Tacchino Course: It's Up And Running!

I know a lot of you in the 'cross community will check here to get some intel on the Tacchino Course at Rosaryville State Park. Yep, there are some day-of spots still open, so go get directions to the course and race times, then get out early to register for your race if that's what you're doing.

The weather should be lovely, mid- to upper 60's by mid-day, with a funk band, food vendor, sausage primes, equal (and good sized) payouts for men's and women's elite races, and a course...

Well, the course has something for everybody, as a lot of people who pre-rode it noted.

There is a long fitness test of a slog up a bumpy grass false flat.

There are a couple hills you can rock if you keep your speed up but which will suck the ever-loving life right out of your soul if you don't understand flow and momentum.

There are several handling challenges where, if you over brake or fail to steer smart, you will be gapped.

There are a couple downhills that require cold-cup-of-coffee-at-4:00-AM courage, to put it mildly.

And there is a set of twists and turns around the pavilions and fans that will cause you to simultaneously get dizzy, hyperventilate, smile, and wonder what kind of sick sadistic bastard laid the course out.

The other comment we got from other teams that pre-rode, is that "it's a typical Tacchino course." By that I think they meant it is fast, has some handling challenges, and is physically very difficult. It won't be DCCX difficult, where you just get knocked on your ass quickly and stay there, it's more like the course toys with you and keeps hitting you just hard enough to knock you down, but not out. You can recover just enough between the clearly recognizable sections of the course for it to not feel bad about kicking your ass again in the next section. "You really want to get up, little man? So be it..."

I hadn't thought about how the Tacchino could have a common of character over a period of years despite different promoters and course designers and different venues, but I guess it's true. There's sort of a Coppi attitude about what makes a good cross course and most of us gravitate to it. We tend to try to take advantage of the natural law of the land, eschewing gimmicks in favor of taking the challenges that the venue throws up for us. We don't throw in gratuitous curves, but value momentum, courageous handling at speed (ask everybody who slipped out last year about that), and in tight spots a linking of the corners and a discoverable good line that a mountain biker would recognize as flow. There's always at least one good fast line through any feature we build in, sometimes two, forcing the rider to make a tough choice. It's very fair, but it's very, very ****ing hard.

It's funny how that happens. We aren't consciously trying to design by that philosophy, it's just what we seem to like to ride on in a cross course, even though it is patently unsuited for quite a few of us who will race on it. Maybe that attitude is at the heart of amateur racing itself - few of us will ever be paid to race, but we love racing, and know good racing when we see it, and given a chance, know how to make a good race.

As a promoter I take comfort in knowing that the race is bigger than me or any of the promoters that have promoted it and designed the course in the past. It tells me that we're striving toward some objective notion of The Good. Either that, or we're uniformly bad and just don't know it, in which case ignorance is bliss, and if we aren't enlightened we are at least very, very happy.

Anyhow, the secret intel I will give my readers about how to succeed on this course is:

Take up mountain biking and start doing lots of threshold intervals. Preferably by last June, if not by last April.

That is all.

Yeah, You Know What This Is...

Key to course map:
A. Protected area. Stay off the tall grass. There is a trail through here between the parking areas and registration. Stay on the trail.
B. Parking areas. Marshals will direct you.
C. Start / Finish
D. Registration
E. Food, band, spectators, barriers and pits are all in or adjacent to this pavilion.
F. Bathrooms, preferred team parking, and wash pits, if needed.
G. Playland playground, for kids. Or small immature adults.
H. Place on course where your suffering will be at its apex.

Friday Fun Time

First, how 'bout a little cyclocross course? This is pretty close to what the Tacchino is going to look like on Sunday.
I added the graphic of the rider throwing up, to reflect reality.

---------------------------------------------------------


Time for some music? How 'bout The Killers, Somebody Told Me?



I like that song. It's not great, it's just good. But good has a lot going for it.

Along the same lines, I've always liked the B-52s, Private Idaho. Works on a lot of levels. Me? I'm living in my own private West Virginia. Picks me up, even if it is about one friend telling another that they are a dipshit.




Nice. I think that ages well. So will this one. Please allow me to adjust my pants, so that I may dance the good time dance...

