It's a long story...

Unwind

2011-11-05T14:18:00.002-05:00

I hate to complain about my luck or lack of it, but I've found myself on the short end of this intangible lately.

I've had a hell of a cough for more than three weeks. I'm on the mend, slowly, but it's effectively killed my training and my cyclocross season. Another campaign with both feet in an early grave.

It's perhaps just as well. I've been busy with a lot of other shit. Seems like that's been the tale of the tape for a few years now. I thought about quitting cycling a few weeks ago. But I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to make it more of a priority and cut other things out of my life that aren't as important.

I'm also going to get more into running, too. I did a 6.7 mile leg of the Kansas City Marathon relay with Keck and some other dudes. I'd forgotten how fun it is to do foot races. I can't do it full on like I used to because my knees are so crummy, but I'd like to supplement fitness with a few miles by foot and do an occasional 5k or 10k.

I just need to become a more healthy person. I don't really like the physical condition that I'm in. Going back to that epic cough I've been fighting, I used to dispatch these ailments in about four or five days tops. Back when I was in better shape. I think this one has lingered because my diet and lifestyle both suck.

There's no one to blame but myself for this, and no one who can fix it.

So I'm just gonna fix it. We're the only ones who can control our own circumstances. Enough bitching, more doing.

Hydration and other stuff

2011-06-16T20:21:00.003-05:00

The other day, Britton K. made mention of the importance of hydrating now that the weather's been getting hot and impossibly humid. It got me thinking about the whole subject as I'm making the adjustment to the warmer weather. When I'm training in the doldrums of January, February and March, I don't worry as much about drinking a ton of water. In fact, in the Sheehan Road Race this year, which was a fairly balmy day, I only sipped down one half of one water bottle and didn't touch the other.

Now that it's like a locker room outside every day, I make it about 30 minutes before I'm out of water.

Here's a couple thoughts on the hydrating topic, and a few others.

Hydration

As Britton pointed out, you can't just wake up the morning of a race or a hard workout, chug a couple tall glasses of water and think you're good for the day. Particularly for racing (and particularly for the perennially white-hot Tour of Kansas City coming up in about a week) you've got to be hitting the water consistently for three or four days beforehand. When I'm getting ready for a race, you won't see me without a water bottle nearby in the days leading up to the competition. I'm not slamming water. I'm taking small sips every few minutes. I usually drink about four liters of water, sometimes five or six if I'm working out hard that day.

Having said all that, though, there's a common mistake people make when they drink water — namely, being that they drink too much. You hit too much water and you'll flush out your electrolytes. If you try and race without enough electrolytes, your legs will feel like rubber, you'll be kinda drowsy and once the pace picks up in the race, you're almost sure to be left behind. One trick I learned from racing track and cross cross country races was keeping some small, simple candy in my pocket the night before and the day before the race. I'd usually have Jolly Ranchers or a few rolls of Smarties. I'd pop a Smarty ever 10 or 15 minutes ago. The simple sugar would restore electrolytes and keep my blood sugar at a normal level. Don't go apeshit with the candy, obviously. I'm not talking about eating this stuff like a kid who just landed a pillowcase's worth of booty on Halloween. But keep the sugar around.

Regarding coffee, there's so much literature out there that discusses whether it's good for athletes or bad, whether it dehydrates you or not. Most trainers and doctors I've spoken with about it say that if coffee is a diuretic (a substance that draws water from your tissue and blood) it's such a weak one that it's offset by the amount of water in your coffee that's taken in. My tip on coffee when I race is I'll try to go all week without coffee. Then on race day, I'll find a Starbucks and get a coffee with a shot of espresso about an hour before the race if I can. You get so much energy from it that I hardly can stand still in line waiting to register for the race.

Diet

An endurance athlete's diet is actually a pretty simple thing. You need to eat a lot, and you need to eat a wide variety of different foods. It's really that easy. I'm always amazed at all the snake oil that gets brandished in discussions about healthy athletic diets. I'm particularly surprised at how few people understand that athlete's need to eat a fairly good amount of fat. When I'm really thinking about my diet, I break it down my intake roughly like this:

• 60 percent carbs.

• 25 percent protein.

• 15 percent fat.

The fat part is pretty easy to figure out. Look on the nutrition label and see what percent calories from fat take up of the overall number of calories. If it's 15 to 20, you're generally OK to eat it. Of course, some things like hummus have a much higher ratio of calories from fat. It doesn't take someone with much education to know what kind of fat is good and what's bad.

Training

I won't get into any detail about training because lots of different things work (and don't work) for a lot of different people. But one thing I see all the time in endurance sports is people who don't know when to quit. It's so easy to overtrain in endurance sports. And getting to a point where your body is burned out is a miserable thing. Beyond your body feeling horrible, you get depressed, you can't sleep well and your life temporarily sucks (or sucks more if you feel like your life always sucks in general). More often than not, you need to be taking slow to moderate rides. I see people kill it a lot on rides or runs throughout a week and then they get to race day and the complain that they feel like shit, even though they barely did much the day before. The simplest advice is to listen to your body. If you start a ride you figured would be a hard or moderate ride but you're feeling run down, why push it? Just take an easy day. Or an off day. That's why I don't keep training logs or write down elaborate training plans. It's too easy to go all neurotic when you see a day on your training calendar where you were supposed to hit some hard intervals but you were only able to softpedal for a few miles. You start thinking about what it is that fucked you up and shit just spirals down from there. Just listen to your body and do what it tells you to do. I'm not saying you shouldn't push yourself beyond your limits and comfort threshold from time to time — you won't get better if you don't learn to break through pain barriers. I'm just saying, listen to your body, use common sense and don't be an idiot.

Tuesday Night World War!

2011-05-03T21:42:00.004-05:00

There was a crash on the last lap of tonight's Tuesday Night Worlds.

It involved two people, one was Charlie and the other was some guy from Big D. There were no serious injuries but at least one bike might have seen its last rodeo.

It happened in front of me, but I didn't really see how it unfolded. Rather than finish, I unclipped to see if everyone was OK.

Soon, a crowd descended upon the scene like flies circling a state park restroom that had gone years without cleaning. Immediately, the chatter what about What Happened. Word couldn't have spread faster on Twitter.

Accusations were made.

Blame was assigned.

"It was [name redacted] who did it!"

"Well, did you see what that guy from [team name redacted] did?"

Reputations were tarnished.

Non-victims shared in the victimhood of victims.

Soy lattes boiled in the stomachs of angry men who were in disbelief at what happened.

Off in the distance, one could see George Tiller and Osama bin Laden, who only moments before had risen from the dead, holding signs advertising a topless car wash at the corner of 95th and Lackman to benefit the Lenexa Optimists Club. But no one at the race could notice as they were trying to identify the Tuesday Night Worlds' Most Hated Man.

Oh yeah, there was a race that happened. We averaged about 25 miles an hour. I hung out mostly in the back.

Good times were had by all.

Well, nearly all.

Sheesh

2011-05-01T20:19:00.002-05:00

So I managed to race OK today. Makes me wonder how I might do if I struck up a more organized training plan.

The truth is I train when I can. That almost always means a couple rides on the weekends of the long-ish variety. And when I can, I ride to work which makes for two short but high-intesity rides a day. Occasionally I'll train after work, but my schedule as it is makes it difficult to get motivated to head out at 7 p.m. when I've tended to my responsibilities and crank it for three hours.

So I do what I can.

I went out to Leavenworth to race all 49 miles of the Sheehan Memorial Road Race. When I did this race two years ago, the weather was a fistfight of wind, sleet, snow and rain. Today was decidedly calmer with temperatures of 45 degrees at the start and marginal breezes.

The pack went out and rode fairly steady for about 23 miles. There were a few mild attacks, but little to speak of other than a lone ranger from Omaha striking out on his own after about two miles. It would be about 42 miles until we'd catch him.

After we hit neutral support, people really started stepping on the gas. And when we left Atchison to head westward back to Leavenworth, that's when we really started getting after it.

At one point, the pack went up a long climb and splintered in to factions. I was in the back of the second one and instantly worried that if I didn't hitch a ride to the back of the first group, my race would be over. I was starting to labor a bit at this point, but I really stepped on it and pedaled until my eyes watered before I reached the lead group. Not long after that, I took a brief pull at the front to take some pressure off of Quiet B., who had been doing his fair share of the work.

We coasted back to Leavenworth and with about two miles left, I started to move toward the front to prepare for what was going to be a 16-person sprint for the finish. But as I moved outside and to the front, I couldn't tuck behind anyone. Left exposed and with about a mile to go, I figured, "Well, I'm at the front and I'm feeling good, so fuck it, I'm going to try to win."

To gapped the pack for about half a mile before I got raided and meekly made my way to the finish. I probably finished 11th or 12th. I have no idea, really.

This was the type of race I would have gotten murdered in a couple of years ago. I would have had a difficult time bridging that gap that emerged with about 14 miles to go. And the sustained pressure in the last half of the race would have been tough for me to manage.

There's a few positives to take away from this race. I was pleased that I remained stubborn and kept with the group, despite a fair share of nerves heading into the race about my readiness to hang with the group for a 50 miles race. Speaking of nerves, I was also pleased that the nervousness of riding in a tight group that plagued me these last couple of years has subsided considerably. I pedaled comfortably in and around the group, making passes through narrow alleys and such.

Now if I can get around to doing some better, more consistent training, I might have enough in the tank the next time to sprout a stronger finish.

But more than that, it was just a hell of a lot of fun to race today. From riding up with some teammates to seeing other riders at registration to putting out a tough effort to finally heading back, it was a great time and it make me appreciate what fun the sport can be. I really missed that last year.

Returning to the scene of the crime

2011-04-12T23:05:00.002-05:00

Real quick, here's a recap of my return to Tuesday Night Worlds, one year after I last visited the Gettysburg of local cycling.

For the most part, I stuck to my plan and sat in and saw how long I'd be able to stay with the pack. I'd feared beforehand that I would be shelled off the back early on because I haven't raced on an asphalt surface in about a year and my training thus far in 2011 has involved very little, if any, intensity.

For the opening salvo, I just tucked in the back of the pack and rode at whatever pace everyone else dictated. I was somewhat surprised to find that it didn't feel all that brutal. I started wondering whether the group collectively wasn't putting forth that much effort.

I stayed there for most of the race, save for the time I tried to pull to the front when Joe A. took the lead in the middle of the race. But I never really committed myself to helping him out.

Sorry, Joe.

Then there was this other time with three laps to go where I joined a group of about five riders making a break for the front. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold a torrid pace for three laps to the finish, but I figured what the hell? With a lap to go, I got passed up and just finished with the pack. Which was fine.

A couple thoughts on today's race. One, I was pleasantly surprised to hold a pace that I would later learn held on at about 25.5 miles an hour. Two, my handling skills need some work, having been out of the asphalt racing business for about a year. I had a shaky turn or two where I didn't do a fine job of negotiating people turning on either side of me. No on screamed at me, so I figure I didn't put anyone at immediate danger, but I'm fairly cognizant that I need to do better and maneuvering with others around me.

Thanks to Adam and Aubree for leading up our ride down to the race, wherein we were joined by Joe A. and Quiet Brian. Lots of fun. I'm sorry I missed out on a year of it.

But I'm back at it now.

Hello, world!

2011-04-11T21:28:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, people suck.

On Saturday, I was making my way down Southwest Blvd. on my way to the morning ride that day when some dude in a camo hat and a mustache pulls a left hand turn with his pickup truck right in front of me. It was close enough that I hit the brake pretty hard and had a split-second flashback to the last time this sort of thing happened to me.

Danger averted, I get out of the saddle and get ready to accelerate again, shaking my head in dismay at another bad encounter with a local driver. Immediately upon doing this, I hear, "Fuck you, pussy!"

Against my better judgment, I flash him a variation of the old peace sign. Again, I hear, "I'll fuck you up."

So this dude goes from zero to sixty in about half a second. It's fairly common to encounter some hostility on the roads, but this was kind of new. I get tied up at the stop light over by QuikTrip where this pleasant citizen has entered the parking lot and he's still stringing along an impressive line of expletives. For whatever reason, I decide it's a good idea to keep smiling at him. At this point, dude gets out of his truck and starts walking toward me. I keep smilin'. He keeps coming closer, challenging me to a fight or something. Keep smilin'.

Ooops! Green light, I'm on my way.

These were the kinds of things I missed on my year long hiatus from much serious training or racing. Life changed a lot for me last year, and the continue to do so this year. But I've really gotten hooked again on how good it feels to ride bikes, to train. And tomorrow, I resume racing. I'm doing Tuesday Night Worlds for the first time in a year.

Wish me luck.

Matters of life and death

2010-11-26T20:29:00.003-06:00

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about an old friend of mine from growing up in Colorado. David was a guy I met in middle school, and I thought he was pretty annoying when we first crossed paths. I thought he was kind of a dork.

But by about eighth grade, I gave up thinking I was cool and realized I was a dork, too. With that barrier out of the way, and with him and I really being the only two people dedicated to the middle school track team, we started to become pretty cool friends. We liked a lot of the same music, and we introduced each other to music that we hadn't known of previously.

We became better friends in high school when we did cross country and track there. David, whose specialty in track was the hurdles, was this really short, pale dude who looked like the last guy who had any athletic ability. When he lined up on the starting line, it was almost a comical sight to see the diminutive David stacking up against these big, hulking dudes in speed suits who were obviously using the track season to stay in shape for football or basketball. But by his senior year, he was one of the best hurdlers in the state.

We went to different colleges, but stayed in touch. I have to say he remained in better touch than I did. I was spending most of my year in Kansas, so I couldn't see him much during the school year. When I came back during the summers, we would play ultimate Frisbee on occasion but I was usually off doing my own thing.

Him and I would chat occasionally after college. He was a teacher in Colorado. And I was, as always, doing my own thing in Kansas City. The last time I talked to him, nothing seemed amiss.

Then a couple months later I got an e-mail from one of his old friends, informing me that there was going to be a funeral service for him the following week.

Apparently a few week before I got that e-mail, a sheriff in Colorado found his car. A couple weeks later, some hiker found his body. I learned he had hit a rough spot in his life. He bought a shotgun. He took his own life.

When I hear about things like this, I always wonder what the last thoughts a person has before they pull the trigger. Or fade off in a drug overdose. Or breathe their last struggled breath in a noose. Or whatever.

For David, his life hadn't been an easy one. He didn't have the best family life. For parts of his life, he was living on spare couches or spare bedrooms in various friends' houses. For other parts of his life, he was being ushered out to places like Texas or elsewhere as his dad would just move somewhere on a whim. I still have letters he wrote to me from these places when we were in high school.

In them, he talks about how I was one of his best friends. In fact, his MySpace page is still in existence, trapped like a bug in amber, with the various nonsense that accompanies anyone's MySpace page. In his, I'm still one of his top eight friends. Every yearly anniversary of his death, some woman posts something about missing him.

I miss him, too, as anyone would after they lose a friend. But I also spend a lot of time wondering if I could have been a better friend in the years that followed our high school graduation. In those years, I was off somewhere else, making new friends, being too busy, experiencing new experiences. We would connect every now and again, but I always knew it wasn't as often as it should have been. And it probably wasn't as often as he would have liked.

David drifts in and out of my thoughts. Particularly in the autumn. That's when we used to go on these long runs for cross country training. We would gripe sometimes about wishing the others were as dedicated as we were. And other times we would just shoot the shit. Girls. Music. Teachers. Whatever.

Every autumn, I kind of replay some of those conversations. And with the exception of teachers, who I no longer deal with, I find myself thinking about the same subjects we used to blabber about.

And each time, I think what a shame it is that David's no longer around to talk with.

A perfect ending to a perfect day

2010-11-01T23:46:00.003-05:00

I don't post much here these days. When I do, it seems like I'm always writing something about Adam K. Some party he threw. Some race he raced. Some stupid shit he said.

It's been really cool watching him race this year. He went from being somewhat of a Colavita/Parisi wallflower last road season, showing up only for races where the team sprang for the entry fee, to an average Cat 4 'cross racer last fall. This year, he trained a whole bunch and eat vegetables and stuff and turned in a pretty good racer. He's also a big part of what makes the team cool.

It was really nice to go to Boss Cross No. 3 and see the spectacle that was Colavita Corner. For those who weren't there, it was basically a cacophony of teammates dressed up in various states of holiday fare banging away at some noisemaker or another. TCPC in one short year has evolved from a small patchwork group of mostly-novice racers to a permanent fixture on the local scene. Dan O. has been a really good president. Britton K. has been a great sponsor. The rest of the team has been an accumulation of good all-around folks. Last weekend was a portrait in what makes a good cycling team, or any team for that matter.

For me, it's shaping up to be another lost season. I'm not racing well, which is a function of not being in good shape. It's been a crazy year. Every year is some sort of new adventure. I've been really busy this year, work-wise and personally. It'll be good to settle things down some and get back out there and train more. I'd really like to get back to the point I was at last February. That'll take a shitload of work, but that's OK. There are lots of busy guys on the team who are making it work and succeeding at the weekend races. No reason I can't do the same.

Adam K., j'accuse

2010-09-15T21:26:00.006-05:00

Few things galvanize a cyclist's shattered confidence like breaking the chain on a little kid's Huffy.

Hold it...nevermind.

As most people know, victory eluded me at this past weekend's Colavita pre-cross season party when the components of a $5 purple bike (frame size 22 cm?) failed under the sheer strength of my legs. Or a chain that started sprouting rust during the height of the Lewinsky Scandal.

Whichever the case, Adam K.'s well-planned and well-attended party was a great way to start a cross season that has more questions preceding it than answers.

Am I in any kind of shape to race from doing a lot of commuting and not a whole lot else?

Will a long hiatus from racing set me up for embarrassment when races start?

Will sudden weight loss from unknown causes help me or hurt me?

We find out a week from this Sunday.

Summer's almost over

2010-08-08T05:29:00.003-05:00

It's been a good stretch of time since I rapped at y'all. Lots of good things have been happening since then. It's been a really busy summer. Seems like each weekend has been pretty packed with lots of things to do, including a few that involved traveling. The weekdays usually have something going on after work.

The downshot to a lot of this was that I wasn't able to do as much cycling as I used to. I'm kind of cursed mentally when it comes to training. My background in endurance sports always involved near daily training, so that's what I got used to. But then I entered the real world where you can't train all the time. And to me, it was hard to accept trying to do sports without a pretty strict, disciplined training program. It's was either I go all in, or I don't do it at all.

Parts of this summer have involved the latter. But now I'm making adjustments to ensure I get more training. I still technically live near the Nelson-Atkins museum, but I spend most of my time at what I like to call my secondary residence over in northeast Golden Ghetto. I started commuting to work on the Sputnik after I had stopped doing so for some time. I have a nice route where I can take Antioch down to Merriam Drive, which turns into Southwest Boulevard and then to downtown. Once you get on to Merriam, there's very little in the way of hills, so I've tweaked the route to take Summit up to the 14th Street bridge. There's a fairly tough hill between about 20th Street and 16th Street. I threw that hill in there to get a better workout, even though I usually curse myself for doing so while I'm on it.

Anyway, doing about 20 miles a day just to commute to, from and during work, along with other training rides as time permits, I'm inching my way back to fitness. I'm hoping it comes around in time for the upcoming 'cross season.

There's only about five weeks left.

The Tale of a Lost Season

2010-06-07T00:13:00.002-05:00

Most people following this blog probably assumed this already, but my road season this year looks to be a lost cause. I've done a handful of races and even had a couple of decent results. But my training has tailed off the last few weeks. I rode today for the first time today in about two weeks, aside from a Tuesday Night Crit somewhere in there. It wasn't pretty, particularly when I think back to the early-season form I was in back in February, when the air was cold and people were staying away from their bicycles.

There are a lot of reasons for how I got to be where I am. None of it can be boiled down to a single source. There are several personal, professional, and in recent weeks, family reasons that have made it difficult to concentrate on training for cycling.

But I can't really say I regret it. Except one thing. We all signed a rider agreement early in the season about what obligations we would fulfill. I can't honestly say I've lived up to much of it. I've been absent from a lot of races and group rides. In short, I haven't been a good teammate. In the past, I've always understood that this is an amateur activity, and therefore there are plenty of reasons that keep people from dedicating themselves to the sport with full abandon. Still, I always hoped people would show up for early Saturday rides, mid-day Sunday rides and even the fun Monday rides. I know how frustrating it can be to show up to an early weekend ride, only to count how many people haven't showed up.

And this year, I'm the guy not showing up for those things. I've been a lousy teammate. And for that, I apologize to anyone who still cares.

A lot has changed for me this year, and in many ways, it's for the better.

Things will continue change for me from here on out, I'm sure. For one thing, I'm getting ready for what I hope will be a great 'cross season, which is what I really like about this sport.

For another, next road season will look a lot like this one, where I'm not hitting a lot of races. But instead, my plan is that I'll be doing triathlons more than I'll be doing road races.

I think triathlons, often the subject of mockery among cyclists, will represent a new challenge for me. Not that I've conquered cycling in any way, but I just think this will be a good activity for me to try. I used to spend hours in the pool with broken bones in my legs from my college days, unable to run. Finding ways to swim successfully always eluded me. But I want another crack at it. And to combine that with running and cycling — the two things in sport I've always loved — with another mountain to climb is something I can't pass up.

Another reason for this is after my epic crash at last year's VeloTek Grand Prix, I've never felt comfortable racing in tight packs since. I thought it would be a brief mental hurdle to climb. But I really do hate riding a few inches off some other person's wheel. I just don't think I can race effectively any longer on the roads with this mental block. I've tried to work on this in group rides, but as anyone who has practiced rotations with me can attest, it's just not working out.

So tri's are where I'll be next summer.

But before that, this fall and winter will be all about 'cross.

If I'm still around then.

He lives!

2010-05-12T17:40:00.003-05:00

So things have been a little slow on this blog lately. OK, a lotta slow. But life has taken on a life of its own for me lately. I won't elaborate on the details here, but I deny any implication made by some (and perhaps others) that my balls have been taken away from me.

Part of the inactivity on this blog has been due to a fairly dry race schedule. Until yesterday, my season's racing consisted of three races. One of those was a mountain bike race that, while fun, was pretty disastrous for me, results-wise.

I did my first Tuesday Night Crit the other night. Did a couple of fun things I normally don't do. This race was a fairly large field and had some fairly fast riders. Early on, I went off the front with an SKC fellow. We built a good distance on the pack and traded leads for a few laps. I think he was getting tired because he stopped pulling ahead and let me lead for longer and longer intervals. Eventually, everyone else caught up.

So I hung out in the pack for a few laps before I saw a group pop off the front. This was a slightly troublesome prospect because, obviously, packs have an easier time of getting away than just an individual or two. So I sprang after them again and we rotated for a while and built a decent lead again. In the offseason, I did some practice in these paceline rotations. But on one, after I took a pull for about half a lap, I went to the side but slowed down too much. So when the last guy, Colavita's Michael E., went by, it was too fast for me to latch on behind him. That meant I spent about two laps about 15 feet off of the last rider in the rotation and therefor getting no benefit from drafting off the lead pack. I eventually got swallowed up again.

On the last lap, I moved up a bit and tried to get in a position to perhaps catch the dwindling lead pack. Chuong D. asked if I had any juice left. I said I'd see what I could do. I went ahead until about the last turn but then found I had no juice at all and just got destroyed in the final sprint. No big deal.

Just one last thing that I discovered on Tuesday night: Most cyclists want race courtesy and etiquette for themselves. But not for others.

Starting the 2010 race season

2010-03-14T19:07:00.003-05:00

At one point, I thought I was going to write this long-winded post reflecting about the erstwhile cyclocross season. But I'm going to skip that other than to say that it was fun and that it's over. No one really cares about the past anyway; they just keep doing the same old thing as though nothing ever happened.

So Saturday was the start of my road season. I trekked out to Lawrence for the Spring Fling. I guess this has been going on for a couple weeks, but I decided to show this last Saturday as I didn't have anything else to do.

