Unholy Rouleur

Moment of Zen

2011-11-29T20:05:00.000-08:00

An oldy but goody.

This is a .50 cal. The projectile makes the round trip b/t/w the gun, a steel target 1000 meters downrange, and the shooter's ear protection. Out and back, and if it'd been an inch to the right homeboy would be dead or breathing out of a tube.

Danger close with the .50 cal is anywhere within earshot - and some places out of earshot. Pretty hella sick invention for a pacifist mormon dude.

Public Service Announcement Involving Your Junk

2011-11-16T18:53:00.001-08:00

Fatty's recent post on Power Faces, and the strain & hurts that come with riding real hard, put me in the mind to post a Public Service Announcement on a very important topic: how not to blow a testicle with an internal firehose gout of misdirected urine as you ride a mountain bike.

I ride with this guy, Earl (not his real name), who is a really nice guy. He's a faithful family man, devout Christian - in the good good way, not the Jimmy Swaggart send-money-for-hookers-and-blow way; he's a strong triathlete, a real straight arrow, and strong like an ox on a mountain bike. What he may lack in skill as a relatively new mountain biker, he makes up in sheer power and determination. He is a guy I like and generally respect, and I love riding with him because he's always pretty good natured, even when the going is very tough. So naturally I bust his balls constantly. And on that same topic, bad things seem to happen to his junk while riding.

Earl had suffered from significant pain all summer from "stemming" his Robert "Purple Guitar Neck" Johnson really hard on this epic ride we did in July. So it's not unusual to see him grasping his ham & eggs with his face showing a mixture of moderate pain and deeply philosophical thoughtfulness.

Then a couple weeks ago we were going out for an early AM ride with the Diesel, the Beard, Smooth Sven and some other folks, and as we were strapping the lights on Earl mentioned that he had to go see the doctor a couple days earlier.

Earl had noticed some unusual lumps on his testicles during a regular self-exam. Unlike everybody else I know, i.e. all my pervy friends, when Earl says he checks his pants yarblies regularly due to a family history of cancer, and not just as an excuse to Juggle The Boys, I believe him. Shoot, if I had a family history of cancer, I'd be locking myself in the bathroom twice a day just to, um, check. Not that I'd be using that as an excuse to fondle myself or nothin'.

I think Earl was having some trouble peeing too, and other unusual pain in the Hobo Bag. You know, beyond the pain you get from ramming your junk into a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 20 MPH. (Official Thomson Advertising Slogan: your bike will break before the stem does. Unofficial Mountain Biking Reality: so will any part of your body that hits it).

So Earl went to the DownUnderOlogist, who did the requisite 'ow's yer father?' on him. Earl was sure that he'd be referred to another NetherRegionOlogist for a consultation about testicular cancer, but as it turns out there was an innocent explanation for the lumps and peckerwreckage, besides his predilection for slamming his stemmage into his stem at 30 MPH.

The doc asked Earl if he'd been "lifting something really heavy lately." Earl hadn't, but he told the doc about bashing his Wedding Tackle off of a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 40 MPH. he also mentioned something about doing some really gnarly climbs a few weeks earlier on our rigid singlespeeds, stuff that takes a maxed out, full body effort to clean. It's like deadlifting on the bike, and sometimes your hands hurt, the knees get tweaked, the forearms burn, you burst blood vessels in your eyes, get twinges in the arms and the lower back, and you get the very unsettling feeling that somebody is removing stitches (without cutting them) from some unspecified locations in your gizzard. So Earl told the doc about that and the doc asked a few more questions. In particular, he asked whether Earl had been riding on a full bladder when he made these exertions.

As it happened, Earl had been doing so. Unlike the rest of my reprobate friends, who are probably in a state of near collapse from dehydration due to constant boozing and other forms of dissipation, Earl stays well hydrated and sober, drinking the government-recommended six to eight glasses of water daily, and an extra glass or two on hot days. Nor does he take joy in pissing in public; he holds his water until it's possible to discreetly offload. In fact it’s amazing that he tolerates us because he’s fundamentally moral, sane, well-mannered and tasteful. In other words, he’s completely freaking nuts.

The doc was relieved to find out that Earl drinks a lot of water and regularly rides with a full bladder.

He said that under a severe strain, urine can be forced down the wrong tubes into the testicles. This causes inflammation and pain in the Asparagus and Broccoli, and that sort of thing was completely consistent with Earl's symptoms.

That, and slamming his junk into a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 60 MPH.

The doc said that this is a fairly common condition, but I suspect he only said that to get Earl to stop crying.

So as it happens, when Earl makes a Power Face, it is only a prelude to super-pressurizing his bladder and blowing the stuffing out of a ball valve in his kidney plumbing. Earl's superhuman climbing efforts are obviously fueled by shifting urine around at high speed, in the same way that you could get a Chevy Nova to go real fast by rolling hand grenades out the back window and having three of your fat friends sit in the back seat and rock forward and back in unison. Yeah, it'd go fast. But it would be mighty tough on area around the exhaust pipe and possibly even damage the whole back end.

Earl is now undergoing treatment with various drugs that are fixing the problem. He can even ride a mountain bike again, but the doc advised him to make sure his bladder is empty when he rides. Apparently, if he doesn't do this, his testicles could blow up just like balloon animals, except they wouldn't be as much fun.

So when we ride now, I stop about every half hour remind Earl to go water the trees before he blows a testicle, shatters a bladder, or pulverizes a pipe. Contrary to what you might think, I don’t remind him about this constantly to bust his balls. My goal is solely to help Earl out and make sure that he stays in peak condition.

I don’t do this just for the Lulz. I do it, because I care so much. Seriously. You people know me better than that.

New Horizons

2011-11-10T18:32:00.000-08:00

I'm still buzzing a little from the Singlespeed Punk Bike Enduro at the 'Shed last weekend. Riding up there - and getting broke in with a lot of super strong folks on singles - pretty much blew me away. There were more rocks than I could have imagined. Given that rocks and hills are kryptonite to my weak-ass Superman impression, I was over my head pretty much all day. It was good though. I spent most of the spring and summer pushing my limits outwards just a little bit at a time. Each ride usually had a little feature or two where I stretched just a touch. By diving so far into the deep end in the company of excellent riders, most of whom ride the 'Shed constantly, I had to stretch hard all damned day. No crashes, even rode decently in a few places. A couple times, on some very long twisty descents, I had to stop though - just to let my mind unspool a bit. Technical mountain biking is only a little bit difficult physically. Mentally though... it's hard. It's all about reading the trail, processing your options, picking lines, and putting all those inputs into context using the feedback that the trail and bike are giving you.

"Skill" on a mountain bike does have a physical component to it, but it isn't really a physical thing. It is mentally being able to process all the inputs, make good choices, and to be able to adjust on the fly dynamically as the bike slides or the trail throws you into different places or as trail features get closer and become clearer and more detailed. Each time the bike or trail adjusts your trajectory, the thousand little calculus operations performed by your brain have to be re-run to reflect the new angle of approach. After a while this becomes mentally exhausting and on a twisty, rocky trail strewn with babyheads, sharp rocks, logs, drops, trees and tight turns, you can feel the formulas and vectors backing up in your head the way the keyboard buffer on your old computer would fill up when you typed too fast. You have to pause for 30 seconds, let the buffer empty, then begin again with a clear head.

Mountain biking skill, in some ways, is nothing more than having ridden enough features to have built up a ready vocabulary that allows to you intuitively read the trail. A "skilled" rider glances down the trail and quickly understands how particular little chunks of the trail will ride, where the front wheel will get tossed to the left a few inches, where the rear will slide out a bit, which line looks good but will ride bad and throw the bike into the weeds, which pile of rocks looks deadly but actually offers three or four good angles of attack. I am not a skilled rider.

I'm looking forward to riding some rocks at Patapsco tomorrow. Should be a lot easier in a lot of ways than it has been in the past. The flowy easy bits will seem exceptionally easy in comparison to most days.

It's good to blow through your limits once in a while. It opens up new horizons. I'm definitely going to make it a priority to spend more time at the 'Shed and Gambrill.

In honor of Joe Whitehair and the whole crew on the SS Punk Bike Enduro, Watershed Edition... Have Some Punk.

A Lisa Salerno Fb comment put me in mind of this one.

The Minutemen are a band that just doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. RickyD was playing this on the boom box during the ride and I immediately recognized it... So nice. A little chunk of the mid-80's in the middle of a very tough ride. So comforting.

This is a pretty good song too. I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it's tight.

Then you got Black Flag. I have no idea why I liked this so much at the time, but I really likede it. It's possible that as a young man I had some issues with rage.

I liked the Ramones a lot too. They had a different sort of energy, a little more upbeat.

Then there's one of the more underrated punk bands of all time - the Dead Kennedys. Listening to these guys now, I realize that they are really tight musically. This song is a pretty good example of it. Looks like they were 25 years too early for the Occupy movement, but a bunch of dudes who toured in a van would have fit in better with (upper middle) class warrior protestors than that rich cockroach Zack de la Roche.

They weren't just transgressive. The DK's had a fine sense of humor, and they were pretty happy to skewer political correctness wherever they encountered it. In addition to Penis Landscape - a scatological album cover (then insert) for their Frankenchrist album, they came up with this little video - an all midget version of Rawhide.

Yeah, that's a tall glass of WTF right there. Here's something that's a little more conventional, and a version of a classic song that fits the amped-up version of Las Vegas that we're familiar with.

There is other good music lurking around there in the punk movement. Seminal garage punk / psychobilly band The Cramps were pretty good. I think that most of the early rockabilly stars would have been surprised to find a groundbreaking punk act relying on their stuff. But hey, you get good music where you find it, and you shoudln't discriminate against genre. If you like it, you like it. Be happy.

You know who they remind me of a little bit? These guys:

Wait, am I saying The Trashmen invented punk? Maybe. And I have The Authorities on my side.

Maybe Dick Dale had something to do with it. That California surf music scene was pretty dynamic. It's really not fair to call it surf music - that ghettoizes it. The influence of songs like Dale's "Nitro" was much more widespread. You see the roots of LA punk, speed metal, hardcore, all sorts of modern musical forms in his driving guitar riffs.

And check it out - a 1960's version of a mosh pit.

And with that I'm outta here.

Draw Your Own Conclusions

2011-11-04T20:13:00.000-07:00

You're grown ups. I don't need to tell you what to think. Draw your own conclusions.

Bread and Circuses

2011-10-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

So first the glorious life of a promoter. I spent some time tonight sorting out emails and getting an accountability of who is owed T-shirts. A bunch of folks failed to pick their pre-paid shirts up at my race. The T-shirt guy may have lost accountability of some, and in either instance some fucker lifted a dozen of them. Nice. So anyhow this is all a mess for a dozen or so people and the losses come out of the club's pocket, or at least half of it does, and we need to make some additional T-shirts to hook up a number of people who bugged me afterwards for shirts. The fuckin' headache that these shirts represent is incomprehensible to me. It's something I spend more time on, for less gain in terms of improvement of the quality of the race, and the profits are functionally nil once I'm done making up for theft loss, and cutting checks to the racers who are now apparently ueber pissed at me for getting T-shirts stolen and not mailing them or whatever after they failed to make the pickup while they were at the race...and now they want refunds and I suck.

I told you it's glamorous.

So anyhow, on to other professional items.

I noticed some comments from a prominent New England crosser ranting on Twitter last week about one of their races not getting UCI C2 status, while the Nacht van Woerden earned top tier status. This struck him as unfair.

If you aren't familiar with it, they raced Nacht van Woerden last Wednesday. Loosely
translated, I think the names mean Night of Scaring the Shit out of Pro Crossers. The course is largely semi-groomed, ill-lit singletrack, where the racers have to bomb out of the groomed grass and light into ill-lit drops terminating in sharp 180's at full speed. The pros find it scary as hell, but sort of exciting. Daphny van den Brand (sigh...) nipped Helen Wyman in the women's field, and Sven Nys took the men's race (with Jonathan Page in 7th).

Then Sunday they raced the SuperPrestige Zonhoven. Zonhoven loosely translated means "like storming the cliffs of Utah Beach except sandy-er and without being raked by machine guns." If we amateurs could recognize 6 nutty features via streaming media, then you can bet there were a dozen heart stoppers on that course.

There's huge irony here and maybe some bitterness as we in the US are reaching for technical excellence, as the Europeans, even in the C2 and higher races, are reaching for circus-like spectacles. So why is that? Why all the insanity in top tier races, when we have technically excellent races that can't get a comparable level of UCI sanction?

