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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