The race started off slowly enough, what with there being 15 riders in the Men's 4 field. Before too long, I decided to kick up the pace, so I jumped in front and pushed the pace a bit for three or four laps. This left me close to the front for the first sprint lap. I was leading going into the last turn for some points but got edged out by someone else, a Bicycle Shack rider, I believe.

I sat in for a little bit after that lap and re-took the lead heading toward the second sprint lap. On that sprint lap, I went to the very back of the pack and stalked the other riders for a little while. Then I came around the last turn before the start/finish line and booked it past several riders. As I approached the line, I felt my calf seizing up, so I stalled my momentum a bit and got fourth on that sprint lap, which was still good enough for some points.

I was pretty tired from that sprint, so I was kind of worried when a VeloTek rider started crushing it again right after the sprint. I thought I was in trouble but we were able to reel him back in. So the race settled for a while until the last lap. Again, I dropped back to the end of the pack and staked things out again. I did the same thing and built up a strong sprint on the second-to-last-turn. I cruised by a bunch of people but it was not enough for the win. I got second behind a Bicycle Shack rider. With the prime points, I don't know if it was enough to get the overall win. I haven't seen any official results, so we'll have to wait.

Overall, it was a solid opening race. Fun and exciting and a decent result, given that I had no idea how I would do.

Interestingly enough, Chris Hshy. from the In-A-Tub team was riding next to me at one point and said "You're racing better than your reputation." I was afraid to ask what reputation he was referring to or how he found it out, so I let it drop.

Do you all have any ideas? What is my reputation? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments, and make it anonymous if need be.

(Mis)adventures in atmospheric pressure

2010-03-08T15:23:00.004-06:00

So yesterday, I'm all set and excited to start off the new road season at Perry Dam. It's the best day of weather we've had in 2010 by a long shot, I'm excited to race and my sister and a friend are coming along for the ride.

I'm loading up my bike in the friend's car when suddenly, with no prompting at all, the tube pops and the tire goes flat. For no reason at all. We were already cutting it close on time, so with no bike stores in the immediate vicinity to buy a new tube and with no spare ones of my own and no certainty that someone else at Perry would have one for me, I was resigned to the reality that there would be no racing for me that day. Instead, we found something else to do.

I'd be interested in learning why it just popped like that. I had just gotten a new tube the day before after I popped an old one on a huge pothole near the Kauffman Foundation, which I was forced into as I was avoiding a slew of cars leaving the parking lot and generally not following traffic laws.

So I'll try racing again next weekend. I was sorry to miss yesterday's race. Sounded like it would have been a lot of fun. I've been really looking forward to racing again.

Good things come to those who wait, or don't plan ahead.

On a related note, I heard today that there was an ugly wreck in the Category 5 race yesterday. Apparently some guy was on a new bike that came apart during the race. I guess he had some serious injuries and was out cold on the road for a while. To add to that, I heard a bunch of Masters racers bitched and moaned about the race being neutralized.

Think about that for a moment. A bunch of oldsters whining about their race being stopped so that a guy in serious need of medical attention can get some emergency care. If this is all true, it kind of makes me not want to race road. If this is all true, then I offer a sincere "fuck you" to the masters who selfishly complained about their race in light of a fellow rider going down hard. I really hope my source of information on this is incorrect, but I've been around enough cyclists to envision this exact type of scenario unfolding.

Race director: We're going to have to neutralize the race.

Masters rider: Are you fuckin' kidding me? We've got a race going on.

Race director: Uh, yes, but there's been a serious accident in the Cat 5 race and there's emergency personnel all over the course.

Masters rider: So? We're trying to race here.

Race director: Right. But it wouldn't be safe for you or the medical personnel for a race to continue going on while they're trying to help this fellow out.

Masters rider: Why can't he just get up and finish his own race so that we can continue ours?

Race director: He's been out cold and has multiple broken bones. I don't think that's possible.

Masters rider: But I wanna race now!

Race director: Sorry. You're just gonna have to wait.

Masters rider: Life's not fair!

Most of the people I meet in this sport are really cool, but there's some heartless fucks out there, too.

Happy President's Day!

2010-02-14T23:22:00.004-06:00

There's a shopworn, tired story I've been telling about Valentine's Day this week, so I won't repeat it here. But nevertheless, I think I might not have noticed this year's passage of the Big Greeting Card industry's self-created holiday were it not for a cadre of married or otherwise taken men complaining about it. After 27 years of this holiday for me, I'm done caring about it. Here's why:

I didn't date all that much in high school. That's because I was awkward and invisible.

I didn't date a whole lot in college, either. That's because I thought at the time that long-distance running was really, really important. I made these silly rules for myself, like no hanging out with women past Wednesday if I had a track or cross country meet that Saturday. And if the Big 12 meet was coming up, I more or less put myself on lockdown for the two weeks prior. That understandably annoyed people and drove a few away. Now I can see how idiotic that was, which is why I now don't put my cycling ahead of too many things in life. I want to do well in my racing and I spend a fair amount of time at it, but not to the outright exclusion of other things I want to do. To do so would be to miss out on a lot of other experiences.

So by the time I got done with college, I was gainfully employed, living in a new town and thinking things were pretty good. But the one thing I thought was missing was what everyone else seemed to have, which was a nice, long stable relationship. Before long, that's what I had. For about three years, I was mostly involved with one person or another. Most of that time was spent with one person, followed by a couple of brief flame-outs and then a longish stint with someone else.

Come Feb. 17, I will have been single for exactly one year. And at this point in time, that doesn't really bother me at all. Some people, like S.C.'s girlfriend, poke fun at me for it, but no skin off my teeth. Relationships are fine. In fact, there's a lot of really great things about them. But it's not a big priority for me anymore. I sort of understand all the Facebook and Twitter updates lamenting the loneliness of being single on Feb. 14, but I say fuck that noise.

Speaking of which, check me out on Twitter, yo.

I celebrated Valentine's Day with a 40-or-so mile ride with Britton K., Chuong D. and Jason K. Britton and I rode Homeboy Bikes, which was a good decision. After several miles in snowfall, a few centimeters of ice built up on virtually every component of my ride. Even the bell stopped working. It was a pretty quiet ride for the last 10 miles or so. There were lots of frozen hands and feet, but I was glad we did it anyway. I don't think a lot of other folks I'll be facing this year were out riding today.

After a couple errands, I spent the evening with a plate of Gates, a few cold ones and Donnie Darko.

Happy Valentine's Day to me! Now listen to each of these songs.

Sandbagging and other things

2010-02-04T19:00:00.007-06:00

Editor's note: Marcus S. was kind enough to help me redesign the photo on the top of this blog. I think it looks pretty cool — a great photo by Philip W. Thanks a million to both, and goodbye Graybeard!

A lot has happened since my last post, while at the same time nothing happened at all. Here's a rundown:

I got my ass handed to me in the third stage of Street Cred last Saturday. It was an urban 'cross race, so you'd think I could hang. But you'd be wrong. My steady decline in the Street Cred series is pushing that bamboo frame further and further back in my wildest dreams.

Despite that awful performance, I got called out on the Sandbagger blog. It didn't make much of an issue about me sandbagging. Before I go further, sandbagging is a phenomenon where cyclists run up a bunch of top finishes in their racing category and avoiding going up to the next frame where they would ostensibly get their ass handed to them. So instead, they race guys who they know they can beat just to collect cash and merchandise prizes.

While I had a few decent finishes in 'cross, I don't think any reasonable person would call me a sandbagger — although r5 doesn't seem to direct that claim toward me. But the sandbagger tag is getting thrown around quite a bit there. And it's kind of becoming an all-purpose receptacle for mocking the local cycling community, slinging mud at people for more than just sandbagging. And it seems to have people's attention. The post about me alone has almost 60 comments. Most online stories in the Kansas City Star don't get that kind of feedback.

The sandbagging blog has revealed a pretty ugly side of the local cycling scene. My problem is not so much with an anonymous person flaming people (although I can understand the frustration), but the way people are reacting to it. One guy seemed to go apoplectic in the comments to defend himself. And many others have done their part to fan the flames. The whole thing has gotten plenty of laughs from me.

That being said, it seems as though the conversation on there has evolved to a slightly more levelheaded tone in the last few days with reasonable discussions emerging about the actual phenomenon of sandbagging, to the degree it exists. I'm kind of mixed on the whole concept. I mean, on one hand, it's really lame to just beat up on people you know you're better than and avoid competing against people who are more on your level. That's like playing beginner's chess and winning all the time, knowing that you might face an ass-kicking if you head down to the Plaza and take on the hustlers. But at the same time, there is some merit to the argument that people getting smoked in races should just try to get better and try to take down these sandbaggers on their own.

Having said even that, I don't think there's much shame to getting licked in any amateur cycling event. A lot of people have jobs, families, other hobbies and distractions to keep them from training all the time. And some people just are not as gifted athletically as others. It doesn't mean they don't belong in the sport. If the Sandbagger blog has revealed another ugly aspect about the cycling scene, it's how much some people seem wrap their whole identities and feelings of self-worth into an amateur sport. Can you imagine how much better off our country would be if people devoted themselves to that degree to things like local government and schools?

Shifting gears here, I've been getting some good riding in around town. I'm sticking with the fixed-gear for these rides. Haven't really touched my road bike. Who knows whether this is actually helping me, but I do think it will pay some dividends in hill climbing, managing a high cadence and turning skills.

Shifting gears again, I was lent a book today that I'm pretty excited to read. It's called A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City. It's written by an Avila University professor. As the title suggests, it's a book about the racial divisions in Kansas City. I've been pretty amazed at the level of racial segregation in this town. It was easy to notice when I first moved here five years ago.

I live in a relatively heterogeneous part of town, but if I go not too far to the east, it gets much less diverse in one extreme. And head a few blocks west, it quickly gets less diverse toward the other extreme. I have a general understand of how this all came about from the history of this city, but I'm hopeful this book will fill in many of the gaps. I'll review it when I'm done with it.

Lastly, I'm drinking a Boulevard Pale Ale as I write this. After drinking their IPA, Pale Ale just tastes watered down. It used to be one of my favorite beers. And still is. But Single Wide is tops.

Now, on to some music you need to hear. Lots of it tonight.

A shift in training paradigms

2010-01-24T22:18:00.002-06:00

I once thought riding fixed-gear bicycles was a fool's errand, the province of idiots who fit the stereotypes of helmetless scofflaws with little to no regard for traffic regulations and who somehow flaunted their no-brake machines. This image was bolstered by once witnessing a rider without a helmet who nearly caused a car accident while blowing a red light and who had his hand wrapped around a PBR tallboy instead of around the brake handle that his bicycle lacked. But now I'm seeing the utility in these efficient, low-maintenance machines in not only getting around town and to and from work, but also as preseason training bicycles.

My first motivation for doing my January base mile routine emanated from a ride last weekend where my road bicycle got gummed up from miles upon miles of wet roads laced with sodium chloride and associated grime. This gummed up the parts and components to my ride, which was not easy to fix.

So Saturday, I saw the roads were still wet and nasty. Instead of striking out on a training ride with a magnet for these disgusting road compounds, I took the Sputnik out for about 25 miles out in Swope Park and then over to the tony neighborhoods of Mission Hills. It was a pleasant and efficient training ride where barreling down downhills was as much of a workout as pacing up inclines. Best of all, I stayed dry thanks to fenders while the Sputnik's downtube caught most of the brunt from the road grime. That's easy enough to clean.

On Sunday, I took it out again for what was an epic road ride with the better part of a dozen people, most of whom sported their road bikes. I didn't have much trouble keeping up with everyone else. We did a long, winding route that put us in Cass County before the weather turned nasty on us on the way back. We rode the second half of a nearly 60-mile ride into a cold and stiff headwind. Nevertheless, we kept a good pace, although the hills during the last 10 miles seemed to represent an unbearable task to make it to the top.

Regardless, I definitely got a better workout treading the miles on the Sputnik than a road bike. In some ways, it was a harsh and difficult ride, but in others, it was a beautiful experience. The forthcoming road season will necessitate more rides like these. Hopefully we can keep getting good crowds like the one we had today. It was a nice mix of cool people, even though it kind of splintered apart into different groups on the way back.

Either way, I'm planning on traveling the long miles of the base-build up of my training plan on the Sputnik. But sans PBR.

Adam K.: Man Of The People

2010-01-20T22:44:00.004-06:00

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Adam K. is a great man with a great blog.

I get home from a Wednesday night of work, which was a busy one, as usual. My phone starts ringing as soon as I get home. Britton K. and I decide we're going to do some riding. No sooner than we're five inches south of the Plaza than we decide we should pay Adam a visit since he's within 10 inches of where we're riding.

So we show up to his place unannounced, and what does he do? He plies us with beer, birthday cake, piping hot pizza and college basketball.

Clearly, no better man has lived than Adam.

Thanks, Adam.

White, Discussion

2010-01-20T00:18:00.003-06:00

This is a post about music. I've seen very little about this in the music press or blogosphere, so I'm dredging it up for posterity's sake (and because Joe and Britton are from Pennsylvania), in case anyone trolling Google ever wondered what happened to a once-prominent but now obscure and mostly forgotten band called Live.

It turns out the band that will probably be remembered for their mediocre song "Lightning Crashes" has called it quits. And they didn't call it quits for the same reasons that a band of their fallen stature normally throws in the towel. Instead of realizing their records sales had dropped off the edge of the universe and that their music represented a bygone era of rock, they shut it down once because their lead singer apparently tried some bizarre legal end-around to screw over the rest of the band.

According to a blog post by Live guitarist Chad Taylor, lead singer Ed Kowalczyk cooked up some half-cocked contract with the band's publishing entity where he was the only signatory. In other words, Kowalczyk appeared to have altered the legal publishing rights to Live's music for his personal and financial benefit. It's unclear what Kowalczyk's goal was in all of this, but it sure seemed to piss off his old buddies.

In any event, Live is no longer.

While I'm sure most of the music world would react to this news with a collective "meh," it's sort of a bummer for me. Live was actually one of the earlier bands I started listening to when I was a pre-teen/teenager. My older brother had copies of their first album, Mental Jewelry and then of their most popular album, Throwing Copper. I thought at the time, and still think, that these were really good, solid alternative rock albums. Their style at the time was unique and their approach to music was refreshing. During the mid-90s, Live's music stood out for being, if nothing else, somewhat of a positive message in an era that embraced music with rather negative and troubled overtones, like Nirvana, Soundgarden and others. I'm all about dark music, but a change was nice every now and again. At that point, Live hadn't been showing many signs of what would later become this overt quasi-religious message in their music.

I listened to Live a fair bit in middle school and then into high school. But by my freshman year, they put out a follow up to Throwing Copper in Secret Samadhi. That album was my first experience with a truly disappointing album by a band that I really liked, although there would be many that would follow. Their music became disjointed and not even really on par with anything they had put out before. I understand how bands can grow and change over time, but this was different. They had abandoned their style in such a drastic way that few other bands that I can think of had done.

By my senior year in high school, they put out The Distance To Here. This was actually a very good album in my estimation. For a long time, it was definitely in my top 10, although they were showing some seriously troubling patterns in their music. Their lyrics had become so bad that I laughed out loud a few times reading their liner notes. Consider this bit from their song "Run To The Water."

Oh, desert, speak to my heart,
Oh, woman of the earth,
Maker of children who weep for love,
Maker of this birth,
Until your deepest secrets are known to me.

Needless to say, Live had become a guilty pleasure of mine at this point. I listened to them in my car but would never suggest at a party that we scrap the Beastie Boys and replace them with Live. Furthermore, it was clear that their lead singer was becoming this unctuous huckster, a bogus portrait of himself that was a vast departure from who he was as he descended into this laughable image of a loser with bogus sex appeal who sought attention wherever he could get it.
As such, their subsequent albums became almost unbearable to listen to. One of them, which bore the obscene title of Birds of Pray, was listened to maybe once or twice before hitting the dustbin of my music collection. Nevertheless, I went with a few friends to see them play at the Uptown Theater in 2007 or so. I actually had a great time at the show. They played a lot of old stuff and spared us from the newer refuse that they had to know no one liked.

Still, it was disappointing to see how much the band had completely discarded what they once stood for. It's impossible to know what forces they face in the major-label music industry that would motivate them to completely abandon their style. Perhaps Kowalczyk's willingness to sell out of his middle school chums from York, Penn., provides a clue or two. Or maybe that's something that worth leaving unexplored.

A Bicycle Race For The People

2010-01-17T11:44:00.004-06:00

Well, it's going to be a lot harder to get that bamboo frame now. The grand prize for the Street Cred series is this cool bicycle frame made out of bamboo and epoxy, and after a second place finish in the time trial/prologue last week, I felt like the stars were aligned to have some bamboo adorn my apartment or otherwise put to use.

But probably not now.

Saturday's aptly-named Roadie Douche Crit didn't go so well. That was mostly my fault for bringing a fixed-gear road bike to a wet course with several patches of ice. Navigating the ice on slicks didn't turn out to be as risky as I thought it would be, but I still took those spots slow as well as the turns to avoid pedal-striking.

So in the end, I got tossed. I managed to pass a few people toward the end, but I have no idea where I finished. No posted results yet. But I do know that scaling the points standings will be a chore going forward. Still, it was fun and good to do some light-hearted racing with the fellas. I wish I could have made the trip up north to witness the dying embers of the 'cross season, but I had some personal business to attend to.

Anyway, I'm about to head out the door to do some miles on the road. Here's what the iPod is spitting out this morning.

Photo credit: Nantsee M.

News roundup v. 1.0

2010-01-14T02:00:00.003-06:00

It's been a phenomenally weird night. As such, I have nothing to offer my readers a few briefs on some of what I'm reading in the news. Maybe I'll have more on how Jan. 13 was spent, and maybe I won't.

I still don't know how anyone continues to think Jay Leno is funny. I remember getting a few belly laughs out of him...when I was 12 years old.
The news coming from Haiti in the aftermath of its major earthquake is nothing short of absolutely devastating. If you could have conjured up a few weeks ago a short list of things that this hermit kingdom could have suffered worse than anything else, I think one would be hard pressed to think of a worse scenario than what they're facing right now. Of course, anyone with a remedial education in Western Hemisphere history knows that this country was already in deep shit before this week's earthquake happened. Furthermore, anyone with a basic knowledge of U.S. imperialism and obstructionism with Haiti knows this country played no small part in where Haiti finds itself today, earthquake or no.
One news story absolutely worth following is the upcoming trial of Scott Roeder. Roeder, as some of you may recall, is the deadbeat drifter who confessed to killing Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller. I won't state my position on this matter here, although I think anyone reading this blog can make a reasonable guess about how I feel about what's going on here. But in any case, it's worth noting that former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline has received a defense subpoena for the upcoming trial. Here's what to watch for: Kline tried but never succeeded in bringing Tiller to trial for what he believed was a series of illegal abortions Mr. Tiller was performing at his Wichita clinic before he was assassinated. Roeder has pushed for allowing the court to allow a voluntary manslaughter defense to get him a few years in prison rather than the lifetime behind bars he faces for his crime. Roeder is basically angling for a permutation of the necessity defense — in other words, he hopes to convince the court that he needed to kill Tiller to prevent further abortions. If Kline testifies, this may give the former Attorney General the opportunity to try Tiller posthumously. A betting man would wager that Kline will try to present a full case that Tiller was performing abortions illegally in Wichita, a presumption that Kline was never able to prosecute while serving as Kansas' top law enforcement figure. That may lend credence to Roeder's position that he carried out the murder in order to forestall the deaths of the unborn. In 2006, Kline was voted out of office with a vengeance in favor of Paul Morrison, who resigned for a salacious sex scandal less than a year in office. Since then, Kline has taught legal aspirants at Liberty University, for whatever that's worth.

Beer review: Tank 7

2010-01-11T23:20:00.003-06:00

It was a bad night for beer. Following a 45-minute bicycle ride for our Monday night ride, we consumed a few pitchers of McCoy's Rye of the Tiger, which was OK but underwhelming, considering that place's other choices. By the time I left, my thirst for good beer was unquenched, which prompted a ride over to the local liquor store for some more. Having heard rave reviews for Boulevard Brewery's new Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale, which is the newest installment in the place's Smokestack Series, which has been mostly hit or miss.

The place's series of high-end beer sold in bizarre quantities (750 mL, enough to share or to get drunk by yourself) was a big miss in one of its latest with Two Jokers. A self-described double wit was actually malt liquor, for chrissakes.

Before I go further, it's worth noting that I'm a huge fan of Boulevard's beers. I avoid buying their Single Wide IPA because it's so good that it's difficult to stop drinking it once I start. Their Pale Ale is tops, and their Lunar is a tremendously underrated beer. Their Bully Porter isn't bad, but their wheat offering is OK — not as good as it once was — and their stout sucks. Their seasonals are OK — the Nutcracker Ale tastes like Christmas trees and their autumnal Bob's 47 is slightly above average. Their summertime beer, Zon, is good for the summer and is difficult to imagine enjoying any other time of year.

And that brings us to Tank 7. It really tastes like Zon, but perhaps stronger. In fact, the higher alcohol content is one of the only things you can discern from the cheaper Zon six-pack. The color is the same and the taste — described on the label as a Belgian-style farmhouse ale — doesn't really carry the day. It's becoming increasingly fashionable to describe one's beer as Belgian-style, but I'm not seeing it in this beer. It's not all that bad. But it's not memorable, especially when you take a second look at your receipt.

For the weather we've been having lately, throw me a strong IPA or something darker over the plate, but not a light, hazy wit beer-styled wild pitch.

Oh, and by the way, I've been posting some music playlists with my blogs. These songs for the most part reflect what is popping up over the iPod or radio as I'm writing these blogs. Listen to the songs, maybe find something new and let me know what you think. Here's the latest installment:

An exercise in gravitational futility

2010-01-10T19:37:00.004-06:00

One day after talking all manner of shit about changing this blog up, we're back to our regularly scheduled programming.

As has been the custom for a great deal of this cyclocross season, I woke up from a late night before and made my way to Shawnee — a medium-sized hamlet in the Kansas City area — for what may be my last 'cross race of the season. I expected to find a park filled with Kansas City's patented meltless snow, and found plenty of it.

In what has been a year of firsts, I ticked off a snow race from my experience belt. While pre-riding the course, I found most of it was solidly-packed snow, as though someone had been driving over the course several times the night before. There were some areas of loose, rutted snow that was difficult to navigate until I figured out I was better of just pedaling my hardest through these sections.

So the race started and I suspect I was in about 7th place to start. I made up a few spots during the first run up when I got off and ran for about 30 meters. I was able to stay upright until the back end of the course when I hit a loose rut and fell into some deep snow on the side of the course. I looked up to see teammate Nathan C. hit the same spot and come careening toward me. Luckily, he stopped before too long and averted a collision.

Nathan and I would trade spots for the most part. In areas where you could ride, he crushed me. In areas where you could run, I could pass him and others. Unfortunately, the running wore me down and some areas of snow turned to slush. I couldn't keep up for long before falling a few times, slipping my chain several more times and just eventually riding it in to the finish. I don't know what place I got. I don't think it much matters. It was a fun ride overall.

Race Notebook

I don't know too many results, or really any hardly at all. I had to hot-foot it out of there after my race. Nathan C. raced well from what I could tell.
It was not nearly as cold as I thought it would be. I woke up and the electron beam told me it was 9 degrees. A bank sign on the way to the course told me it was 17. But once you started riding, it felt pretty mild.
Special thanks to a cheering crew of Dan O., Jami S., Adam K. and others who were on hand to support us despite temperatures that weren't suitable for spectators.
Don't know how Dan did yet. Hopefully someone can update me?

That's that. My last 'cross race of the year unless I don't end up traveling next weekend. We'll see. I'll have more thoughts about my 'cross season later on. For now, all I'm really thinking about is a post-work Monday night ride. Who's in?

Photo credit: Roger Harrison

A new year, a new leaf

2010-01-09T11:31:00.004-06:00

So we were partying it up last night at Volker Bicycles when someone let it slip that Adam K. has been penning a blog for a while. At first, I was pretty skeptical about it, but Britton told me it was pretty good stuff.