I have a theory that this is a bit like what what we faced in rugby about 7-8 years ago (roughly 7-8 years after the sport recognized a full time professional tier). It has to do with growing the TV market, and how that warps decisions about what is permissible, and impermissible on the field of play. Bear with me here.

At the top tier domestically in the U.S., semi-pro clubs with maybe a handful of scantily paid chaps, the refs were damned pedantic about what we did at the tackle - the ballcarrier goes down, then has to release the ball immediately. We didn't get a lot of slack.

How you're supposed to behave at the tackle, in the "ruck," is explained here and demonstrated with crystal clarity:

Notice how fast the ballcarrier puts the ball out once he's on the ground. That's what is expected at the lower level - tackle, set, release. Just fast like that and a failure to get your hand off the ball toute suite results in a quick penalty. That is exactly how the laws of the game are written.

Now watch what a pro can do in an international test match, and focus on what the Welsh player (in red) does at 13 seconds, and how long he takes to produce a set ball:

First, the Kiwis (in black) do a really good job of producing cleanly set ball, real fast. But then did you notice that the Welsh player goes down on the ball, regains his feet, is in the midst of contact, goes down again, and then the ball seems to roll back over 2-3 seconds, and Wales maintains clean possession of the ball? Did you also notice the result of that "cheating" - that Wales were able to launch a scoring attack?

Why are the technical standards looser on the pros - where you'd think tech standards would be tight - than on amateurs?

Treating some top tier events differently under the same set of rules creates different modes of play, and some of those modes of play are more telegenic than others. The amateur style ruck, with quickly set ball, is often disorderly. It is scrupulously fair - and it's a damn sight harder to hang onto the ball because a quick "set" often means the ball is bouncing around and not really still on the ground. It's hard to mount an attack when the thing you need to move and throw and chase, will not hold still long enough for you to place hands on it. In contrast, allowing the player a few seconds to place the ball back in a "continuous motion" permits the tackled ballcarrier to carefully set the ball, resist initial efforts by the defense to steal or poach the ball, and it leads to a more organized, neater, and more effective offensive attack by the ballcarrier's team. And scoring.

So WTF? Where is this going?

It's pretty simple. In allowing the top tier players to "cheat," the officials help create a product that sells well on TV, and to casual fans who aren't as hung up on the rulebook as serious fans.
More telegenic, of course, means more pleasing to the crowd. Allowing slack standards at the ruck is the kind of idea, like the proposal to eliminate offsides penalties in hockey, aimed at convincing casual fans to watch and get invested in the sport. I know a fair number of you are hockey fans, but can you imagine regularly watching 12-10 hockey games? You probably can't, but a lot of casual fans might find it pretty interesting. Purists wouldn't like it but maybe it would draw in more casual fans looking for a diversion, who aren't wise to a more traditional 2:1 defensive battle. In the search for telegenic sports action, the rules aren't the only thing that get crushed. The NFL has singlehandedly destroyed proper form tackling with it's high impact shoulder charge "tackles" and the NBA allows traveling in direct proportion to the marketing power of the star who is walking with the ball. It's all about the Benjamins...

That brings us back to cyclocross.

I suspect that part of the motivation for some of the crazy, mountain bikey features in top level cross (as in these two races, or the whoop-dee-doos at Ruddervoorde) is that perhaps top tier courses feature some unfair, spectacle-creating aspects to create interesting visuals that televise really well. Of course part of the deal is that when you have the best racers in the world collected in one place, you need to have a somewhat selective course - but that only explains basically hard courses, it doesn't explain gimmicks like the 60 foot sand dunes that caused tons of spectacular (but basically safe) endos at Zonhoven or the insane night riding at van Woerden. What explains them, is the need to create a scene that is a little different from the ordinary amateur race vista, to engage the fans and build the business of the sport.

Bart Aernouts (U-23 winner at Nacht van Woerden)
Struggling Through The Ill-Lit Places

Pauwels Makes Like Superman
at Zonhoven

That's my theory anyhow. There could be really petty reasons or maybe substantively good reasons that technically excellent US courses get the cold shoulder from the UCI while technical nightmares in Europe get warmly welcomed into the brotherhood... but it sure looks to me (an admittedly ignorant, total outsider) like somebody is taking TV marketing into consideration.

Some Random Music

2011-10-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

Appropo of nothing... The Rev. Horton Heat with one of the better rockabilly / metal mashups. Very clever lyrics here.

Tom Waits has more cool in his cigarette butts, than any of us have in our whole selves.

Oddly enough, that lead to this:

You Don't Know Jack

2011-10-20T21:21:00.001-07:00

Ultimately, we don't know jack about what's in another human's heart. We can think we do; they can share stuff with us and we can feel at home with them. But we just don't know what's in the heart's dark corners. I've recently come to grips with a couple of my own dark corners; I can talk about them now. It's not the end of the darkness in me. There are some places you don't want to go. Shit, there are places I'd rather not go right now. The dude that lives in there ain't so pleasant. But sometimes shining the light into those little corners makes us feel better. Maybe in doing so we can help out a friend and let them know they aren't alone, that others have struggled with something like they are facing. Then again, maybe it's a huge buzzkill for the share-ee.

You just never can tell. So if you're one of the friends who shared a deep-dark with me this week, or if I unloaded some of my load of venom on you... thanks for being a part of the week, I owe you one.

Here's a good secret.

There used to be a really great band out of Syracuse called Little Georgie and the Shuffling Hungarians. It is probably the greatest blues/jam ensemble you never heard of. George Rossi featured on the keyboards, and as I recall they had an interesting assemblage of guys and sometimes gals who would play horns and other instruments and provide swinging background vocals. Think Blues Brothers, but without all the comedy. They used to play around the northeast a bit, maybe got down Cajun way (there's a major Syracuse/Cajun connection for some reason...see, e.g. Benny Mardones). I also seem to recall them having a sort of regular gig at Styleen's Rhythm Palace, a place comparable to the Black Cat Club in D.C. or Chapel Hill's Local 509, just more locally focused (more like 509). They weren't cut out for fame & fortune; they didn't fit an easy record company mold. I think they'd do a lot better now with the iTunes Store... but there's no way of knowing.

Li'l Georgie has been out of circulation for a while. I don't know what his deal is but I miss his music badly. He's just good for the soul, right? But lately, it looks like maybe he is going to come out of his cave and share his considerable gifts with us. Gary Frenay - a NY pop legend - has talked him into playing a show at the Auburn Theater on November 24th. Funny, I'll be in the neighborhood around then... I may have to catch it.

[UPDATE: through the magic of Google-fu, I located Li'l Georgie. Here's his blog, and here's the story of what happened to him b/t/w the early Y2Ks, and now. Damn, he's had an interesting life in music; and I'm glad he's playing gigs again. I'll let you know if I hear about any albums.]

So here's what you missed if you never heard Li'l Georgie play on his first go-round, right after the band stood up:

This is what the band sounded like in barely-rehearsed, early, guitar shop-show form:

So-so video, mediocre sound quality... but you can just tell, cant you? If you're feeling a little Doctor John there, I'm with you.

There's a little bit of soul in this impromptu piece recorded a few months ago - maybe there's hope for a full time working reunion?:

Here's what George sounds like now - not sure where this is but he's getting the pump primed for sure:

Damn that's good stuff. And here's a good audio-only sampling. The Ballad of Li'l Georgie may be the best thing on here, but it's all good.

If you like that, there's a lot more here.

So not all my secrets are a buzzkill. Have fun this weekend, and if you're going to be racing cross, I *strongly* encourage you to legit freakout, and Unleash the Fury!

Watch more videos on Cycling Dirt

The Hoogerheide Constant

2011-10-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

A few years ago checking out World Cup or SuperPrestige Series CX results, Hoogerheide probably, I noticed something funny. A bunch of racers finished without a time. Or (-1). The best racers in the world were getting their asses lapped. Or pulled. Or maybe they weren't being scored. WTF? If that can happen at Hoogerheide, how can we escape it locally?

I've talked a little here about what we've tried to do with the Super 8 to address scoring and pulling problems. In discussions with promoters around the country, as well as with some of the top local officials (and in their discussions with top national officials) we identified some best practices that can help make the scoring go smoother, result in few lapped riders, and fewer pulled and non-scored riders.

So one thing you will notice is a lot of the Super 8 courses ride long. Pros / Cat 1's can expect to ride 8 minute laps on a lot of them. Cat 4s - not the sandbagging few guys at the front riding 9's but the mid-pack - can expect to ride 9:30's. Now this is not guaranteed - on a dry day you may ride faster; on a wet day slower; and some courses, despite being 3.5km for whatever reason will give you a 6:30 lap, while some 2.5km courses will yield a 9 minute pro lap. But the general rule is longer course, fewer scoring / pulling issues. It's easier for the officials to see who is coming by when they are all spread out, and on a long course, there is less pulling because there is less lapping. It's practically utopian, right?

Well, not exactly.

The long courses seem to come with other problems that we're seeing right now.

We heard about some race length issues at Nittany Cross. That fine race had a few races that went long, causing some scheduling problems for the officials. That's not a Super 8 race but it is in the MABRA region and word gets around. One or two of the races at Charm City - another MAC race - ran a bit long. So then at Tacchino, we had a masters race that got cut short. How did that happen? I don't know, exactly. But here's what I suspect happened.

If you are an official, a key job is to keep the day running on time. It's your job to calculate how long to let a race go, figure out an average lap time, then calibrate the race length accordingly using the lap board, usually starting with 3 or 2 laps remaining.

Cross presents a problem because unlike a crit, where the riders come around every minute or two, you don't see the lead riders for 7 or 8 minutes. Meanwhile, more mundane talents are circulating the course on a 10 minute pace, with a few lollygaggers taking longer than that to get around. Figuring how to make it a 45 minute race is hard due to the lap time variability and the fact that you have few samples on which to base your judgment.

Not only that, but course conditions can change rapidly, the whole race can blow up, or maybe the tete de corse figures out how to ride it and suddenly the lap times drop or rise by a minute or two mid-race.

So it's two laps into the race, you have a 45 minute race, and it's taken 18 minutes. You are administering a 45 minute race. You figure it's muddy, the racers will lose a minute or so per lap as the race goes on. How many laps should the racers do?

How about 4x 9 = 36. That's way too short. But the back markers will be coming in at something near 4x11, or 44 minutes - except for a few who are way back, get lapped and get their race cut short at 3 laps or so. That's right on time for overall length. But it sucks for the guys in front.

5x9 = 45. But the rear guard will be coming in at 55+ minutes. That is way too long. In addition to brutalizing the racers, that only gives the officials 5 minutes to finalize scores and get ready for the next race. This is likely to result in scoring errors as the officials hustle to get the next race rolling, and scribble madly to produce a score sheet reflecting the finish of 100 or 120 racers. Or worse, 60 racers in 4 categories, which is an enormous mess to sort out.

So a responsible official, with an eye toward keeping the day on schedule - because it's just wrong to inconvenience 350 other people to keep 100 people happy, may opt for 4 laps, and cut the race short. A bunch of people get pulled after a very short race, most of the field gets 40 minutes, but then a bunch of people in the front third of the race bitch on facebook about how the promoters are screwing them out of money by selling more slots in the same time period and raking in the big money. That isn't how it's happening, but that's what they think. Meanwhile, the promoter gets bombed with emails about how there wasn't supposed to be pulling this year, or how the officials (or maybe the harried team data entry guy) screwed up the scoring in the earlier race that they left to go long...

When you get right down to it, there's a certain constant of misery that maybe we can't quite get rid of in amateur racing. This is the Hoogerheide Constant - no matter what course of action you pick, there will be a comparable number of hacked off racers. Longer laps just force a different set of unpopular decisions.

I don't know how other series are working on it; the one I'm affiliated with is having some discussions about how to cope with it. But it's clear that in opting for long courses (and other scoring improvements like left side(and sometimes shoulder) numbers, officials stands and the like, we've merely shifted the way the misery occurs. Guys are still getting pulled weirdly, mis-scoring still occurs although in a different way, a few of the races have been too short, and the world remains imperfect. Complicated scoring systems are unworkable, chips only work until they don't - and then you're reliant on a failed piece of technology and your whole results spreadsheet is worthless. And even at the best event in the country, some folks didn't get scored right this last weekend,that's with one of the best scoring teams in the country.