Just Because

"Then, I Peered Into The Eye Of The Behemoth
As A Great Wave Smashed The Vessel"

That picture is of The Most Interesting Man In The World, Sting, in case you were wondering. No, really.

And this is what a bicycle-riding circus bear looked like after test riding the Tacchino course yesterday:


Okay, maybe we shouldn't have made that 180 degree chute quite so hard to navigate...

Register now. Pre-reg closes at Noon on Friday.

Phew!

Been working pretty hard this week getting the Tacchino together, and doing some work at my actual job. Things have gotten incrementally more stressful there and between that and the Tacchino, I'm racking up the non-fitness-helping TSS points. Still, every once in a while, there's a glimmer of fun.

Here's Bill Schiecken with yet another excellent video of a cross race. Yet again, my fat ass is co-starring, at least for the first 4 or 5 minutes. As for Bill, he threw his chain on the start, got held up behind me, then finished on the podium. Not a terrible race, eh?



I did cross practice this AM, sort of. I rode a few laps, one or two at okay speed, nothing special, just hanging onto the tail of the group speed. The Redline was in the shop getting some orthodontics put in, so I was riding Das SurlyPanzerKampfWagen, rigged single. Not ideal for our practice course, particularly on a day when my legs were blown from Monday's longish ride (w.t 90 minutes of subthreshold work) and yesterday's big ring low cadence hill repeats. The sore legs with the stress from all the other crap basically meant I was mentally toasty, and although the legs maybe could have gone harder, my mind sure couldn't have. Still it was great to ride with my pals. They always make the day better, even if it's 40 degrees and the dew has made my feet wet and super cold.

Anyhoo... we're up over 300 registered racers for the Tacchino, and still growing. If you aren't pre-registered yet, get after it, people. I think the M4 race may sell out, and the 3/4 35+ may well break 100. Tremendous showing, folks. Thanks for making this promoter happy; and I hope that my club can return the favor and make you guys super happy too.

Tomorrow is course layout day. KenBob and I will be touring the fields with the groundskeeper, cutting grass and getting the basic layout put together. It's going to be a good one folks. Reserve your spot now.

Stuff

Been a little bit busy this week, puttin' together a little festival we call Il Tacchino! Little bit of stress at work too, refinanced the house, the usual stuff. I could use a break.

But I've been thinking... Aren't douchebags nominally human? If you cut them, do they not ooze both blood and hair product? So when will somebody stood up for the douchebags?

Well, douchebags, apparently, that time is now.

We Are Douchebags - watch more funny videos

Speaking of which... I'm not usually one for touting middle eastern modes of justice, but this story was interesting. The headline: "Saudi court upholds child rapist crucifixion ruling." Hmmm... So what's the deal?

A Saudi court of cassation upheld a ruling to behead and crucify a 22-year-old man convicted of raping five children and leaving one of them to die in the desert...

I don't know what a "court of cassation" is but I suspect the the only thing standing between that term and the literal truth about such courts is a missing "t".

So what was the sentence that the appellate court upheld?

tying the body of the convict to wooden beams to be displayed to the public after beheading.

Wow.

I don't know about what you guys think, but I'm amazed that the Saudi trial court decided to show such leniency.

All Hallows Cross CRP: Giving Cross the Finger

All Hallows is a new event put on by PAX Velo in Hughsville, MD, just a few miles south of Waldorf. I had to go down there yesterday anyhow and made the decision to race the night before. I had no expectations of doing anything grand. The training workload is getting done, but between work stress, re-financing the house and race promoter stress, the Training Stress Balance is underwater, even though the legs are fresh.

At first glance, the course wasn't very impressive, involving a lot of tape in an open equestrian park, with a straight ride through a sand jumping arena. Follow the course around, however, and it leads to a Back 40 comprised of a lot of tractor path double track, and a twisty, rooty wooded section that rivals the more interesting bits of mountain bike trail at nearby Cedarville State Park. The twisty section had serious flow; you could hammer it at full tilt without hitting the brakes, providing you were the kind of person who is comfortable riding little mini-berms, looking for lines well ahead of schedule, and using trees as berms elsewhere. Combined with the open meadow half of the course, the course seemed really nice.