I went home checked it out, liked it, added it to my blog roll on the right and watched The Big Lebowski before falling asleep on the couch half way through.

Adam has been doing with his blog what I've wanted to do for a while now. I think things have gotten a little crusty around here. Too much bicycle stuff and little else. Of course, I set the blog up for that very reason, but I don't think it's been very interesting for a while. It's been more difficult to sit down and write race re-caps and training logs. Reading back on some of what I've written, it was interesting to see the evolution of my opinions and thoughts and experiences about the sport of cycling.

But I have more thoughts and experiences than just what I do on two wheels. Of course, people may not care about that, but I'm not monetizing this blog and I don't think I have too many readers anyway, which is fine. I appreciate those who do read, but I'm branching out a bit, more for my own sake than anything else. I still plan to retain everything I've done with this blog up to this point, but just add to it things that go on, things I'm reading, things I'm listening to and so forth. Not stories about trips to the bathroom or what I'm eating or anything that narcissistic, but still pretty narcissistic anyway.

In the next couple weeks, I'm going to redesign this thing a little bit and let it rip. Like anything else, we'll see how it goes.

Ten in 2010

2010-01-03T20:38:00.004-06:00

The 2010 road training season would start much like last year's did — riding in the freezing cold for more than an hour.

For no particular reason at all, I considered today's ride the kick off to the upcoming road season, the time of year when training involves long, slow miles in the depths of the Kansas City winter. And what a winter it's been. The snow and cold has been more Denver than anything I've seen in this Midwestern town. At any rate, Britton, Chuong, some guy named Jason and myself struck out in KCK and the West Bottoms on mountain bicycles for maybe close to two hours. Aside from frozen feet, it was a pretty nice excursion. It was about 17 degrees, which was actually quite a bit warmer than last year's road kickoff when Britton and I trekked across Mission in what might have been subzero temperatures.

Even with a couple 'cross races still ahead, I'm mostly looking forward to the road season. A time trial yesterday in the Street Cred series reminded me that I'm fairly out of shape. I rang the bell for a second place finish in the two-mile course, but I was huffing and puffing half way up Roanoke Road. After a holiday season where I did more 12 oz. dead lifts than bike riding, I need to get my base back up. No time like now to do it.

I'm pretty excited for the road season. I'm not into making predictions, but with a year of racing under the belt, I'm hoping to make this season a better one. 2009 was a really good year for me. Much better than 2008, which was weird and difficult. The new year is off to a good start in a lot of ways. There's plenty to look forward to this year, both in sport, in personal life and professionally. I've got a trick up my sleeve for later this year. We'll see if it works out.

Expressway To Yr Skull

2009-12-06T20:30:00.004-06:00

I've done a lot of embarrassing shit in my life. I've done things I regret. I've done things that make me wish I could reverse time and do over again. I've done things I'll never live down. I've done things I won't even tell my dentist about.

This is all why I don't feel all that bad about recounting for the Internets the humiliating experience that was Boss Cross No. 4. The only really unfortunate thing about how my Saturday in the Northland turned out was that it could have been a nice triumph in my nascent cycling career. Here goes:

I kind of sound like I'm trying to attract some false sympathy by saying this, but in Saturday's case it's true. I came into Saturday with a lingering illness from what turned out to be a hellish week, and I was slightly hung over from the aftereffects of a going-away party for a much-liked-but-departed-co-worker on Friday night. So while I had figured earlier this season that Boss Cross could hold some promise, I was thinking Saturday morning that the fourth and final phase of this 'cross series was not going to be a good one.

Nevertheless, I rolled up to the start line with a decent position. But because I spent a few moments thinking about it before the whistle blew to start the race, I didn't clip in particularly well. So I start the race in about 12th place or so and kind of hang out there for a while before we hit the sand pit. I'm running across about 15 meters of volleyball court sand and passing a bunch of people before I get back on the Double Cross before I realize I slipped a chain. So I get off the bicycle and reposition the chain, which costs me several spots. At this point, I guess I lost about 10 to 15 positions.

I start riding, and Britton K. tells me, "You're OK!" I respond with an ungrateful, embarrassing and regrettable, "No! I'm fucked!" But it turns out he's right. Before too long, I've passed a bunch of people and I'm right behind third place, who is right behind second place, who is right behind first place. This is a first in my 'cross experience. In the past, I've found that bridging more than a 100 foot gap is very difficult to do. But in this case, I had made up several spots and was feeling good enough to challenge for a top finish. And then disaster strikes.

There's this 180-degree turn at one point in the course and once you make the sharp turn, there's this deep muddy divot waiting for you on the other side. If you can maneuver around it, you're fine. As it would turn out, I hit this turn pretty fast in all my zeal to catch these three SKC riders right in front of me. I see this divot-from-hell and try to steer around it. But I hit it and my front wheel comes to a sudden stop, forcing my back wheel straight up in the air, which launches me straight on my head and then back. I lay there for a few moments, completely dazed and wondering how to get my bicycle untangled from around my neck. Finally, I get on one knee and just sit there, wondering what the hell just happened. Then I get on my feet and check out the Double Cross to see if it's still ridable. I eventually get back on and start picking people off, remembering what Britton said before I started going again, which was, "Get pissed!"

What would really piss me off is what came next. At one point, I'm trying to catch teammate Joe A., who became a temporary, but still friendly, foe as him and I were tied for second place in the overall series points with one race left. So I put my head down on a long straightaway and just pedaled as hard as I could. I did this for what seemed like an appropriate length of time, only to open my eyes again and look up and realize that had managed to pedal my way off course by a longshot. I looked back and saw where I had wandered off course and it was so far back that there was no use to go back and try to re-enter the race. That's right, I rode straight off course. I don't know if this had to do with inattentiveness related to a possible mild concussion from my spill earlier or just plain stupidity (I suspect it's the latter), but my race at that point was toast. I unclipped, stepped off my bike, dropped it to the ground, laid down on my back and stared at the sky for a long time.

The frustrating thing in all of this was I think I was actually doing some of my best riding of the year that day. When I was slipping chains, delighting spectators with astonishing crashes or doing some freelance exploration, I was riding fairly fast. All for naught, though. I've said before that I loathe not finishing a race, save for serious injury or unsolvable mechanical problems. I had neither on Saturday, but frustration overcame me after three gaffes and I just didn't want to take any more shit. In retrospect, this sucks. I kind of regret it. But what's done is done. Now it's a matter of moving on and learning from it. I guess...

Race Notebook

Hats off to Britton, who finished No. 2 in his single-speed race. Looked like he waged a solid battle the whole time;
Hats off also to Joe A., whose consistency and perseverance in the Boss Cross series landed him a No. 2 overall position, an impressive performance for a first-year 'cross rider. I still say that Joe has shown perhaps the most improvement over anyone on the team over the course of this year. That's not to say anything negative about where he started, but he's been consistently sticking his neck out and getting solid results as the year has gone on;
Teammates Nathan C. and Adam K. rode to solid finishes in the Men's 4 race, although I don't know their exact positions. Unless someone told me, in which case I've already forgotten;
The weather was perhaps the coldest we've had all year, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I think it was about 30 degrees when we started our race. It was a fun course. It's the kind of course that a roadie can do well on: long, flat straightaways and not too technical. Running across a couple sand pits is tiring, but not too bad.

I'm undecided about racing in Manhattan next week. I'm tempted to because there won't be another race for a while. But at the same time, I'm trying to build my mileage for the upcoming road season. It seems strange to say that in December, but road really isn't too far off. Speaking of which, Dan O. and I had a nice ride of about 50 miles or so. We went straight south on the town until we hit some country roads and ended up at 215th Street and Mission Road. That's where the end of the road is, at which point we turned around. It's fun to get back to doing some long mileage. Thanks to Dan for riding, despite the chilly temperatures.

The Fixer

2009-11-23T20:57:00.004-06:00

My biggest regret of Sunday, besides making all kinds of horrible navigational decisions while participating in Cranksgiving, was not borrowing someone's iPhone so I could live blog the thing. All year I've been thinking that it would be fun (for myself only) to write up some event while actually doing it. Someday my bike handling skills will be good enough to allow me to do a 'cross race while updating my blog continuously. Until then, you all have to be content with my day-or-two-late blog entries about everything.

But since I can't go back in time — and even if I could, there would be many, many, many things I would do differently before correcting what I did last Sunday — I'll try to recreate a the best minute-by-minute recaps I can from my memory.

Cranksgiving, for the unknowing, is a charity ~~ride~~ race where cyclists assemble in one location, each one gets a slip of paper with 10 grocery store locations with instructions to pick up one of a list of various items from each store. Riders have to hit each store and fill their backpacks with the various items and return them to a Downtown bar with receipts for each purchase. The purchased items go to a food pantry of some sort for Thanksgiving. Anyway, on to the post-haste ~~live~~ blog recap:

1:15 p.m. — Volker Bicycles, 1717 W. 39th St., Kansas City, Mo.

Following instructions from the previous day's e-mail, I show up to the shop before our estimated departure time of 1:45 p.m. The first thing Britton does is convert my single-speed freewheel into a fixed-gear. I put up a good front about this, but deep down, I was insanely nervous about this. I haven't been on a fixed gear since the grass track race in August, and who cares what happens to you on grass?

It's bad enough to ride on Kansas City streets, to say nothing about a bicycle you're not sure you can control. But I justified this decision in my own mind by buying into the idea that this whole excursion would be genuine only on a fixed-gear ride.

After a while, Philip W. and some lady with tattoos shows up and we're off to the race.

As we hit the roads, it turns out that just like my deep depression a couple weekends ago about my employment status, it turns out that I overreacted about riding a fixed-gear. This ain't gonna be no problem.

2 p.m. — Legacy Park, 48th and Troost, Kansas City, Mo.

So we're here at the race. There's a ton of people here, even a few I know. More than I expected. Pretty soon, someone's shouting my name. It's Brian C., who still has this medieval-torture-looking device on his hand from some ghastly bike-polo incident recently. He hands me my instructions. I leave the planning up to Britton. Pretty soon, he has drawn out a battle plan with each store numbered in order of which ones we should hit. A few minutes later, someone screams for us to go and everyone starts running about like a bunch of hyenas looking for their bicycles. I find mine and hightail it outta there after Britton.

We cruise north on Troost. We thought Philip was supposed to be in our group, but he's nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, Mike P. is behind us on his road ride. Fine by me.

2:15 p.m. — Aldi, 64th and Troost, Kansas City, Mo.

Britton, Mike and I are the first ones to show up at Aldi. It's kind of empty at first, but then it appears that lots of people had the same idea to hit this store up first. Within moments, while we're trying to figure out which grocery item to get first, the place becomes a total shitshow of cyclists and confused and outraged shoppers. We're wondering where the hell anything is in this store when I save the day and spot green beans. Green beans it is.

Trouble strikes when I hit the checkout line. The checkout lady runs out of receipt paper while tending to the shopper just in front of us. This is the worst possible thing that can happen. A complete debacle. It's like having a teammate call a timeout late in a basketball game when you don't have any timeouts left. My blood pressure shoots out of the roof as I watch other competitors check out with their items. Finally, more paper arrives. I pay the lady 51 cents and I'm outta there.

2:25 p.m. — Brookside Price Chopper, 63rd and Brookside Plaza, Kansas City, Mo.

Britton and I haul ass to the ritzier part of town with a speed that convinces me we're going to win. The trip there is flawless. No lights, no obstructions. Only Mike in tow. I find peanut butter quickly. It's the last good idea I have on the day. We're out of Brookside in hardly any time.

3 p.m. — Aldi, 48th and Roe, Roeland Park, Kan.

This is where I really screw things up left and right. We're popping down Meyer Blvd. no problem until we hit Mission Hills. Instead of continuing to go west on 63rd Street, I suggest hitting Mission Drive. What a rotten decision this is. Mission Hills is no place to be experimenting with your travel. I think they make this place impossible to find your away around because they know all the uber-wealthy people here have navigational devices in their cars, and any miscreant who goes stealing things or is otherwise causing trouble in this money-saturated community will just do circles forever until the cops show up and ship them off to Gitmo.

So we take this long, circuitous route through town before we finally our way on to Shawnee Mission Drive. We make a right somewhere and lose Mike, who continues on risking life and limb and dignity on busy Shawnee Mission Drive. We get to Roeland Park and find all the traffic lights are out. At one point, Britton is crossing Roe Blvd., which confuses me for a moment. I should have said something right away. We were supposed to go north here. So we do some more roundabout traveling in this suburban burg before getting spit back out on to Roe. More non-functioning traffic lights. Lots of confused cars who forgot everything they learned in driving school about handling such situations. I fuck things up once more by insisting that we need to go to Price Chopper and not the Aldi across the store, like Britton said. But then I remember that I am indeed wrong and we waste a bunch of time getting back across the street to Aldi.

By the time we get there, this lady with an Aldi shirt is basically telling us that there's no power anywhere in Roeland Park, much less her store. There's no way we can pay for things and she pretty much tells us that we have to get lost. We sit there and contemplate the gravity of the situation. So we're at one of our ten locations, but we can't buy any items or get an receipts. Eventually, we dismiss this problem, thinking that the judges will surely understand.

This decision, and the tenth receipt we never got, would become our white whale by the end of the day.

3:15 p.m. — Apple Market, Mission and County Line Road, Westwood, Kan.

This would be an easy and uneventful trip. We get there, find some $2 women's deodorant, pay with cash, stuff the receipt in our pockets, and we're on our way.

3:25 p.m. — Sun Fresh, Mill Street and Southwest Trafficway, Kansas City, Mo.

We once again relied on my erroneous information when I suggested we get toilet paper because Sun Fresh surely sells it by the single roll. I'm thinking of conserving space. But they only sell it in packs of four. So we find some for 99 cents and travel eastward.

3:30 p.m. — Thriftway, 39th and Main Street, Kansas City, Mo.

Britton calls an audible and we disrupt the numbered order of our journey for the expediency of a more manageable route. The trouble is after we pick up some oatmeal, the line is taking seriously forever. I'm starting to have doubts as to whether we have any shot of winning. I saw Chris T. and some cute lady outside and they looked like they had a lot of items. We finally escape from the checkout logjam at Thriftway and go north on Main.

3:45 p.m. — Wild Oats, 43rd and Main, Kansas City, Mo.

This is the best stop of the day. The smart fellows at Wild Oats catch on to what we're doing and make the trouble of going out and corralling a bunch of items for us and putting them at the front of the store. I quickly grab two boxes of instant mashed potatoes, one for Britton and one for myself, pay and jump.

4:05 p.m. — Save-A-Lot, 34th and Troost, Kansas City, Mo.

Holy hell, riding a fixed-gear around is more exhausting than I thought. We're still going pretty fast, but it doesn't seem to be much use going a whole hell of a lot faster. Whatever happens is going to happen.

We roll up to Save-A-Lot in a semi-skeezy part of town where some lady asks us what we're up to. We kind of try to explain it to her, but she seems to really buy into the whole idea. "God bless y'all," she says. Uh, OK. I don't remember what we bought here. Tuna? Yeah, that's it. Upward and onward.

4:25 p.m. — Aldi, 7th and Paseo, Kansas City, Mo.

It's getting late in the competition and people are starting to get nasty. The collective Joe Namaths (the obnoxious Broadway Joe version, not the super-drunk "I-just-wanna-kiss-you-Suzy" version) starts coming out some folks. A few people seem to have their eyes set on winning the whole thing. I'm thinking we might even have a chance. On the way down, it starts to dawn on Britton and I that we may be doomed by our lack of a receipt from the out-of-power Aldi in Roeland Park. Clearly, none of this is our fault. But in charity, like in real life, judges don't care if it's our fault or not. Either you have the paper trail, or you don't.

Anyway, we decide the right thing to do is purchase extra items from Aldi in northern Kansas City that we couldn't get in Roeland Park. That's what we'll do.

So I find some chicken noodle soup while Britton sniffs out some soap. This lady sees what we're up to and lets us cut in front of her in line. Then she let's a couple other guys. But then these guys start pointing at another competitor approaching the checkout aisle and imploring her not to let him get ahead in line. She has about 200 items in her cart, so this is really going to screw this guy in a bad way. Genius move on their part. The lady hilariously follows their instructions.

4:35 p.m. — Costentino's, 12th and Main, Kansas City, Mo.

The last stop is at highfalutin' Costentino's where we do a quick inventory on what we have and figure out that apple sauce is what we need. We're in and out of there faster than a couple of University of Pittsburgh basketball players who are in there for some reason. Right on our tails are the two guys who are clearly our closest competitors, so we hightail it to The Brick to see if we're the victors.

4:45 p.m. — The Brick, 17th and McGee, Kansas City, Mo.

We're heading to The Brick, a place I used to frequent a lot before some really odd circumstances kept me out of there for some time. Brian's sitting out front, telling us that we're the first people there. We scramble to get a bunch of crumpled receipts out of our pockets to seal up our victory. We tell the judges about our Roeland Park misfortune. They're not sure what to do about it. The next two guys roll in and they have a receipt from Roeland Park. They got there just in time before the power failed. Again, I don't know what the judges will make of this.

But we've been riding all day and we're hungry. So I drink a quick beer and we're off to Grinders for some two-fer-one pizza. I'm so nervous about whether we're going to win or not that it's hard for me to eat pizza. Nonetheless, I eat twice as quickly as Britton. I go over to a television, see the score of the Denver game and I'm further sickened. Pretty soon, we go back to the Brick.

Long story short, and a few beers later, we discover that because of the receipt snafu, we're not the winners. But in a way, we are. We still get a crack and some freebies and I dig through the prize bag and find a bicycle computer, which is easily the coolest prize in the bag. I give it to Britton and life is good again.

In the end though, I guess when it comes to charity, we're all winners.

And I didn't die riding a fixed-gear. I guess that makes me The Fixer...

De Stad wrap

2009-11-16T21:44:00.007-06:00

Dan O. (pictured) deserves a lot of credit after his race on Sunday. The Manhattan Mad Man has battled some nagging injury problems for the better part of the season and particularly in the last two weeks, but still went ahead and won the Kansas State Championships for the second year in a row. I didn't get to catch much of Dan's race on Sunday as I was in the back of the race, trying to handle racing in several inches of deep, thick mud from the rain and miserable conditions, but it sounded like he raced like a maniac. Hats off to him.

As for myself, I doubled up on Sunday. Neither race was impressive. The Men's 4 race was fairly uneventful. There was a crash right in front of me in the first few meters of the race, but I got around it and ended up in decent position during the first lap. I moved around a few people and got myself in top 10 position. I had gone into the race hoping to get a top 4 finish at least, but I just didn't have much in my legs. I couldn't keep up with a couple guys could beat if I were feeling up to it. The course was in decent condition at that point, and I finished in 7th place. Not a great performance, but good enough to move up one spot in the overall series for finish 4th across all five De Stad Series races. The best part of finishing well in the series? Getting a Chamois Butt'r koozie, which is holding a New Belgium 2 Below as I type this.

By the time I decided to race a second time in the 3/4 race, the rain had picked up considerably, a few more races had turned the grass into this disgusting thick mud and a couple of post-first-race beers were having a fist fight in my stomach with the Guinnesses I had the night before doing Goldsprints at some strange bar in Midtown. I jumped in the race primarily for the experience. I fell off my bike three or four times in the first lap, being unaccustomed to riding in such deplorable and fantastic conditions, and the race more or less got away from me at that point. Racing around in that crap made me feel like someone in the middle of this mosh pit:

So that's a wrap on 'cross races for a little while. I'm not sure when the next race will be, but chances are it will be a lot colder by the time we're doing them. But the large measure of the season was wrapped up well by a nice get together at the Stull residence yesterday evening.

On to other notes, I was shocked to read today via BikeSnobNYC that the mainstream music press is describing the new 30 Seconds to Mars music as "epic." That band is a fucking tragedy, a maddening mirage of itself. I got into them after their first album in college turned out some pretty solid, creative and unique music. I figured they would be a gimmick to further Jared Leto's acting career, which at that point had churned out a spectacular role in the film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s amazing book Requiem For a Dream and a before that, a few otherwise bland performances as Jordan Catellano in the old TV series "My So-Called Life."

But their eponymous first album was fairly good music. I went to one of their shows in Lawrence at The Bottleneck. Leto even attacked me mid-song at one point because he thought I was making fun of him. He stepped off stage, dropped his guitar and made his way through the crowd and grabbed me by my shirt collar and asked, "When are you going to shut the fuck up?!?" Truth is, I wasn't actually making fun of him, but it would take a really long time to explain what actually happened. I was just glad other fans, who were mostly teenyboppers all excited to see Leto, didn't scratch my eyes out at his behest. Long story short, I approached him after the show and we both had a good laugh about the whole thing. At that point, I asked him about what their next album would be like, and he told me it would be "sexier." I knew at that point that the next album would be disappointing. And it was. And now they're on their third album, which shows that they've completed their metamorphosis into a Creed-sounding outfit.

Yes, Creed. That's who they now sound like. The same band that a friend of mine and I, upon learning that they had broken up a few years back, rushed out to the liquor store to buy two bottles of champagne which we promptly drank in celebration.

Photo credit: Lyle Reynolds.

Topeka, Leavenworth, fast food and music trivia

2009-11-08T19:05:00.005-06:00

Since the weekends are my reprieve from the five-day trances I experience nowadays, I spend my Sunday evenings taking an inventory of my triumphs and accomplishments before heading off to bed and start another work week.

Easily my biggest accolade of the weekend was thoroughly besting Adam K. in a two-day contest of being the first to name songs that come on 96.5 while sitting in the car going to either Topeka or Leavenworth. I was the quick gunslinger this weekend, beating Adam on tunes from artists ranging from The Smiths to the Foo Fighters. His big score was Echo and the Bunnymen, but I otherwise came out on top. Of course, it's easy to win when you get to make up the rules as you go. But like in real life, there's always two different sets of rules, and the haves always get it easier than the have-nots.

To a lesser extent, weekend racing was somewhat of a success. I have a red, flaming, throbbing tire track across my leg to show for it. That and a Michelob Ultra t-shirt — I don't and won't drink this swill — that doesn't fit me, which was the spoils of a fifth place finish on Sunday in Leavenworth. I might have been able to win a bottle of Power Gel, which is what the second place winner received. I was gaining on second place for a little while before I took a bizarre spill at the bottom of a steep downhill on the University for Bad Girls campus. I was riding along going fairly quickly and plotting out my next move to scale up to second place when suddenly I was on the ground. Roger H. was there and maybe when he posts his photos, he may even capture the catastrophe in progress. In any event, I managed to somehow run myself over, hence the tire marks. I then spent a couple moments reassembling my bike and making sure it worked again. During this time, two guys passed me and I couldn't catch them again. So it goes.

The night before in beautiful Topeka was spent racing an unusual course in the middle of a monster truck rally arena, or some such dust-covered motorsports arena the the Kansas capital. It was a nice novelty to race there under the lights and in unusual surroundings. I didn't start particularly well, but I moved up OK. I chased Joe A. for the better part of the race, but Joe was speeding through the dirt and grass for a No. 6 finish, I believe. Someone named Shane Voeleroot finished No. 8. He may or may not be related to me.

Race Notebook

Erik E., like clockwork, finished No. 2 in the Master 55+ race on Sunday;
Andy W. won the Men's 4 race easily;
Nathan C. finished 7th in the Men's 4 race, followed by Joe. A in 11th;
Adam K. flirted with local cycling celebrity when Tradewind racer Brian Jensen hastily used Adam's bicycle in the middle of the race on Saturday after a seatpost snapped off in the middle of the Men's Open race. This, of course, is an illegal move. Not sure if a disqualification was given;
Adam K. would suffer a busted derailleur on Sunday, one of a few team riders to have mechanicals;
David N. raced well to an unknown finish in the Men's 3/4 race, followed by Dan O., who dropped his bicycles going over barriers, which set him back a little.

Adam K.'s mechanical was joined on Sunday by chain problems experience by Britton K. and E. Stull. Stull's chain just snapped apart altogether. For good measure, I slipped my chain when I fell. All in all, there were enough mechanical problems on the team for us to form a country music band to sing about all the misfortunes. Maybe if we did that, Adam would have a chance at picking those songs out on the radio.

