Garbage miles

December 11, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

The ever-readable Mike Ferrentino has a meditation on “garbage miles” in his “Beggars Would Ride” column over at NSMB.com.

No spoilers. Pop over and have a squint. I will say only that his thoughts on the topic have evolved over the decades, because he is mos def one of the higher primates.

This photo was taken three days before my 36th birthday. I was single, I had a job, and yes, that is a ponytail you see peeking out of the back of my helmet.
*Photo by Larry Beckner | The New Mexican*

I first encountered the concept of garbage miles back in the Eighties, while racing bikes out of Fanta Se. Logging a ton of miles I was, and getting ruthlessly flogged on race day by people doing half my weekly average, or less.

“The fuck?” I inquired.

“Too many junk miles,” they replied.

Junk miles, garbage miles, all samey same. Unfocused and thus unworthy. Or so they said, the rotten, podium-hogging sonsabitches.

But not me. Because whenever I was in the saddle spinning I was not parked at the The New Mexican‘s copy desk, where I had to log many junk miles indeed to underwrite my cycling habit. Many, many of them.

At least the bike miles, like crucifixion, got me out in the open air.

Once we moved to Bibleburg in fall 1991 I kept it up. The Sept. 15 entry in my training journal after a 157.5-mile week was: “A few respectable miles. Nice to not work — nothing like a job for fucking up your training.”

The fabled 115 ride from B-burg to Penrose and back, circa 1995 or thereabouts.

“Training,” he calls it. This is the hee, and also the haw. Oh, I was riding on road and off, first with Rainbow Racing, then later with the Mad Dogs. And I was running regularly, even doing a little inline skating and snowshoeing because I was freelancing pieces to a sports-and-fitness outfit in Boulder between my chores for VeloNews (see, I was actually trying to work and earn, kinda, sorta).

But at my first few Colorado cyclocrosses I was either OTB or DFL, eventually settling into a fairly reliable fourth-place kind of fella, out of the money yet very much in the way. Seventh of 11 finishers at the state championships at Chatfield State Park that year, after which I called it a season.

Too many junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.

Oh, I got better. Or maybe they got worse, as one of the fast guys mused in my presence after I finally managed to finish a race in front of him. In any case, by the mid-Nineties I could podium at a ’cross every now and then, even win, rarely, if the weather got truly evil and the fast guys stayed home.

This could’ve been because I actually trained for cyclocross, which by this time was the only cycling discipline I really cared about.

I worked on technique, ran a ton to counter my lack of snap in the saddle, and even built my own course at altitude (at the base of our 43-acre plot at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe in CrustyTucky).

During the seven years we lived there I rode a ’cross bike just about everywhere, because pavement was miles away and when I finally got to it I didn’t want to be herding the old mountain bike with its 26-inch knobbies and boingy fork. Though I missed its 24-tooth granny ring while cursing my way up the long dirt mile back to the house, 430 feet up from the washboarded county road.

Not a lot of junk miles in CrustyTucky.

In those years I logged my junk miles behind the wheel of a Toyota pickup, with my bikes in the bed. Our Mad Dog cyclocrosses were in B-burg, a 150-mile round trip from home base. The bulk of the state race series meant an even longer slog up the Front Strange, to Littleton, Denver, Franktown, Boulder, Mead, and Fort Collins. The weather was frequently wintry, masters were always first to race, and more than once to make the start I had to hit town the day before, overnighting in some low-rent motel.

Talk about your junk miles.

After a few years of that my training logs crumbled into random entries followed by none at all. It was starting to feel a whole lot like work — which was also suffering in part because the cycling community in CrustyTucky consisted of me, myself and I. It felt like being sentenced to Stationary Trainer Without Parole. I was taking all the pulls and yet going nowhere. In terms of fiscal and mental health it seemed prudent to seek out a few voices that weren’t coming from inside my head.

Dennis the Menace and Dr. Schenkenstein take the long view atop Bear Creek East, a once-active cyclo-cross venue.

In those first years back in Bibleburg I had a good crew. Quite a few of the Mad Dogs owned the clocks we punched and could rearrange at least one business day a week to log junk miles and devise solutions to the various crises facing the world (you’re welcome). Big Bill “Shut Up and Ride” McBeef and his bro Other Bill. Usuk and The Geek. Dr. Schenkstein and Dennis the Menace. The Old Town Bike Shop crew. And the rest of you lot; you know who you are. So in 2002 we went back there.