As the C's rolled out, it started to rain, alternating mist with a steady drizzle. The course was already wet, and the fresh rainfall would add quite a bit of squishyness to the front half of it, turning a 100 yard uphill slog on a squishy hill into a 100 yard uphill slog in partial mud. At 10, the Masters 3/4 rolled out with a field of perhaps 50 riders. The uphill grass start was a bit of a PITA. Since I was rolling casually, I didn't bother scrumming for a decent position on the starting grid, but just went as hard as I could from the back.

I kept contact with the long string of the pack for most of the first lap, until the string started to shred. Bill Schiecken apparently dropped his chain at the start, but caught up with me just past the barriers, and stayed there for a bit, so my fat ass will feature in yet another one of his excellent cinema verite vids, if the editing works out and his camera was on. Bill passed me going into the woods and I managed to stay on his wheel for much of the rest of that lap, until the mud hill anyhow. I picked a bad line near the top and ground to a halt, with the rear wheel spinning and had to run 10 yards and remount. Coming through the sandpit I flashed a Rock & Roll hand gesture (I was wearing a KISS jersey. It was Halloween. so no lectures, please...) and didn't pay enough attention to my line, so I immediately stacked it. A few people passed me there. Then something cool happened.

I've heard this axiom that gaps in cross never close, they only open. That has usually been true for me. However... once I got past the second set of barriers on the back of the course, and into this long section of slippery sweeping turns and tractor path, I was able to gap people behind me, and close up gaps to the people in front. I closed a huge gap on a guy in the really twisty section, despite the roots criss-crossing the trail, a 35% corduroy surface. In front of him was a string of several riders all holding a wheel pretty closely. I saw Bill or maybe one of the other Arrow Velo guys up there. I was back in contact with a group that had dropped me. This was simply amazing.

Would it mean anything at all to you if I said I've been dropped from a group in cross, but in three+ years, have never caught up to a group? My inner monologue was voicing the axiom about gaps and laughing like a maniac at that point. The guy I caught was getting gapped himself, however, and when we approached a little sandy uphill turn, I decided it was time for me to make a move on him, and maybe try to jump into the middle of that group, which was moving at an unacceptably slow pace through the woods. (Yes, the mountain biking is paying off in cross, bigtime, that such a move was even a possibility). So I stood up, launched a brief sprint and went rocketing past the guy on the left. I kept on the gas intent on closing the 20 feet to the group really quickly, to carry momentum and maybe get into the middle of it.

Unfortunately, I was on tubulars. This was a bad thing because the tubies just don't hook up as well as the clinchers do at comparable pressure. I think the cloth sidewalls aren't as resilient as rubber, so when the weight comes off them - like during a standing sprint effort - the tread takes longer to bounce back into full engagement with the ground. Whether my theory is valid or not, tubies are slippery under me when I sprint, and what happened next was sheer horrorshow.

As my front wheel crossed a forearm-sized diagonal root, the front wheel slipped out from under me in a flash. I went down really, really hard - like massive big rugby hit hard - and landed on a bunch of roots and rocks. The pain was like a lightning bolt.

I bounced up right away, cognizant of the fact I was laying across the trail and about to get hit. I got the bike off the trail, and then doubled over and hyperventilated a bit. A guy I'd passed stopped and asked if I needed help - evidently it was a pretty spectacular yardsale - and I told him not to stop, it's a race, I'd be fine. Then I tried not to cry.

I took stock for maybe a half minute. I could just about stand. There was something wrong with my left hand, like a broken finger or two, and I kept shaking it hoping the pain would drip out of the fingertips or something. And I could already feel a tennis ball-sized lump on my hip. I decided to quit, but then thought that I'd paid same-day registration fees to race - $20 plus $10 extra - and I wasn't about to quite after 1.5 laps if I could function at all, even if it mean soft pedaling in.

So I hopped on the bike and pushed off, only to realize my chain was derailed, the derailer was in the rear wheel and the chain was munged up between the derailer and cassette, and my STI's were clogged with mud and pointing inwards. So I hopped off, and using my good hand, got the chain unclogged, eventually managed to get it back on the big ring, and gave the derailer a tug. It looked lined up okay... we'd see if it worked. The STI's moved back into position with a few good punches and with a squeeze of the brakes it was possible to flick out most of the mud and leaf bits. While this was going on I lost maybe a minute, maybe two, and several people passed me. Not good!