The shifting of light and shadows

2009-11-01T22:38:00.003-06:00

The last time I ran a real road race, I showed up to a county fair in Joplin, Mo. in about 2005 where they were offering $300 to the winner of the 10k. I had a friend who at the time was working at the newspaper in that town, so I traveled down there, stayed the night at her place and raced the next day. I won the easiest $300 I would ever make up to that point and probably from that point forward. We went out and had a nice dinner in downtown Joplin before I traveled up to Kansas City, never to do another race on foot again until today.

I woke up this morning at what I thought was 6 a.m., which turned out to be 5 a.m. because of daylight savings. At any rate, I went to northeast Kansas City holding on to some small hope that I could maintain my undefeated post-collegiate road racing status. Those hopes evaporated when I saw an old KU teammate Paul Hefferon lining up at the start line. I ran with Paul for one year at KU before I graduated. Paul went on to become an All-American in cross country and track. He still trains like a maniac.

I tried to follow him for about three-fourths of a mile in the Cliffhanger 8k before I realized I was wasting my time. Paul became a speck on the horizon of Cliff Drive before I regained my sense of self-preservation and settled back into a more manageable pace. Whatever the case, I enjoyed running a road race after all these years. It was an out-and-back race where I ran about 2.5 miles before turning right around and coming back the same way I went. The second half of the race was mostly spent passing stragglers who were racing the 5k version of the race. I dropped back a ways before regaining a second wind in the last mile and passing several people for a top-10 finish.

The race was followed up with a nice bicycle ride on a beautiful day with Britton K., Joe A. and Mike P. from the Black Sheep International Mob Crime Syndicate. Those of you who missed it really blew an opportunity to get some good riding in on an unbeatable fall day with a hilarious group of guys. We crossed up Wyandotte County and the Golden Ghetto before making our way back to Volker Bicycles, where we hung out and drank Anchor Steam and discussed metaphysics and religion.

Back to the scheduling Ponzi scheme that is daylight savings, Nov. 1 represents the reversion to afternoon darkness and mind-detonating depression. With the passing of this insane annual ritual, I can look forward to coming home from work in supreme darkness and navigating the streets on two wheels without the benefit of light.

In honor of this mood-altering event, enjoy the greatest music video ever made.

Knowing an opportunity when you see one

2009-10-31T21:32:00.004-05:00

So last week, I bellyached about not doing an even adequate job of starting 'cross races. Apparently, an old 27-year-old can still learn new tricks.

Truth be told, I wasn't in much of a position to do any serious racing on Saturday morning in Platte City for the third race in the four-race Boss Cross series. Most of the week was spent missing a lot of sleep in a quest to find new ways to supplement my income (more on this later). Then on Friday night, I pedaled the Sputnik to downtown Overland Park from my place at about 11 p.m. to meet up with an old friend who is back in town from London for a few beers. I got back to my place around 1 a.m. or so after a few Pale Ales went down the hatch.

Combine that with missing the exit on the way up to the race and then another painful and tragic experience with embrocation, I wasn't in a very good mood at all at the starting line and wasn't looking too forward to racing.

Not long after the start, I was in about 7th or 8th position. Despite relatively narrow passages on the course, I moved up to 4th pretty quickly. Then there were three guys just ahead of me as they trudged through some Play-Dough-esque mud on the course and weren't moving too quickly. Seeing a lot of open space on the right, I figured I would take advantage and take the lead.

At this point, I had more or less forgotten about everything that was fouling my mood before the race. Instead, I was thinking that with the lead, I should try to extend it as much as possible. I pushed it pretty hard in the lead for the rest of the first lap and most of the second. I think that separated a few leaders from the rest of the field. But it did make me pretty tired. I got passed by two guys who were moving quickly. I wasn't able to keep up with them for long. Then a guy from Local Cycling whose face was all painted up for Halloween moved ahead of me. We traded positions for a while until he just pulled ahead of me. Behind me, there wasn't much of a chance for people to catch up, so I spent most of the race trying to keep a good pace and not crashing. I wound up finishing 4th, which is my best result so far of the season. I got a hat and a t-shirt for the effort.

In the end, I guess getting off to a good start sets you up for a solid finish.

Race Notebook

Erik E. snagged another third place finish in the Masters 55+ race;
Adam K. had another solid race in the 4s race, finishing No. 6 or somewhere thereabouts. Joe A. and Nathan C. were not far behind;
David N. did a nice job to move up in the 3/4 race. I think he said he finished No. 6;
The course overall was brutal. The grass was soft from a week's worth of rain and at various junctures, it felt like you were pedaling the wrong direction on an airport conveyor belt. Add that with several steep climbs and sharp turns and you have the toughest course we've raced all year. As Britton K. told me about halfway through his race, "It's dumb!"
The Open race featured one of the more interesting battles we've seen all year. Cameron C. was on a fixed-gear mountain bike and dueled the entire 60 minute race on the wheels of some other guy who was on a 'cross bike. The Other Guy had an obvious advantage with gears and a faster bicycle, but he just couldn't shake Cameron. Those two were neck-and-neck the entire race until The Other Guy pulled away at the very end. It was very fun to watch and see everyone else really get into to it;
The run of nice weather for this 'cross season continued today with clear skies, light winds and about 45 to 50 degrees.

No race in Lawrence for me tomorrow. Instead, I'm changing things up a bit and running an 8k at Cliff Drive. It's been a few years since I've done a road race on foot. I have no idea what to expect. We'll see what happens.

Lastly, this week I started a new writing gig over at True/Slant. This is a relatively new Web site and follows a somewhat similar pattern to The Huffington Post and similar online-only news sites. There's lots of good writers here from publications like Rolling Stone to the New York Sun and various other places. I'm writing about sports and its sometimes absurd interplay with society. It's kind of a work in progress right now and I'll be picking up steam as I write more and gather some new sources of information and ideas. Check it out sometime. In the meantime, I'm also looking into another new writing opportunity that Britton K. passed along to me. I'll let you know if that works out, as I suspect this blog's readers would find this interesting.

Photo credit: Jane A.

Starts the party

2009-10-25T20:34:00.005-05:00

One of the first things Britton K. told me to work on before I started doing cyclocross was starting a race at a fast and furious pace. Compared to so many other elements of 'cross racing, this seemed like one of the easier ones to conquer. I thought I would have a harder time with dismounting and re-mounting and the technical aspects of racing. Yet, after five 'cross races, I have yet to get off to a pristine start to a race. As such, a top three or top five finish has been elusive. Today was no different.

Out by Smithville Lake, the Men's 4 race started in chilly but decent weather. The day got off to bad enough of a start when I rubbed cold weather embrocation on my legs and forgot to rinse my hands off before hitting up the urinal. This came two days after I managed to get some of the stuff in my eyes. Sometimes it's hard to save myself from myself.

Anyway, I think I started off somewhere between 25th and 30th place for about the first half of the first lap before the course took us this stretch of sandy lakefront beach. As I'll tell anyone who listens, I don't ride sand. It's slow, it gums up the gears and its hard to handle the bicycle correctly through sand. For me anyway. So I ran this stretch of sand on the first lap and managed to pass about seven or eight people. Delighted with my own brilliant idea — which was reinforced by Brian C. from the Pink & Black Organized Crime Unit yelling "Great move!" or something like that — I worked my way up in the race a bit. This was a fairly technical course with one particularly unforgiving hill. Overall, it was a fun course and might have been the season's most challenging. Either that one or The University of Bad Girls in Leavenworth.

At any rate, I got into a position where me, Chris H. from Renaissance Racing and teammates Nate C. and Adam K. were exchanging leads. By the last lap, I dropped a chain about halfway through and lost my position. I wound up finishing No. 14 out of about 47 riders. If I could get out to a better start, I could probably avoid some of the shenanigans that pollute the early stages of these races. I guess that's my goal in life — at least my amateur cycling life — between now and the Kansas 'Cross Championships some time in November.

After a bowl of chili, some cornbread and several cups of coffee, I decided to enter the 3/4 race. Of course, this meant much faster competition. I really only did so to get a good workout. I had few visions of placing well in this race and just used it to practice riding technical spots better. In this race, I was hitting the brakes far less and hitting tight corners much better. So while I still haven't learned the art of getting out fast, at least the sharp turns are coming to me.

Race Notebook

Well done to Erik E. who won the Masters 55+ race today;
Newly-minted Colavita squadron member Andy W. continued his impressive run this season with a second place finish in the Men's 4 race;
Adam K. finished 10th in the Men's 4 race, holding off some competitors close on his tail with a dollar bill in his mouth from the Money Tree;
Dan O. finished 7th, I believe, in the 3/4 race;
Jane A. got a medal but I don't know what place she finished;
Weather was a bit chilly early on, but no wind. It cooled off later in the afternoon and started raining just as I finished the 3/4 race.

A missed opportunity

2009-10-24T18:36:00.003-05:00

I've complained a number of times on this blog about how bad drivers are in Kansas City and how frustrating — not to mention dangerous — it is to ride a bicycle among them. I have also lamented their complete ignorance of laws governing the roads, such as who can use them.

Trying to reverse their collective stupidity is like trying to push water up a hill. As such, I normally don't respond to drivers who either scream at me or come close to hitting me. On the rare occasions that I do, I do so in French.

But today, I was riding home from Volker Bicycles on the Sputnik, which is now equipped with fancy new fenders. It used to be that coming home from the shop meant a two-minute walk to Wyoming Street. But now that I've moved, I have to take 39th Street east until I hit Locust Street over near Westport High School and go south. So as I was on 39th Street approaching Main Street, this gold Chevy comes riding past me and this twentysomething lady yells out at me, "Get on the fuckin' sidewalk."

Hearing this is about as new as '97 Malibu she was riding in. But the light ahead on Main Street turned red, which meant she had to stop just ahead of me. Without really thinking about it, I pedaled up alongside the passenger door and had this conversation with her:

Me: I'm sorry, were you trying to say something?

Lady: Why can't you ride on the fuckin' sidewalk?

Me: Because I'm not allowed to.

Lady: How come?

Me: Uh, it's against the law for me to ride on the sidewalk.

Lady: What are you talking about?

Me: Why don't you read the statute?

Two things happened at this point. The look on her face seemed to betray her realization that she was ignorant of the law. Also, the light turned green, so she started rolling up the window and driving away.

My only regret from this conversation was calling her a tramp as she rolled up the window. I wish I hadn't done this for three reasons:

It's not a nice thing to say;
I don't know for a fact if she is one or not;
Because I said it, the only thing she will probably remember from the conversation is that I insulted her.

Otherwise, she might have been inspired to at least look up the statute and realize that cyclists are not supposed to ride on sidewalks in business districts, which in a city pretty much means everywhere. Or at the very least, she might have considered that there is room for cyclists and drivers on the road. But because I'm an idiot who couldn't keep my mouth shut, I missed an opportunity to maybe enlighten someone.

But seriously, what are these people thinking? Consider for a moment the implications of having cyclists cruise along on the sidewalks. Could these people imagine themselves walking their dog on the sidewalk somewhere and having to deal with cyclists barreling toward them at speeds ranging from 15 to 40 miles an hour on such a narrow passageway? The danger in that for both cyclists and pedestrians — to say nothing about dogs and cats on a leash — is pretty unthinkable. Is this really the alternative they want?

Anyway, I have a 'cross race in Smithville tomorrow. Looks like it could be a tricky course, especially if it rains tomorrow, which it might. The Cat 4 race is definitely on the agenda with perhaps another go-'round in the 3/4 race in the afternoon. The Broncos are on a bye week this week, so it's not like there is any reason to go home.

Better late than never

2009-10-21T22:01:00.006-05:00

So it's been almost a month since I've written anything here. I originally told myself that I wouldn't let my blog go stale, and guess what?

It did.

Like anything else in life, there's an excuse for this. The last several weeks have been fairly busy with work, trying to get in shape, going to Denver, seeing some old friends and trying to find new ways and avenues to do some writing.

At any rate, since we last spoke a couple of cyclocross races have gone by. About three weeks ago, I had a pair of decent but certainly unspectacular races at English Landing Park in Parkville. By now I've learned the lesson that getting off to mediocre starts in 'cross races is like leaping off a bridge without a parachute — it's a long, lonely way until you're finished and there no chance for rescue.

But I did think I was on my way to reversing the laws of physics the next week at the campus of the University for Bad Girls in Leavenworth (formerly the Barracks for Bad NFL Quarterbacks) when I started off in about 40th place early on and worked my way up to fifth or sixth place with a full head of steam going into my last lap. Or was it? Long story short, I ended up with another lap to go after I flicked on the afterburners on the previous lap, thinking I was about to finish up. So I had little left in the tank and got smoked, rendering me to a disappointing 14th place finish.

Nevertheless, 'cross season has been a lot of fun. This weekend takes me to Smithville for a race. I heard a malicious rumor that this course involves a 200-yard stretch of sand. Since I don't pedal through sand, it's going to be a lot of running for me this weekend if that's true. Good thing I got in four days of decent running in altitude in Colorado last week.

I normally don't do this much here on this blog, but I felt this was worth mentioning. On the plane ride back to Kansas City, I read this important and fascinating article in Rolling Stone, of all places. I definitely recommend giving it a read. It's a long read, but it definitely sucked me in for the whole hour I was on the plane. Also, I've added a number of new non-cycling blogs to my list of reading below. Check 'em out if you want.

Double Cross

2009-09-28T21:56:00.004-05:00

Q: What is the best way to drink a warm can of Fat Tire?

A: Drink it on a Sunday afternoon in 85-degree heat, sprawled out on the ground clad in a skin suit just moments after having finished your second cyclocross race for the day.

Sometime around 2:45 p.m. this last Sunday, I coincidentally found myself in this exact situation. I was under a tree in this park in Lenexa, enjoying the shade after being chastised a few moments beforehand by a little kid who complained that I was drinking from the water fountain for too long. Moments before, I had wrapped up 40-odd minutes of racing for the second time on the day, which if it hadn't been so much fun, I would have found the kid's comments only slightly less insulting than my performance in that second race. So I surrendered to the shade and was laying on the ground when someone — either Britton K. or Brad W. — rolled a can of above-room-temperature Fat Tire my way, which I promptly and graciously consumed.

That capped off a day I had been looking forward to for a while. My first 'cross race was probably more fun than people had warned me about. Clearly, my fitness level is nowhere near where I had hoped it would be to start my 'cross career. After 10 days of no exercise following my left leg's visit to the Chainring Chop Shop a couple weeks ago, I found it fairly difficult to really dig very deep and try competing. But this is what I get.

The first race went off at 8 a.m., which was pretty much perfect weather. I got off to a slow start, which was exactly what the more experienced members of the team had told me to avoid. On the first lap, this cost me some time as several logjams around the initial turns cost me spots early on. The clusters of immobile cyclists got bad enough on the first lap that when we approached the muddy, off-camber turns on the southeast corner of the course, I just got off my bike and ran that whole section. Once things cleared up, I spent most of the race passing people. I wiped out a couple times — the first was approaching the second set of barriers when my left leg did not unclip in time to make the jump. The next time was when my back tire washed out on a section of gravel road. Those were the only times I really lost positions after the opening half of the first lap. I finished No. 18 on a field of 55 riders. Not too bad.

The second race was six hours later. Not enough time to really recover. After the first lap, I pretty much decided the value I would get out of this race would be practice for future races. No spills though, so hooray for progress.

Race Notebook

Some good performances from fellow teammates. Dan O. got 3rd in the 3/4 race.
Joe A. got 3rd in the Masters race.
New teammate Nathan C. finished 7th in the 4 race, with E. Stull not far behind in 10th.
Jane A. got 5th in the women's 4 race.
Good weather early on, but it got pretty warm later on the afternoon. The breeze wasn't much help.

That leaves me with a couple 'cross races coming up this weekend in Parkville. Work is going to be pretty busy, but I'm hoping to get some good rides in this week to go along with riding to work.

— Photo credit: Jane A.

No news is not good news

2009-09-15T22:29:00.002-05:00

I wish I had something to write about, but I don't. Actually, there's quite a bit going on in the world that I would love to write about, but for various reasons, I won't.

I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn't make the Tour of Missouri, but my current medical condition meant that crowds were the last thing I wanted to be around.

Speaking of which, I won't be racing this upcoming weekend at Swope Park like I had originally planned. Some of you know why, and those who don't can just ask if you really want to know. It won't be discussed here. To those who do race, good luck. I might be there to watch.

Until then, enjoy a reasonably good song.

It's been quite a ride

2009-09-07T21:20:00.005-05:00

With the 27th Annual Steve Vockrodt Labor Day Extravaganza having come and gone, it also means that the sun has set on my first road racing season. Having passed on the Gateway Cup in St. Louis, there are effectively no more road races or criteriums to speak of. Even Tuesday Night Crits is finished for the year. Of course, my road season has been long over anyway, as the Tour of Lawrence was really the last big race I did. My mind has been more fixated on 'cross anyway.

But it's been quite a ride. More than a year ago, I was sorting through various personal crises and was not really doing anything productive outside of work. That summer, I got my first road bike, which led to racing this year. It's been a strange year, but a much better one. Cycling has been one reason for that.

I entered the season knowing that I needed to be patient and spend time learning the new trade rather than stack up a number of expectations on my shoulders. This was an extension of a lesson I learned nine years ago. When I entered my first year at the University of Kansas, I was all high on myself from a successful high school career in running. I thought I could reasonably set my sights on being an All-American by the end of my sophomore year at least, if not sooner. It didn't take long to see that I was in terra incognita where the training was much more difficult and the competition was at least tenfold stiffer than it was at the highest levels of high school. In the stubbornness and myopia of youth, my response to this was to push myself in order to accelerate my supposed ascendancy to the highest ranks of the NCAA. This, of course, just led to injuries and a psychological addiction to overtraining and I kind of spun my wheels for two years. By the time I was a junior, I was more mature and more understanding of what I would face and what I could expect. It was at this time I started to succeed.

Even without much in the way of expectations for this road season, I was kind of disappointed by how it went, performance-wise. Early on, I felt like I was adapting well to the new sport. Some of the early races, like the Spring Fling and the Perry Dam Races, I would typically finish at least in the top 7. It was also in those early races that I raced more aggressively. I approached racing with a degree of arrogance, feeling like slow early paces were the equivalent of laziness. I would get frustrated if the pace wasn't flying in the first mile or so. In some of those early races, I would get to the front and take long pulls, even if it meant doing so in a stiff headwind. I had this idea that it was incumbent upon me to do work if it seemed like no one else wanted to. In one instance, I pushed through wind, snow and sleet to lead a huge majority of the Sheehan Road Race, only to get picked off by my pursuers in the last mile. At the time, I thought of those guys as opportunistic carpetbaggers. Now that I understand how bicycle racing works, they were not entirely unreasonable.

My first weekend as a Category 4 racer started off well enough at the VeloTek Grand Prix. I had decent time trial and criterium results in my back pocket heading into the last day. I think I was 13 seconds behind the leader going into the road race that Sunday with some aspirations of erasing that gap and maybe making a payday. That day I had a pretty shitty crash early in the road race. In retrospect, I allowed this wreck to affect me psychologically much more than I should have. For the next several races, I raced timidly, hung out in the back and more often that not got shuffled out of the back of the pack, relegated to the kind of mediocre results that soft racing gives you. I had mostly abandoned that early season arrogance, which while costing me some opportunities, was at least a more reasonable approach than racing with fear.

I got some of it back with a decent result at Tulsa Tough, which was a really fun weekend. If I had waited a lap or two before shaking out into the front, I may have had a much better finish. I'll definitely do that race again next year. After that trip, I had inconsistent results in the next several races with at least a few better than average finishes sprinkled in there. But there was nothing to go bananas about.

At any rate, it wasn't what I had hoped for in terms of amassing results over the course of this year. I thought a solid running career would translate into a solid cycling career — I couldn't have been more wrong. But I've had the fortune of learning a lot about the sport this year. I've had the benefit of some good teammates to learn from. All in one team, I've got the experience, training know-how and racing savvy of someone like Britton K., the wisdom, perspective and patience in Dan O.'s and Joe A.'s years, the drive and push of younger teammates like Matt P. and David N. and the impressive capability of someone like E. Stull. Next year, I'll be a bit more regimented in my training and my outlook toward races. I figure at this point I'll want to do well at Tulsa Tough, Tour of Kansas City and Tour of Lawrence. I got some training literature this year but mostly ignored it and kept it on the shelf, opting instead to train simply how my body told me to train. This in and of itself is not a bad way to train, but it can be helped with more structure.

Taking the longview, though, this season has been a success. Cycling has been really fun for me this year. I don't really have any regrets about it. I've gotten to meet a lot of cool people. It's also been a better activity for my spare time than hanging out in bars and standing around at concerts. As I've said before, results in sports to me are kind of a small piece of a much larger picture.

So while that closes the book on my rookie road season, a new one starts soon for 'cross. This Labor Day weekend was a good one for training. A 50-mile Saturday morning ride was followed up with 4x10-minute intervals out at Roanoke Park on the Double Cross on Sunday. Then this foggy morning, I met Britton K. at the same park where we did various drills. I capped off the weekend with about eight miles of running on a beautiful Monday afternoon to exorcise some of my anaerobic demons. Might as well enjoy to the good weather while it lasts.

Critical morass

2009-09-01T21:48:00.004-05:00

When I'm reading the local news, which I do a lot, I've made it a habit to skip most any story I see that plainly deals with cycling. Around these parts, most of these articles deal with cyclists getting hit by cars. The articles themselves are not what bother me, but instead it's the reader comments. They usually denigrate cyclists and some go so far as to suggest that people on bikes deserve what they get when drivers cream them on the roads.

But then the other day, I saw this article posted online by my former employer. This story disappointed me for a different reason altogether. The article describes a phenomenon that goes on in many cities on the last Friday of the month. Cyclists gather somewhere and then tear around on the streets en masse. Every description I've ever seen of a Critical Mass ride portrays the participants as have a complete and reckless disregard for traffic laws. Having never gone on one of these rides, I used to be skeptical of this characterization. But now armed with photographic evidence of what goes on in Critical Mass, I can understand why people get so frustrated with this phenomenon.

As some of the commenters point out below the story, most of the cyclists aren't wearing helmets. The entire pack — some more so than others — completely obstruct the flow of traffic. The story then describes what can kindly be described as a complete nuisance on the public roadways, while organizers of the event laughably suggest they're all in it for the safety.

Critical Mass rides, as I understand it, originated as an attempt to show the world that cyclists were going to use the roads no matter what. That's a laudable goal in and of itself. They say Critical Mass is supposed to "raise awareness" of cycling, whatever that means. But now with a better understanding how these rides unfold, it seems like the antithesis of what they say they're trying to accomplish. Commenters on this story seemed almost unanimous in their condemnation of this group's tactics. Count me in among the critics. Stopping traffic, clogging intersections and showing contempt for others using the road seems to put a big target on the backs of people who can ride bikes on the roads responsibly. I spoke to a guy last Saturday who participated in Kansas City's Critical Mass ride the night before. He said that tons of people were out there, with many guzzling tallboys as they cruised the streets. I like bikes and like a cold tallboy (depending on what's in it), but the idealism of this combination really does not intersect with reality.

Anyway, enough with that. I closed the chapter of my crosstown move late last night. The new place is cool so far. I'm glad to get that process over and done with. Now I can get back to training, which has been spotty as work and moving have collapsed upon one another, leaving little time and energy to hit the roads like I should. Maybe my first 'cross race in a few weeks won't be the prettiest. But it's a long 'cross season and I would rather be doing well in December than September, so I've at least got some time on my side.

No country for Paulie Bleeker, plus Blog Contest III

2009-08-23T22:22:00.008-05:00

These days, I've been supplementing my training with some miles on foot. Sometimes, I run the same streets and hills that I travel on my cycling training routes. Each time, I wonder to myself, is running harder on this stretch of road? Or vice versa? When it comes to Cambridge Street, the steepest road in Kansas City, I now know the answer.