I think I've identified what we're up against.

I submit to you that there is a number - the Hoogerheide Constant - which is the lowest non-zero number of racers in an event who will feel screwed by the race length, pulling activity or scoring. My theory is that you can improve race management a lot, but you will never run a race that has fewer unhappy riders than the Hoogerheide Constant would suggest.

I suspect that other race series in the area are working on dealing with this; grass roots efforts like the Sportiff Series should be able to address it really well because keeping the scale of the race manageable simplifies scoring and the officials' race management duties. Big race series like MAC and increasingly the MABRA Super 8 will have a larger array of problems just by virtue of numbers of racers; there is more ability variance (and lap time variance) in a 125 rider field than in a 70 rider field; and recording all those numbers each lap is roughly twice the work in the larger field. But no matter how small or large the race, I suspect that nothing can eliminate the race management issues faced by promoters and officials. If it happens to pros, it will happen here.

The Hoogerheide Constant: you can't beat it, you can only hope to contain it. And that's what we're working on. Keep griping - respectfully please, not dickish accusations of profiteering - but keep griping because it lets us know where the problems are that we need to keep trying to fix.

Tacchino Video

2011-09-27T02:57:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty good representation of what the Tacchino looks and sounds like.

If you want to know what it feels and smells like, you'll have to race it next year. I think "pain" and "sausage" would sum that up, but as somebody who was raving about this year's edition of the race told me, "I can tell you about it, but you kind of have to be there."

Racers and volunteers - thanks for a great day!

Rouleur Tested

2011-09-12T19:46:00.001-07:00

I got an invite a couple weeks ago to try out Appalachian Outdoors.com. They've been around for quite a while as a retailer in State College PA, as Appalachian Ski & Outdoors. I hadn't heard about their website, so when they sweetened the invite with a $50 gift certificate - providing I was willing to write about the experience - I thought I'd give it a shot.

I browsed the site quite a bit and found it to be a nice online retailer of a range of outdoor goods - think REI or a more sports-oriented LL Bean with more brands, and you'd be on the right track. It's not directly bike related; mostly it's "outdoor" gear, active wear, camping gear, clothing for men, women and kids, and so forth, with some bike-friendly stuff (like hydration packs and base layers) included in there. Much of the stuff was at more or less retail prices, but a lot was on closeout or a substantial discount. Ordering was pretty easy, and I ran up a nearly $50 bill on a new 50 ounce Camelback. My current hydration pack is wonderful but it's a 100 ounce pack with day-pack-like cargo capacity, and it's heavy and hot. I need something for 2 hour rides on hot days, something that doesn't add too much to the heat and doesn't upset my balance on the mountain bike. And man, did they ever have options. I found a nice simple one in black, and ordered it up. I had to pay for shipping - the $7 exceeded the cost of the gift certificate - but hey, who cares. It's a free Camelback, right?

So far, so good. Nothing spectacular.

Then a day later I got a call at home. A nice lady called me, and asked that I call her back about a problem with the order. So I did, and got some nice personalized attention as we tracked down what had happened. It seems I fat fingered my credit card when I entered it, and the card didn't go through. We sorted that out, she straightened out my transaction, it went through, and I was off to the races.

The Camelback arrived a couple days later and it was just what the doctor ordered - a tiny pocket big enough for a multitool and maybe an energy bar, and a small hydration pack that doesn't upset my balance. *Perfect*.

So let's run down that list. Lots of products, some of them at a nice discount, some at retail; a fairly easy to use web interface (that I still managed to screw up, my bad there); fast shipping, and friendly customer service that bailed me out. The only potential downside I saw is they have sooo much product, so much diversity of choice in some products, that you need to look around carefully to make sure you're seeing all the options. For instance, they offer an astounding 75 hydration back packs - and that doesn't count the lumbar packs and the other hydration alternatives. Realistically, that's only a downside if you have trouble choosing your product; personally I enjoy wallowing around and looking at a lot of products, and finding *just the right one* for my needs.

It was a pretty good experience overall, and Appalachian Outdoors will go into the rotation of retail sites that I check out when I need some outdoor gear.

Maybe some of you folks who have lived / worked in State College PA have some experiences with them and could add your thoughts in comments.

Holy Cr@p!!! It's Cyclocross Time!

2011-08-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty busy getting together that Festival of cyclocross-type activities and affiliated silliness that is locally known as The Tacchino. Seems we're going to be the September 25th opening act for the revised MABRAcross series, now known as the Super 8.

You're probably wondering about the Super 8.

What's so super about it? Well, cripes, I dunno. What if you could build a series that's big, but small enough so that every race mattered? And what if you could get the promoters to commit to doing a bunch of hard things to make the race day experience better than it's been in the past? And what if you based those initiatives on what the promoters *know* has to be done, and on the results of a rider poll in which the riders told us what they really want done?

The Super 8 races will have minimum prize lists for the elites roughly 3 times what the old minimums were. There will be better amenities for the racers and spectators. Yeah, that's right - we're getting graded on whether we have enough bathrooms, food other than cold hot dogs, smooth running registration and scoring, and things to do for the kids *other* than play in traffic.

There's going to be some changes in the substantive parts of our races too. We've been talking to people on the west coast, people in New England, and people in between and you to find best practices to handle our growth and these are some of the things we've come up with. There is a strong focus on better scoring and race management to make registration, the start grid, scoring and finishing smoother. Remember all that anger last year over people getting pulled, sometimes in an arbitrary way? Well... we're doing things with course design in the Super 8 to alleviate that problem with uniformly long-riding courses, paying more money to bring in top tier scoring judges, and working on procedures to ensure everybody, even the pulled, get scored if they do it per procedures. You'll see quicker podium scoring, and team representatives working with the refs to make scoring, and redress of errors, smoother.

This doesn't happen by accident. We - the promoters - have been working with the officials over the winter and summer to figure out how to handle the big fields in a way that results in everybody getting scored, fewer people getting pulled at bad times, and so on. The spring we mostly spent drinking heavily and riding mountain bikes, in case you were wondering.

And God bless the officials. They've been with us in this project and have put in a lot of time, to put the racers first. Local official majordomo Jim Patton has been very instrumental in putting this together, and he is orchestrating the importation of officials who work top tier events, in the hopes that with enough hard work and expertise we can smooth things out. You guys need to buy him a fish dinner...

There may even be a little experiment with chip timing which, I assure you, is not going to solve the scoring and pulling problems despite what some of you think, and it may even come with it's own problems. But we're taking a serious look at it to see if it helps alleviate some of the issues that have arisen. Please bear with us as we work with you to figure it all out...

There's probably also some wonderment about the class structure this year. Here's the deal.

We looked at who are racers have been, what races they register for, and how we're likely to continue growing. Our center mass racers are male cat 3.5 racers who are, or soon will be masters eligible. For a few years we have packed the Cat 4 and Cat 3/4 races, and a lot of the Cat 4s in those fields have more than the 10 races required for upgrade. In fact, we seem to have some folks who are looking to be lifer Cat 4s. This will not stand, dude.

The profusion of Cat 4s is producing a log jam in any race open to Cat 4s. We can only have so many Cat 4 fields, and if we don't move some people out soon, the influx of new riders is going to make it really unpleasant trying to register and race for Cat 4 races and Cat 4-heavy events, see e.g. 35+ 3/4. Soooo... we took a very hard look at the racer demographics, and figured out that our center mass races really ought to feature Cat 3s, and that the Cat 4 races should really be true beginner races, as the "C" races were a few years back.

Thus you'll see two pure Cat 4 races this year - M and W 4. They are both labeled "beginner" races, they are to be just over 30 minutes in length for most racers (consistent with much of the country's treatment of Cat 4 and past C race history), and we hope they will be an amenable home for new racers, comparable to Cat 5 on the road. We also hope that if *you* have done your 10 races, that you upgrade to Cat 3, or at least move to the 3/4 or 3/4 Masters. Those will be 40 minute races and we're viewing them as the Joe Lunchbox races. There are also two L'il Belgians races during the day, so Junior can double up, or just race one but in a time slot that is compatible with mommy or daddy's race day schedule. Women will also have a 3/4 race to go to, and hopefully the much larger prize list encourages our local elites, men and women, to come out in better numbers.

We also broke out the Masters a bit more, making 1/2/3 races for 35+, 45+, and 55+. This is a bit of a leap of faith - we're counting on experienced racers, some of whom have over a hundred events under their belt, to cat up to Cat 3, and to sometimes race in a less crowded field. Sure, you're probably not going to win a 1/2/3 race as a Cat 3. But were you going to win the Cat 3/4 race or the Cat 4 race? I'm not so sure. What do you get from catting up? Well, a beatdown from Dave Weaver and Blair Saunders for one thing, but we're working to make sure that lapping doesn't necessarily equal pulling particularly in smaller fields, and you'll be in good company with the beatdown. Other than that, if you choose the 35, 45, or 55 1/2/3, you'll get to race in a less crowded field, with a lower risk of getting pulled and a much improved chance of scoring series points and podiums. Series points go 25 deep kids, and we're awarding series prizes in most of the major events at the end of the year to 10 deep.

Holy crap, did I just say that out loud? Yes I did. There's cash on the barrelhead for those who get good results in the series. Now there's some positive incentive to get out of the super crowded Cat 4 and Cat 3/4 fields, and get into a less crowded field and go points hunting, and hit all the races.

We even put together a SingleSpeed class, for the freaky-deaky among you who don't want Jack & Coke, but would prefer to swig CX whiskey straight out of the bottle. Yeah, I'll be in that class getting pounded, all year.

Is this perfect? No. It won't be. But we're consciously working to make it better and after this year's reshuffle, we'll look at what you racers did, and what your feedback was, and adjust accordingly.

So that's what's going on with the Super 8 series, at least from my perspective. Alll the promoters of the MABRA races you love most, are working very hard with the officials and our insanely generous sponsors, to build top quality local/regional races that serve the MABRA community. We're not interested in going UCI and being super focused on the elites, though we think the MAC has a great series and we'd love to see a lot of our racers graduate to the elite competition the MAC hosts - that's why we've beefed up the elite field cash purses. We support those of you with the goods, and the desire and drive to move up. We're super stoked that there are now three grassroots series with races within 90 minutes drive of D.C. It's essential for 'cross's continued growth that there are local races with low barriers to entry for promoters and racers; the more the merrier. But our mission is in the middle ground. The bigger races in the Super 8 have the ability to take cash flow and big supportive velo clubs running our races to provide a lot of pleasant amenities for all the racers, from grassroots to pro; and to build courses and big fields that are fun for Joe Lunchbox to race in, but also help the front runners move up to local and then regional elite competition.

Got that? We're not trying to compete with anybody other than ourselves, and we'll consider it a win if the technical standards are better than last year, and you have more fun through our improved amenities.

More on the Tacchino in a day or so.

Hello Blog. It's Me, Margaret...

2011-07-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

Been busy lately so not much blogging. Busy with good stuff.

Looks like The Tacchino, your favorite bike race and sausage fest, is going to headline the revised MABRA series, the MABRA Super 8. We'll be kicking off the new season on September 25th at Rosaryville State Park. There will be more cowbell, and for those who have had sufficient cowbell, there will be Duvel beer, some hard core racing, a couple new masters classes, and a new SingleSpeed class! Wooooo hooo! The singlespeed class is a series championship class, SS Cat 1-4. Some big fans of SS among the promoters fought for it, so all of y'all who think One is Enough had better support my "Ray... if you build it they will come" efforts, layin' it on the line for you.

Yeah, that's work putting that race together, but I've been having fun too doing some riding. For instance:

TOT 78: Half Tour de Patapsco: A Hard Day In The Saddle

TOT 79: We Sleep All Night and we Ride All Day

TOT 80: Good to See Toaster McBabyhead Finally Ditched His Inner Tubes

TOT 81: Mountain Bikers Hit Coffee Shops Too. They Just Don't Glam It Up Though

TOT 82: Flensed

TOT 83: Fairhill. Got My Ass Kicked So Bad No Picture Could Do It Justice

TOT 84: Sometimes The Best Part of a Ride is After

TOT 85: This Is How I Treat My Bike (The Flenser) After Rides No Wonder It Hates Me And Throws Me Down Frequently

TOT 86: My Smelly Kit Must Have Weighed 15 Pounds After a Sweltering 90 Minute Ride With Sven & W

TOT 87: Hitting Rosaryville Early. 49 Minute Lap - PR

TOT 88: Recovering After a Road Ride; Pre-Nap

TOT 89: Slipped Up. No Picture.