Remounting, it appeared I couldn't really grip the bar with my left hand. The forefinger and thumb worked and the palm was okay to lean on but bending the ring finger and pinky, and to a lesser extent the middle finger wasn't really an option. So I rode up the hill and onto the course like I was gripping a tiny cup of tea, pinky extended. Very classy, very proper, not teddibly practical for riding over roots.

Aunty Mavis Demonstrates the Proper Method
to Grip The Handlears With a Broken Pinky

So at that point, there's only two players left at the table, me and that cyclocross course. It's eyeing me nervously, sweating a bit, trying to look cool. I have no idea what cards are left unflipped, haven't even looked at them, but I'm glaring at the course. It's now personal, and I'm going to beat the course, or go bust trying. I've taken this big stack of chips, and pushed them to the middle. Now we start to flip the cards.

Coming out of the woods it didn't take long to pass back the guy who most recently passed me. I got him on the ride up to the mushy hill. Up ahead of me on the mushy hill, quite a ways up, maybe 50 yards, I saw a tall DC Velo rider, a 55+ racer, I think - James ____? It was a big gap, but maybe I could get him before the end of the race. Figuring he (unlike me) knew what he was doing, I watched his line as he spun up the soul-sucking hill, doing the same thing except mashing it about two gears higher. This closed the gap to about 20 or 30 feet by the time he turned the corner to ride to the sand pit. Coming out of the same corner, I did a standing effort, closed the gap a bit more in the sand, hung it out in the turns onto the start/finish straight, and passed him going up the hill. This wasn't a huge accomplishment in the grand scheme of things, I've got maybe 20 years on the guy, but I've usually been a fader in cross, not a strong finisher - here I was recovering and moving faster. Maybe it was some anger, maybe some adrenaline. Whatever it was, it was working.

The DC Velo guy tracked me pretty closely past the barriers but when we got into the double track, where I could rail the slippery turns and hammer through the woods, he was gone. I cought another guy in the woods, and then had a big gap to my front. In a haze of pain and anger, and positive surprise about this new ability to go faster and close gaps, I just kept my head down and kept grinding, losing the concentration only for about 10 seconds at one point before noticing some slackness, and recovering with a quick standing sprint out of a corner to get the speed and effort level back up.

I was alone from there until starting the last lap. Heading up the finish straight, a cluster of fast riders emerged from the woods. They would have been about a minute or 90 seconds behind me. I wanted more than anything not to get lapped, so I got after it hard from that point on, redoubling my efforts. That caused a few interesting moments. With the rain continuing the corners were really slick, so each corner was risky. I nearly had a second really hard crash in the woods, since with nobody in front of me I was carrying a ton of speed and sliding all over. Then it was out of the woods and into the field, and the guy I had passed right before crashing was maybe 75 or a hundred yards up, turning onto the muddy hill right as I started up the rises to get to the turn. I thought, "there's the carrot" and got after it as hard as I could.

The thought process at this point was pretty funny, the same mindset I go through on hard intervals. "It's two minutes to the finish. I can do anything for two minutes. It's all out until I pass that guy." When I turned onto the hill the carrot was about three quarters of the way up it, and mashed for all I was worth, taking the 55+ rider's smart line. When the carrot turned right off the top of the hill he was maybe 40 or 50 feet in front of me; too far. Coming out of the sand, the race leader caught up to me and asked for a line. I let him take it and told him to go get that next guy. If I was going to finish -1 on the results, I didn't want to be alone, I wanted the carrot to be there too. Coming into the finishing straight, I did a standing effort on the short downhill into the sketchy turn; carrying speed would be important if I was going to catch the carrot. Hitting the tape as I slid around the turn I noticed the carrot was still *way* ahead of me and it didn't seem I could close the gap but I put my head down, shifted up a few times, and went as hard as I could anyhow. I kept my head down and passed him about 6 feet from the line.