On this last beautiful Sunday afternoon, I went out the door for what I originally planned to be a six mile run around Loose Park. I was enjoying the weather and seeing so many people out that I decided to extend the run to about nine or 10 miles. As I headed back north in town, I figured I'd try running up Cambridge Street near where branches off from Barber Street. I've only taken my bike up this stretch of Cambridge Street once, but it wasn't easy to forget. It was some time around March or April that Britton K. and I were doing various hill repeats around Coleman Heights when we were cruising around the general neighborhood. With little warning of what was coming, he tells me to get in my small ring. We suddenly turn left off of Barber and head up what seemed to be an impossibly steep hill. The photo on this page doesn't really do it any justice. Anyway, after a few meters into the climb, I decided I wouldn't look up for the remainder of the hill, as to not break my will by seeing more climbing. I eventually made it to the top, but I was pretty tuckered out.

So I tried running up this hill on Sunday. The first few strides, I started thinking that this hill wasn't all that difficult. It could never be as difficult as Olympic Loop in Lawrence. But the hill wouldn't quit and before long, I was slowed to a crawl, despite my best efforts to sprint upwards. This hill probably wasn't much longer than 200 meters, but it probably took me the time it would take me to run 600 meters to make it to the top. Once I crested the hill, this lady on her front porch calls out to me,

"How'd you like that hill?"

"Just fine," I respond. "Kinda tough."

"Yeah, that's what they all say," she tells me, as someone who seemingly encounters dozens of masochists each week who traverse Cambridge Street by foot or bicycle. "People come for it."

"Yeah, I can see why," I say before heading off back to my place.

In the final analysis, though, I much prefer running up Cambridge than taking a bike up there.

The run capped off a mostly uneventful week and weekend. On Sunday morning, I went out to Swope Park's mountain bike trails with my 'cross bike. It wasn't a memorable experience for me. I found I had less control over my 'cross bike than the mountain bike I borrowed in Montana. I pedal struck several rocks and when my front tire hit some of the bigger rocks on the trail, I spun out to either the left or the right. After falling a couple times, I cut my losses and got out of there.

Earlier in the week, I raced Tuesday Night Crits. It was the third-to-last race of the year. A couple of the guys from the Tradewind team showed up. It was scorchingly fast. I managed to hang on until about two or three laps to go before I blew up. I haven't had much racing under my belt, and I'm mostly focused on 'cross. It's only about a month before it starts.

It's been about a month — perhaps more — since my last blog contest. And while I try to figure out a good way to get bottles shipped out westward, I'm offering up another Blog Contest Special. I haven't come up with any good trivia, so here's a simple algebra problem for you all:

Joe A. can ride the Swope Park mountain bike trails 5 kph faster than I can. In a marathon mountain bike session, Joe rides 54 kilometers compared to my 39 kilometers over the same period of time. How fast did Joe ride? How about me?

You must show your work. Answers alone won't work. Also, if you think you've got the right answer first, please specify your beverage.

So long, John

2009-08-16T21:10:00.004-05:00

Remember the other day how I complained that so many people seem to leave Kansas City? It's already happening again. John K. got what sounds like a pretty sweet job out in Corvallis, Ore., the same town where there's Oregon State University. Go Beavers! I guess he's going to be the executive director of a charter elementary school there that has a curricular emphasis on environmental issues and what not. Sounds like the perfect job for him.

Sadly, John did not get to race much this year. He did several early spring races, but came down with what I think was a strange respiratory sickness while working as an apprentice at an urban farm. In the weeks leading up to that, him and I would do some interval workouts out at the Downtown Airport. He would always kick my ass easily. The last time I did a workout with him, I dropped him on the last two intervals, prompting me to wonder if he was OK. This was around the time he became ill. Following that, it just didn't seem like he got back in the swing of racing. We went on a few rides around town here and there and stayed in touch over the telephone and the miracle of Facebook.

I went by a house party for him over at 27th and Holmes last night. He greeted me at the door with a hug, which was cool. He cut his hair down quite a bit; I almost did not recognize him as he came to the door. We chatted for a while, had a PBR and then I left. We might try to do a ride this week, but if not, he's gone in a few days. Like Marcus S., he was definitely one of the good guys to have around on the team. Always easy to talk to, always with a levelheaded perspective on things. He will be missed.

Speaking of being missed, lots of folks didn't show up for this ~~morning's~~ afternoon's ride with Joe and I. I can't say I blame anyone. I think some were out of town and others are recovering from various ailments or on vacation. The heavy rains from last night and this morning might have kept others away as well. Accordingly, our ride at just after noon started off very humid and only got worse as the sun came out. But as far as rides go, this was a good one. We took the Heart of America Bridge over to the North Kansas City and then over to Parkville via Riverside. From there, we traipsed around the National Golf Course, or Skid Row, as Joe called it. We reared back into Clay County until we found Chouteau Trafficway, which shot back across the river and to Cliff Drive. Chouteau isn't a bad way to get across the river, but just watch out for the broken glass and motorists distraught at having lost their savings at the nearby casinos. By the time all was said and done, our ride came in just a hair short of 50 miles. I ran out of water pretty early and the humidity started slowing me down around mile 30. But it was a really good ride. Lots of climbing. The Northland may be a new frontier in training ground. Time to study some maps.

Anyway, I don't know what's ahead of me for racing. I'm going to try and race Tuesday Night Crits this week. Some races in Sedalia are coming up on the weekend of Aug. 29. I won't be able to attend those because I'll be moving into my new place that weekend. So the road season may be largely over for me, unless I get a wild hair and go to the Gateway Cup in St. Louis the following weekend. Speaking of moving, if anyone wants to help on Aug. 30, please let me know. I can guarantee you the Holy Trinity of moving: it won't take long, cold beer (everyone knows I have supreme taste in beer) and hot pizza.

Better than the Tour?

2009-08-14T23:32:00.004-05:00

It's time once again to make space on the DVR, to cancel tapings of MythBusters, No Reservations and 60 Minutes and to get ready for some serious couch potato duty. No, Versus isn't airing a re-run of the Tour de France. Instead, it is broadcasting the IAAF World Championships for track and field.

Track, and its cousin, cross country, remain my favorite sports. With the possible exception of soccer, track is the best sport for television. And unlike the Olympics, which inundate viewers with gymnastics, the World Championships offers coverage of only track. Few events for me are more exciting than the 10,000-meter and 5,000-meter races. While boring to most, the tactics, maneuvering and skill in those races rival anything you would see in a professional cycling race.

Looking at the start lists of this year's competition, there are several names I recognize from my running days in college at the University of Kansas. One that really sticks out is Paige Higgins, who was a teammate at KU. She came to the school the same year I did, and actually went to a nearby high school in Colorado. Paige had moderate success at KU, but by the time she graduated, I think most people suspected she would continue running, but more on the local road racing circuit. Paige obviously had other ideas, and while working as a high school teacher, managed to log ungodly mileage — in the neighborhood of 120 to 140 miles a week from what I hear. A couple years ago, she ran a time in the Chicago Marathon that most extremely fit men could only dream of running. She would have destroyed Lance Armstrong.

Now, she's representing the ol' Red White & Blue in Berlin this year. I hope they broadcast the marathon. Watching her run will be really special. For one, it will be very cool to see an old friend competing at such a high level. For another, she's proof that naysayers are nothing more than that, and with enough work, some pretty lofty goals become attainable.

Sometimes I feel foolish for having given up on running after college. I did some running to keep in shape and entered into a couple 10-kilometer road races here and there after moving to Kansas City. I even managed to win a good chunk of change at some. But it was never the same as in college. I was frustrated from all the injuries that stacked up on me in college. Lots of medical techniques to my left knee, culminating in surgery, left it mostly unable to do the kind of mileage I used to at KU. I bought into the thought that I could never again run the times I did in college and mostly gave up on the sport and wasted a lot of the gifts that were given to me.

Fortunately, I took up cycling this year. The sport has filled a void, that need to do something competitive and to test my limits and to discipline myself. While I have not been as successful in cycling as I was in running, I learned long ago that places and times don't mean nearly as much as the experiences you have and the people you meet through sports. Times and places fade like any other minute detail, but the things you do and the people you come across get trapped in the amber of memory. To place too much stock in race outcomes is to miss the point.

There's no doubt cycling has been a lot of fun this year, and will be for years to come. It's much easier on my body, so I can do it longer than I was able to keep running. But there's no doubt that I miss running. I'm certain that as I watch the track championships this next week, I'll feel that twinge of that old excitement from track and cross country races. That feeling of toeing the line, both embracing the thrill of competition and dreading the pain you will feel to do it. That deafness and numbness you feel as you're sprinting that last 100 meters. That contortion in your face as your neck and facial muscles seize up with lactic acid and suffering.

Yep, that was all fun. Upwards and onwards.

Good luck, Paige.

Photo credit: Jeff Jacobson

So long, Marcus

2009-08-13T21:06:00.005-05:00

I didn't have to work on Wednesday, so I had time to swing by Marcus S.'s place to say goodbye to him and his wife. He's starting a new life in old New York. I met Marcus about a year ago when I bought my first bike. He would be on hand for a few group rides that I did from Volker Bicycles that usually included Britton K. and perhaps a couple other folks last summer. Marcus was one of those guys who was always welcoming of new people to the sport, like I was at the time I met him. He was never the type to sneeze at someone else's equipment, nor did he particularly care if you were fast or not. He was also very gracious in helping me get this blog set up. The guy is a talented Web sorcerer, so I was lucky to have his help.

I raced with him only once at a Tuesday Night Crit earlier this year, a race that he won. I think Marcus was more into cyclocross, and I was looking forward to racing with him this year until he told me several months ago that he was moving to New York. He definitely seemed excited to move to the Big Apple, and while I'm sad to see him go, I'm pleased that he'll be moving on to something that's exciting for him and his wife, Anna S. He was definitely one of the good guys in the local cycling scene, and he will be missed. Same for Anna.

But that's life in Kansas City. Marcus is another in a seemingly endless procession of cool people who have left town. Just a couple weeks earlier, an old college friend and his fiancee moved out to Denver. Kansas City is a town where people don't stick around.

But I arrived back to town on Tuesday night from a week-long trip to Bozeman, Mont. Bozeman, a smallish college town in southwest Montana, might be the most beautiful place I've ever been. The city is situated in a valley surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges. Needless to say, I did not spend much time indoors last week. Among other things, I got some good mountain bike riding in. I've never really done much on a mountain bike, unless you count the month I had a "mountain" bike that I bought from Target while I was in college. I used it to get around campus, which was good in cutting down on time spent walking to and from classes. But the bike can be kindly described as a piece of shit. Within a week, it made this terrible squeaking sound that was seemingly incurable. About three weeks later, parts started falling off of it. It found its way to the dumpster not long after that.

Anyway, mountain biking in Montana was a thrilling adventure. This one trail I did a couple times was pretty much 10 miles straight up the side of a mountain. Once I got to the top of the trail, where I was greeted by the so-called Mystic Lake (pictured at the right), I crossed this creek and meandered my way up an abandoned dam and one to a singletrack trail that started my descent from the mountain. This was a nerve-wracking experience; this two-foot singletrack abutted the side of the mountain. If I fell to my left, I was going to be falling for quite a while down the side of the mountain. The locals call this four mile stretch the Wall of Death. I don't know for a fact if anyone has died on the Wall of Death, but the prospect didn't seem implausible. But it was fun anyway and I made it out alive and probably with some better bike handling skills for the upcoming 'cross season.

Still, it's good to be back. Too bad I missed the Tour of Kansas City, but it sounded like it was quite the inferno, weather-wise. Nothing like the easy 80 degree days and cool nights of Montana.

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius

2009-08-04T21:53:00.007-05:00

I haven't been doing much with this blog lately. I complained recently to a friend that for the last month or so, I've been in a rut with writing. In high school, they call this "writer's block." I guess that's what I've got. It happens from time to time. When you make a living from writing, these stretches are depressing. It makes me hate sitting down and trying to put letters and words together. Sometimes, it makes writing seem like taking the trash out in the rain. Or getting your oil changed. Or kissing on a first date. Or watching network television. It always seems like something you could do later on. Or not at all.

With that in mind, I've just got a few notes to scribble down. Tuesday Night Crits were fun tonight. Very nice weather. Not much action worth describing. I felt pretty good racing. I'm not sure at all where I placed.

My cyclocross bike was built up the other day. I took it to Roanoke Park on Saturday and Sunday and tore around on the grass. On Sunday, I did a good interval workout, doing four repeats of going as hard as I could for 10 minutes, and then resting for 10 minutes. People at the park looked at me like I was crazy. Some lady screamed at me, asking me why I kept going around in circles. I ignored her with the ferocity of a thousand white-hot suns.

This much I know: cyclocross is going to be a lot of fun. The only downside so far is getting dog shit stuck to my tires. After my ride last weekend, I was sitting in my room reading and wondering why it smelt so, um, shitty. Did I fart and had already forgotten? No, because 30 minutes later, it still stunk. Was someone else in my room, hiding and surreptitiously passing gas? Doubtful. In the end, I realized that while visitors to Roanoke Park are good at keeping their dogs on leashes, they're less adept at picking up after them.

I have also been running more and more these days. I went for six miles on Saturday morning, which was refreshing. My legs are definitely geared toward cycling now, so running is a bit tough. But I cruised at 5:30-mile pace for about four miles on a run the week before, so I've still got some semblance of running legs under me. Too bad my knees suck, or I would try to run a marathon.

Anyway, I leave Thursday morning for Montana. It will be a nice vacation for sure. I'll get to do some mountain biking, which should help for cyclocross. I'll also go fly fishing, hiking, beer-drinking and other things people in Montana do. I'll miss the Tour of Kansas City's second leg, but that's OK. I hope the guys on the team who do race this weekend do well. But I won't be there to see it. Maybe when I get back, I'll have something interesting to write about. As a favor to hold you off until then, I leave you with the greatest song ever written.

Grass Track Championships

2009-07-27T19:55:00.005-05:00

A year ago, I could not have predicted that I would spend a hot Sunday afternoon in July decked out in lycra speeding around a 333-meter grass loop in the middle of nowhere chasing feverishly after other men dressed in lycra on fixed-gear bikes with no brakes. But these are the twists and turns life takes us on.

This latest twist, as it went down on Sunday, was an enjoyable one. It was the first grass track race in Kansas that it seems anyone can remember. A grass track is exactly as it sounds: a race around a mowed, grass loop that pretty much resembles any standard high school track, except that it's grass and it is 67 meters shorter.

After a pair of solid but unremarkable 1,000-meter time trials, the main event went off in the form of a scratch race. I'm not sure why they call it a scratch race, but that's the way it is. Having watched the previous scratch race, I knew that I would have to get out hard early on, as it did not look like an easy task to make up ground on bumpy grass surfaces with no gears. So I trucked it out at the beginning and it seemed like six of us were in the front, riding single file. I was feeling pretty good early on in this 24-lap race as I clung on to the fifth position, inches behind the wheel of the fourth rider.

Then at about lap 10, excrement hit the air conditioning, as Billy Pilgrim would have said. I could see that the fourth rider, an unnamed fellow from Renaissance Cycling, was falling off the pace. I didn't want to lose the leaders, so I started going around him. That effort continued into a turn, at which point I was yelling, "Stick! Stick! Stick!" This, as we learned last week, is the track racing parlance for "Don't move your ass, I'm passing you on the outside." Nevertheless, the fellow ahead of me kept moving to the outside of the turn, which in effect started pushing me out toward the outside portion of the track in order to avoid colliding. I was nearly in the weeds before I could get around him and move back to the inside lane to do some racing. But by then, the leaders put a straightaway's length on me and my race was essentially dead. So it goes.

That was good for a fifth place finish. Disappointing because I felt I could have hung with the main pack but was prevented from doing so by another rider. But these things happen in bicycle racing. Some elements are beyond your control, so you might as well get on with things.

Race notebook

In the category scratch race, Britton K. and Nate S. finished third and fourth, respectively.
Local cyclocross virtuoso Shadd Smith won both scratch races easily. And the time trials, for that matter.
I don't recall any of the other time trial results. Sorry.
E. Stull and Matt P. trekked down to Springfield, Mo., for a few criterium races down there. I guess they had good results on Saturday and each made a payday, but both got tangled up in Sunday's race. Fortunately, they're both OK.
The weather in Kansas City was nice all weekend, although maybe a bit too hot on Sunday. I didn't bring sunscreen, which seems to be my M.O. these days. Accordingly, I got burned.

The grass track race was a really good event. I had a lot of fun and hope they do it again next year. Hopefully, the event will capture a good following in the coming years.

Meanwhile, I was delighted on Monday morning to see this article in the New York Times. As far as cycling blogs go, this guy is in a class by himself.

Photo credit: Vanessa B.

Death Valley '69

2009-07-20T22:42:00.005-05:00

At this point in life, I've seen most of the bands I want to see play live. Those I haven't I'll never get to see because either their lead singer ate his shotgun or they broke up a long time ago or they're too expensive to justify buying a ticket.

But Sonic Youth fills none of those bills, so on Saturday night I scratched them off the list. I walked to the Uptown Theater from my house and got there two hours early to get a spot close to the stage. I was pretty much right behind the railing and stood there and waited..and waited...and waited. During that time, I met one old guy who kept cussing profusely and would not stop apologizing for talking to me. And then there was this other guy to my left who was from New York and had seen the band more than 30 times. I was relieved to see Chris Hudson from Renaissance Racing stroll on into the venue, so we hung out and chatted for a while before the show.

After a decent opening act, Sonic Youth finally took stage and opened with "Tom Violence," a really old tune of theirs from the 1980s that I encourage you to listen to for free by clicking here. It's pretty much a haunting, noir-type tune that was part and parcel to their early catalogue, and really set the stage for what turned out to be a show that exceeded my expectations. As they have in the past, they played all but one song off their current album, The Eternal. But the songs they played from other albums were a real treat. Their third song of the night was "Silver Rocket," one of my favorites which I briefly wrote about here. They don't play that song often, from what I understand, so it was quite a thrill to stand just a few feet from Thurston Moore during that tune. Throw in a couple other tunes from Daydream Nation, and a couple from their next best album, Sister, it really made for an epic evening.

I used to go to concerts constantly. I wasted a lot of my income seeing a lot of bands I didn't care that much about just to say I saw them play live. Over the years, I've mostly stopped going to that many shows, in large part because a lot of the bands I started liking in the early 1990s either don't exist or cost too much money to see. That's why last Saturday night really was a special night for me. It was a rare instance in which I felt I had recaptured that excitement and anticipation of getting the opportunity to see a good show, an event that used to be one of the few truly memorable moments of my youth.

Set List

Tom Violence
Walkin' Blue
Silver Rocket
Sacred Trickster
Calming The Snake
Anti-Orgasm
Poison Arrow
Malibu Gas Station
Antenna
Leaky Lifeboat
No Way
Massage The History
White Cross

Encore

The Wonder
Hyperstation

Encore II

What We Know
Pacific Coast Highway

Photo credit: Scott Spychalski

Sputnik

2009-07-18T17:48:00.002-05:00

Here's your chance to have some influence in my life.

Due to strange and increasingly bizarre circumstances in my life that are completely beyond my control and actually don't involve me, I have to find a new place to live. As such, I've decided that I'll try to live closer to Downtown Kansas City, partially because I would then be able to commute to work on a bicycle. I'm thinking that way, I'll make seldom use of my car, and the increased cost of my new living conditions will be somewhat offset by the rare need to fill up my gas tank and do maintenance. I'll also have vague sense that I'm doing something good for the economy and environment, which will undoubtedly impress new people I meet and friends at dinner parties.

So today, at Volker Bicycles, I came away with my new commuter bike. At 16 pounds, my Jamis Sputnik actually weighs less than my racing bike. It once earned a mention on the other blog that I allegedly author. I've only been on it for a few miles, but I'm very happy with this skinny, lightweight and 62 centimeter frame. I'm not using it much right now because I've got it juryrigged for next weekend's grass track race, which will be a new experience and somewhat of a warmup for the anxiously-awaited cyclocross season.

Here's the thing with it: It's a fixed-gear bike, and currently doesn't have a brake. That's in part because next weekend's race bans the use of brakes. I had heard about fixed-gear bikes, but didn't really know what that meant except that it would essentially just be one gear. In fact, I assumed that single-speed and fixed-gear were synonymous terms. So you can imagine my surprise when I rode it for the first time and tried to coast, as I am accustomed to doing on my road bike when I'm up to top speed. What I quickly discovered was pedals on fixed-gear bikes don't stop turning until the bike comes to a complete stop. It's impossible to coast, and if you try, your trail leg will get jerked up as the crankset keeps moving, uncaring of your ignorance or desire to coast.

So I figured things out while riding around on the grass last week and drilled it into my mind to keep pedaling, no matter what. Once I get next weekend's race under my belt, we'll reinstall the original fork and wheels to the bike, as well as put some brakes on it, to make it back into a commuter bike. My question is should I ride it as a fixed-gear or modify it into a single-speed? I don't know much about the pros or cons of each, but as long as I have the option, I'd like to know what others think. Do you ride either? If so, which do you prefer or recommend?

Let me know in my poll or with a comment.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Happy Bastille Day to me

2009-07-14T22:45:00.004-05:00

Because I hold dual citizenships in the United States and France, today is a national holiday for me. Unfortunately, Bastille Day doesn't fly as an excuse to get a day off of work. I celebrated the French national holiday by racing at the Tuesday Night Crits.

Expectations were low heading into Tuesday night's race, especially after riding more than 50 miles, some of it pretty hard, the day before with E. S-burg. I didn't get off of work in time to make the A race, so I hopped in the B race, which seemed to start at a time of day that was no less hot than when the A race went off.

After about a lap, I took a flyer and went off the front by myself for a few laps. The rest of the riders caught me, which I pretty much expected, as it wasn't easy holding a lead with the headwind we faced after the fourth turn. I rode in the pack for a while, trying to recover but taking the occasional pull because there seemed to be only three riders in the whole race who were interested in doing work.

I fought off the temptation to make a move early in the last lap and stayed patient, hanging out on the wheel of the fifth rider. Coming around the last turn, I caught a couple people and finished fourth overall. My sprint legs felt somewhat weighed down from the mileage I've done in the last three days coming off of a week of no training. But oh well.

In other news, the Tour of Missouri is going to happen. Apparently Gov. Jay Nixon decided that the $1.5 million his administration considered freezing should thaw. Race promoters will get the contribution that the state promised. Score one for promises kept. Hopefully the state's contribution won't affect other state programs or agencies. But I'm glad the race is going to happen, regardless of where the money came from, and I'll look forward to watching it.

Lastly, I just booked a flight in August to Bozeman, Mont., where my sister lives. My brother, who lives in Europe and whom I see about once a year, will be there, too. So while I'm taking advantage of seeing my rarely-seen family, I will miss the last leg of the Tour of Kansas City. That means the road season is largely over for me, unless I end up doing the Gateway Cup or some such race. If not, I'm just going to be getting ready for cyclocross, which starts in September. My cyclocross frame and fork came into the shop last week and in the next few weeks, we'll be building up a pretty mean cyclocross machine. As such, my training is going to undergo some changes, including some running. I'm reading about all this now.

Meanwhile, enjoy some holiday-appropriate prog-rock.

Tour of Missouri: Time to let it go?

2009-07-10T20:53:00.005-05:00

This post won't make me terribly popular among the readers of this blog, but this may not be the year the state of Missouri should be contributing taxpayer money to the Tour of Missouri.

The Tour of Missouri is an elite-level cycling race that this year was set to start in St. Louis and finish in Kansas City early in September. Several of the top teams currently competing in the Tour de France accepted invitations to compete in this year's event, including Lance Armstrong's team, Astana.

Then came word late yesterday and today that the Tour of Missouri might not happen because Gov. Jay Nixon decided to freeze $1.5 million that the state had committed to helping the race run this year. While nothing has been finalized, it appears that without this appropriation, it won't be possible to have this race.