Took me right back to my riding roots it did. I no longer felt as though everything was uphill and into the wind in all directions. A couple years later I quit racing because I didn’t need it anymore. I had my junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.

Some dogs just gotta tip over that trash can.

Leaf me alone

December 10, 2024December 10, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

An overly spicy pasta dinner led to a restless night, and by the time I dragged ass out of the sack this morning temps in the teens plus a biting wind out of the north had done a Pythonesque “Meaning of Life” number on our trees.

A veritable blur of activity was Your Humble Narrator back in his days as a cyclocross promoter..

Herself’s mantra is “We can do anything for 30 minutes.” But she wasn’t here, so I gave myself a day off from the usual outdoorsy pasatiempos. Took some pix, downloaded some software, entertained the cat, fed the birds (no, not to the cat), collected the mail (all bullshit), perused the news (likewise), drank tea.

In short, stayed warm.

There’s something deep in the heart of me that remembers those bitter wintry mornings of yesteryear, which saw me hammering barrier stakes into frozen turf at stupid-thirty and wondering if this would finally be the day when nobody but me turned up to race cyclocross.

Psychlocross

November 4, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

A wee dose of winter in the backyard, just in time for Election Day.

My brother geezers were already abandoning the Monday ride on Sunday. Cold, wet, no thank you, please, etc.

I bailed too, mostly because I’m taking antibiotics and steroids to beat down a sinus infection, but also because I had my fill of cold and wet in the Before-Time™, when I fancied myself a cyclocross racer.

My interest in the activity started to flag after a few years living on our wind-whipped rockpile outside of Weirdcliffe, in Crustytucky County, Colo. (“Gateway to Gardner”).

I actually had some of my best races while we lived there, because I was living at 8,800 feet and training even higher, running a ton, riding a ’cross bike almost exclusively on the indifferently maintained and largely unpaved roads, and doing laps on my own short homemade course.

But evil weather was both my strength and my undoing. I needed a course with lots of running to have a chance against the roadies, who are like cowboys, reluctant to dismount from their steeds and proceed on foot. So, yeah: rain, mud, snow, anything to suck a few mph out of those tree-legged, leather-lunged sonsabitches.

But getting to the races in the kind of conditions that favored my limited skillset — run around for 45 minutes while wearing a perfectly rideable bike — could be something of a project. The nearest one was 90 minutes down and north in good weather, and it was the race I and my club put on twice a year in Bibleburg. The others were in Franktown, Littleton, Lakewood, Longmont, Boulder, Mead, Fort Collins, and like that there.

It got to where I would book a motel room, drive north the night before a race, eat dinner out, breakfast on coffee and energy bars in the room, get my ass handed to me at the event, clean up in a car wash, find something to eat, and drive home. After a while it began to feel a lot more like work than recreation, even if I did well, which mostly I did not.

Unless I saw heaps of snow on the deck when I got up on race day. Yay. And even then I had to drive home in it.

The travel got a little easier when we moved back to Bibleburg, but the racing never did. I was working a lot while training less, and at a lower altitude, too. The flesh was unwilling and the spirit was weak.

I could tell I was over it in 2004, when I rode my main race bike to a ’cross in Bibleburg . No spare bike, not even a spare wheel. And when I flatted about halfway through my race, I wobbled off the course, resolved the puncture (who brings a pump and saddlebag with spare tubes and tire irons to a friggin’ race?), and rode home.

And it wasn’t even snowing.

Just like cyclocross, only slower

December 3, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Big Red after we exited the Elena Gallegos trails.

Having grown weary of thumbing through heaps of dusty grimoires in my fruitless quest for the incantations through which I might impose my will upon the WordPress Block Editor (curse its name, yes), I stepped away from the Mac, climbed onto a bike, and pedaled out for an hour of rolling meditation with a heavy overlay of just not thinking about the fucking thing.

The bike was my red Steelman Eurocross, sporting a new seatpost; its predecessor, a RockShox suspension post, had begun showing its age, and for safety’s sake it’s worrying enough that the senile old fool in the saddle has been doing that for a few years now.

