Posts Tagged ‘Bear Creek East’

Here’s mud in your eye (or not)

January 30, 2022

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.

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Cyclo-cross, Weather | 12 Comments »

A Giant among men

July 7, 2014
This stretch was one of the fast downhill bits of our old 'cross courses.

This stretch was one of the fast downhill bits of our old ‘cross courses.

Stifling again today, with the high somewhere in the mid-90s and the promised rain nowhere in sight.

It was already 80-something as I stepped away from the iMac and started slathering on the sunscreen after a bracing few hours playing second-chair tuba in the Live Update Guy Symphony Orchestra during stage 3 of the Tour de France.

What a fella wants after all that chin music is a bit of the old bikey ridey, and a little shade to do it in, so I rode south past Colorado College and America the Beautiful Park to Bear Creek Regional Park, where the Mad Dogs used to run their cyclo-crosses back in the day.

The shade is spotty over there, especially if you climb westward through Bear Creek Terrace toward Gold Camp Road, which I did. Then I zipped down 26th Street into Old Colorado City and turned east, toward home.

Nobody would have mistaken me for Marcel Kittel, who I figure can play The Batman anytime he wants to. I’m sure Ben Affleck would be happy to step aside, especially if Marcel has gotten his bad self up to speed.

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Posted in Bibleburg, Bicycle racing, Bike stuff, Tour de France | 5 Comments »

Trails and travails

June 12, 2014
The Bianchi Zurigo Disc atop a descent leading to Bear Creek Terrace.

The Bianchi Zurigo Disc atop a descent leading to Bear Creek Terrace.

The three Ws — work, weather and writer’s block, overlaid with a thick coat of pollen — are conspiring against me this week.

I’ve accomplished a few small tasks, but the process has reminded me of being chased in slo-mo through a nightmare by something large and toothy. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it can be some days to corral 850 words that dollar up on the hoof, or scrawl a semi-funny cartoon. That Watterson fella is like the cops — never around when you need him.

I did manage to shoehorn one two-hour ride in between chores and thunderstorms. It was one of my patented weirdo cyclo-cross outings that took in bike paths, city streets, sandy single-track and lots and lots of hills.

I was full of albuterol and Claritin-D 12 Hour, so the time passed quickly, as it will. But the rain has been tough on the trails hereabouts, especially if you happen to be riding a cyclo-cross bike.

Still, it’s better than being on fire, or heading up the VA, or having your ass kicked by a Lipton Legionnaire.

I’ve not had a chance to follow up on the Old Guy kit, so bear with me. It’ll probably be next week before I have any definitive answers on cost, availability, online store, and what have you. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I plan to flog that Bianchi around some more. It’s wearing a set of 700×38 Continental Speed Rides now and is ever so much more comfortable to ride, even on Friday the 13th.

 

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Posted in Bidness, Bike stuff | 9 Comments »

Crosswords

October 29, 2013
The flier for the 2000 Mad Dog Cyclo-cross in Bear Creek Regional Park.

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.

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.

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Posted in Bibleburg, Bicycle racing, Cyclo-cross, History | 26 Comments »

Off the rails

March 18, 2013
Choo-choo.

Choo-choo.

Roads are for the weak.

What a fella wants after too many days spent indoors with runny snoot pressed to grindstone is not the sissified hiss of skinny tires on asphalt but the crunch of gravel under roughly shod wheels.

So Thursday and Friday I broke out one of my own bikes for a change — Old Reliable, the Voodoo Nakisi, with 700×43 Bruce Gordon Rock n’ Road tires — and rode around in Palmer Park, Bear Creek East and pretty much wherever else the cars weren’t.

On my way back to the ranch on Friday I took a side trip along a stretch of lightly used railroad tracks that not long ago bisected a small city of homeless camps. The “No Trespassing” signs are up now, in part to keep the street folks away and in part to save the unwary from getting carpet-bombed by road workers rebuilding a bridge overhead.

Naturally, being the sort who views “No” as encouragement, I pressed on regardless. I survived.

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Posted in Bike stuff | 17 Comments »