Maybe this wasn't an awesome result on the final results. For all I know, it's possible that I was staving off DFL in my class and narrowly avoiding DFL'ing to the 55+ guys. But some things happened that were really positive that really pleased me, particularly after last week's debacle at DCCX. For one thing I've *never* been able to close gaps and bridge in cross, but I was doing that yesterday, finding a way to do it (mainly on bike handling - do I have some aspect of cross I'm strong at? - and grinding not so hard but more consistently than usual). Second, I took some injuries that in the past would have knocked me out of a race but overcame them yesterday. Finally... maybe there were some glimmers of hope coming out of that race. Cross is funny, it takes away and sometimes it gives. Last week, it got a pound of flesh, and I wanted to throw the bike into rush hour traffic on Rock Creek Parkway. Yesterday, it gave me a bit of hope.

The tennis ball-sized hematoma on my hip and the fingers dislocated yesterday are an unpleasant reminder about the race but as I discussed last week, a big part of this is about progress, and the progress will remain after the fingers and hip heal up.

Other Coppis had nice races too, particularly Andrew, who took the 3/4 race, and Steve, who distinquished himself as usual in the M-1-2-3 35+. Not sure what Jeanbean did but I bet it was good. As usual, it was great to see my teammates and friends, and good to see PAX Velo out there with a promising new course. Keep the double track guys - it makes the whole course interesting.

My All Hallows race, in a nutshell:

Friday Fun Time

First off, if you haven't pre-registered for All Hallows Cross... well, it's too late. But it's not too late to hustle your butt down to Waldorf for some Halloween Saturday racing fun. Nah, I didn't register either, but if this nasty case of the leprosy clears up by Saturday AM, I'm definitely racing. I'll probably race in costume - not sure if I want to go as Superman, or a nudist. That's probably a race day call.

I noticed a headline on my newscrawl today, "French Pedophile Trial Fuels Castration Debate." I'm not sure if it's really fueling debate, or just throwing another log on the fire.

Slate.com, the online mag for all Right Thinking People asks, and answers, the question: "How Bad Should I Feel About Taking Hot Showers?" The answer? Pretty fuckin' bad, as it turns out, you Earth-molesting sonovabitch. (Newscrawl: Stinky Bike Racer Taking Post-Cross Race Hot Shower Fuels Castration Debate.") In fact, the article makes it clear that if you wash your goat smelling ass using any sort of liquid materials at all, be they hot, cold, or lukewarm, that you are personally responsible for the death of multiple polar bears, who are tall white hairy people who famously get trapped on icebergs because as we all know polar bears cannot swim. In fact, here's a picture of a polar bear drowning, probably the result of some Earth-hater having washed his hands after having a poo. The proper way to shower, apparently, is to get a little damp, turn off the shower, then lather up and go get dressed and go to work. You should jog or take public trans to work so that your sweat will rinse off the suds. Um, make sure there's no cleansy phosphates in your soap either... they contribute to inappropriate algae growth.

You May Smell Good, But
She's Going to DIE Because of You!

If you don't have anything in your life that causes you to hate yourself, be needlessly worried and ultimately conclude every other living creature and perhaps some mineral deposits would be better off if you were dead, Slate's Green Lantern column provides plenty of arguments that will have you finding some self-hateworthy shortcomings in no time, providing a handy reason to lock yourself in a closed garage with the Prius running.

Oh wait a minute... that idling Prius isn't going to help you shuffle off this mortal coil now, is it? It doesn't actually idle so that old standby method of saving the earth by expending yourself won't work. Told you you shoulda gone with the BMW.

I shouldn't pick on people for trying to be green but when we're discussing how washing our Balzac in ice cold water is going to save the Erf, it's hard not to have a reaction in that direction. There once was a country where people said all sorts of crap about the necessity of taking cold baths and their public discourse centered on micromanaging private, small areas of one's personal life like how much sex to have or whether to have kids and how many were required for the health of the nation. We now think those people were insane, prudish, repressed, and obsessed with scientific and medical quackery and their social attitudes are, for the most part, a punchline to us. That country was Victorian England. We're acting just like them, but with a few different obsessions substituted in, plus our imperialism is a lot more half-assed and benevolent. Yet I've seen some articles this week from supposedly reputable publications that make me think we're heading back in that direction and perhaps I should counsel the Wife of Rouleur to cover the piano legs lest the dog become aroused, and when she has to see another Smiling Bob commercial, to lie back and think of England.