TOT 90: Sunrise in the Woods: The Prettiest Sight

TOT 91: Happy Birthday To Me!

TOT 92: Flat Tire, Lost Skewer Nut; No Worries, Beats Working

TOT 93: Liberty Jam Turns Out It's Not Possible to Ride an Like a WUSS in Hiking Boots

TOT 94: First Intervals of the Season, 3x 5 Minutes at L5+ Eased the Pain With Americanos

TOT 95: Hill Repeats Then Down This Sketchy Trail
Oh, I Used My Feet, Plenty

TOT 96: Short But Climby Route Today
Legs Hurt and May Beg Off Tomorrow AM

So that's what I've been doing. Y'know, in case you were actually wondering, for some inexplicable reason.

New Horizons... Tour de Patapsco

2011-07-05T18:14:00.001-07:00

On Sunday I fell in with bad company and rode the Tour de Patapsco, or half of it anyway, from the Eastern end of the park out to the Western end at the McKeldin Area, mostly on dirt. It was a hell of an adventure. The distance wasn't that long, only about 23 miles, but there was a lot packed into that mileage. The goal is to stick to dirt as much as possible, whether the dirt is an IMBA-spec, bench cut length of smooth flowing singletrack, or a muddy straight line bushwhack down a 60 degree grade, slipping and sliding and trying not to lose your footing as you roll your bike with your right hand and hold onto tree branches with the left.

Joe Whitehair has a pretty good discussion of the TdP here. It is fair to call it a Big Boy ride. You don't have to be a great rider or super fit to do it, but you probably need to be in pretty decent shape and have at decent, intermediate level skills, and perhaps most importantly good judgment about what you can, and can't do at any given level of exhaustion. The up and down is pretty much constant, there are a lot of steep hills, a lot of the downs are a little (to very) sketchy, and the rider has to make some tough judgment calls. There is quite a bit of hike-a-bike, even if you're strong and climb like a goat. You need to pack more food and water than you'd expect. A one-way trip is a solid 4 hours. Two ways, 7 if you're real strong and don't have any mechanicals, 8-9 for mortals.

What are the tough judgments? Here's a sample. "Do I ride down this super rocky, nasty grade that I think I could just about make, or take my lumps and walk (like those two guys who are super strong MTB racers). "Am I comfortable riding on this railroad bridge to get to the next trail section? There's no much bailout here." "That is one tall, slimy, off-camber log. Should I ride it or just do a quick dismount and hop?" "Hmmm... what's a good point to ford this river?" "Am I willing to cut across a piece of (maybe) private land to avoid a 200 yard bushwhack?" "Do I have enough food?" And, "I have a borderline mechanical failure here. I think I can make the bike last another 3 hours. Should I keep riding or bail out?"

In short, you have to be self reliant and understand that your actions have consequences that will stretch pretty far into the day. It is an adventure ride, not a loop around well groomed trails. Along with the downside risks, comes commensurate rewards.

We started the day by leaving my truck at McKeldin. A few of us were trying this for the first time and as intermediate level riders knew we were potentially weak links in a crew that included three very hot local expert MTB racers, and a few *extremely* strong guys who had made the trip a few times before. *Extremely* strong as in "ride up hills that are difficult to walk up." I think five of us were NooBs, with one of the NooBs also looking to be a super strong rider. So my worries set in early that I'd be a huge drag on the group. (Full disclosure: I am not known as a strong climber).

It wasn't bad from the start though. We headed out from the CCBC tennis courts with about 13 folks. Off we went on Santee, then down NuCharcoal. We had to stop for a brief tire valve-related mechanical, then continued on over to Hilltop via Sawmill, then out onto the road, turning right on the tarmac (instead of left down toward Buzzards) and making a left onto a disused looking stretch of singletrack. That took us down to the creek over a bunch of logs and through some terrain resembling the river below Nuns - but I'd never been here before though it was clearly in the Park. From there we came out into some fields with some nasty gravel up downs, thence into tall grass. We skirted a farm, pushing up and down through grass and a powerline-like climb, and onto some singletrack. From there we dropped down onto river, then quickly up Old Frederick and left into the woods again. There was a tough gravel climb, then some mushy bench cut trail that I kept sliding off, then down a steep rocky / slippery face, onto the Trolley Trail in Ellicott City. From there it was up the river a ways, across a little wood bridge, across a damn, then hike-a-bike up a log-strewn trail to Oella; then back into the woods and climbing again into some nice neighborhood double track, where kids had made some jumps.

One of our number split his frame at or prior to this point and had to abandon. From there... well, it gets hazy. I recall a long climb, a steep descent among powerlines, JN almost getting run over by a big doe, another long powerline climb, then a whole bunch of singletrack. After a bunch of up-down, we rode a long singletrack descent down to the river near Rt. 40, just East of the Hollofield Area. After making our way across the temporary bridge, we bushwhacked up to a small trail, then up from a river overlook up steep stairs, and a steep climb to a pavillion with running water. After a nice break, we took off down the park road, under 40, and onto a lot more single track climbing. Once on top, we traversed the ridge, and headed into a steeply wooded area. Everybody had to roll bikes with one hand, and grip trees with the other to get down to the railroad tracks area. We then rolled maybe a mile on the heavy rock fill adjacent to the tracks, before crossing and cutting upwards yet again.

This was pretty tough for me. I'd brought the geared bike, which was a good choice, because on some of the really long climbs when I was tired the near-granny gears offered a nice bailout, allowing me to keep moving and also recovered. I was generally - maybe 4/5ths of the time - the last guy into a rest point, but seemingly managed to blend hikes with riding well enough to not screw up the group. It was damned hard work; there were a lot of steep bits resembling the steepest bits in Patapsco/Avalon / Glen Artney, only a lot longer. The compensation is I could make up a lot of time on the downs (catching the middle of the group for sure, not JPoz or P. Miller... but still). It is a bit of a point of pride, that one of the other guys commented there weren't any weak links on the ride. I still received a lot of charity from the fast guys though, and to them I am duly grateful.

After we got through Hollofield we moved into the Daniels area and then the best part of the ride began. Daniels started unobtrusively, with a sort of mildly wet singletrack climb. It was the nice sort of climb that strikes you as a stretch of trail that would be a blast to ride in the other direction, on a bone dry day. After a long, long up, we cruised across a pleasant single and double track ridge for a while, then into a series of up-downs which could just about be rolled, with little hike-a-bike. At the end of that we hit a 5+ minute downhill run of the sweetest, most flowing single track, through what felt like a primordial forest filled with huge trees, ferns, and other ancient-looking undergrowth. This stretch was fairly quiet, fast flowing, and a sense of the magnificence of the old forest filled me. The trail wasn't perfectly smooth, there were some logs to be dodged or cross as appropriate, some drops, and some babyheads, but it was just right, it was magical. At the rail trail following that section we split up with the three seriously seriously fast guys taking off, and the rest of us boogieing down the trail toward McKeldin.

A bit further on, we forded the Patapsco, and then got into a nice flowing section of trail, the new White blazed through trail. Now some call the whole route the Thru Trail, but the park only recognizes the trail linking Daniels to McKeldin as the Through Trail. It's a nice trail with a lot of potential, a bit bumpy and a bit soft in spots, but it has huge potential because of the ribbony, flowing arcs it cuts into the hillside it traverses. It also has a couple of those long, flowing downhill sections on it, and a flowing roller coaster section that would be a blast to ride if your legs were even half fresh.

At this point I had settled into a comfortable pace with Carl and Baler, and we cruised on into McKeldin, eventually linking up with a couple guys who had gotten a few minutes ahead of us. There we parted ways, with the full TdP crew heading for the overlook and a water break, and five of us heading out, with 4.5 hours of ride time and maybe 4500 feet of climbing, and 23 miles, under our belts.

It doesn't sound impressive but it was as physically draining as a 4 hour enduro race, perhaps even more tiring as the hike-a-bike and bushwhacking added new layers of exhaustion into the mix. The guys who did the whole thing also had their share of adventures. I heard tales today about an impossible 400 meter bushwhack, and also about a tire (booted earlier in the ride) that blew out completely, necessitating an emergency visit from the rider's buddy, who also brought ice cold water and as importantly, ice cold beer. Those guys all finished the ride, with a bit over 50 hard miles behind them on the day.

In addition to opening my eyes to some new trails, the ride opened my eyes to some possibilities. The nice IMBA style trails I usually ride are wonderful, they are great basic skill builders. But an MTB can take you to a lot of places that aren't exactly groomed or couth or civilized. It can carry you on a trip to a destination, maybe even if you have to bushwhack or carry it a bit, or ride a bit of rail trail or even down a few hundred yards of railroad track to get to the next trailhead. I've always viewed a road bike as having that sort of touring utility, but it never really hit me that a mountain bike can be the same thing, only in the back woods. It's not just a toy, it's a vehicle that helps move you around to places. And along the way, there are probably some sweet trails to shred. This is like getting a free shot of Van Gogh with your tiramisu; dessert atop dessert. It's not just about the destination, it's about how you get there. And even as spinning around parks go, I think that a McKeldin / Daniels ride is going to be on my radar from now on. Those trails are too good to let alone, and definitely the equal of many of the trails in Avalon.

In sum, it was a great day, amazingly hard, amazingly fun, and something that will give me inspiration to be trained up and ready to go next summer, to ride the whole way. It's probably not everybody's cup of tea but if you are up for a hard day's riding, and something more rewarding than the typical engine test provided by spinning around the same 10 miles of groomed single track, it's worth hitting the MORE message board and asking around about routes, when people are going, and so on.

Stopping For a Drink

2011-06-30T19:33:00.001-07:00

It's been a great week of riding and looking at this past week's worth of ToT pics, it's pretty clear to me I've just about gone over to the dark side. Looks like the only time I ride on the road, mostly, is to get across it to the next patch of singletrack. I'm not complaining. Mountain biking gets into your soul, oozes on in there. You get past a threshold point with it and it changes your outlook on what riding a bike can be. Don't get me wrong - road is cool, road is the high priest of riding style, riding a bike in all its stripped down purity. MTB though is like the biking Lollapalooza with 10 stages playing at once, there's so much too it, so many different fun things going on within it at once. I'll show you what I mean.

I started the week with a nice ride with Trevormatic. Lately, he's been riding a difficult set of rocks near the Cascade Falls at Patapsco, going further than anybody else in the group. It's a pretty aggro bike trials-like move to cross these rocks up to where the water starts, and I caught him missing it last Friday.

ToT 73: None Shall Pass

Then on Saturday, we had the Family Bike Shop shop ride on dirt, doing a nice tour of Patapsco, with a couple and a half hours of solid riding time. We were out there nearly 3.5 hours though... because a brother's gotta stop when he sees a 25yard long patch of raspberries. Here's The Human Lung snorting raspberries by the handful.

ToT 74: Numnumnummnumnummmm....

Tim - an accomplished marathoner - later confessed that he plans his runs around berry patches too.

Then there was the family ride on Sunday. It was Wife of Rouleur's first trip to Patapsco, Son of's second trip. Son of tore it the hell up, learning how to cross logs and breaking his plastic bash guard in the process. Wife of had a good time too, going up the hills fine, getting over some of the smaller logs, and basically toasting the brakes a bit and stepping off the bike (gracefully) once or twice. We rode all of Rockburn Park's trails, then hit the Log/Lewis & Clarke/Cascade/Morning Choice / Old Track / Log loop, thence back through Rockburn Park. Nearing the pavilion where the cross race starts, she bonked, and could barely turn the pedals over as we limped back to the truck. Later on that night I confessed my pride in how well she'd ridden, and she expressed some embarassment over her speed. I told her not to worry, she was tired, and it takes time. "It's not that my legs were tired. It's that there's so much to process. I had to think through so much." I explained that's right, the beauty of mountain biking is it's very cerebral. If you ride a lot certain terrain features become part of a schema and the brain can process them very quickly. But until you've ridden logs, or particular root or rock configurations, thinking out a line is hard work. Then today, I was discussing that ride with Sven and he said when he first used to go to Patapsco, he and his buddies would ride for 45 minutes or an hour and think their ride was so epic, they'd be destroyed by it... So let me reiterate my pride in how my wife handled her first trip up there.