So I thought I’d get that minor gear change dialed in, and since the sun was out, I decided to take it off the pavement and onto the dirt at the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

In case you’re wondering, yes, the dreaded Brown Stripe followed me home.

Except the dirt was mostly mud, except for where it was snow or ice or all three at the same time. Oh, yeah, right — we got a half-inch of precip’ on Thursday. Duh, etc.

The mildly sketchy conditions reminded me of the Good Old Days™, when that bike, its mango-colored older brother and I motored around Colorado in search of 45 frosty, filthy minutes plus a lap.

Nobody else in Elena Gallegos was rocking drop bars and 35mm rubber today, and a couple spectators at my one-man not-so-hot lap pronounced themselves impressed, which says less about me and my mad skillz than about the visibility of actual cyclocross in The Duck! City.

In truth, I shouldn’t have been on those trails, as wet as they were, and once I saw how soft the surface was with no improvement in sight I headed for the nearest exit and thence for home.

What is the sound of no snow falling?

October 29, 2023October 30, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

One of the very dry washes on today’s hike.

Dude, we got to bed at midnight, after mildly terrifying descents of both the Eisenhower Tunnel and Fremont Pass in the giant bus sleigh, which . . . barely made it the last miles to the college due to a mechanical issue. Also, it only had one headlight. — Hal Walter, who joined son Harrison for a Colorado Mountain College team bus trip to the NJCAA Region IX Championships Oct. 28 in Beatrice, Neb., after their return to Leadville in the dreaded wintry mix

We may be short of water here in The Duck! City, but we are also light on what state departments of transportation call “winter driving conditions,” a state of transportation that I do not miss in the slightest.

I don’t drive much in any conditions these days. Duck! City motorists lean toward the Four I’s — Inept, Inattentive, Impaired, and Insane — and are reliably unpredictable under sunny skies on dry roads.

So, even in good weather, I tend to limit my happy motoring to the weekly grocery run. That way the odds are 50-50 that I’ll have something to snack on while waiting for the paramedics.

And winter driving? Cyclocross may have ruined that for me before I ever got to The Duck! City. I always loved racing in mud and snow, because I was a strong runner, but unless I was promoting the event I was at least an hour’s drive from whatever soupy and/or snowy mess awaited me.

If the forecast were particularly dire I might drive up the day before a race, treat myself to a motel room and a restaurant meal. My ass didn’t always get a whuppin’, but my wallet pocket did.

Once, when we were living in Crusty County, I nearly slid off the icy descent of State Highway 96 through Hardscrabble Canyon en route to a race in Pueblo with the Bicycle Racing Association of Colorado’s cyclocross race kit — and my own race kit, including two expensive bicycles — piled high in the bed of my 2WD Toyota truck.

“2WD Toyota truck?” you inquire? Why, yes, it was blindingly pig-ignorant, thickheaded, and just plain stick-ass dumb of me, especially since I also owned a 4WD Toyota truck, and thanks for asking.

But as I recall the BRAC kit was already stacked in the bed of the 2WD truck, moving it over to the 4WD would’ve been a hassle, and surely the extra weight of all those plank barriers, metal stakes, and Reynolds 853 Steelman Eurocrosses would help keep the rubber on the road?

Just barely, as it turned out. Somehow I managed to keep the truck out of Washout Creek and the front end pointed downhill and made it to Pueblo in plenty of time to see hardly anyone turn out for the race because … well, it was in Pueblo.

Most of the racing then, as now, was in the Boulder-Denver clusterplex. It’s where I had to go to fetch the race kit. And if you can race twice a weekend just one cup of bespoke java from home, well. …

This was one of the reasons our Bibleburg races drew about half the entrants of a Boulder ’cross. In The Steal City, yet another hour’s drive south in bad weather, the race organizers were lucky to draw flies. Why was I there? Because I was the schmuck with the race kit.

Eventually I wised up. My last race was in Bibleburg, after we gave up on Crusty County. I didn’t promote it. Didn’t fetch the race kit. Rode my bike to the race.

It should go without saying that since I didn’t think to bring a spare bike slung over one shoulder, I flatted about halfway through and chalked up a big fat DNF in my final cyclocross.

After I replaced the punctured tube, I hung around for a while to heckle the Boulder-Denver contingent — “Hey, that looks just like cyclocross, only slower!” — and then pedaled lazily home.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. But it was a beautiful day just the same.