Should the Earth be culled of humans as the Guardian suggests? I dunno, maybe. But the question about whether we've gone stark raving nuts about this stuff is something to think about when you're strapping on your hemp chastity belt tonight before bed.

What? Lo, do I hear a complaint? Why yes I do. Some reader thinks I am being mean-spirited and obtuse. Maybe the Earth-cullers are going a little overboard, but their suggestion of genocide is well intended, not like my denialist hoots of derision.

Indeed I am being mean. I find it increasingly hard to be a responsible, non-insane, conservation-minded person. I believe in minimizing our impact to a reasonable extent, but the idea of ice cold and sub-minute showers is enough to turn me into The Deacon. This Erf saving stuff is turning into a contest about how much guilt we can make ourselves feel over imaginary sins. C'mon, people. Some of us have done that before and you don't want to go there. That's called "being raised Irish Catholic." Trust me, if you're going to be Conspicuously Green, the kind you want is the Authentic Green and not the ersatz secular emerald article. And if you have to go green, why not Irish Catholic? We who were raised Irish Catholic are permitted to eat meat (except on certain Fridays), drink beer that makes us belch all sorts of earth destroying methane (except on evenings when we've drunk all the beer and have resorted to Jamesons, which is methane emission, but not DWI free), and we are permitted to take long hot showers (longstanding British government propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding) (and no Bashing the Bishop while you're in there, Patrick...) Plus we get a promise of salvation in return for our guilty feelings, whereas all you get for making a donation to the Sierra Club is an annual membership and a flood of subsequent fundraising letters.

So you want to forget about that crap and have some straight up fun? How 'bout some NSFW fun? Check out the Whitest Kids U Know explaining how Abe Lincoln really died. Seriously NSFW (bad language). I mean really, really NSFW.



I have to give some mad props to Friend of the Rouleur James K. who recently turned me on to local band Clutch. They are kind of good. Check 'em out.

This first song, Electric Worry, is a good intro.



Before you hear the next one, check this out, by classic Chicago-style bluesman John Lee Hooker. Haw haw haw haw... Boom boom boom boom... And that looks like Donald "Duck" Dunn playing the base. Sweet.



Hey, did that John Lee Hooker song sound kind of familiar after Electric Worry? You can almost see the lineage. Now check out Neil Fallon of Clutch doing something similar with a classic sort of blues song, Regulator - puts me in mind of Sonny Boy Williamson.




And here's a song that I can only describe as an antidote to the Jonas Brothers. If you need to wash their filth out of your head, crank this to about 127 decibels, grab a bottle of Knob Creek, and... well... just sit there. It'll knock the Jonas Brothers right out of your head, along with algebra, memories of the ex-girlfriend who set fire to your concert T-shirts, and a lot of Metallica's newer stuff.



Thanks James K. Appreciate the tip.

And have a good Friday and a nice weekend, all y'all.

I'd Do Business With This Guy

If'n I was in the market for a used double-wide anyhow.



The ad suggests an interesting philosophical question: is authenticity still authentic when it is knowingly ironic? The subtext of that ad contains an entire meta commentary about mobile homes and the folks that live in them.* It's a wink and a nod to customers - 'we know you live in a mobile home... doesn't mean you're dumb - in fact we bet you're smart enough to understand this witty commercial - all it means is you live in a mobile home.'

The video about the making of the commercial is pretty good too.

And while I'm on the topic of commercials - check out this video from Casual Adventures. They're a locally owned outdoor outfitter that is providing nifty swag for the Tacchino Ciclocross. We're super pleased that they are supporting the race, but even happier that they made this funny ad.




Speaking of the Tacchino. . . You don't want to miss out on the racing, the great food, the Ommegang ale, or the band.

Yes, I said "the band." Rockville funk outfit Gallons to Ounces will be there to inject a bit of funk in your trunk. They've agreed to funk the place up for your riding and viewing pleasure. Pretty sweet, huh?


So go register for it.




*Full Disclosure: I never lived in a mobile home because, at a point in my life when I had that choice, I went for a feral cat-infested slumlord tenement instead. Shoulda gone for the mobile home.