Definitely on a down cycle as regards the bicycle. Running is the thing lately.
It’s so bloody simple: Pull on some shorts and a raggedy T, add shoes, and leave. Return when suitably sweaty and enfeebled. What’s not to like? Besides the pain and suffering, that is.
I did break out the old Voodoo Nakisi the other day for a short jaunt along Trail 365 and its various offshoots. I got a long-distance look at the haze from the Washington-state fires. It wasn’t my first — during my trip back to the Duke City from Bibleburg I couldn’t even see the damn’ mountains.
I’ll probably go for another short ride today, because not even I am dim enough to run two days in a row unless something really big and ornery is chasing me. Like, say, Peter Sagan, who got knocked off his bike by a race vehicle today and decided to punch a couple of them. Hulk smash!
Oye, vatos, primos y cuates, Charles Pelkey is cranking up the Live Update Guy machinery once again for the final grand tour of 2014, the Vuelta a España, and some loudmouth Irish-American will be hanging around the shop, making inappropriate comments, getting in the way, and generally lowering property values. Stop on by and say ¿Que pasa?
“Pamplona” is the sound of three Garmin-Sharp guys hitting the deck in the team time trial at the Vuelta a España.
Sport director Allan Peiper said Koldo Fernandez laid it down in a corner in the short, technical TTT and took Michel Kreder and Thomas Dekker with him. Ouch. Nothing like shredding the old skinsuit — and the old skin, too — on stage one of what will be a very long Vuelta.
“It’s a little mistake that makes a bigger damage,” Peiper said. “It’s a pity because we had started well.”
Charles Pelkey and I had a similarly rough start to providing live coverage of the stage over at Red Kite Prayer. Time trials are always a pain in the ass to cover live, especially short ones, and extra especially short ones in which the folks on the ground keep changing the times and standings on you in some foreign lingo. It was like herding kittens, to be precise.
But we got ‘er done, and Sunday brings an actual road stage, one for the sprinters. So y’all come. Coverage should commence five-ish Mountain time and end around 9:40 a.m.
Rig for heavy weather, me hearties —the Vuelta a España starts Saturday, followed on Monday by the USA Pro Challenge, which in just one voyage has had more names than a Limey brigand in an Irish witness-protection program staffed entirely by informers.
I’ll be assisting Charles Pelkey with the former as he performs his magical Live Update Guy act for Red Kite Prayer, so if you’ve nothing better to do around 11 a.m. Bibleburg time tomorrow, drop on by and heckle us. We’ll be on duty throughout the entire three weeks. You’re welcome.
This year’s Vuelta sounds like a real bear. Our old colleague Andrew Hood says it’s even nastier than last year’s edition, which caused cycling scribes worldwide to cramp up, fall off their barstools and abandon the race in tears just watching the goddamned thing. There are only four Americans in the 2012 Vuelta, so nobody on this side of the pond will be paying the race any mind, which means more bandwidth for the rest of us.
Where are the Yanks? Why, in Colorado, of course. Matthew Beaudin at VeloNews and Liquigas-Cannondale pro Timmy Duggan both think this year’s edition could go right down to the final time trial in Denver. This would be a good deal more interesting than last year’s race, which started with a lame-o Chamber of Commerce prologue in Bibleburg and pretty much ended with the Vail time trial … on stage 3.
I like a time trial for a finale, especially if it’s going to decide the race, so let’s hope for a nail-biter, if only to distract ourselves from the Never-Ending Story that is the Big Tex investigation. I won’t even link to that endless game of One-Handed Spit-In-the-Carpet At $300 Per Hour, having had my fill of the cop shop in my brief tour of duty as a police reporter back in the late Seventies.
Cheers, too, to homeboy Danny Pate — I feared he might be jobless going into 2011, but it seems he’s leaving Garmin-Transitions for HTC-Columbia instead of the dole and the Dumpster. I’m still waiting for word on Mike Creed, whose relationship with Team Type 1 appears to have soured. I don’t care who he pisses off, I like him. His old man’s all right, too.
And finally, a twirl of the jet-black Mad Dog Livewrong bracelet to Taylor Phinney and Ben King for completing a Trek-Livestrong sweep at the USA Cycling Professional Road Championships in South Carolina.
Yeah, yeah, I know — they are affiliated with He Who Shall Not Be Named, and Trek sucks, and the dormant journalist in me is mumbling, “Oh, really?” over his second beer. But at least it’s not another steer from that same sorry old herd crossing the line first.
And as for me? I have the day off. I should be in Santa Rosa, California, sipping local microbrew and contemplating a week’s worth of cycling up hill and down dale with my old pals Merrill and Chris, but what the hell? A guy can ride his bike around here, too, even if most of the routes feel a bit stale, like Repuglican campaign rhetoric. “Why, by gum, if we just give our poor rich folks some more money, we’ll soon be as right as rain. Well, we will be, anyway. Your mileage may vary.”
The road bike remains unforked at Old Town, Ritchey being somewhat slow on the uptake, warranty-wise, so it seemed like a ’cross-bike kind of day. As the Vuelta was wrapping Dr. Schenkenstein rolled by astride his ’cross bike to say howdy, a tad weak and pale from his Yom Kippur fast, so I — full of last night’s green-chile chicken enchiladas, rice, salad and Mirror Pond Pale Ale — seized the opportunity, broke out the Nobilette and flogged him like the miserable pissant he is for 90 minutes or thereabouts.
That he had an asthma attack as we were climbing the weed-lined, dusty single-track to Gold Camp Road had nothing to do with it. My triumph is untainted. God’s judgment, I call it. The Irish are one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, don’t you know. And you can tell Yahweh likes us best ’cause he didn’t dump us off in the middle of a desert bereft of whisky.
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