ToT 75: All This Thinking Is Making Me Sweat

Then it was a couple days off, and I did a Wednesday AM ride with YDT. We rode here and there and everywhere, mainly looping around the Howard County side of the park I think. Cleaned some things I hadn't cleaned before, kept it conversational but bombed the downhills and I tried to stay within sight of YDT - a remarkable climber - on the uphills. He cleaned Waterbars on the singlespeed despite the dampness and looseness of the soil. Dang. This view of a field, looking out from Connector, pretty much captures our mood on the day. Fabulous, relaxing ride (except for those dang little steep hills).

ToT 76: PVSP is a Clean and Well Lit Place

Then today I did the big loop with Sven and KR. Sven advertised it as a ZMC ride - zippy, mellow, casual - which means there's some efforts involved here and there. He's obviously super strong and KR is a superb climber, so I had my work cut out for me. They were charitable on the big ups but I managed to hold my own for the most part and we managed to do the big loop in just a couple minutes over two hours, and that included my stopping for a drink on Charcoal. After endoing into a creek and landing on my face in the rocks... Fun anyhow, real fun, and our average speed was 9 MPH, which isn't that fast but for a long loop w/t the Baltimore County side included was pretty solid. There's a few holes in my game - climbing real rocky hills is one - but it's coming around and it's good enough that I'm feeling less uncomfortable about being one of the slower guys in my group. Hey, when all your friends are super strong, you either cope, or find new friends. They're cool, so I don't want new friends, and my coping mechanism is to understand my job is to let them rest for a half minute at the top of the real big climbs, and then pedal straight through when I get there so's not to hinder the group. Hurts some but the progress is evident and it's more rewarding to ride with better riders than it is to ride alone, or to pick out a slower group to ride with and to serve as ego balm.

ToT 77: Sven's Zen

Bonus shot: first dirt on the replacement Monocog frame. Rides great, but it's definitely a more nippy (twitchy?) ride than the Monocog Flight.

New Bike: Redline Stands Behind its Products. Which is Nice.

So there you have it. The rides ranged from aggro, to Zen. They were all learning experiences, every one of them felt very different and memorable and unique. Yeah, I still love my road bike. But it's really difficult to walk away from the mountain bike in good weather. The road bike is a nice little gourmet treat. But the mountain bike is a moveable feast.

Now we dance.

How 'bout a little mountain music. Steve Martin steps in with bluegrass great Earl Scruggs and plays the classic Foggy Mountain Breakdown. And Paul Schaeffer damn near melts down on the keyboard. Sweetness.

Scruggs was a lot better known as one half of Bluegrass legend Flatt & Scruggs. Here he is playing another classic, Cripple Creek, with Lester Flatt.

The banjo is really an underestimated instrument. It's capable of really beautiful lyricism in the right hands. Here's one of my most favorite pieces of music. I can hear something like this in my head when I'm riding my bike and get onto a long country road, or get really flowing out in the woods alone. Yeah, I got some pretty weird earworms.

And of course Fleck's version of Copeland's Hoedown is just off the hook. Crazy. Hoedown - Copland's whole Rodeo suite - was composed for a ballet but stands on its own as great neo-classical music.

Yeah, that's the Beef it's What's For Dinner song. Figures I'd like that.

Sorry there's no nifty video with that. Damn, you could make a good rodeo vid with it... but the music is strong enough to stand on its own. No, I don't hear that music in my head when I'm riding. I'm not good enough musically to imagine something like that.

If you're not familiar with Copland, you'd probably recognize him from this piece, Fanfare for the Common Man.

Okay, and that's enough. Bluegrass to jazz to neo-classical... my brain hurts as bad as if I'd been mountain biking all week. Ride safe and have fun this weekend.

Solid Week

2011-06-23T18:36:00.000-07:00

No ride photos for this week, but suffice to say I rode Saturday at Wakefield for the Aaron Ryan memorial ride, Sunday in the woods, took a break monday, hit the commute reasonable hard on Tuesday, Patapsco after work yesterday, and nothing today. Yep, two rest days in one week... I'm takin' 'er easy for all those slackers out there. I was due a week with a couple days off so that's what I'm doing, hoping to hit it hard on the weekend.

It's been a solid week because my LBS and Redline did me a major solid. My Monocog Flight - which admittedly got rode hard and put up wet all fall and winter - has a crooked rear wheel. There's no way to get it into the dropouts, Paragon slider knockoffs, such that the tire is equidistant from the chainstays and simultaneously equidistant from the seat stays. It turns out that the sliders - the dropout portion - are shot. Instead of being nice, flat little slots through which a couple allen bolts secure the sliders, they are a couple little metallic smiles, curving up on the near and far ends.

So I've been looking for a replacement frame. A replacement for this replacement - it's already a warranty replacement bike since the first generation Monocog Flight was infamous for blowing the dropouts, and that's just what mine did. Evidently the problem isn't completely solved. Movie Star JPoz has been looking for a Kona Unit for me, I pinged Bikeman to see if they had any recommendations, and was just about prepared to spring for a remaindered bike to tide me over until I could get a really solid frame custom built (in a year or two) when my buddy Seibold, proprietor of the fine Family Bike shop, suggested we ask Redline about a warranty claim. What's the worst that could happen, they say no?

That sounded smart, so his man Tyler took some photos, spent some time running down answers with Redline, and got me to a good, excellent solution.

Turns that the slider problem is something the Flights still have, even with the redesigned sliders. So Redline is willing to warranty it for me. Only problem is, they don't have any 2011 Flight frames in stock in 19". So they thought about stripping a complete bike... but then negotiated it out with FBS and agreed to just give me a 2012 frame which will have a completely redesigned dropout. Sweet! But they won't be in until sometime in the fall. Not Sweet! But wait - they offered to send me a regular old Monocog frame, the entry level, heavy steel sucker (probably rides sweet though) to use until the new Flight frame comes in and I think they might actually let me keep the loaner. SRSLY? I don't know if it's new or a remainder or a return or whatever but that is amazingly cool of them, and yep, it makes me want to do more business with Redline in the future. Very sweet! I think Tyler or Jon likely did a lot of negotiating on my behalf, but it's mighty generous of them to stand behind their product that solidly and give a brother who is a riding junkie a hookup. My Flight has been ridden harder and more often than Kim Kardashian, and although I haven't exactly been dirt jumping or riding urban stunts on it, they would be within their rights to tell me to go get another bike and I wouldn't have complained.

The moral of the story is pretty simple. Good folks deserve your business because they stand behind the products they make and sell. This includes topnotch local bike shops and manufacturers that bend over backwards to make sure you're happy with their product. They earn your loyalty. Now it's not in the cards for me to always stick with the same brand, but Redline is going to stay in the mix for me after this. My kid will probably need a 26" bike within a year or three, my wife may want an upgraded 29'er, my friends may want to get MTBs or cross bikes. I'll be compelled to say good things.

How is the Monocog Flight to ride? Pretty damn good. It's a singlespeed, you know, point and shoot. It ups and goes pretty well, the Avid BB5s are pretty good as mechanical disc brakes go. The stock wheelset is a little heavy but the bike retails for around $900, you can't expect awesome wheels at that price. It's smooth; it eats up the bumps really well for a rigid, and it works real nice with an 80 or 100mm suspension fork if you choose to put one on. It does most things really well, maximizes the strengths of the 29'er wheel (stability, smoothness, ability to flow over obstacles) and it's hard to beat at the pricepoint. The Monocog doesn't do racy stuff - it's not a short framed racing 29'er with a 3 pound frame and super nippy, nervous handling. But it does everything else pretty well, and it's capable of being raced better than I'm capable of racing it. Yeah, I'm faster on it in most places than I am on my geared full suspension bike. Go figure. A nice, solid 29'er. Seeing how Redline stands behind it, just burnishes my impression of it.

Now for some tunes...

First, a little Scott Miller. This guy is just a damn good song writer and singer. Haven't a clue why he's not more popular. Oh wait a minute, yes I do. He writes more or less grownup music. I been drunk all around this town...

I guess it's possible for guys like that to really make it in show business. There aren't many of them though. We tend to think about Lady Gaga or Madonna as music stars. But there's a lot of people out there making a good living at playing and writing music, but they aren't the first name that comes to mind when you think of music and they certainly aren't on the playlists of any pop stations. Come to think of it, most high quality people in life aren't famous. They're just doing their local gig. And often they're far superior to people who are famous for doing the same thing. Case in point:

And some people are famous in a limited sphere, but then gone before you get a chance to really know who they are.

Some are just interesting too, in addition to being talented. Charlie Mingus negotiated some difficult questions of race when he was coming up. Tiger Woods makes a thing out of it but Mingus - in addition to maybe being the greatest bassist of all time - was the original Cablinasian. Not that it mattered; people only saw his music.

And a lot of times in stuff that's a little more obscure, you catch some stuff that's got a slice of life in it. "All you chirrets - get off the cars."

See you all on the flipside.

Week as Hell

2011-06-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

It's been a long week filled with some good riding. It's had its share of horror too.

First off, if you're an MTB'er and not a total dick, and you'd like to give a little back, hie yourself to the tennis courts at Wakefield this Saturday AM and be ready to roll at 10:30. Washington Underground Singlespeed Society (WUSS) stalwart Aaron Ryan died a few weeks back, leaving behind a lovely wife, young daughter, and another unborn child. He expired a few days after a run-in with a car, though it's not clear that the car was the cause; Aaron just dropped dead after experiencing some minor symptoms that might not have been anything. I wasn't close to him; we raced at the same place at the same time a bunch, and we had a lot of friends in common. What I did remember, after Mrs. Outlaw mentioned it, was that he had ridden in this utterly brutal day long mountain bike decathlon on a 98 degree day a couple summers ago, and while we all cooled off in Liberty Reservoir afterwards (catatonic) he decided to go for a swim across the reservoir and back, maybe a mile round trip. We were sure he'd die but he just knocked it out and came back laughing and smiling. Good guy, strong rider. The ride Saturday asks for a $40 donation to go to a scholarship fund for Aaron's kids. It's a good cause.

Second thing is I found out a friend from rugby days died last weekend. The circumstances are not clear; he apparently parked his car on Route 50 near Annapolis, and then walked in front of a semi. The cops said very quickly it was a suicide, and that got me to thinking. You know, suicide is never a smart way out. The permanent solution to temporary problems, it may be an attack on the self but it also functions as a huge "fuck you" to all your friends and family. I've been a member in a bunch of different tribes in my life - some military crews, some rugby clubs, bike racing crews - and the thing is if somebody in my crew was down and out they could take over the man-cave (which rivals a lot of Capitol Hill basement apartments), eat my food, yell at my dog, and piece it back together. I'd be there for them. And I'm not alone. My friends are solid folks, and I know they'd be a safety net for others in our little tribe. If you're down, you're out, lean on friends. You've got 'em. Don't ever even seriously consider throwing your life away. The other real problem with suicide is that killing yourself is one thing, but suicides occur in clusters. A person will sort of infect others with that mentality - so you often see suicides running in families, or in a school, or in a little community. Don't be a link in the chain that causes deaths like that. Yeah, it ends your damn problems but it heaps heartbreak on all your friends and family. Seek help. Please.

Last thing - would folks making the Lance Armstrong prison ass rape jokes give it a freaking rest for a while? Seriously. I've been on the cop side, the prosecution side, and the defense side, and I clerked for a judge for a while. I've interviewed inmates in prison, post-conviction. I get the criminal justice system. I sense that most of the people making the dumbest and most offensive cracks don't. This is like the "war geek" bloggers critiquing our troops tactics. When some lardass who has never gotten closer to the Army than playing with his GI Joe action figure thinks he knows something about what the guys in the mud are about, he's generally wrong and generally making an ass out of himself in front of people who have actual knowledge of the matters in question. Second, it's undignified. Lance may have some smarts but at heart he's just a dumb ass cheating jock - like almost all the other guys who were top 10 TdF riders in the 90's and 00's; are you willing to sell out that hard just to insult a guy that doesn't give a shit about you? It's a little disproportionate too. There's a million worse criminals than him that are going to go on to rape, murder, rob and create mayhem in their communities. Why doesn't anybody give a crap about that? This is important enough to you that you're willing to toss away your dignity in order to indulge yourself? Really?

Enough heavy shit. I feel like I just removed your finger warts with a shotgun. The week wasn't *that* bad. It was a good riding week. As usual my friends were an emotional and spiritual life buoy for me. There were some rides...