I looked forward to watching this race, but it seems entirely reasonable for the state to put this money to other uses, given Missouri's staggering budget crisis. True, Missouri's fiscal struggles aren't quite to the level of states like Illinois, Arizona and California, where the state took the pitiful step of issuing IOUs to vendors. But it's still pretty bad in the Show-Me State.

Missouri's budget for the fiscal year 2009 assumed a 3.4 percent increase in tax revenues. But in 2009, revenues instead dropped 6.9 percent. The current state budget planned for another year of increased revenues, but beancounters in Jefferson City are already saying that revenues will continue dropping in 2010. Making matters trickier for Missouri is the fact that it took $809 million in federal stimulus funding to help balance the current fiscal budget. This means that unless another stimulus package gets passed in the next year, which seems doubtful even with a filibuster-proof Senate, Missouri will have to build a balanced budget with the prospect of ever-dwindling revenues and without federal funds that the state relied upon to stave off much more severe cuts in the current budget year. How bad were Missouri's cuts this year? The state cut more than 1,200 jobs, plans to eliminate 200 more positions and reduced Medicare rates to health care providers, not to mention slashing funding for education programs.

All of this is a long way of explaining that with all the critical agencies, departments and programs taking cuts or being eliminated, it's not unreasonable think that funding for a bicycle race could be cut as well.

I understand all the arguments in favor of still holding the Tour of Missouri. I really want to watch the event. Furthermore, it's a great exposition for Missouri, and it will surely attract a large number of tourists to a state that otherwise has a hard time bringing visitors around these parts. Also, one could make the point that the plans to cut money for a bicycle race seems unfair in light of local and state government funding and tax breaks for the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals. Hopefully here is another way that someone can come up with $1.5 million privately to save the the Tour of Missouri.

But to continue to spend $1.5 million on a bicycle race in an economy like this sends the wrong message to taxpayers, to say nothing about the state employees who lost their jobs, positions that could conceivably be saved with the money devoted to the Tour of Missouri.

Vockrodt goes viral

2009-07-07T21:15:00.003-05:00

After meandering through the labyrinthine system that we call American health care, I finally got to see the ophthalmologist this morning. He told me I have a viral infection that has settled into my eyes, of all places. I have no idea how this happened, but at least I know I won't be going blind, which I wasn't so certain of a couple days ago.

Since it's a virus, there of course is no cure. This thing has to run its course. I've been given some drops that sort of help with the pain, but my eyes still cannot tolerate light well at all. Typing this message is painful, and most of my Tour de France viewing has actually been spent with my eyes closed, listening to the soothing strains of Phil Liggett's voice describe the action instead.

What does this all mean for me? For one, no biking for at least a couple more days. I can't wear contacts because my eyes are too swollen and inflamed, which means I can't see when I ride. Besides, being out in sunlight is pretty rough, even with sunglasses. It's risky enough that I'm driving, which I do with one eye closed and the other one barely open. I really ought to be taking the bus. So because of the no riding, I probably won't be making this weekend's trip to Omaha. That's too bad, because I think the whole event would have been fun, particularly the time trial. The good news in all of this is that I am not and have not been contagious. So any readers who have been around me don't have to worry. Unless you've been kissing me — and no one walking this Earth can claim that fortune since about mid-February — you all are fine.

Photo credit: Roger Whatshislastname, from Sunday's circuit race at the Tour of Lawrence.

Touring Lawrence

2009-07-05T20:53:00.004-05:00

I'm going to make this a quick one. I've had some kind of screwed up thing going on with my eyes all weekend, which have endured this excruciating pain. It got much worse on Sunday to the point where I drove all the way back to Kansas City with one or, in instances where I could, both of my eyes shut at the same time. Looking at a computer screen makes it worse, so I'm going to write a quickie and head off to bed, seeing as how I can't type, can't watch television (a blessing!) or read.

Anyway, Saturday's race in downtown Lawrence sucked. I've been fatigued since the Tour of Kansas City, and so when I fell off the pace about midway through the race, that was that. The fat lady had already finished singing, was packing up her equipment and checking into the hotel.

Sunday's race on the campus of the University of Kansas went better, at least at first. For about three of five laps, I hung in there pretty well. There was a tough hill that spit riders out by the Chancellor's house on campus, which I managed well for the first two laps. Except when I got to the top, I couldn't switch gears back into my big ring successfully. I'd spend about 10 to 15 seconds at the top of the hill on each lap playing with my shifters until they finally caught on. So in each instance, I gave up a lot of ground and would spend the subsequent flat portion through campus chasing the lead pack, while they were presumably recovering. Anyway, I lost contact with the leaders after a while, but still tried to muscle my way back to a decent finish. I ended up 23rd, which was fine by me. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

So I've got some decisions to make. I could continue on as I had been planning, go race in Omaha next weekend and try to get ready for the second leg of the Tour of Kansas City in mid-August. Or I could try and get rested solely for the Tour of Kansas City. Or I could go on a badly-needed vacation, hit the reset button on my fitness, do some running for a while and get ready for cyclocross. Decisions, decisions...

Meanwhile, I've got to take a trip over to WebMD to see if I'll still have eyes tomorrow morning.

New stem

2009-06-30T22:26:00.003-05:00

Short people make good jockeys and cyclists. Tall people make good basketball players and circus sideshows. I was never all that great at basketball, although my bank shot is better than most. Unfortunately, a bank shot is only good for two things: Scoring points and getting laughed out of a pickup game.

One of the many disadvantages a tall person faces in cycling is the difficulty in getting a precisely good fit on a bike. I, or rather Britton K., have made gradual adjustments to my current bike, mostly lowering the handlebars for a more aggressive position, and subsequently raising the seat post. Just yesterday, I took a big step in improving my bicycle's fit for my 6-foot-5 frame. Given all that height, can 10 millimeters make much difference? If that sounded like a rhetorical question, it's not. It has an answer. And that answer is, "Yes!"

Britton K. put a 140 millimeter stem on my bike Monday afternoon. A stem, for those unfamiliar with bike parts, is the horizontal segment that extends from the frame and grabs on to the handlebars. My old stem was 130 millimeters, or so I'm told. I never actually measured it. The change is noticeable. My torso is much more parallel with the ground, which is clearly good for aerodynamics. One of my friends who came and watched me race this weekend said that my position on the bike seemed much more vertical than most of my competitors. I would guess that if he saw me on my bike now, he would find I conform more with other riders. Others have said that my elbows tend to stick out away from my body when I ride. For evidence of this, scroll up to the photo at the top of this page. With my new stem, this isn't much of a problem anymore, if it is a problem at all.

I've only gone for two rides since getting my stem. While I've enjoyed the new position on the bike and think it will benefit in the long run, I haven't embraced the overall fatigue I've felt since racing a trio of criteriums in the Tour of Kansas City this last weekend. Monday's ride was a slow one, but I felt like I never had much pop in my legs. I showed up to Tuesday Night Crits tonight and found I was still feeling the same way. After taking a couple pulls in the front of the main pack of the A race, I could tell my legs didn't have it. I fell back in the pack and off of it entirely. Seeing no point in riding hard on bum legs for the remainder of the 40-minute practice race, I jettisoned off the course and just went and did some slow miles elsewhere. I thought about jumping in the B race to see if I could rattle my legs out of it, but instead, I chalked today up as a rest day.

I'll have to get my legs back under me for the upcoming Tour of Lawrence, which ought to be a great event.

Tour of Kansas City, and Blog Contest II

2009-06-28T21:42:00.005-05:00

It's Sunday night, and after a weekend of three races, I am exhausted. I'm semi-coherent and my mind can't seem to string more than two consecutive thoughts together, but I'm going to try to scrape together some writing about the weekend. And, on the same night I gave away the payoff from the inaugural "It's a long story..." blog contest, I have another six-pack to offer to up to another lucky and sharp-witted contestant.

Friday - Longview College Criterium

I managed to weasel out of work at 4:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon to make my way down to Lee's Summit. For those who don't know their Kansas City geography, Lee's Summit is a suburb out well east of where I live, or at least will continue to live for two more months. Wherever I end up in about 60 days, it will still be well west of Lee's Summit. For a reason I can't put into words, eastern Jackson County strikes me as an extremely weird place.

And on Friday afternoon, it was an extremely hot place. The heat index I suspect was well north of 100 degrees, as it has been all week. Anyway, come race time, I was lined up toward the back. The pack strung out pretty quickly, which really sucked for me because it meant I was constantly bridging gaps up toward the next group of riders ahead of me. This required a lot of energy, and energy in this sort of heat was something that needed to be rationed out carefully, not expended in short order like I did early on. The race eventually splintered out into a few packs and I found myself working among a chase pack of about six guys. We ended up catching a few people, but I finished 18th of about 40 or 45 riders or so. I was pleased to see that race come to an end.

Saturday - Downtown Lee's Summit Criterium

The Tour of Kansas City schedule put us back in Lee's Summit on Saturday for a Category 4 race that wouldn't go off until 7:40 p.m. While I sort of welcomed the opportunity to race at a relatively cooler time in the day, having a race later on a night made it difficult to get other things done during the day. After I went for a nice, easy morning ride with Britton K., Philip W. and a few others, all I really did was sit in my room and do some research for a book proposal I'm planning to work on.

Finally in the afternoon, I headed over to Lee's Summit where it started raining a few moments before I started warming up for my race. As it started sprinkling, I was hoping for a torrential downpour. A light rain exposes all the oil and grease that gets deposited on the road, making for slick surfaces that would create problems on some of this course's tight turns. A downpour washes all this crap away. A downpour is eventually what I got.

Come starting time, the rain was coming down hard, which make it hard to see once the race got going. All this rain coupled with the water being sprayed in my face gathered on my sunglasses, making it nearly impossible to see. But that eventually worked itself out. This course worked out fairly well for me. A long, sloping uphill was where I was able to stay in the thick of the race. I found some success in propelling past people on this incline, picking off the dregs from the lead pack and trying to keep position on the subsequent downhill. While I'd say I was about 40th early on, I slowly picked people off lap by lap.

On the final lap, I came back up this incline feeling pretty strong and still stalking the lead pack. I accelerated up the incline and passed a few tired stragglers. Coming around the last turn, I had some good momentum and thought I might have a top 10 finish in my sights with a good final sprint. But then I made a hotheaded rookie mistake. I cut into the inside of the road where I would have nobody in front of me to make a final, unobstructed sprint. But instead of wailing past other riders like I had hoped, I got caught in a headwind and found that I couldn't cruise past people at all. Actually, I managed to get by a few people but it wasn't what I had hoped for. Next time, I need to take someone's wheel for a little bit and then try to collect some scalps at the end. I finished 18th out of 50 riders or so. Not too terrible.

Sunday - "Power & Light" Criterium

I woke up on Sunday morning feeling like 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Something is wrong with my left eye and I otherwise felt like I had been out drinking until 4 a.m. Fortunately, Sunday's criterium required no commute. The race took place in downtown Kansas City, about three miles from where I live. So I put everything I needed for my race in my back jersey pocket and rode my bike to the race.

This was a somewhat difficult course as far as criterium courses go. A long incline was soon followed by a sharp, short hill that preceded a couple long declines and wide turns. This race panned out much like the previous day's race where I would hang around the back of the lead pack, eclipsing the occasional casualty from the early, fast pace. But I found I had trouble moving up the pack like I wanted to.

Nevertheless, I was feeling pretty good for much of the race, except I was parched and had no water on me. With about five laps to go, I planned on moving up slowly to set myself up for a final sprint. Then we came around the start/finish line and the announcer said we had one lap to go. What the? Are you kidding me? So I figured I needed to get moving since the race somehow got truncated. Before I could gain momentum, some rider in an Oklahoma Sooners jersey ran into me and the next few seconds were spent trying to stay upright to avoid crashing. This took me off the pack a little bit. I was able to regain some spots, but wasn't in any position to do much in the final sprint. I ended up 20th among 60 starting riders. Again, not too terrible.

I'm not disappointed in the weekend's performances. Clearly, I can and should do better, but this last weekend helped my confidence somewhat after a disappointing showing in Pittsburg a couple weeks ago.

Weekend Notebook

Hats off to several Team Colavita/Parisi Coffee riders this weekend: Nate S. won his first ever race on Saturday and placed second on Sunday. This performance didn't really surprise me, though. The first time I rode with Nate was during a weekend ride in February where he was able to keep a good, fast pace on a single-speed bike. Figures that he's ready to race.
Britton K. finished 6th in Category 3 races on Friday and Saturday.
Matt P. recovered from some ailment on Saturday in time to finish 2nd in Sunday's Category 3 race.
E. Stull similarly recovered from a wreck in Saturday's rain-slicked race where he split his hip open on a curb to finish 4th in Sunday's Category 4 race.
I apologize if I leave out anyone else's solid performances, but my memory is failing me at the moment.
Here's wishing a speedy recovery to Philip W., who wrecked twice this weekend. I didn't see either mishap, but I was glad to read from his Facebook entry that he is OK.
Not to sound like I'm giving an Oscar speech, but I had a few friends to thank for coming out to watch my races, namely Art M., Keith W., and Brent B.
Thanks also to E. Stull who hosted several of us at his house for a post-Tour party.

So now it's off to another week of training before the upcoming weekend's Tour of Lawrence.

Speaking of Lawrence, here is the question for Blog Contest II:

Lawrence, the home of the University of Kansas, was one of the last potential sites for a development that would eventually be built in Colorado Springs, Colo. in the 1950s and continues to exist to this day. What was this development?

Yeah, I know this has nothing to do with cycling, but who cares? You know the rules. Good luck!

Photo credit: Jake Schell

Gone but not forgotten

2009-06-23T22:23:00.004-05:00

Tonight was my first crack at an A race at Tuesday Night Crits. Like upgrading to Category 4 racing, this was definitely more fun. The pack held a fast but not blistering pace. I really used this race as one last hard workout before this weekend's Tour of Kansas City. As such, I practiced positioning, pack riding, moving up in the pack and so forth. In that respect, it was a success. I won't try and guess what place I finished, but it was just off the lead pack in the final sprint.

So the hay is in the barn for the Tour of Kansas City.

While I'll be racing this weekend, a celebration of the life of one of my friends will be taking place in Denver after he passed away this morning following a recent struggle with illness. I won't be able to make the service this weekend for several reasons, but he will be in my thoughts this weekend and beyond.

You will be missed, Jim.

Blog contests

2009-06-22T22:02:00.004-05:00

Due to the overwhelming and stunning participation in my post yesterday, which garnered a record five comments, I've decided to do periodic blog contests. The essence of the contest is to offer a nominal prize to the first person who can solve simple problems or trivia. Dan O. yesterday won the first installment of this prestigious contest when he found an e-needle at the bottom of a virtual haystack. I'm still waiting to hear what he wants to claim as a prize, but I am sure he will do so some time soon. There is no regular interval between blog contests, and no warning will be given prior to the start of a new contest.

Here are the rules to the blog contest:

The first person who correctly identifies the answer to whatever problem or trivia that comes up is the winner of a prize.
The prize will always be the same: A six-pack of beer of the winner's choice.
Malt liquor is acceptable. So too are fruity drinks. I don't refer to such beverages as "bitch brews" because I don't think there is any correlation between flavor and manliness. If you request a "bitch brew" I won't know what you are talking about.
There are only two exceptions to what a winner can request. One is Budweiser products. You guys can do better than that. The other is ultra-obscure beers that would require a rescue team to find. If your selection can't be reasonably found at a Gomer's or Berbiglia or even World Market, you need to find another selection.
Questions will generally involve cycling in some form, but the author can deviate into subjects including, but not limited to, current events, college level calculus (you must show your work), supply-side economics and counterculture trivia.
Well-timed and genuinely funny "your momma" jokes by participants can qualify for bonus prizes.
Collusion between participants to either stack or spread out prizes will be detected and frowned upon.
Participation is open to anyone, although respondents without an account who post under the "anonymous" option need to leave at least an e-mail or phone number where they can be reached to negotiate their prize.
Prizes will be given to winners at the author's earliest convenience, although the author will make every best effort to award to prize in a timely fashion.

I should mention that this is not some gimmick to attract undue attention to my blog. I don't know how many hits this blog gets, and I would just as soon not know. I think someone in Colorado reads this blog sometimes and I have perhaps another reader in Montana, but everyone else is in the Kansas City area. I also don't make any money off of this blog, nor would I want to. This contest is solely for my own amusement and for free beer for intelligent readers.

Let the games begin!

Which one are you?

2009-06-21T20:55:00.015-05:00

From Denver's Westword...

Postscript: I'll buy a six-pack of beer for the first individual who can identify the direct E. Stull reference buried in these comics. Leave your answer in the comments section.

Some Kansas City drivers do dream of dead cyclists

2009-06-20T19:32:00.005-05:00

On Friday, a co-worker and avid cyclist came up to my desk with a copy of that day's Kansas City Star. He pointed to a Mike Hendricks column that contained this paragraph:

"Just last Saturday, Overland Park police arrested a 21-year-old Leawood man for allegedly pointing a gun at three cyclists on Mission Road."

It didn't surprise me until he told me that he was one of the three cyclists. I've had some lousy encounters with drivers, particularly in the Golden Ghetto, but nothing quite like that. Apparently this 21 year old flipped the bird at the cyclists, and when they came near at a red light, the driver brandished a pistol and pointed it at them. The suspect is a Leawood man, so he presumably has some money and a few things going for him. Pointing a gun at people can carry some time in the clink. If he gets convicted, I wonder if it will have been worth it for him. I wonder if the cyclists had slowed him down so much to keep him from where he was going that it was worth doing something that could send him to jail. I hear jail time puts a cramp on life plans.

I'll never understand the mentality of these drivers.

Anyway, no race for me this weekend. This last week of training was an intense one. I've got some plans for a hard workout or two in the upcoming week and perhaps an installment of Tuesday Night Crits, and then it's the Tour of Kansas City.

Do Kansas City drivers dream of dead cyclists?

2009-06-16T22:56:00.005-05:00

Usually when the Kansas City Star runs articles online about cyclists being killed or injured on the streets of this Midwestern town, the story is followed by a couple dozen bitter motorists commenting on the reader forums that people on bikes deserve whatever they have coming to them. Sometimes, similar comments pop up in articles in The Pitch. "Why don't these leotard-wearing assholes ride on the sidewalks?" they say, ignorant of state statutes and city ordinances that prohibit cyclists from doing as much in most circumstances.

So today, I read this article expecting to find more of this sort of venom. Surprisingly, the reader comments are pretty tame. Either motorists in Kansas City are coming around, injected with a fresh supply of rationality and an education on city laws, or the article got buried so quick with other news items that the insane drivers in this town couldn't get to it easily. The article was about Columbia, Mo. passing laws that would make it a stiffer misdemeanor for drivers to harass cyclists. Colorado has a similar law on the books, but I doubt it gets enforced so I wouldn't rest easy if I were a cyclist in Columbia.

While I agree with cycling critics to an extent when they say that cyclists need to do a much better job of obeying the rules of the road, I find the attitudes of most drivers drip with hypocrisy. Nothing on the roadways are more dangerous than inattentive drivers, which are as common as salt in Kansas City. Their inability to focus on driving shouldn't mean that I have to ride on sidewalks.

For example, Joe A. and I were riding in Wyandotte County yesterday, heading west on Metropolitan Avenue to find some rural roads out there. There are some steep downhills there as you approach 55th Street. On one such downhill, Joe and I were cruising fairly quickly as some beige sedan pulls by us. Moments after the car passes us on this two-lane road, it suddenly and inexplicably whips around as though to try and do a U-turn just a few feet ahead of us. Now, the car had just passed us so it's difficult to imagine they didn't know we were in close proximity. But these are Kansas City drivers, so there's even money that they weren't paying any sort of attention. Anyway, Joe was just ahead of me and the chances of us being able to stop before we ran straight into the side of the car looked grim. I assumed early on that Joe was going to crash for sure, and I was slamming my brakes and trying to maneuver to the outside to avoid a similar fate. Luckily, Joe did not hit the car, and neither did I, despite both of my tires skidding severely on the road.

Neither of us yelled at the driver like we were perhaps inclined to do. I was so pissed about it that I didn't talk much on the rest of the ride. Oh, and guess what? Just moments before that happened, a conversation between Joe and I about this Columbia cycling law was interrupted by some teenager and certain future valedictorian candidate screaming something about my butt. In Columbia, that would have been a $1,000 fine.

Anyway, on to what you really came here for — an update on Tuesday Night Crits. Like most Tuesday Night Crits, there wasn't anything too exciting that happened. The pace seemed kind of slow early on. I got bored at one point and decided to crush it for a little while, which gave me a nice break from the field, which I held for two laps. Predictably, I got swallowed back up into the pack just in time to hear that there were only three laps left. So I figure I'm screwed with so little time to recover. But I stayed near to front of the pack for the next two laps. On the last lap, I positioned myself about six riders back from the leader going into the last turn. I sprinted on the final straightaway and passed a few people, but could not catch up to some SKC rider and Joe, who finished first and second, respectively. Joe rode a smart race, staying in good position throughout.

Race notebook

Near perfect weather for tonight's race with temperatures in the lower 80s and a slight breeze.
Britton K., E. Stull and Brad W. all raced in the A race and seemed to be pleased with how things turned out.
From here on out, if I can get out of work on time, I'll be jumping in the A races. I'd like to get a workout at a faster pace and an opportunity to get more experience riding in a bigger pack. But Tuesdays can be difficult work days, so as a backup, I'll do B races when I get out late.
Probably the best part of today's trip to Lenexa was practicing some final sprints after the race with the other guys on the team. I've got plenty to learn about timing these sorts of attacks.

Postscript: The headline comes with apologies to the great Philip Dick.

Kool Thing

2009-06-14T21:50:00.014-05:00

I did not race this weekend, but at the risk of letting this blog become stale, I've got to cook up something to write about. I passed on a trip to the St. Louis area because I attended the annual Kansas City Press Club dinner on Saturday. Gotta keep up with the professional responsibilities. But Britton K., David N., E. Stull, Philip W. and Matt P. all went for Sunday's 67-mile ringer. I ran into those guys by happenstance Sunday night on 39th Street when I was coming back from buying a sixer of 1554 to, you know, keep around the house. Instead, we sat in front of Volker Bicycles, downed a few beers and talked about the good results that the team posted. I am sure in the next few days, descriptions of said performances will appear here, here, here and here.

In lieu of racing, I did some good workouts. On Friday and Sunday, I trekked to the Downtown Airport where I would be free of traffic and other obstructions to crank out some good interval workouts. These are the types of workouts that, as Britton K. would say, make my eyes pop out. Saturday was a good training ride with several guys on the team whom I would split off from about half way to do a longer ride elsewhere in town. I managed to get myself lost for a while but hit Bannister Road and caught some good hills on my way back.

The most exciting development of the weekend was, of course, unrelated to cycling. I'm going to the Sonic Youth show at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City on July 18. This will be the first time I've seen these guys. I missed a chance to see them in Lawrence a couple years ago for reasons that are too painful to repeat.

My first glimpse of Sonic Youth came to me in my early teens. A big Nirvana and Soundgarden fan in those days, I kept seeing Sonic Youth being mentioned in Kurt Cobain interviews in the various Guitar Magazine issues I had laying around my room. If Cobain liked them, they must be good, but none of my friends had any of their CDs and this was well before the halcyon days of Napster, so stealing their music was out of the question. I was watching a David Letterman re-run on Comedy Central or some such station when I was 13 or 14 and saw Sonic Youth playing their song "100%." I had never seen anything like it before. They were playing their guitars with baseball bats and drumsticks. Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo flopped around on the ground like a couple fish out of water during the song as concerned or scared Letterman kept asking them if they were OK. Over the years, I'd collect a few of their albums. Daydream Nation is still one of my absolute favorite albums. It's impossible to get tired of that CD.

My guess is next month's show will be one for the ages. If they play anything like they do on this video, it will be an incredible night. Watch the whole thing. How they treat their guitars halfway through this song (at about the 1:38 mark) and still manage to finish it off sounding great is a complete mystery to me.

If you want to come along, let me know.

