As expected, x-ray images of my foot were inconclusive as to the presence of a stress fracture. Tomorrow I'll get an MRI and we'll work with that later in the week. Not that you need to care. I can still ride a bike if I want to, but as bad as this blog gets sometimes, I'm not going to write about my trainer ride in gory detail, or worse yet the makeup of my "trainer mix" whatever that is. Instead, since it's been a while, I throw out a flame-bait op-ed piece.
What's wrong with this picture? And I'm really not picking on promoters here. This example of a cyclocross race meeting separates the "racers" into nine categories. The problem is that while eight of these categories appear to be based on standard criteria such as the age, ability, and gender of the athletes, one of them is based purely on the design of the bicycle. Who thinks this is a good precedent? Not me.
Quite a variety of bicycles exist in just about any bicycle race, especially cyclocross. We have nice bikes, junky bikes, light bikes, not so light bikes, bikes with one chainring, bikes with two chainrings, bikes with three chainrings, bikes with 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and even 11 cogs on the rear cluster, bikes with suspension forks, different tires, different wheels, frame differences both subtle and not so subtle. There's no getting around equipment choice being a factor, but the competitions are primarily among athletes, and I hope that most of us would like it to stay that way. Otherwise we're dancing dangerously close to ... motorsports. Yuk. So why start forgetting about the athletes and classifying races based on equipment? I happen to think single speeds are cool. They look cool, especially with disc brakes. I like simplicity too. That's one reason I like track bikes (which all have only one gear, and always have, so leave them out of this debate). But this is bike racing. If you don't think the equipment you have is competitive, then get different equipment. I'm not out there promoting or asking for a race restricted to ill-fitting, outdated, poorly maintained steel bikes with box rims and mismatched tires, just because that's what I happen to own... And you can keep your stupid bubble machine too.
Related subject - course design. The cyclocross pictures from flickr have been pouring in. The northeast isn't very well represented by the way. Almost nothing local. Hundreds of photos per week from other regions though. Lots of variety in courses. Some look good, some not so good. Yes, cyclocross has some rules about barriers, width of the course, the length of the runs, and the percentage of pavement. All of those rules would not be necessary (and neither would the stupid 35 mm tire rule) if everyone adhered to one simple guideline: the course shall be designed such that the fastest way to get around it under human power is on a traditional cyclocross bike. Simple. Maybe not always possible, but when you think about the best cross courses, it's true. I like this guideline because it has a certain purity and relationship to the man versus horse roots of the sport. The course should never be so nasty that a runner could beat the bikes. Now, the world record holders in 10k cross country running maintain almost 23 kph. Even if they had to hold on for the one hour duration of a cross race, these runners could maintain over 20 kph. So a proper cross course should always allow a world-class competitor to go faster than that, or at least faster than any runner could conceivably go under the day's conditions. Similarly, mountain bikes and/or road bikes shouldn't be able to beat a traditional cross bike either. If they can, then there is something wrong with the course. Meet those criteria, and have a track wide enough for good competition (not so narrow that the singlespeeders can block you while they rest and prepare for their next momentum building sprint to conquer the next rise, not mentioning any names here) and you're all set. No additional rules required. And that's what really grinds my (9) gears. Thanks for reading.
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