Saturday was a Dawn Patrol at Patapsco. Great ride, except I ate shit about 2 minutes into it on the wet grass in the field heading onto Nacho from Landing Road. The lower (worn in) track was real damp and I was closing a gap up to Svenstrom and BB, so I decided to hop up into the less worn grassy track, which is smooth. I was going full steam when the front end slipped out and went down hard. I thought I'd broken my leg, did a quick break check, then got back on the bike and started chasing like hell. I was a little shook up and later on my back started cramping. I also got a twinge in the lower back on a hill - I dinged up one of those muscles around the disc that bothered me last year and my back is still a bit stiff & sore. I rode okay though - managed to clean a couple obstacles I've never even attempted before. It was tough though and the full extent of the bruising wasn't clear until I was riding road on Sunday and Monday, with achy cramps in my legs and back where the worst of the bruising was. Adding insult to injury, I broke out with a Poison Ivy reaction on Tuesday. When Momma Patapsco wants to hit you, she frickin' unloads.

TOT 63: I thought a bone was broken...

TOT 64: What does a road cyclist look like?
90 minutes L2/L3

Then again, there are some days you ride, and you see God's face about you, and realize that you are created to feel joy.

TOT 65: Finding Beauty Even On A Bike Trail Commute

It's funny how you can be riding along and not thinking about the biking / picture taking project, and all of a sudden something grabs your eyes and goes, "this is it, take a picture NOW!"

It wouldn't be a good week, of course, without a couple hot laps of Rosaryville prior to work. So check this out, the Redline frame is breaking, so I rode the geared boinger. I took it real easy, just cruised. You know what my time was? 51 minutes / lap, same as if I'm going moderately hard. It's like 51 is my time at Rosey, unless I'm working very hard. But all effort levels seem to end in a 51 for me, unless I'm fixed.

TOT 66: My Favorite Stream Crossing

And speaking of fixing things... BB fixes it. Great ride at Patapsco, two flats, one near crash by Svenstrom, a near-cleaning of Ridge by Moi, and a nice time overall.

TOT 67: The 1x1 Wasn't Broke
But BB Fixed it Anyhow

TOT 68: The Fog is Getting Thicker
But Leon is *Not* Getting Laaaaaarger

Okay, I'm going to go light on the tunes here because I'm all tired out.

First off, some Dropkick Murphys, for the Broons. They earned it, and god bless 'em, they do have the best team song in the NHL.

Then this - nice soul song, hella video:

And this, which reminds me of Bullitt:

And finally, because it's tick & flea season, and you need a Kafkaesque reminder to check yourself after riding in the woods:

See you guys on the flipside.

Another Weak in the Books

2011-06-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a great week. I discovered a new kind of saddlesore. You know where your butt-tocks sort of hang over the back edge of the seat? Yeah? Well, I've got two baseball-sized raw spots there. My ass is chapped, and I'm not saying that metaphorically. The Brave Soldier didn't help so I whipped out the diaper cream tonight and that seems to be helping a bit.

Why do I have flaming red Twin Piques on my ass? I don't know. I have theories though. Many theories. First, maybe it's the fat seat on my mountain bike. Three out of every four rides for me now are on the mountain bike and maybe that fatass seat is too much, and I need a FiZik Gobi, or some hard narrow little thing like I have on the road bike. A little ass wedge that fits my pre-existing butt callouses. Maybe it's the hot weather - after 10 minutes in the woods, my ass is soaking wet, and maybe this is making everything soft and easily abraded. Could be my ass is just huger than usual, and rubbing on the sides of the seat. Or maybe, just possibly, I have some new rare form of ass fungus, a weaponized form created by Al Qaida specifically to chap my ass.

Either way it's back onto the cheap cloth-covered saddle for the weekend, (for the weak end?) and it's going to be diaper cream for a few days too. I'm also taking tomorrow (Friday) off; I've ridden for 9 out of the last 10 days and my legs need a break. I was cooking off at Rosaryville, cramping up this morning, really suffering. I realized later that it was just hunger pains and maybe some lingering suffering from last night's 100+ degree ride, but still. Even cooking off, and taking the last 1/2 of the perimeter trail real easy I managed a 51 minute lap so maybe the mountain biking thing is coming along for me. So what went down this week?

Well... I started off with a little of this:

TOT 59: A Couple Brisk Sunrise Laps of Rosaryville
Nice Way to Start The Week

Then I ran into this guy on the NY Ave Metro bridge, while waiting for Fast as Schidt Sean to come along and beat my ass on the homebound commute. He told me that he takes pictures of cyclists around town and that he got the idea from Joel Gwadz.

TOT 60: Bearded Guy With A Trailer in D.C.
Who is Not Cargo Mike

TOT 61: Happy Hour Ride w/t Ms. Svenstrom and Crew
On the Hottest Day of the Year (104 by some accounts)

Not to be confused with

TOT 10: Ride in 2 Degrees in January
Coldest Day of the Year

Wrapped it up with a ride this morning at Rosaryville, the afforementioned cramped, legs falling off general failure ride.

TOT 62: Moving at a Turtle's Pace
After I Cramped

So it's been a pretty damn good week riding wise. I'm taking tomorrow off, trying to rest the legs up a little for a big day at Patapsco on Saturday early AM, and to let the weird saddle sores heal up. Things are coming together nicely on the MTB; it's getting so that I can clean a lot of stuff I didn't used to be able to touch. The weight, it's coming off alright too, been getting the diet tuned up and trying to stick to it. I will admit to breaking down and munching a big bowl of popcorn tonight... a brief break in an otherwise pretty solid streak.

The only bad news is the Redline Monocog Flight is dying. It's the second one I've killed, and it's going down the same way - either the sliders are opening up, or the rear sub-frame is twisting. If I line the wheel up so it's straight with respect to the chain stays, it's darn near rubbing the top right seat stay. If I get it straight between the seat stays, it's darn near rubbing the left chain stay. Bummer. I've been hunting around, and have the Posse and assorted friends hunting for a Kona Unit 29 Frame in Steeeeel, 19", but if you have something cheap and wicked strong and around 19" readily at hand, let me know. The 19" Konas are in a bit of a short supply, and I'm looking for a frame to tide me over until I can afford to get a nice Moots or some similar high end supertanker built for myself.

Have a good weekend, all y'all.

What's In a Week?

2011-06-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

It all started here on TOT 53

Then on TOT 54, Toaster McBabyhead Said,
"Two Hard Laps of Rosaryville Before Work, Fatboy!"

Didn't get a picture of TOT 55. There were a few efforts.

But on TOT 56, with the first 2x20 L3 intervals of the year... Something there is, that doesn't love a wall. It's called "a mountain biker."

Someday, I'll Probably Break The Law and Ride
This Powerline Easement

Got some nice flow going on TOT 57
Still got dropped eventually. Fast boys.

Trevor took pity on me on TOT 58. Sore legs, slow guy. Still, managed to clean some stuff I've never cleaned before. We decided I'm getting to the end of the low hanging fruit on mountain biking. The gains are going to come harder from here on in.

I ride with giants... Clydesdales anyhow.

TOT 59: Son of Rouleur Cleans a Difficult Hill,
with only 1 good line on it

Weakened Report

2011-05-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

Spent a great weekend w/t Sven & Friends out in the wilds of western Maryland. I rode the Margrave Plantation Trailby Deep Creek for the first time. Nothin' to it, right? 7 miles, mildly hilly, intermediate skill level. I think if you thought "Lodi Farm" but added in "with no flat spots and typically on a 7-15% up or down grade with loamy pine needle forest floor" you'd be spot on. Nice, nice, nice trails, fairly technical (by XC rider reckoning) with some very technical options, really well marked, as if done by some people who knew what the hell they were doing. I managed to bite the wax tadpole on a downhill log that was diagonal to the trail - crashing on such logs is becoming one of my riding specialities. But the real highlight was watching the kids play, nursing a mild sunburn, breathing clean air, and counting the different ways that a large murder of crows spoke to each other. (A dozen distinct, repeated calls one morning). Evidently, people make a career of studying how crows speak to each other... who would have thunk it?

Mainly though, the weekend was sheer fun and it reinforced my belief that I am really lucky to have the friends I do.

Artist's Depiction:
Me, Waiting for Dinner on Saturday Night

#MakignCoffeets

2011-05-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

What with doping scandals a plenty, it feels like the 80's and 90's again.

Let's start by makign coffeets.

That's for my pal AnonCX. I don't know who he is, but I know he *hates* you. Let's ease on up from there.

Solid, huh? Nice mix of rap & funk, showing rap's early roots. That's so good it makes me want to bust a move.

There's a lot of good stuff in there if you need advice - better than "take her to the Holiday Inn," for sure.

"Just in case you missed it, I'm the one that said just grab 'em in the biscuits." High-larryous. Man, I used to dance my ass off when this came on - clubs used to just go ape shit. Hard to explain if you weren't there.

"So chiggety check yoself befo you wreck yoself." Good advice. And there's really only one way to wrap it up before the long weekend. Friday!

Shades Of Black, White & Gray

2011-05-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

When sitting there passing judgment - or more charitably trying to situate their acts along a moral spectrum, what do you take into account in drawing conclusions? I consider several things, including whether a rider ever (actually or likely) doped, whether they paid a price for their decision, whether they were caught doping, whether they confessed to it (before or after being caught), and what they did subsequently. Here are some cases, some drawn from this helpful reference, others from current press accounts. Understanding how I view things as a moral matter may help you understand why I'm particularly peeved at Tyler & Floyd. Seeing that I have a systematic way of viewing it, may inspire you to think about our current enforcement system, and what it is that we reward & punish, and how that system may need to be changed in order to be effective.

Consider first the possibilities that a rider faces - whether to dope or not; whether to deny or not if accused; whether to deny or not if caught; whether to become an anti-doper, or to continue on quietly (once again doping, or quietly not doping); whether to accuse others of doping.

Second, consider you you weigh these decisions. I weight the decision to race clean the highest; if a rider is willing to stay clean it has in the past been a costly decision - God bless those who hit the upper reaches of the sport and stayed clean. I consider the decision to confess use when not under coercion, and where it has professional and personal costs to be a less immoral course than denying and/or retaliating against accusers. Getting caught - well, that proves the doping; subsequent denial of it is adding lies atop the initial crime, while confession is at least coming clean after having screwed up. Becoming an anti-doper is clearly a bid for moral redemption, while turning state's evidence, while good in an honest sort of way, is often as self-serving as the initial decision to dope, perhaps moreso. Pile a number of bad decisions atop one another - dope, deny, get caught, deny, turn state's evidence - is a long decision of choices to act in an immoral and self-serving manner, whether or not any good comes of it. The decision, for instance, to become an anti-doper after being caught, is morally distinct from the decision to turn state's evidence. One decision *may* carry with it some professional or personal advantage, while the other decision - testifying to avoid incarceration - generally lacks even the appearance of altruisim. So too the difference between merely turning state's evidence, and turning state's evidence plus becoming an anti-doper. The additional act of undertaking anti-doping initiatives is an affirmative act, a thing that was not compelled to avoid prosecution.

Here are some test cases. The lettering tells you how I weigh things. Think about how you weigh them.

A. Never doped, lost professional opportunities because of it, speaks out against doping.

B. Never doped out of fear of getting caught, discusses openly that he views it as a moral neutral.

C. Doped, never caught, confessed, speaks out against doping, lost professional opportunities, post-cycling, because of it.

D. Doped, never caught, didn't exactly confess, speaks out and works against doping, may have gained professional opportunities because of it.

E. Probably doped, never caught, never really admitted it, never denied it either, just wants to get on with his life.

F. Almost certainly doped, vociferously denied it, never caught, filed libel suits or engaged in other attacks against accusers.

G. Doped, caught, confessed, became an anti-doper, has new professional opportunities because of it.

H. Doped, caught, confessed, became an anti-doper, avoided (maybe) prosecution as a result.

I. Doped, caught, denied it, shut up, went back to racing or retired.

J. Doped, caught, denied it, took others down in their defense, hit up fans for defense donations, admitted having doped but *still* insisting their dope tests were wrong or based in corruption, and making allegations against C, D E and F.

A. Danny Pate

B. Mike Creed

C. Frankie Andreu, Udo Boelts, Bjarne Riis

D. Jonathan Vaughters, Rolf Aldag, Jesper Skibby

E. George Hincapie, Sean Kelly**

F. Lance Armstrong, Stephan Roche

G. David Millar

H. Joe Papp

I. Danilo DiLuca, Ivan Basso

J. Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis

Aside from people who manage to avoid making the terrible choice to compromise themselves, everybody else is just a darker or lighter shade of gray. We should understand those shades, ponder the motivations, and figure out whether our current system is set up to drive people to the dark side, or the light.

