Having chosen not to do the double this weekend, I should have had this up earlier just to make sure I was first. So yeah, I made my 2009 cyclocross season debut at Gloucester on Saturday. A lot of you talk about how proper 'cross season shouldn't start until October, but I walked the walk and waited for the calendar to flip to race. I did relent a bit and hit the Wrentham practice twice beforehand, just to make sure that I still suck at this. The two Wednesday night sessions also provided chances for me to see how my equipment is holding up. My cross bike is probably ten years old. I purchased it used at the start of the 2004 season, I think. The previous owner was a professional racer who had it custom built for him some years before that, and I'm not sure when. He's taller than me and has freakishly long arms, so this build doesn't fit me all that well. I like the tall seat tube, as it makes the bike easy to shoulder. In the old days of a "fist full of seatpost" this would have been considered spot on. Nowadays everyone rides the tiniest frame they can get and has 400mm of mountain bike seatpost sticking out. So my ride may not be what your eyes are used too, but it's not as oversized as it appears. The real issue though is the long top tube and front center on the bike makes me end up with too much rear weight bias, which doesn't help in the slow tight sections of the courses. It's good on fast bumpy stuff though.
Where was I? Oh yeah, driving to Gloucester at 6:00 am on Saturday. Flashback to 2004, and I got stuck in Salem Halloween traffic while coming home from this race. So they must have moved it up three weeks at some point. See? Calendar creep. I got to the venue and it was still dark out, yet there were a bunch of people already there riding the course. A fog horn blew out in the bay about every 30 seconds. It was raining. I'd heard horror stories about cranky evil officials not allowing preride at Catamount, and I did not want that to happen to me. For the record, the officials at Gloucester were totally fine, at least with me. All this crap about the "soul" of cyclocross and how cool and laid back the 'cross faithful are is a steaming pile of shit. These motherfuckers are wound up so tight worrying about their start and style it's sad. I'm thinking we need to start up a Bike Racing Internet Whiner Hall of Fame. There are one or two wonderboys who would be shoe-ins for a first ballot induction. You know who you are. And boo-hoo, but the rain kept the crowds away big time. The expo area was totally dead, and there were maybe 1/4 the normal spectator count. What good is your hand-picked style when nobody is there to see it?
Back to the warm up. The course was full of those tight turns that I'm not good at. And there were gallons of standing water at that hour. But it was not "epic" ok? Maybe the section from the first seawall, where the wind was howling like the last ten minutes of "A Perfect Storm" to the run-up was bordering on "epic" but thirty seconds out of a ten minute lap doesn't cut it. The rest of it was just a rainy assed cross course with a hundred tight turns. I did one lap, got my number, got the fuck off the course while the Cat 4 race staged, and retreated to my vehicle. No sign of the Cronoman or my other mates, so I camped out in my front seat and installed some spikes on my shoes. Eventually those guys showed up, and Timmy brought a popup tent trailer. Sweet. Saved the day actually. The wind and wet had only increased and standing outside was rather miserable. The camper gave us a nice place to sit and get ready. I even did some pushups in there to get warm.
The rest of the morning was equally not epic. We could see some of the early racing out the door of the camper. Later we got out for two more warmup laps between races. It was getting greasy. The Cronoman gave me a Tufo tubular front tire, one of the new ones that the Dugast/FMB snobs still turn their powdered noses up at. I had an older Tufo on the rear, the kind they treat like a lepper and only dab at with ten foot poles. Whatever. I pumped them up to the high 30s too. Go ahead and roll your eyes along with your $150 designer tires that don't glue on straight and fall apart after two months. Too much pressure means a slip or a slide here or there. Not enough means a half lap walk back to the pit. That's my story and I'll stick to it. Yes I know your Rhinos made your bike handle like it was "on rails." I heard that from a dozen people. Well you probably were in a six inch deep rut at the time, good as rails.
Clothing: I went with a long sleeve skinsuit, and under it an ancient Peal Izumi techfabric sleeveless topped with a Merino wool t-shirt that I got from the 'rats lastest ebay venture. Two pairs of socks to make sure my Time MTB shoes stayed tight. No glasses, just a cycling cap under my taped up helmet. I wore long finger gloves, wind and waterproof. Never thought about the temperature the rest of the race, did not overheat, and only got cold when I had someone hose me off at the post-race bike wash. Ready, set, go. Except I was putting wheels in the pit when they called for staging and when I got there a few rows were already lined up. I took the first available table, three rows back. Good enough. It was raining lightly, the wind was blowing, all decidedly not epic still. Now we go for real.