The Pitts

2009-06-08T19:21:00.005-05:00

I'm not going to write much about last weekend. Saturday's race was another lackluster road race, which have been legion for me lately. But to spare the lucky few who read this the details, suffice it to say the Saturday's result was the product of a few things going on that won't be discussed here combined with a couple annoyances that I'll address briefly.

Saturday's 57-mile effort in Pittsburg (yes, that's the correct spelling, unlike the Pennsylvania counterpart) started in some stiff wind, reminiscent of earlier races in the spring. For that reason, things started off slow. And, you'll never guess it, but I started the race toward the back of the pack. But I figured I'd be OK because nothing going on the front seemed to really matter because few seemed willing to work in the wind. Come two 14 mile laps later, the leaders of the peleton ripped into the headwind. My position toward the back was my undoing, as it has been several times in the past in road races. Once the leaders got a jump into the wind, the whole pack just splintered. And being in the back with little time to react, I was stuck there and this is where I would stay.

With one lap to go and a hip muscle that was getting increasingly stiff and painful, it was tempting to pull off the side and call it a day. But that's a habit I don't want to start, so I finished another 14-circuit among the scraps of the race. I was scheduled to race in a criterium on Sunday, but took a rain check and headed back to town with Erik E. and Philip W. on the account of not wanting to risk worsening my hip with a shorter, more intense race.

Race notebook

Teammates David N. and E. Stull finished No. 2 and No. 5, respectively, earning them somewhat of a payday for their efforts.
Money also went Matt P.'s way in the Cat 3 race.
There are various sources that can report what happened on Sunday.

That's it for now.

Photo credit: Unknown

Tulsa Tough

2009-05-31T23:17:00.003-05:00

I got home mid-evening on Sunday all ready to blog about my weekend experiences in Tulsa, Okla. when instead I was disappointed to see this news. Regardless of how you feel about the matter underpinning this story, Sunday's development is bullshit.

Anyway, on to the story of Tulsa Tough. Team Colavita/Parisi Coffee headed down south on Friday night in a rare configuration. For perhaps the first time this season, I would be the sole team representative of Category 4 racers at Tulsa Tough. The only other teammates headed down with me were Britton K. and Matt P., both Category 3 racers. We stayed in Independence, Kan. on Friday night, graced with the hospitality of Britton K.'s parents who live there.

We arrived to the staid Oklahoma town of Tulsa on Saturday morning around 10:30 a.m. or so. My race was at 11:35 p.m., so time was a little cramped for me to get ready for my race. I headed straight for registration. I signed up online, so I thought this would be a simple process of only getting my race number before heading off for my warmup. Instead, a bureaucratic nightmare ensued when my license, which lists me as a Category 5 racer, contradicted my entry in the Category 4 race. In the past, this problem was reconciled when I told the race organizers that I had upgraded recently and had not yet received my new license. Not so at Tulsa Tough. The race organizer said I needed proof of my upgrade. She said I could go to the Tulsa public library and print off a copy of my upgraded license. I had no idea of where the public library was, much less whether they would let me go in there with my bike and race attire to print off a copy of whatever I needed. So with MacGyver-like instincts, I found a nearby observer with an iPhone where I could access the e-mail that proved I had upgraded to Category 4 and showed it to the race organizer. That was enough and I got my race number. That was one disaster averted. The otherwise organized Tulsa Tough was without pins to affix numbers on jerseys. That's like hosting a dinner party and forgetting the food. Or playing Monopoly without the play money. For my warmup, I kept riding up and down the same block and returning to the registration table to see if they had the pins they kept promising would arrive any minute. They never came, so I bummed some pins from Britton K., who saved my bacon with some pins of his own. Make that two disasters averted.

So I finally arrived to the start line having undergone a couple mini-crises and a deplorable warmup. Whatever. I lined up and like the last few weeks, found myself positioned among the back of the pack of the Category 4 race. That's like the last couple weeks of racing where I would start at a disadvantage. I was pissed for a few moments until they announced this would be a 60-minute criterium, the longest of my short racing career. Another disaster averted — 60 minutes leaved plenty of time to make up spots.

The race started on time and I hung out toward the back for the first lap. This race went straight for a few meters from the starting line before banking a sharp turn to the left on an uphill. That short-lived uphill turned another left into a headwind, which turned right onto a long uphill before making a couple quick left turns onto a long downhill pitch before turning left again to the start/finish straightaway. I hung out in back for a while, knowing I would have plenty of time to make up spots. But I didn't want to hang out in the very back for long because it's difficult riding in the back of a large pack, and it's also dangerous. About three laps in, a wreck occurred at the bottom of the downhill.

As a brief aside, I'll say this: Everyone told me before I started competing that Category 5 racing was the riskiest of all the categories. They told me that these slow, inexperienced and jittery novice riders would cause the most wrecks and I would have to watch my ass in those races. I don't recall a single wreck in any of my 10 Category 5 races, whereas nearly all of my Category 4 races have had crashes.

Anyhow, I kept up with the pace of the main pack while keeping an eye out for anyone coming off the front to splinter the pack. While some people did make some moves, nothing seemed to stick. I slowly moved my way up until they announced we had 15 laps left. That's still a lot of time, so I didn't do anything too ambitious. While the race was fast, nobody else did anything too crazy.

Fast forward to lap 4: Figuring that I needed to get myself in better position for the late stages in the race, I trucked my hardest on the downhill on the inside of the pack until I elevated from the dregs of the pack to sit among the leaders. On the straightaway, I got out of my saddle and pedaled hard to maintain my momentum. By the start of the third lap, I somehow found myself leading the entire 80-rider field. That was sooner than I wanted to be in the lead, but since I was there, I figured I would try to make something of it. I pedaled hard and tried to keep up my pace up the hill to see if I could get a group to make some separation. I looked back at the top of the circuit's hill to see a bunch of guys were on my wheel. Damn! I kept in the lead through that lap before the peleton swallowed me up. I hung in there with the massive main pack for the next two laps. I lost a little contact on the last lap before busting a decent final sprint. I finished 39th among 80 or so starters.

In the world of academia, such a finish as a percentage would qualify for an "F." In my own world of cycling, this race qualified as a "B-." Given my results last week, it was a decent effort. I stuck with it in a competitive field. I went too early, of course. If I would have waited a lap or two, I really feel like I could have finished in the top 25. I was feeling really good when I took the lead, but wasted a lot of energy towing the field for more than a lap at such an inopportune moment.

I did a long cool-down before watching Britton K. and Matt. P race a few hours later. Britton K. raced one of the smartest races I've seen all year, moving up patiently in a crowded peleton before finishing 18th in a 100-rider field to make a few bucks. Matt P. wrecked early on with an unfortunate pedal-strike against the pavement, leading to the latest in a string of lousy luck.

We hit the hotel after watching the pros race that evening and embarked upon a three-hour television spectacle of prison riot programming.

The next morning, a scheduling snafu caused me to miss my Sunday race. Instead, I watched Britton K. race to another impressive 6th place finish on a hugely-difficult criterium course. A good weekend for him, which was great to see.

Next weekend: The Kansas State Championships!

A picture is worth...

2009-05-26T23:21:00.012-05:00

There was no Tuesday Night Crit tonight on account of the Memorial Day holiday yesterday and the likelihood that attendance would be sparse tonight. So I don't have a race recap to offer you. Sorry.

But unlike some general circulation newspapers, I want to keep my readers happy. And I know nothing keeps readers happier than photos of me.

So here are just a few from my last weekend's worth of racing in Iowa, which I moped about recently. All photos are credited to Michaela, Dan O.'s girlfriend who came along on the trip. I was grateful for her help and support for the whole team over the weekend.

This first photo offers some perspective on what kind of hill I'm talking about when it comes to the Snake Alley Criterium. This hill is to hills what The Killers are to FM radio — constant, unforgiving and just brutal to endure. And where the double-digit grade doesn't offer enough punishment, the cobble stones and switchbacks more than make up for it.

As I reported previously, one lap was marred by a mild spill I took when my momentum up this beast stalled and I was left with the decision to fall to my left on the grass or to my right on the uneven cobble stones. I chose the grass. The guy standing up in the red shirt was imploring me to get going again, which I of course was going to do. He offered to start pushing me up the hill once I got back on the saddle. I appreciated his offer to help, but I politely declined. Instead, I saw a stream of riders coming up behind me and knew there wasn't a safe way to put my bike back on the path and start pedaling again without impeding their progress. So I grabbed my bike and started running up the hill instead. Which leads us the this next photo.

Running in cycling cleats up cobble stones isn't my idea of fun, but it's the best I could come up with at the moment.

Here's what I look like when I'm actually riding my bike.

That's all the photos I'm going to post for now.

So instead of racing tonight, I went on a training ride on the east side of town. For all the readers outside of Kansas City (all two of you) who aren't familiar with this city, there's this street that runs north to south called Troost Avenue. Ever since I've lived here, it's been described by politicians and the local media as the racial and poverty dividing line of Kansas City. I'm not sure about the accuracy of this line of thinking, but the general thought is west of Troost Avenue is the relatively better-off portions of town. East of this street is the poor, downtrodden and largely minority population of Kansas City, at least until you get to the Eastern Jackson County suburbs.

Anyway, tonight I was doing some steady state paces well east of Troost Avenue. I know of some cyclists who refuse, or at least strongly demur, at the prospect of riding in these neighborhoods. They think the bad element is out to get them on this side of town. I actually prefer to train on the east side of town. Unlike Midtown (where I live) and Johnson County (the affluent suburbs of the Kansas City area) I never run into angry or dangerous drivers out east. At the most, people just stare at me as I go by.

About midway through my ride, I'm climbing southbound on Hardesty Avenue when I get stopped at a traffic light at this intersection — Hardesty and Truman avenues. This pickup truck pulls up next to me and there's these two guys who start yelling over at me. At first I figure I'm just going to get made fun of, like all the people who used to yell "Run Forrest, run!" when I used to run. No big deal. These ask how far I'm going tonight. I tell them 30 miles or so. "Goddamn! That's far!" they screech excitedly. "You're a maniac!" they continue. I smile at them, grateful they're not being insulting.

The light turns green. The lane I'm in is obstructed just ahead of the intersection by a tow truck that's illegally parked while they lane they're in is smooth sailing ahead. They tell me to cut ahead of them as the light turns green. Any cyclist knows that this never happens — cars never yield at an intersection for a cyclist unless they absolutely have to. These chaps graciously let me cut ahead of them to get around the tow truck. As they pass me again, they keep encouraging me as I simply wave back at them, relaying my appreciation for a rare positive exchange between a cyclist and a motorist.

A few miles ahead, I see the same guys in the front yard of this house. They once again get excited about seeing me. "Damn, you're fast!" they tell me. I look down at my computer. I haven't been going terribly fast at this point in my ride, only going 17 miles an hour or so. But it seems they're just being cool. One of them asks if I'm going to ride again tomorrow. I tell them yes. They once again howl in disbelief before I ride off.

Again, it was a rare but pleasant interaction between some generous drivers and an appreciative cyclist — a much more positive outcome of this often-strained relationship than this.

Moral of the story? Do your training on the east side of town. They're way cooler out here than in the suburbs.

Lastly, racing at Tulsa Tough is in the cards for me. I registered today, sparing me the heartburn of wondering whether I would get to the race day registration in a foreign town, only to discover I wouldn't do any racing that day. It should be a great day of racing, and perhaps a reprieve of the weekend just gone by.

Weekend in Iowa

2009-05-24T23:50:00.004-05:00

We all take our lumps some time or another. I took mine this past weekend.

For a short recap of this weekend, here you go: Two of my three races were almost uglier than child abduction. The third was marginally better.

Allow me to explain.

I took Friday off from work to head up to a 33-mile road race up in Burlington, Iowa. Dan O., Michaela, Britton K., Matt P., Joe A. and myself loaded up the Suburban and took to the north. The distance, shorter than most road races, meant there would be no screwing around. I was fairly ready for a fast pace early on, especially considering they consolidated Category 3 and Category 4 racers in one field. So there were no surprises when the pace jetted off to what I'd ballpark at a 27 to 28 mile per hour average for at least the first five miles once the neutral start expired.

It's worth saying at this point that this pack was a sketchy one. Even during the neutral start, there were plenty of helter-skelter shenanigans. Right at about mile five there was a pretty ugly pile up that I was able to avoid. Since my wreck one month ago I have found it still psychologically difficult at times to remain in tight packs at high speeds. When wrecks happen, it's still unnerving. I don't even look at them when I pass them. There was another tangle up at one point a few miles ahead that I slowed to a stop to avoid, and then had to push hard to catch back up to the pack. Once I'm back in the pack, I look to my right and see some guy just pedaling out of control in the grass, which he continues to do for several meters before he just collapses, as though someone just bayonetted him. At this point, I'm wondering, "What the hell is going on in this race?" I'm also wondering what the hell is going on with me. I'm struggling to keep pace. At about mile 15, I'm off the back and never catch up. For someone who suffers jitters in unsettled pack riding, I at least had the luxury of riding the last half of the race on my own. But it sucked in every other way imaginable. I don't have any excuses — Friday just sucked.

I had plenty to think about in those last several miles. Among those was the possibility that I was overtrained, which caused my unexplained blow out. I've overtrained before in running, and it's not a pleasant experience. More on this later. The miserable afternoon was tempered by knowing all my teammates raced well, topped off with a victory by Matt P. Job well done to him and the others, and read some of Matt's ink and thoughts about cycling in the local press here.

Saturday

It would be tough to overstate how difficulty of the Snake Alley Criterium course. The main feature of this race is a one mile lap punctuated with a steep-grade climb on a cobble-stone road crossed up with several short switch-backs. If you don't believe me, check this out.

Anyway, I was actually feeling pretty good in this race early on. We registered late, so I started the race off in the back and managed to start picking people off in the first few laps. You hit Snake Alley and your pace slackens to a crawl while you negotiate other suffering cycles, sharp turns and an old man in a devil's outfit, tempting cyclists with cold cans of malt liquor. But you reach the top and you're headed downhill for a while until you loop back around and do it again. By the third lap, the race had splintered somewhat and near as I could tell, I was ahead of what looked like the third pack. I headed up Snake Alley and took one of the turns close to the curb, stalled and lost my balance. I fell on to the grass, picked up my bike and tried to get started again. There were several riders behind me so I couldn't just jump back on the course without unfairly impeding their progress. So I jumped to the outside of the course and ran up the hill carrying my bike. It was either that or stand around waiting, looking foolish.

That nightmare put me further back behind the leaders, so about two or three laps later I was deemed out of contention and pulled out of the race so that I didn't get in the way of the leaders when they came around again. Make that two bad races on the weekend. But Dan. O finished in the money in the Category 4 race, which was good to see.

Sunday

So morale is pretty low going into Sunday's 14-mile criterium. This race covered a one-mile loop that goes down a long descent, goes over a speed bump that forces you to go airborne for a moment before scaling a long road. The pace was screaming to start off this race as we came through the first lap hitting 30 or 31 miles per hour on flat ground at the starting line. Early on, I slipped away from the pack, leading me to think I was in for another long, lonely race. But I forced myself back into the race and even got to the upper quarter of the pack for a few laps. This was encouraging because this was a good field and we were going fast pretty much the whole time. I hung in there pretty well before getting shredded on or near the last lap.

This was somewhat of a salve for what was an otherwise lousy racing weekend. It showed me that I wasn't overtrained, or else I would have been spit out the back of that race into oblivion much earlier. I'm not sure what else caused the poor racing because the training has been pretty well intact these last few weeks. Sleep has not been, so maybe that's it. But endurance sports are screwy activities in the sense that there are some performances where no matter what you do and how well you prepare, you just don't do well. For now, I'm chalking this last weekend as one of those weekends.

Failure is always an option

2009-05-19T23:00:00.006-05:00

Well, it was worth a shot. Just as the beautiful lady of Tuesday Night Crit first place glory was casting longing looks my way, her seven big brothers flipped on the lights, dragged me out back and gave me an unforgettable whipping.

And so it goes, as my first cycling race victory continues to elude me. In today's race, I jumped into the lead with half a lap to and figured I'd just try to carry it to the finish. I led through the last two turns and went for broke to the finish. About 100 meters before the line, one guy's wheel started creeping up on me. And then another. And then some more. By the time I arrived at the line, I was in eighth, making for a paltry finish.

OK, now let the rationalizations begin! My legs were still feeling somewhat heavy from the abuse the Auburn roads put on them. I'm definitely glad I got out for a decent and slow ride with John K. and Joe A. on Monday night, or I'm sure it would have been worse.

I did a cool down lap or two before I happen upon Joe Weis, who nudged ahead me at the finish once again. I circle around him and tell him, "Joe, you're killing me. You got me at the line again." He shoots me this contemptuous look, as though I had pushed him into a puddle of piss and then asked him for five dollars. He says, "I'm going to tell you this, and I'm not trying to be mean, but you're a big fucker, you need to get behind someone and sprint to the finish." Of course, Joe's saying this partially in jest, but there's certainly some truth to his words. But as I've said before, Tuesday Night Crits are simply opportunities to try some outlandish approaches to racing. It's just another chance to fail, and learn from it. The best way to learn is the hard way.

The race before the finish was nothing too remarkable. I drove down to Lenexa by myself since I knew I was going to get out of work later than I usually do. I made it there in enough time to get a decent warm up in. Thomas G. hopped in the B race after dropping off a pretty past A race and helped me out in some of the early laps, pulling me toward the front before peeling off and watching the rest.

Race notebook

Temperatures were in the low 80s with gusting winds from the south at about 12 to 20 miles an hour.
E. Stull raced in the A race, which featured some pretty formidable competition. Professional and former University of Kansas cross country star Brian Jensen led the most of the race and I think might have lapped the field. Anyway, that race was cookin' and Eric did a good job of hanging with the main pack from what I could see.
Before the race started, I notice there's a huge metal street plate right at the corner of the first turn on the course. This was bad news for me, as I usually stay on the outside of the turns and straightaways. It didn't affect the race too much, I don't think, as people simply squeezed in tight on the inside around the first turn. But I knew I wanted no part of riding over that metal plate.

It's back to a truncated training schedule for the next two days since a road race on Friday in Iowa is in the offing, followed by two more races on Saturday and Sunday.

Photo credit: Lantern Rouge, from Sunday's Auburn road race.

Vanquished!

2009-05-17T16:46:00.005-05:00

I'll say this for the Topeka area, which always struck me as a relatively unimpressive place, there's hardly any flat ground to be found in the rural roads around that place. That made for what turned out to be a pretty tough course for Sunday's 67-mile Auburn Road Race.

Like we have before in the past, we had to hustle to Auburn, a small hamlet outside of Topeka (or Tapeka, if you're going by the sign held by the hitchhiker walking alongside I-70) to get there on time for the 8:30 a.m. registration cutoff. But I didn't really worry about the lack of warmup because my experience with road races in the past is they get of to fairly slow starts and the opening miles are a warmup in and of themselves. Not so on Sunday.

I could hear the echoing voice of famed college football broadcaster Keith Jackson in my head saying, "Woah, Nellie, it's fast one out there today!" The race got out to a decidedly blazing pace in the first several miles, and it would only get faster. A wreck at about mile eight did nothing to slow the pace. I didn't really see what happened. We were going up a long incline when I saw some guy hit the deck in front of me, followed by several other people piling behind. I swung way to the outside and deftly sidestepped the growing wreck going on ahead. I looked back and saw teammate Joe A. out in the grass, so I wasn't sure how much he got caught up in all that mess, but I didn't see him again during the race. Apparently, he busted a tire, got another one out of the wheel truck and kept going.

Anyway, once that happened, the race more or less blew open. A few guys made some breakaways off the front, one of which stuck in a big way. Matt P. went with I think two guys off the front and that was the last we saw of them. The rest of the field, presumably in an ultimately futile attempt to bridge the gap with those guys, picked up the pace. I don't know how fast we were going because my computer shut down for some reason early on, but the pace was screaming. It felt faster than most of the crits we've been doing. I tried to stay toward the top of the chase pack, but more or less found myself hanging off the back of the pack. At that point, I was thinking to myself that if these guys could keep a pace like this for 67 miles, then I need to go back to Category 5.

Eventually, perhaps around mile 25, the pace relented. I still stalked the back of the pack, unsure of when the pace would pick up again. For most of the rest of the first lap, things calmed down quite a bit. But by the time the second lap started again, it started moving pretty fast again. I caught up with Dan. O and E. Stull. I told them I would try to help them out, but I felt scorched from the first lap. Dan said to just hang on. Oddly enough, I would end up toward the front of the pack after this happened. Some guys were whining about other people not moving up toward the front, which was funny to me. They didn't exactly strike me as martyrs themselves. If they had such a problem with the way things were unfolding, perhaps they should have chased after Matt's pack. But they didn't. Listening to bitching during a race gets tiresome in a hurry. It's definitely not worth responding. Nevertheless, E. Stull and I went on an attack to reel in a Bike Shack rider, which we did fairly easily. I stayed ahead for the better part of 10 minutes before Dan told me to back off, which some of the other whiners howled about.

Anyway, I kept toward the back of the pack once more and the pace slackened again. We were riding along at an easy pace for a while when about 10 or 12 miles before the end of the race, I hear the unmistakable sound of a tire popping. Pschhhhhhhhhhh! I look around and see if anyone else is slowing down before I look down and realize it was my front tire. Damn, I thought flat tires were things that only happened to other people. So I waited for the wheel van, pulled a spare and put it on. By then, the pack had moved along quite a bit. In the end, I could never really catch them. I finished the last five miles, which seemed to last an eternity, all by my lonesome. I'm not sure what place I got, and I'll update this when I find out.

Race notebook

My incessant complaining about the weather is over. Early race temperatures of mid-50s got up to the mid- to upper-60s, no clouds and fairly calm winds.
Impressively, but not surprisingly, Matt P. won the Category 4 race, outlasting the guys who chased him at what seemed like an impossible pace. I'd imagine he'll tread among the Category 3 racers in the near future.
E. Stull finished somewhere around 6th in the Category 4 race, just a whisker ahead of Dan O., making for what seemed like a very solid for both of those guys.
Britton K. finished somewhere among the top 10 in his race. It sounded like his race was extremely fast, which comes as no surprise, seeing how they grouped the Category 1 and 2 racers among the 3s. That made for a tough field including professional Steve Tilford.
Philip W. flatted during his Category 5 race, but unfortunately didn't have a spare from the truck to throw on his bike.
Jane A. told me she finished 5th in her race, adding that she did the best she could. That's all you can ask for, right?
A Bike Shack rider, Bobby (didn't catch his last name) rode down there with us. He raced in the Category 5 race and was a good guy to get to know.

I've got my eyes on perhaps traveling to Iowa next weekend for a four-day race series there. Other guys on the team seem keen on going there, too, which could make for a great Memorial Day weekend. I've put in a request for Friday off, but have a lot of work to get out the door if I'm going to go.

— Photo credit: Philip W.

Bike Week in Kansas City

2009-05-14T22:39:00.005-05:00

Not since I got in the saddle for the legendary Goldsprints race captured in this photo a month and a half ago have I been itching to race this much. It's been two weeks since any substantive racing, Tuesday Night Crits notwithstanding. But that drought ends this coming weekend with a 67-mile race coming up on Sunday.

While I'm not yet feeling like an insane gambling addict with no money left in the checking account, I really have been looking forward to this weekend's trip to Topeka. T-town is not a place I've spent much time in. As the little-known capital of Kansas, I used to go to the statehouse there a fair amount when I was covering legislative matters for a newspaper I used to work for that hardly exists anymore. Between there and the Quiznos I would eat at between votes, I don't know Topeka much at all. From what I've heard from the Topeka natives in my office, the area where we will race promises to be fairly hilly.

While I used to say hills were a good way of sacking me in a race, I feel like upward climbs have been more gentle on me lately. This is not to say that I fancy myself as an aggressive climber, but if there's an area where I've made the most progress since December, this is it.

As such, a group of us met Volker Bicycles to hit some hills in south-central Wyandotte County. We hit some decent hills fairly hard early on. I was telling E. Stull today that when we first started riding together with the team, him and I (more so myself) were kind of getting licked on the hills. He's clearly gotten much stronger on the hills and overall. A nice new bike should help him along this weekend, but more so than that, his form, along with everyone else's who was along today, looked strong. Anyway, it was a good ride through The 'Dotte and back to the store, leading into what should be a couple days of long, steady mileage before Sunday's event.

