouchery

September 24, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

I don't know why that hand is in there. I bet this bike can stand on its own, drink a couple of Belgian ales and maybe jump over the moon like Elliott's bike in "E.T." (Stolen from tech editor Zack Vestal at VeloNews.com.)

Katie Compton, the Beast of Bibleburg, blew everyone’s doors off at CrossVegas last night. I was reading a piece on her crazy quilt of sponsorships yesterday — Stevens frameset, Dugast rubber, Zipp wheels, bars and cranks, SRAM Red drivetrain — and scoping out all that bike jewelry got me to thinking.

Remember the good old days, when a cyclo-cross bike was a beast of burden instead of a thoroughbred?

Like a lot of us, I rode my first few cyclo-crosses on a mountain bike. My first “real” ‘cross bike was a steel Specialized Sirrus road frame that a framebuilder acquaintance in Santa Fe doctored with a torch, adding cantilever braze-ons, removing the chainstay bridge and shifting the seatstay bridge up a bit. My second was a real ’cross bike, a neon-yellow steel Pinarello with bar-end shifters, MA-40 rims and Wolber 28 Cross Extra rubber, Weinmann cantis and a Shimano 600 drivetrain straight out of the gack box like the Sirrus before it, ’cause I knew from experience that it was going to take a beating.

I got a little more disco as my skills and resources improved, stepping up to a series of Steelman framesets in Excell, Reynolds 853 and Dedacciai zero-uno, his venerable CC first of all, followed by a succession of Eurocrosses. Instead of generic Shimano cantis I stepped up to Paul’s Neo-Retro and Touring brakes. And I raced at least once with a Voodoo Loa ti’ bike sporting a one-off Marzocchi suspension fork and a pair of Zipp 530 carbon clinchers, because I got ’em for free from Andy Ording and thus wasn’t emotionally invested in their long-term viability.

But after a while I started to feel like a fat bald guy driving a Maserati in hopes of picking up chicks.

First to go were the tubies, ’cause I got sick of losing a pair every weekend to the Chatfield Reservoir goatheads. The ti’ bike went away shortly thereafter (though I held onto the oddball fork). And the Zipps went back on the time-trial bike where they belong.

My final race, in 2004, was on my Reynolds 853 Eurocross, with a clincher wheelset and no spare bike, not even spare wheels; I rode to the course from the DogHaus, and when I flatted midrace, I replaced the tube and rode back home.

If I were to stage a comeback, I’d do it on that bike. Like me, it has a ton of miles, dents, dings, scratches and scrapes, but somehow it keeps on keeping on. I wouldn’t trade it for a six-pack of Stevenses. No disrespect intended.

But still, damn. Look at this thing. I’d hang it on a wall and bow to it six times a day, maybe pray to it. But race on it?

Housecats gone bad

February 8, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

Cyclo-cross, schmyclo-cross, lemme sleep.

I used to be hard core. Lately I’m all brittle exterior and soft interior, like a Tootsie Pop, but not as sweet. Why, there was a time not so long ago that if the temperature rose to the freezing point, I was out the door like a congressman fleeing the vice squad. I had my own private cyclo-cross course, and at 8800 feet, too. Used sunning rattlesnakes for obstacles and carried a pistol just in case the course decided to redesign itself in a hostile fashion.

Somewhere along the road from there to here I turned weaker than 7-Eleven coffee. Maybe it was moving from the mountains back to town, or switching my pet preference from dogs to cats. Dogs must go out, we will go out, let me out, for the love of God. Cats find the one sunny spot in the house and cover it like Sherwin-Williams. Fuck a bunch of winter, I shit in a box. What’s t’eat around here, anyway?

But there must be some small, vestigal hint of a whiff of mutt in me somewhere, because today I ventured out for 90 minutes on the Eurocross despite a high pegged right at freezing and a dampish breeze that took the wind chill 8 degrees lower. Rode the sonofabitch over to Palmer Park and zipped around the single-track, skirting the occasional icy bits when possible and generously yielding trail to various porky nitwits sporting headphones and unleashed dogs.

Then I rolled home, whipped up a skillet full of peppers, potatoes, chicken, parsley, onion and garlic, topped it with some hard-boiled eggs, and gobbled it all down, refusing to share so much as a single solitary nibble with the housecats. Stand back and let the big dog eat, you pussies.

Dog day afternoon

February 5, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Gave myself the day off in honor of William S. Burroughs’ birthday. I can do that, because Mad Dog Media is a one-dog shop. Unsnap the leash and off I go.

It being 60-something and sunny, I broke out Old Reliable, my Reynolds 853 Steelman Eurocross, and rode the trail to Fountain and back. It’s about a two-hour U-turn, if you throw in a few didos on the return leg, like a lap of Monument Valley Park for extra vitamin-D absorption.

A couple largish downed trees this side of Highway 85 require a quick zig and zag; a short pair of run-ups around a washed-out concrete climb follow. Other than that it’s smooth sailing. A guy could do it on a road bike. Not me, though. Not as long as I have five ‘cross bikes taking up space in the garage. Put those fat bastards to work and save the skinny rubber for the streets.

Ike got a fine crop of tulips to keep her company last spring.

A bit of drama greeted me on my return home. An elderly neighbor needed an assist with her equally aged greyhound, which has been having balance issues and today lost control of its front legs. Being creakily past my own prime I commiserated briefly and then helped load the dog into her car for a trip to the vet. She was expecting bad news and got it. The vet prescribed a dose of steroids, but confessed it was a delaying action, the equivalent of locking up the cantis on a sandy descent. You may slow that long downhill slide but you ain’t gonna stop it.

Upset me, it did, in part because I have a beloved cat — Ike, a.k.a. Chairman Meow — buried in the back yard. I miss any one of my departed animal pals more than all of my deceased relatives. So I showered the grit off and went to Trinity Brewing Company for a couple of IPAs and a bowl of their mac’ and cheese. I’d never been there, and the online reviews were not encouraging, but I was not in the mood for my usual haunts, so I took a chance and it paid off. Good beer — the brewmaster used to whip up the popskull over at Bristol Brewing — and a friendly, attentive staff. Just what the doctor — or, in this case, the vet — ordered.