Better than average solobreak cross start, at least up the pavement. Nobody surging past, not blowing up, no drama. Onto the grass things turned sour. I was stuck up on the wheel of an EVC guy who seemed kind of fish out of watery. Of course, maybe it was just because I was closer to the front than normal, which meant more eager racers charging from behind, but I lost numerous spots. Lynchie, Kevin C, and Keith B were all lined up right in front of me and now they were a turn ahead. Made some time on the seawall autobahn and caught up to Keith on the runup, even giving him a few pats on the back to try to coax more speed out of him. The maze behind the registration building saw a few riders drop by the wayside with fallen and I can't get up syndrome, but not as many as I'd hoped/expected. It was greasy and challenging, but very much NOT EPIC. I thought that part kind of sucked to be honest, especially the uphill right hairpin just before the barrier section.
Nothing happens for a while... Or I don't remember. Ran the entire section behind the backstop and got on the back of a nice train for the pavement, but that didn't matter so much this year as it was a rippin' tailwind. I was with grouppo Keith at that point. Then Soups came tearing through all of us on his way to a top ten. With a friggin' insulin pump hardwired to his hip under his skinsuit. Mutherfucker. Somehow I lost contact with that group. Then Lynchie came blowing by me. Not sure how he got behind me. Retrospective analysis shows my first lap was done in 10:45, the second in 11:15, the third 11:45 and the fourth 11:20. Or something like that. I thought the second lap sucked but I did pass a few people who might have gone out too hard. The third lap I was pacing but also made a few mistakes, and some of them passed me back. Jeff from Hagen's ride and Brian M were in this mix, along with my team mate Timmy who blew by me down by the sandpit. I went to school on his lines. At this point in the day the standing water was mostly splashed aside, and the tight lines were 50% rototilled and getting greasier. This left half the course as firmer grass, but the problem was the wind was blowing the course tape really bad, creating quite an entaglement risk. Riding the stakes meant you might end up like a dolphin in a tuna net (Gloucester is not a tuna town really though, is it?). At one point Timmy and I entered a section where the tape was completely across the course but we were saved by Bill Thompson (Keltic) who was walking to the pit with a broken chain and he very gentlemanly held up the tape so we could pass under. Classy, just like their kits.
I sat on the rivals and made them tow me up toward Timmy as much as possible but I got ridden off behind the backstop. This section was not kind to me all day. Then we took the one to go bell and I tried to empty the tank. I thought I was going well and I reeled in one guy, then tried to get to Timmy but he endoed head first into the muck on the little downhill heading to the pit. He was OK so I kept going and got up to Jeff but then I f'd up the backstop section again and he re-passed me. I tried to make a last ditch sprint and my day almost ended horribly when I lost the front wheel for a second in the high speed turn out onto the pavement. That would have hurt but since I'm practically a magician on a fucking bike I kept it up and resumed my "sprint" which didn't get me even close to passing Jeff. I ended up 27th, five minutes down on the winner. The Race Predictor had me in 22nd, so I have to give myself a C minus for a decidedly non-epic performance. Thank goodness for the 45+ category.
Because of the rain I did not take any pictures, but the rest of the day was pretty fucking sweet, although not epic. Spent the next three races sitting in the camper with friends new and old. Timmy had it stocked with frosty mugs and a bunch of 22's of Belgian Ale. He even had a stove and made pesto pasta with sausage and hot coffee. When all that was gone I busted out a 40 of Schaefer that I'd brought for the Link guys but never found them. Timmy and Crono were racing on Sunday too so they headed home to get dry, and I staggered off. In the parking lot I bumped into both Reuter on his way to the pro race start, and the legendary Paul Nixon of race announcer fame, who insisted on buying me beers for the rest of the day. I had a small run-in with Gloucester's finest who objected to my taking beer out of the beer tent and throwing it at Reuter as he raced past, but my smooth negotiating skills quickly diffused the situation and I went back behind the fence for another beer. Danish champ Joachim Parbo even tried to snatch a brew out of Paul's hand. That's PRO, taking beer feeds when you're in 5th. By then the wind had died down, it stopped raining, and the muck was more like peanut butter than the soup we raced in. Not epic at all. But those guys were filthy.
Heh-heh, if you made it this far, you're not G-Ride. If you want to see more, VeloNews has a highlight reel. You can see for yourself how epic it was not:
My Sunday was also not epic. I recovered from the festivities, did a few hours of tempo on my road bike, hit the gym for an hour to work on my douche abs, then slowly completed my first 10 mile trail run in almost a year.
Don't give up on your blog. Keep writing, even if it sucks. Like this entry. Thanks for reading.
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