While we wait for the sounds of steel bracelets clicking shut, steel doors creaking open, and a judge intoning, “Will the defendant please rise?” … how’bout a bit of bicycle content?
Find the typo.
I haven’t been spending much time in the Elena Gallegos Open Space lately, other than in passing during road rides, so yesterday I grabbed my favorite Steelman Eurocross and headed over there from the Embudito trailhead.
The trail pixies have been busy in and around the EG, laying out alternatives to old routes, and as of National Trails Day last weekend I guess they’re finally official, with cautionary signs and everything.
The old routes had some sections that were pretty well overcooked and sketchy in spots, with a few slip-’n’-slides, gullies, and blind corners tailor-made for mayhem. The revisions are twisty, narrow, and mostly lack thrilling descents, but also present fewer opportunities for high-speed, head-on collisions.
I didn’t ride every trail in the area — there are a few that remain just plain unfriendly to 69-year-old stumblebums rocking rigid steel, drop bars, and 33mm tires — but it was pleasant as all get-out to escape The Duck! City drivers (and the news) for 90 minutes.
We went from gray to white in the blink of a shutter.
God is pitching softballs at us (graupel), and the temp just fell 10 degrees in as many minutes.
Looks like I won’t need to slather on the SPF 70 for that bike ride I won’t be doing.
Last year, March 2 was “sunny, virtually windless, 61-65°,” according to my training log. I was doing hill repeats and pulling off the arm and knee warmers.
Big Bill McBeef chases Your Humble Narrator upslope in a rare March cyclocross in Bibleburg.
And to think this year I haven’t even pulled them on. When I get out I’m still wearing long sleeves and tights. The only bit of me showing any color is my nose, and I think that’s windburn.
Well, March is always belligerent. Named for the Roman god of war, it marked the beginning of ass-kicking season, and it has kicked mine many a time.
In March 1994 the Mad Dogs put on a cyclocross in Monument Valley Park just to see what would happen and the answer was, “Not much.”
When even the cyclocrossers think you’re insane you might want to check yourself into the screw factory for a vigorous rethreading. We’d have gotten a bigger turnout promoting a St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl in Qatar.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla has rediscovered the joys of an old crinkle tube, some coarse wrapping paper, and a Wholeazon Amafoods shopping bag, all of which make fine sounds when run through, sprawled upon, or snuggled into.
Me, I likewise got back on the old hoss, metaphorically speaking, which is to say I started running again after giving my damaged toe a month of downtime.
Bikewise I hardly broke stride. Kept cranking out the 100-mile-plus weeks even with a pulverized piggie, and so far (knock on wood) I have avoided doing anything else inexplicably stupid to myself.
It’s nearly fall here in The Duck! City, but you’d hardly know it. Oh, the leaves are coming off the trees, but the weather widget says 87° in midafternoon and the hummers are still hitting the feeders like a cluster of knee-walking bog-trotters who just heard the barman call, “Time, gentlemen, time.”
Time, indeed.
A certain restlessness I ascribe to muscle memory. Come September Back In the Day® I would be in the early throes of cyclocross season, with a side of Interbike, and there would be much motoring and bicycling and running around to no particular purpose.
Your Humble Narrator at Dirt Demo circa 2005.
My Septembers are less hectic now. I did my last ’cross race in Bibleburg, way back in 2004, rocking a Steelman Eurocross but no spare bike, not even spare wheels. I rode to the course from the DogHaus, and when I flatted midrace, I simply replaced the tube and rode back home. It could be argued that I was not taking the whole thing seriously.
Thirteen years later I did my last Interbike. I lasted longer at that game because the finish-line payout was better and getting sockless drunk on the publisher’s dime was more or less a condition of employment.
But the publishers changed, and so did the game, and in January 2022 I retired, an event with all the significance of a mouse fart in a haboob.
I hadn’t expected to waltz offstage in the middle of a plague — which is over now, I understand, so, yay — but as the fella says, you go to retirement with the virology you have, not the virology you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Anyway, here it is September again and I still haven’t tapped my generous pension to buy a Peace Van and finally buckle down to the serious business of writing my great American road-trip story, “Travels with Snarly.”
Some days that Nobel Prize in Literature seems farther away than the finish line with a slow leak and no spare. At least I’m still riding and running.
My 1998 Steelman Eurocross didn’t get muddy today, either. I’da wanted mud, I’da had to pee a damp spot into the dust.
The great thing about being a retired cycling scribe is that if there’s a race going on that you don’t care about, you don’t have to watch.
So instead of finding some way to catch cyclocross worlds over the Innertubes, I went out and rode my own damn cyclocross bike for 90 minutes.
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.
I watched one lap of yesterday’s women’s race on YouTube earlier in the day, and that was enough. The Fayetteville course looks like a lot of fun, and I hope it hosts many years of exciting racing.
But I’m sorry. I gotta have filth.
No knock against the race organization — they couldn’t get a hammerlock on the Arkansas legislature, so you know they can’t control the weather — but I gots to have me some evil weather, mud and/or snow, equipment failures, spectacular crashes, pit strategy, and all the rest of the unpredictability sweepstakes that keeps a ’cross from turning into a dirt crit.
I promoted a few dirt crits in my day, but in my defense I will say that the Dogs at Large Velo races in Bibleburg were always intended to provide a gentle transition from road season to ’cross season. Occasionally we got a bit of weather to make the Bear Creek course interesting, but generally it was pretty predictable.
Me, I lived for the sloppy conditions we’d get at Chatfield, Fort Collins, or the horse park in Franktown. The kind of race where you spend so much time off the bike and running that your cyclocomputer goes to sleep. And you have to clean up in a nearby car wash afterward — bike, spare bike, and kit — because the wife caught you doing it in the shower once and you’re lucky she still lets you into the house, much less your slime-soaked gear.
Of course, the course and conditions don’t seem to have much effect on the actual finishing order. I notice the strong people mostly win wherever and whenever.
So, congrats to all the freshly minted world champions in Fayetteville. I hope that shiny new kit gets dirty one of these days.
The Stud, retired from the bike shop, found himself with a little free time and more than a few unpaid bills.
The UCI-Walmart 2022 Cyclocross World Championships kick off today in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
I won’t be there, and neither will my old ’cross buddy Brook Watts, whose baby this is.
Or was, before the political climate in Arkansas took a distinct turn for the worse, presenting him with an insurmountable run-up to race day.
Those were not cheering throngs at courseside. Cowbells were out, bullshit was in. Not even shoe spikes would help, unless applied to asses, and maybe not even then. Some days a fella can wear out a couple dozen pair of kneecaps kicking ass and all he gets is practice.
You can read Brook’s take on the whole mess at VeloNews. And for those of you who enjoy such things, here’s a hot GoPro lap of the course.
Mad Blog Media 