Joe A. mentioned today that Tom Boonen deserves perhaps to get kicked off his team for his latest drug run-in, but that cycling's governing body probably should not take much further action against him, seeing as how his trip downhill skiing — nose first — was out of competition. Furthermore, it's hard to see how cocaine can be a performance enhancing drug. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm less certain about the circumstances surrounding Boonen's cocaine use. Does he just like to party? Or is someone really screwing with his drinks? I doubt the latter, but regardless, is recreational drug use something that should be held over an athlete's head? We used to talk about this back in school, as to whether the NCAA should really include drugs like marijuana on its banned substances list. My hunch is yes, it should. On one hand, few would argue that a dope-smoking cross country runner gains an edge over his competition. But on the other hand, I understand why organizations like the UCI want to disassociate themselves with needless, illegal drugs and the people who use them. What do the rest of you think?

Either way, here's to hoping Tom can get some help, if he indeed has a problem. Despite depictions to the contrary, blow is really a nasty little drug. I saw it cause at least one friend to become a stranger.

Anyway, Bike Week in Kansas City is nearing its end, and so too is this post.

A Dog In A Hat

2009-05-09T15:39:00.005-05:00

I finally finished Joe Parkin's book "A Dog In A Hat" today, which took me two weeks for some reason. I've been reading a lot of Bernie Madoff stories in the print media lately, which slowed my progress in this book. Britton K. lent it to me after the Bazaar road race a while back. It's worth a read for anyone who follows the sport. I've copied my review of the book from my profile on Goodreads.com, a cool little Web site where you can track your own reading see what your friends are getting in to.

* * * * * *

Joe Parkin's sports autobiography succeeds where so many others of its type fail. As a genre, these books tend to read like Oscar awards speeches, a continuous shout-out to the people who crossed the paths of the subject of the book. They're also pitifully self-aggrandizing, a vehicle of breathless self-promotion by the author, or, more often, whoever ghost-wrote the book. Parkin's "A Dog In A Hat" falls into neither trap. The book is impressive, if for nothing else than its authenticity.

Parkin was an American amateur cyclist who leaves the United States shortly after high school to pursue a life of racing in the world's toughest cycling atmosphere in Belgium. Parkin's retelling of his career in the mid-1980s to early 1990s is a strikingly clinical account of the lifestyle of a fledgling cyclist in Europe. Riders hoping for a glimpse into the mind of an upper-level racer or seeking advice from Parkin's career to use in their own pursuit should look elsewhere. "A Dog In A Hat" does little to inspire other racers or explore the methods of a professional's accomplishments and failures. It's apparent that Parkin never meant for his book to do either. Instead, it's a straight telling of the story of his career, complete with details of the drugs that permeate the sport and the sketchy interlopers who populate the European scene.

In the end, Parkin never achieved rock-star status in his sport, which is either fine or greatly disappointing to him. It's impossible to tell which from his book, as it offers no window into his mind. But this approach lends unmistakable credibility to Parkin's side of the story. What it does offer an utterly believable look into a life that few who ride behind the wheel ever get to see. And by the story's end, a reader is left wondering if he or she would ever want to.

— Four of five stars.

Cheap entertainment

2009-05-05T22:03:00.003-05:00

Today is Tuesday, so it's clear what that means. Britton K. and I loaded up our bikes on the back of my little Honda Civic and off we went through rush hour traffic to Lenexa for our latest installment of the $10 Tuesday Night Crits.

No one else from the team came along, so I was on my own for the B race at 7:15 p.m. For the second week in a row, I did not unfurl the Colavita flag for the crit. My old team jersey is shredded beyond practical use, even for training rides. I've got a new one coming this week or so. Instead, I raced in a plain gray jersey.

I led the first couple laps at a fairly moderate pace before falling back and letting others shuffle the lead for a while. It was a real see-saw race today. There were times where I felt I moved effortlessly to the top of the pack where I'd either lead or be one or two bikes back, but then without a noticeable change of pace, I'd find myself swallowed up and treading 10 or 12 bikes back. It was no matter though, as no one really made any impressive breaks. Someone would take the lead, hold it for the better part of a straightaway and then look around for someone else to do the work until a volunteer obliged. The pace remained relatively even, averaging 24.5 to 25 miles an hour throughout.

With three laps to go, there was still a fairly tight pack of about 10 riders toward the front. I stalked the back part of this group for the next two laps, remaining patient and thinking I could take a stab at a top three finish. With half a lap to go, I got out of my saddle, cut to the outside and started passing riders en masse. I made it to the last straightaway and saw there were still a few people I could catch. I collected a couple scalps but in my last push to try and finish third, I got caught up behind some guy who just gave up and stopped pedaling. I tried to move around him, but it was too late. I crossed the line in fifth. I was a little annoyed, but these things happen. Better they happen at the Tuesday Night Crits than elsewhere. The winner was no more than two seconds ahead, and I finally found I had somewhat of a gear in my legs for a decent final sprint, whereas before, I was typically hanging on for dear life.

Anyway, back to the solitary miles for the rest of this week going into the weekend.

Race notebook

Britton enjoyed pretty decent weather for his race. Overcast and a breeze from the south. After a couple laps of my race, it started to sprinkle somewhat and the winds kicked up a bit. The roads never really got too wet.
Talked for a while with Joe Weis, who I raced against a couple times at the Perry Dam Race. He passed me on the last hill at the first Perry Dam Race when I slipped a chain toward the end, costing me an opportunity at a win. As he went by, he yelled, "Oh man, you had it!" He's a good guy and I'll look forward to racing him some more.

After giving it a few moments thought, I decided against racing down at the Joe Martin event in Arkansas this weekend. From what I understand, it's going to be some fairly high-level competition. Not one to shy away from a challenge, I nevertheless relented, mostly because of cost. There's a few other upcoming races I'm considering traveling to, and I might as well get ready for those. I think Matt P., Brad W. and perhaps Dan. O are making the trip down there. Best of luck to those guys.

Can't Get There From Here

2009-05-04T22:39:00.005-05:00

Following Sunday's Tour de Golden Ghetto, I had the idea in my mind all day today that I'd try to replicate that ride to some degree for Monday's training route. But then real life intervened. Let's back up a bit.

On Sunday, which turned out to be a perfect weather day, a group of six of us went westward into Wyandotte County. Like my theory that Africa is an untapped resource of great cyclists who only need to be discovered (I'll write about this later), I've often regarded The 'Dotte as fertile training ground that awaits exploration and exploitation. Sunday's ride out on Metropolitan Road out west to the rural hills of Wyandotte County was akin to my earlier days as a Denverite suddenly discovering the running paths and trails in Boulder, Colo. It was really good riding out there for the first several miles of that route. Then we headed south into Johnson County, full of traffic, strip malls and gas stations. We even stopped at one to get water, a feat which was described by a teammate — I'm paraphrasing here — as a totally American thing to do. Elsewhere in the world, stops would perhaps be made at cafes or pastry shops. But not in the Golden Ghetto. I'm not complaining at all here — I was and always am grateful for a good ride. The rest of the ride was fine, interspersed with occasional sprints and climbs that topped out at 30 miles for the day.

So parts of last night were spent looking over maps of Wyandotte County to figure out some extended routes out there in the western land's undiscovered rolling hills and plains. I thought I had a route mapped out for my Monday ride when work got in my way. I've got some decent stories in the hopper for the paper, and these things take time. By the time I got home, there was more than a loser's chance that it would be dark by the time I was about a quarter-way through my ride. Not exactly ideal conditions for mapping out a new route. When it's getting dark, I prefer to stick with routes I know by heart, like Swope Park. I can tell you with surgical precision where every pothole awaits the uninitiated rider on that course. The 'Dotte? Not so much. So I settled for the familiar surroundings.

Here's some stats from Monday's ride:

Distance: 25.6 miles

Avg. speed: 17.9 mph

Max speed: 41.9 mph

Avg. cadence: 79 (too low!)

Max cadence: 127 (still too low!)

Thomas G. on Sunday told me that my arms are too rigid on climbs, so I worked on that today to varying levels of success. That's a project for the rest of this week. I always heard that a group of elite 400-meter sprinters used to practice intervals with potato chips in their hands. They were instructed to run all out without breaking the chips, a feat which signified that they were running relaxed enough in their upper bodies to maximize the strength in their legs. I'm trying to figure out an equivalent for cycling, but nothing is coming to me.

Anyway, as for the week ahead, I don't know what awaits me. Work is going to be rough until Thursday, so I don't know where that leaves me. I'll at least have some long-ish rides for the entire week. Whether there will be races, speed workouts or hill drills, that's anyone's guess.

A Saturday at home

2009-05-02T14:41:00.006-05:00

This vexing springtime weather had another couple tricks in store for us this weekend. For one, all you heard during the weekdays was how lousy the weather was going to be this weekend. Rain, rain and more rain. So far, not a drop has fallen. And while the sun remains hidden, this is actually perhaps the best Saturday weather we've had all spring. No wind at all, comfortable temperatures and, yes, no rain.

Funny that this happens on a Saturday when we're not racing. Going back to February 28, this is the first Saturday that I haven't raced for reasons other than inclement weather. There's no worthwhile race on the calendar. There's a 10-kilometer time trial in Gardner on Sunday, but $25 for a little more than six miles of racing seems absurd.

In some ways, I see this as a bit of relief. It was good to get in a group ride after all these weeks. I met Britton K., Joe A. and a pair of Erics on the Plaza for what amounted to a 40 mile ride. Perfect day for it and we held about a perfect pace throughout. It was just about the exact type of ride I needed after this week.

We went to Swope Park, as per the usual, but then headed out south of the park and ended up somewhere in South Kansas City or near Lee's Summit. Not sure which. We passed over the dam at Longview Lake when we saw a woman driving in her car with a completely flat tire. She had been riding on the shoulder for some time and while I couldn't see her tire, the smell of smoldering rubber made me suspect she was driving on her rim. As we approached, she moves out into the fast lane and starts cruising along while you can hear a steady clunk, clunk, clunk as she drives. Eric S-burg flags her down and tells her she really needs to pull over. We all stopped to see what we could do to help. But with no spare and no service station within the next four miles, there wasn't much we could do. It was kind of an odd situation, but whatever.

So we went back to Volker Bicycles where they've got the sweet shirts pictured above in stock. Got mine yesterday. I loitered around there for a while, ate a doughnut and went home.

A couple of other notes here. I've been perusing some cycling blogs and found some that I really enjoy. I've added them to my suggested reading box. Pave is this blog written by a cyclist who loves to make prognostications about upcoming races. I haven't been reading him long enough to know if he's ever right, but he's got a lot of good information there. Britton K. and I were laughing last night about how he's always soliciting comments from readers after his posts, but nobody ever writes anything. I'm thinking I may become a prolific poster on his blog. Another worthwhile read is The Service Course if for no other reason than the author is a terrific writer. For me, good writers are and always have been the coolest people in my opinion. When I was a kid, I used to hold writers in about the same esteem that my friends held professional athletes and actors. I still do, I guess. Anyway, check those out along with the other ones I link to. I never link to bad blogs, so if I'm linking them, you know they're good.

So, yeah, no racing this weekend. My wounds from last Sunday have scabbed over, which is a mixed blessing. My shirts no longer stick to me, but my scabbed up skin feels really tight, like a plus-sized model posing in skinny rocker jeans. It sucks. Long ride tomorrow? I hope so. We'll see if there's some interest in doing a long trek somewhere exotic, like Leavenworth. If not, a long ride somewhere in town would be nice, too.

I'm off to get some ice cream and do some reading and then heading off to the Brookside Art Fair.

Let the comments begin!

Tuesday Night Crits!

2009-04-29T00:21:00.003-05:00

I received what amounted to a meaningful e-mail from teammate Matt P. on Monday. He crashed in a recent race, whereas I had not until Sunday. In essence, he explained to me what it was like to race again after a wreck. I don't want to make a wreck seem like more than it is, but in a lot of ways, it's not different than crashing a car. Once you're done worrying about your physical condition and the damage to your vehicle, you see the entire process in a different light. For one, you're more aware of what you're doing. For another, you know you're not invincible.

I always knew I'd wreck at some point, it was just a matter of when. After Sunday's debacle, I thought I wouldn't race again for a couple weeks. I thought I needed to chill, let some scabs heal over and reassess the remainder of the road racing season. But after Matt's e-mail and some encouragement from Britton K., I figured I'd launch myself into the Tuesday Night Crits.

For the uninitiated who might be following this nascent blog, this is the essence of the Tuesday Night Crit: It's a circuit race held around a modest rectangular course in a business park in Lenexa, Kan. Lenexa, for the increasingly uninitiated, is a suburb of Kansas City that seems to consist of only warehouses and business parks. I know some people live here, but I'm not sure who or why. Anyway, these races cost only $10 and are not to be taken entirely seriously. I look at them as practice races. If you finish toward the top, nothing but gold stars for you. If you finish toward the middle or bottom, hardly a soul will or should care. It's really an opportunity to try out some highfalutin race tactics or simply get a good workout. Don't get me wrong; I'd love it if I could win a Tuesday Night Crit. But if I don't, no tears will dilute my Tuesday Night Beer.

To repeat myself somewhat, I hadn't planned on racing Tuesday night. I thought I'd hold off on racing for a couple weeks. That feeling was reinforced by a sudden load of work that came across my desk at work at about 3 p.m. But then I figured I might as well test myself tonight, get a result and overcome my sudden fear of racing. So I got my work done, checked out and went for a day at the races.

It turns out the fear of racing was relatively easy to conquer. Once the first lap was finished, the brain was no longer on what happened last Sunday and I found myself within inches of another rider's handlebars without so much as a second thought. Actually, that's not true. There were a few sketchy moments where someone did something a bit out of the norm and I found myself unnerved by the sudden activity going on around me. But that did little to stop me from doing what I needed to do.

So the race itself — here's how it went. As usual, the first laps of the race were uneventful. Nobody tried anything too interesting. That was until Colavita teammate E. Stull grasped the lead an extended it, pushing the early pack to a fairly fast pace. Nobody went with him, so he was doing some early work into wind that seemed to blow against the grain at every turn of the course. Like all crits I've done so far early attackers were reeled in and the race coagualted into a fairly tight pack. I even took the lead for the better part of a lap early but discovered that fighting the wind at an appreciable pace was an exercise in futility. It takes a lot of strength to make a successful breakaway, and so far, I don't have or haven't found that strength.

Borrowing a bit from an e-mail sent out earlier in the day by Britton K., I thought I'd try to stick mostly among the lead pack of the race. And that's mostly what I did. I didn't try any ambitious attacks or foolhardy endeavors and practiced instead stalking the main pack from behind. This went of for several laps.

Let's fast forward a bit. Come three laps to go, I was still loitering around the back of the lead pack just to see what would happen. At this point, teammates E. Stull and Marcus S. were ahead of me, keeping a stout pace while Joe A. at one point went surging for the lead. I didn't do much to position myself on the second to last lap, but on the bell lap started to move up on the so-called hill on the course. I thought I'd try to make a big move on the subsequent downhill, but saw that a long-haired rider had already tried the same thing ahead of me. It was hard to imagine that what he was doing wouldn't haunt him two turns later. He took a formidable lead, but it was clear it was going to vanish in the final sprint. So I tucked in behind some riders I suspected were going to make a strong final finish. Ahead of me still were E. Stull and Marcus S. Come the final straightaway, I was in about 10th place. I managed to pass a few riders, including the long-haired fellow who made an admirable, if not ill-advised, sprint for the finish with half a lap to go. I wound up 6th, behind E. Stull and Marcus S. who was the winner.

Overall, I'll take the finish. I still need to hone my finishing sprints. There have been a few races where I feel I could have placed higher, but am either too timid to make a significant move in the final stretches or lack the capacity to mount a strong final sprint. Both seem correctable, with enough practice.

Race notebook

Race weather was mostly fine. Slightly chilly temperatures in the low 60s combined with occasionally moderate winds lowered the average MPH from a week ago.
Joe A. had another unfortunate mechanical failure, and perhaps the most unexpected kind. His metal cleat snapped in two just as we prepared our warmup. But he raced nonetheless and could easily be found among the lead pack for most of the race.
Marcus S. won the B race, despite what I think was a slipped chain early on. It's fun to watch this guy race. Here's a 6'8'' rider on a steel frame whose cadence seems impossibly low but nonetheless outfoxed an entire field.
E. Stull, after a strong early effort, rebounded to finish among the upper portions of the B Race.
Britton K. seemed to perform well in an odd field in the A race. I didn't see much of the race, but he seemed to tuck in with the leaders among the chase pack in his race. Somehow, a group of five or six riders broke away from the pack and forged a serious gap on the rest of the field.
Jane A. appeared to hang around the top racers in the women's B race. Not too sure how she finished up, but seemed to be in the thick of things among the women's racers in the B group.
Long rides expected for the rest of the week. No races this weekend. Instead, a possible 60-plus miler to Leavenworth may be in the works for either Saturday or Sunday.

VeloTek Grand Prix

2009-04-26T23:18:00.006-05:00

A wise man once told me, "There's two kinds of cyclists — those who have crashed and those who are going to." Unfortunately, that wise man, Eric S-burg, told me this after I joined the former on Sunday.

Somewhere about 12 miles into the 52 mile road race at Perry Lake, I hit the pavement along with two other riders. Here's how it happened:

The category 4 racers were pretty much all clogged up for the first portion of the race. Something about the pack felt fairly sketchy early on. There were a few accelerations and a few sudden slow-downs that didn't seem to make sense. I was mostly around the back for the first few miles, wondering how I was going to try to make it to the front. We had it pretty lucky in the early stages with a tailwind and no significant hills. But then we headed east around mile 10 or so right into a stiff cross wind. We hit a long, slight downhill and things seemed to be fairly steady during this stretch. I figured this would be a good time to get some water. So I reach down for my cage, grab my water bottle and start taking a few sips. Right at this moment, the pack slowed pretty suddenly, forcing me to squeeze the brakes with the one hand I had on my handlebars. This, along with the crosswind, caused my front wheel to suddenly jerk to the left and the next thing I know, I'm on the ground. I think I went over the handlebars, hit my head first, shoulders next and then slid some on my left side.

I laid there for a second and then remembered there were cars behind us, so I got up quickly. Thankfully, the cars stopped and I looked the other way to see two other riders had also hit the deck. One got up and pedaled away but the other was done for the day. I retrieved my bike, saw that my rear derailleur became unhinged and knew there would be no more riding for me today.

I hopped into the wheel vehicle where a helpful judge with a VeloTek hat helped me load my bike up into the back. Once I sat in his car, I started checking myself over. My jersey was pretty shredded up and both my shoulders were bloodied up. Raspberries also appeared on my arms, legs and hips. My helmet was cracked, the second one to go in the trash for me this year.

The driver dropped me off at the starting line where I finally found some peroxide and started cleaning myself off. Joe A.'s truck was locked up, so I couldn't get to my clothes or anything. I stood there for about an hour watching people mill about. I felt like a museum display there for a while. Several people walked by, pointing at me and gazing in amazement. Many of them informed me that my scrapes were going to hurt, particularly in the morning. I was grateful for their reminders.

Not much damage done to the bike. Britton K. tells me he can fix it up, either tomorrow or Tuesday. The various abrasions across my shoulders, back, arms and legs are pretty sore, just like those folks told me they would be. It'll be a while before these heal, but it could have been much worse. In retrospect, it was about as good a crash as I could have asked for considering the speed we were heading at the time. Brad W. and Joe A. said we were going somewhere around 30 miles an hour at that point. I was glad I didn't screw up Brad's race. He was right next to me when it happened. He said he got bopped in the back by someone after I fell. It could have been me, could have been someone else. Don't really know.

It was an unsavory end to the VeloTek Grand Prix, which had otherwise gone fairly well. Saturday's time trial and criterium produced solid, if not spectacular results for my first weekend racing among the category 4s. Despite Sunday's crash, I was grateful to race among the 4s. The pace is much faster, more exciting and feels more like actual racing than some of the circuits I treaded among in the 5s. That's not to put 5s down in anyway, but I felt like I was ready to move on to 4s and still stand behind the decision.

Race notebook

The weather was OK Sunday. Very windy, perhaps 25 to 30 miles an hour. Cloud cover throughout although storms never really materialized. No complaints about Saturday's weather.
Brad W. and E. Stull seemed to have solid efforts in the 4s. When I saw the first few 4s finish, they looked to be right among them. Eric had some shifting problems early on, but appeared to make it through that. He's racing well right now, particularly in his first weekend among the 4s.
Joe A. slipped a chain at the worst possible moment — at the foot of perhaps the biggest hill on the course going into a stout headwind. That put him off the back of the pack and made it a tall order to catch back up in those conditions.
Eric S-burg also had some bad luck when he flatted somewhere in the second lap.
Britton K. said he made a big attack going up the final hill but locked up some. He appeared to be in the mix of things in the 3s from what I could tell.
Marcus S. finished a solid second in his category in a duathlon in Lawrence on Saturday.
Thanks to Melissa K. Cameron M. and Philip W. for coming and supporting us. And thanks to Joe A. for driving.
No racing for the next two weekends. It will be a good opportunity to do some longer miles in the saddle and work on a few weaknesses.
No training tomorrow. Need to get the bike worked on and have tickets to a Royals game.

First edition

2009-04-26T22:17:00.007-05:00

The story of how I started my career in cycling, if you can call it that, is a long one. But here's the short version.

Around summer time last year, I had finally rallied up enough money to buy a road bike, which I had wanted pretty much since the moment I graduated college. I was tired of long distance running, which I had done for a number of years at the University of Kansas a for a long time even before that. My knees were in bad shape from all that pounding, so cycling was the only thing that really made sense.

So anyway, I was trying to figure out where I could get a bike. Road bikes are expensive machines, and like cars, it's hard to know who to trust and where to start. I live in the Volker neighborhood in Kansas City, but somehow was unaware that there was a new bike shop right up the street from me. Not knowing my ass from my elbow when it comes to bikes, I figured I'd try Volker Bicycles, you know, to support the local neighborhood businesses.

I go in there right before closing around the Fourth of July of 2008. As soon as I step in the shop, my phone rings. It's this lady I'd sort of been seeing for the better part of a month. She tells me she doesn't want to see me anymore. Fine. Fair enough. Over and out. I've got other things on my mind. I hang up and meet a gentleman at the shop who months later I would discover is named Colin. He asks me if he can help. I tell him I want a road bike, but don't know what kind to get. We chat some and he tells me that a steel bike is a comfortable ride and can last for up to 30 years. Sweet, that means I won't have to buy another one until I'm 56. I end up choosing a 2008 Jamis Satellite and pick it up a few days later.

Over the course of the next several months, I start learning quite a bit about cycling, thanks in no small part to hanging around Volker Bicycles and getting to know its owner, Britton K., who has been much more than a little generous and helpful in getting me to launch into this hobby.

A few months after that, he asked me if I would be interested in joining a cycling team he was putting together for the 2009 season. It was an invitation I've been more than grateful for, as it has generally been a productive activity for me.

So far I've raced about 11 races for Team Colavita/Parisi Coffee and had some average results but have had a lot of fun and met several cool people along the way. It's sometimes frustrating to talk about bike racing with people, particularly ex-runners I know because there's really no similarity between the two sports whatsoever, despite assumptions to the contrary. I also had this illusion that after having some success in running, I would automatically pick right up in cycling. I couldn't have been more wrong. There's definitely plenty of work and practice to do.

Part of that for me is starting this blog. I've attempted to blog before, but have mostly failed. I launched one a few years ago when I was living in North Kansas City, but took it down when all my posts about my mundane life started boiling down into political rants, which can get me in trouble with my job. All this blog really attempts to do is give me an opportunity to track my own racing and training, and perhaps give a few people a perspective on racing if they're so inclined to read. And it's good practice for my writing, which I generally like to do.