As I see it now, it is set up as a gambler's choice - dope and maybe get caught and punished, or stay clean and certainly get punished in a practical sense, of having great difficulty reaching the top tiers of the sport. I've talked to some guys who doped; you need to understand it's not a huge choice presented with an opera playing some moody overture from an Italian tragedy in the background. It's a tough choice - you're a young rider, you're very good, you could be great. Do you want to take the bag and be a supported rider or a key domestique? Or would you rather have to fight for your contract every year and hang onto the fringes of the sport? Would you rather be staying as a guest in people's houses, ekeing out a bare living in-season and doing some ski bum job or something out of season, or would you rather be a decently paid domestic pro? It is a hard choice for them, an immoral situation thrust upon them, that offers only one - very difficult - moral path out of it. The choice shouldn't have to be so tough.

Looking at it in this analytical manner suggests to me that we need to think about how we can incentivize highly moral behavior - anti-doping, self-referral (confession) of doping, and turning attempted dopers in. Can we offer immunity to those who stop freely and subject themselves to verification testing? Would it be possible to incentivize behavior like Xavier Tondo's, who turned in the people who were attempting to sell him PEDs?

I think it could be done. It will take a mindset change at the top levels of cycling management, however, and in the grassroots. We need moral clarity, and we need to think analytically about what matters, about what behavior in particular we are trying to encourage, what we are trying to discourage, and how the current system of incentives and disincentives is set up. I would argue now that it favors the dopers who can most successfully evade enforcement, rather than those who would rather stay, or become clean racers.

As for low level racers who dope, well, you guys are just assholes. There is no justification for it.

**Tested positive in 1984 but it was determined he'd used his mechanic's urine for the test. His mechanic was on PED's to cope with the long hours of work...

TOT 51: Birthday Boys

Tyling the Floor

2011-05-22T15:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all the feedback on my ranty bit about Tyler Hamilton.

I watched the 60 Minutes interview tonight, and I'm totally won over by Tyler.

Well, except for the part where he reiterated his long-running story that he didn't dope before/at the 2004 Olympics, and that he left the sport on 2008 after his second bust (for herbal supplements for depression) because he didn't want to injure the reputation of the sport. His big confession was that just like Floyd, sure, he took dope here and there, but he never got caught for the dope he was actually doing. He just got caught on a fluke mistake in '08, and God knows what was behind that 2004 bust. This story is completely consistent with his earlier denials, except for the admission that he did do some doping but was never caught for that...

Other than that tiny fly in the ointment, he was totally credible.

Holy shit.

Of course I'm not being serious. If this the knight in shining armor that's going to save us from Lance, then we've become stupider and more naive than we were in 2001 when we thought there was no doping after Festina.

On a strictly personal level, I'd respect him a lot more if he'd actually come clean and move on but given his allegations coupled with the continuance of his self-serving (and frankly sort of laughable) rationalizations and denials, it's tough to take him seriously.

One of the benefits of being an asshole with an opinion and a blog is sometimes you get interesting feedback in email, and I've had some enlightening discussions offline with guys who have been popped for doping. The guys who have gotten popped and moved on, or done things that aren't in their immediate best interest, I've got no major problems with. I get their perspective, and although I don't forget I can forgive them what they did - granted none of them cost me any money so I have no skin in the game. But I see it as morally different.

In contrast, a guy like Tyler who is still telling the same old lies but (Now! New and Improved!) with 50% more Lance allegations, rubs me the wrong way. He doesn't appear to be coming clean about anything except for that vague admission that he did some dope once. Can we call that Floyd defense the Lancaster Loop or something, like the Immelman Turn, and just be done with it? Tyler is a guy who won't even admit to having been caught doping, who is making allegations against a guy the haters love to hate, and the serious flaws in his story in order to more deeply believe the allegations he is making against Lance. It's like we're all Agent Mulder now. The rush to embrace Tyler *screams* confirmation bias, and one has to wonder what will happen if Tyler drops some other shoe - news about an immunity deal, a book deal, or some other wheeze that benefits him.

Tyler gets double bonus points for his allegations of a massive UCI conspiracy to hide Lance dope test positives. I want to believe the UCI and Dick Pound and the Swiss federation and anti-doping authorities can be bought off for $25k... That *soooo* fits into my mildly xenophobic outlook and dislike of unaccountable international organizations. I want to believe, really. But the allegation just isn't that credible. If there is some coverup going on at UCI (and WADA, and the Swiss federation and their national anti-doping agency, and in France (and their anti-doping agency, see e.g. the $100k donation), it would be damned hard to hide. I suspect the actual truth is something simpler, and not being spoken anywhere I can hear it right now.

At the same time people I ordinarily respect and think of as somewhat rational are getting orgasmic over the Tyler and that just creeps me out; this includes one guy who is crowing and doing victory laps after being voluble three weeks ago in his criticism of the rubes who spontaneously celebrated Osama bin Laden's death.

It's getting so that it's hard to be an honest Lance Ambivaleteer these days. The baying hounds are rabid enough that I almost reflexively want to kick some of the haters in the shins and defend Lance until I hear *credible* testimony. Tyler Hamilton is only the latest example. The moralizing alone is painful to listen to, and reminiscent of the Clinton-hunters of the late '90's. Or the Bush-haters or the Obama-haters, for whom no act is without sinister motives. The latest one going around is that Lance stood up his cancer charity as a pre-emptive strike against future possible doping charges. I guess it's possible, and maybe it's possible he gave himself cancer in order to win a jury's sympathy vote at some point 20 years in the future. If you listen close, you can hear somebody whacking Occam's razor on a leather strop... I strongly suspect we will look back on this some years from now and be a little ashamed of ourselves for acting this way.

In the meantime -

Oh, what a damned mess these people - Lance, Tyler, Pound, the UCI, Nowitzky and everybody - are making of pro cycling. Some folks are cheering and thinking that Tyler is the guy who is going to burn down pro cycling, and then some pure, new version of pro cycling will spring up out of the ashes.

Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen. I suspect that what will happen, is that everybody will get soot on their faces, and then sort of keep going on more or less as before.

TOT 50: The FBS LBS Ride
The Only Dope Here Is Aiming the Camera

Tyler Shamilton

2011-05-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Tyler Hamilton writes a letter, confessing to doping today:

Dear Everybody,

I hope this finds you all doing well.

First of all, sorry for sending this out as a group letter. If there was any way I could come visit each of you individually, I would. I hope we are together soon.

There’s no easy way to say this, so let me just say it plain: on Sunday night you’ll see me on “60 Minutes” making a confession that’s overdue. Long overdue.

During my cycling career, I knowingly broke the rules. I used performance-enhancing drugs. I lied about it, over and over. Worst of all, I hurt people I care about. And while there are reasons for what I did — reasons I hope you’ll understand better after watching — it doesn’t excuse the fact that I did it all, and there’s no way on earth to undo it.

The question most people ask is, why now? There are two reasons. The first has to do with the federal investigation into cycling. Last summer, I received a subpoena to testify before a grand jury. Until that moment I walked into the courtroom, I hadn’t told a soul. My testimony went on for six hours. For me, it was like the Hoover dam breaking. I opened up; I told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And I felt a sense of relief I’d never felt before — all the secrets, all the weight I’d been carrying around for years suddenly lifted. I saw that, for me personally, this was the way forward.

The second reason has to do with the sport I love. In order to truly reform, cycling needs to change, and change drastically, starting from the top. Now that I’m working as a coach, I see young people entering the sport with hopes of making it to the top. I believe that no one coming into the sport should have to face the difficult choices I had to make. And before the sport can move forward, it has to face the truth.

This hasn’t been easy, not by a long shot. But I want to let you know that I’m doing well. The coaching business is more fun and fulfilling than I’d ever imagined, and Tanker and I are loving our Boulder life. I recently turned 40, and my friends threw the best 80’s themed surprise party in the history of the world (hey, most of you were there!). Life is good.

Again, I just want to say I’m sorry, and that I hope you can forgive me. What matters to me most are my family and friends. I’m deeply grateful for all your support and love through the years, and I’m looking forward to spending time with all of you again, hopefully soon. My Mom and Dad always told me that the truth would set me free. I never knew how right they were.

Sincerely,

Tyler Hamilton

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I've got some thoughts on it too.

Dear Tyler,

I presume everybody who raced pro in the era you came up in, raced on dope. I suspect that very few avoided it; even anti-doping advocates like Jens Voigt are cagey, and admit they came their current position because they didn't like the other path, or slippery words to that effect. Yeah, Lance probably doped. So did everybody during that period. I'm more or less over it. He's an ex-racer who runs a cancer foundation, as far as I care at this point. I don't exactly follow him, or carry a vendetta for the dirty racers of that time period, I'd rather we expend resources cleaning up cycling now, than hashing over crimes from back when UCI turned a blind eye to the problem.

Many were caught, and many denied doping during your era. Yet few attacked their accusers - including 'accusers' who weren't actually accusing but citing doping convictions, facts - with the vindictiveness that you and those close to you used. Lance, who hasn't been busted, goes around personally attacking people who accuse him of doping, making a good point - you'd better be able to make the accusation stick in a court of law. Yeah, it's bullying, but it isn't the personal attack your buddies and family launched on people, and he doesn't go around telling outlandish lies about his phantom twin being the cause of the test failures. You have been caught at least a couple times that we know about, and a few years back I remember reading in Bicycling how you used your family and friends as attack dogs to personally abuse anybody who so much as raised a whisper about doubting you, including people you had known for years and who considered you a close friend. That makes you a buddy fucker, Tyler. And buddy fuckers are lower than whale shit.

You're like Floyd in that sense; you preyed on credulous others to get them to pay for your legal defense, knowing all the time that you were a damned dirty doper. Lance is probably a damned dirty doper too, but he hasn't made personal appeals to me or my friends to pay for his grand jury defense costs, based on his "innocence."

Doping is bad enough, getting caught is worse, then mounting a 7 year campaign to impugn those who caught you, is even worse than that. Now I guess we're supposed to absolve you because you confessed to make yourself feel better, or some bullshit like that. Like the phantom twin story, it strains credulity. I'm glad you feel better; but none of us feel better about what you did or the way you treated us. Reading your story about watching Lance dope is like watching a felon on the stand implicating somebody else based on a jailhouse conversation. Maybe everybody has to go to jail here for justice to get done, and maybe it's the truth, but it's damn ugly and an honest person looking on can't trust any of the actors involved. It's a train crash. Thanks for causing it, jerk.

I got a newsflash for you Tyler: you may be telling the truth and it may make you feel better, but it doesn't make most of the rest of us feel better. Many of us wish you'd just go away and maybe help Basso with his cancerous dog, or help out Leogrande as he quits cycling to concentrate on tattoos. Maybe if Lance is eventually caught, you guys can buy an island somewhere and spend the rest of your days rationalizing what you did.

Some of us fans are getting dubious about the flunked test => confession =>anti doper metamorphosis that is so common; but please understand, even in those cases where we as cycling fans agree to not despise a confessed doper, the doper didn't just wrap up a 6 year campaign of slander and agit prop. The coverup is almost always as bad as the underlying crime; and the coverup is worse when your mechanism isn't just lying but attacking others in libelous terms.

For many years, Tyler, you were completely sanctimonious in your denials, pointing fingers at others to explain away your doping. Like a preacher who gets caught with a prostitute, or a book keeper caught embezzling, you betrayed a trust. The hypocrisy of what you did is stunning; you didn't just deny, you blamed and lectured.

In the end, I'm sure God will forgive you. Me, I just want you to go away so I can forget you and get back to watching the ATOC and Giro. Your doping was bad enough, your coverup was worse, and all the crap you're now doing to make yourself feel better or sell books or settle scores or whatever you're trying to do, is worse yet. Please, go away while there are still three or four people left in the world that you haven't pissed off.

Warmest regards,

Jim

What I Did This Weekend

2011-05-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

I was Outstanding in My Field:

TOT 45: TMR/DP/OR, PVSP

(The initials make sense if you ride, and live in Ellicott City). On Saturday, I fixed it, and got all wet:

TOT 46: Singin' in The Rain

Then I went out and caught wood with my wife, and Jon Seibold:

TOT 47: Life's Better When You Catch Wood (Fenders)

What did you do this weekend?

Minor Stuff

2011-05-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

Blogger is buggered right now and I can't post comments. A number of high profile bloggers have been knocked off line and told their blogs are spam. Joy. Gotta love Google. Their motto is, "Don't be evil." It should be appended to, "Don't be evil unless doing good is too hard."

Anyhow...

I'd been thrilled, which is to say a little more happy than non-plussed, to hear that NBC was going to bring Wonder Woman back. Bracelets of Steel and Sex Appeal... good stuff, right?

Well, it turns out that David E. Kelly's master plan, perfect for our politically correct age, involves casting a skinny version of Rosie O'Donnell as Wonder Woman.

The hot pants are exchanged for loose tights, the cleavage... well, that's obviously being faked by a very ambitious squeeze-together bra, the post-Callista Flockhart era horizontal companion to the successful push-up bra. Look, it ain't always about the boobs, but I can recognize armpit flesh being tortured into posing as boobs. You want to make her a buffed out jock chick, that's cool. But don't take a skinny pilates chick and try to convince us dudes that she's Linda Carter's heir apparent. We're dumb about women, but we can still see.

It's soooo politically correct to take the sex appeal out of Wonder Woman. Part of the deal with Amazons is they're supposed to be... Amazonian. Capable of hitting for power, and average. Making her boney, and no offense to Rosie O'Donnell, Rosie-O'Donnell-Ugly? It just ain't right. I am womyn, hear me rawr... Naaaaah.

Anyhow, the TV gods are punishing Kelly for tampering with a good thing. Turns out the NBC execs saw the pilot and refused to greenlight the show.

Which is as it should be, if this is what he views as a suitable replacement for Linda Carter and her shiny outfit.

Sure, I know I'm being crass here, but the Chippendales ain't hot if they're wearing deep sea diving suits, and Wonder Woman ain't Wonder Woman if she's not wonderous in a way that a 1960's Italian movie director might recognize. The concept is Girlie Power, not Grrrrrrrl Power. David E. Kelly ought to rot in hell for even thinking this way. No wonder our culture is falling apart; he can't even speak in the semiotic language it relies on. Plus you just don't screw with the icons of my youth, okay? Put 650b tires on a Schwinn Stingray, forget to add the lettuce hold the mayo, or put a skinny girl in Linda Carter's suit, and there's gonna be repercussions. Hear me?

Can anybody here play this game?

Painful Truths

2011-05-10T21:38:00.000-07:00

What I like about my bikes is that they tell me the truth no matter how harsh it is. I'm too weak to keep up a fast pace here and there, to fat to climb well, too chickenshit to descend well. My off road handling sucks compared to good handlers; I can't ride a skinny to save my life, stagger over logs with the subtlety of a pig humping a watermelon, ride rocks with the finesse of a one legged drunk guy navigating up stairs, cross streams like a six year old girl afraid of a monster under the bed, and destroy flowy sections with the gross incompetence a surgeon with shaky hands. Sure, I can lie to myself pretty well, this blog is often a place where I can lie to myself and others, and you can maybe lie to me too. But the bike just isn't capable of it. That is why I like it.

The bike does something else in its truth telling. It doesn't just speak to us; it actually punishes us for shortcomings. The bike tells a truth about us the way a prison sentence or a tax bill does. You may not like it, but you have to deal with it because the truth told has the harsh sting of reality to it. You cannot dodge it.

Too fat, not trained enough, not smooth enough on the pedals - your legs and lungs will burn unnaturally. Stop paying attention on the fixed gear for a minute, it will slew you into the ground like you insulted its mother. I paid for that particular mistake with torn rib cartilage and an undefined shoulder injury that took months to heal. Fail to pay attention to a tiny stump, and you may fly headfirst into a tree at 25 MPH, and have clear fluid running out of your ears and nose for the next hour, and a killer headache. Hit the traffic circle at 30 MPH as the rain starts, slip on the oil, and you will have to lay in the shrubs just off the circle for 3 minutes until you can breathe again without involuntarily sobbing. Try to ride courteous in a crit and let him pass in a place you know he shouldn't, slide in a couple inches to him into the line, and the guy next to you make take you and eight other people out for your lapse in judgment, and when you come to your fingertip will have been ground up, your sunglasses broken, and you will have a number of perforations in your body. Fail to get your ass back far enough behind the seat on a steep descent, and the bike will taco the front wheel, and drive you into the ground head first like a tack, leaving you shaking and in shock. Lose concentration on a rocky descent, and you'll hit a tree hard, leaving your hand swollen for a week, and you afraid of rocks and descents for a month.

All these are true stories. They are stories about how the bike told me about my deficiencies, how it told the truth. Occasionally, the bike bites its tongue. It doesn't tell us that we should eat shit for how we misjudged that line of rocks, it holds its tongue and lets us slip through. It doesn't always chastise us for failing to notice gravel in the turn; instead maybe it is quiet while we slide a little, and pass through the turn with just a scare. Other times, we get away with crossing railroad tracks at an angle, hitting a log just wrong, or forgetting to pedal our fixed gear. In these instances, the bike gives us a freebie... but it does not lie. The bump, the skid, the brush of a shoulder on the tree - these are whispered truths. But they are truths nonetheless.

Mostly though, the bike just tells simple truths. Screw up, and it will drive you into the ground like a nail. That's its most basic, straightforward way of pointing out that you made a big mistake. Cause & effect. Tit for tat.

One of you guys used comments to call me an insensitive prick or somesuch for pointing out that Wouter Weylandt's crash was self-inflicted.

Sure, I'm an insensitive prick.

Doesn't mean that I was lying though.

TOT 42: We Pass By Like Shadows

Wout The Hell...

2011-05-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

I've got some thoughts about Wouter Weylandt's untimely death in the Giro today but I'm not going to share them because what I have to say will likely cause a lot of pants pissing because it sure looks like operator error to me; a needless death.

The bike can be harsh; we love it because it does not spare us. It hurts our legs if we are unfit, it hurts our lungs if we have not trained. It hurts us far worse if we aren't paying attention to the road. We know this, and we love the bike anyhow because it makes us work hard before giving us rewards. The bike is the only thing we can be completely sure is telling the truth at all times.

And the truth is life is short. Make the most of it. And keep your damn eyes on the road.

All The Fits That's News

2011-05-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

We often don't think about how important bike fit is until we start to have a chronic joint or muscle problem. Corollary: if we have a good bike fit, we usually take for granted just how good it is.

My buddy Jon, owner and operator of both Family Bike Shop and the most identifiable beard in MABRA, offered me a free bike fit recently. He has been doing a lot of work upgrading the shop's appearance, and decided to offer a new service, legit bike fits. To do that, he sent one of his top guys, Tyler, and his lovely wife Sarah, off to take several days of training to become qualified to fit bikes, using the Fit Kit system. Afterwards, Sarah said she wanted to practice and offered me a free fit.

I've gotten a really good bike fit in the past. Les Welch, of the East Coast Bicycle Academy in Harrisonburg, fit my road bike a couple years ago and solved a persistent knee problem for me. He's kind of a legendary old school bike shop guy, and worth visiting. He straightened out my pedal stroke and riding became pain free (except for hills which still hurt no matter what). I take for granted what that bike fit did for me, but it in effect trained me to ride in a particular way, to be used to a particular comfortable, efficient position. More on that in a second.

I was comfortable working with Sarah because she is a friend, and in past discussions about this injury or that, she's always displayed a lot of knowledge about physiology and rehab. She is also a licensed physiotherapy assistant, and knows how to use her training to help prevent, and rehab people's injuries. With her new training I figured with her new training I couldn't go wrong.

The bike fit was straightforward. I brought my single speed cross bike, in fixie trim, down to the shop. It definitely didn't fit right; it was rigged up for cross, with a padded WTB saddle, a short stem dropped low on the steerer, and the saddle was up and forward. That works great for handling in cross, but was brutal to ride over any distance, causing immense hand pain and general discomfort.

At the outset, Sarah asked me if there were any problems. I told her about the hand pain, and how I'd start bitching about discomfort maybe ten miles into any ride. I thought it needed a longer stem, and not sure what else.

I swapped over the thin leather saddle, and Sarah had me warm up. After warming up, she asked if I wanted to make any adjustments. I did, raising the seat a few millimeters to compensate for the lack of padding, and then moving it back quite a bit to give it an effective seat tube angle that felt efficient and comfy. My hands still hurt as I pedaled the trainer. Sarah measured the incline of the seat and noted it was tilted very slightly forward. We adjusted it so it was perfectly level, and the pedaling felt fine. The reach to the bars was still crummy, however, and my hands continued to hurt.

Using the fit kit, Sarah worked out my optimum saddle height and setback on the saddle. It turns out that my adjustments on the fly, using just feel (and Sarah's brief measurement of the seat attitude) got the saddle into spot on height and setback - just about physiologically perfect as is possible with my weird physique (short legs overall / long lower legs - Mr. Setback Saddle). We may have tapped it a millimeter in one direction or the other but it was real close.

She also calculated stem length and determined I needed to go at least 10mm longer, maybe 15 longer. She got a longer stem, and it was in the ballpark. There was some weirdness up front - most cross bikes have a tall head tube, so it was hard to get the stem just right. A long stem put me too low or too high, and a short stem had me putting too much weight on my hands. In the end we settled for a 120mm stem with around a 6 degree drop, and we raised it slightly (2mm) on the steerer tube. So I'm reaching considerably further forward, and have more drop than with the 110mm stem. This required a bunch of leg and hip measurements and stem configurations, to see what configuration would allow me to pedal strong, and also to ride in a posture that was comfortable over the long run.

Sarah took final measurements and determined I was within acceptable ranges. She commented that many experienced cyclists are able to do a lot to dial in their bike fit by feel, which is what I did with the seat & seatpost's basic configuration. This was a direct result of Les's good bike fit on my road bike. Thanks Les! What Sarah brought to the process was an accurate way to dial me on things that I have no intuitive method of navigating, detecting the oh-so-slightly tilted seat, and helping work out the complex stem situation - which, BTW, can't be made exactly perfect because I've got weird shaped legs and monkey arms.

I've managed to get a couple rides in on the bike, including a 30 miler. Bike fit is always important, but it really matters on a fixed gear used for longer training rides, because there is no rest, no way to move the hands and butt and to shift posture out of an uncomfortable position. It has to be right or you will hurt badly. Sarah squared me away and the old discomfort is completely gone; it feels indistinguishable from my geared road bike. On the one hand, this is a testament to Les Welch and his old school methods of fit. His road bike fit has gotten me accustomed to having a properly fit bike, and the muscle memory that results from that fit allows me to adjust my bike to at least get the saddle height / setback pretty close to where it should be. On the other hand, other factors like proper hip angle, proper positioning on the bars and over the top tube, are not as intuitive, and little changes in stem can have a huge effect on how well your lower body is able to work. Sarah's fit is perfect for me on the fixie and I'll definitely hit her up for a bike fit in the future.

My takeaway is that it would be worth paying the money to get a fit, and that's what I'll do with the next bike I purchase. FBS is offering basic fits for $50http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, and a more extensive and detailed fit for $250.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Family Bike Shop's fit information is here.

Les Welch's information is here. Other places that have fit my friends, to great good effect, include Contes, which does 2D and 3D bike fits; and my good friend Beth Mason, who uses the Retul system for 3D bike fits. Beth is also a whip smart physiotherapist - and pro cyclist - who is wrapping up her PhD. She lives in the Southwest now but takes appointments and travels all around.

The takeaways are pretty simple. You need a good bike fit because if you don't have one, all that pedaling can cause injuries. Getting a good bike fit won't just prevent injuries, it will also train you to ride on a properly fitted bike, knowledge you will take with you in the form of muscle memory (or maybe in some notes on a piece of paper) the next time you borrow or buy a new bike. It matters to you because it improves the ride considerably. You might want to think about getting a fit, particularly if you are having some pain, and feel (or look) ungainly on the bike in your usual riding position. The bottom line is that even if you think your position is pretty dialed, it can't hurt to spend a few bucks once in a while and get a fit - and on the other hand, it can definitely hurt not to.

E-to-the-C-to-the-O-to-the-N

2011-04-28T20:09:00.001-07:00

Round two of Keynes v. Hayek:

It's the follow up to this:

Sure, the deck's stacked against Keynes in these videos but it basically explains both theories pretty decently. I tend to prefer Hayek intuitively because his theories of knowledge, spontaneous organization and the tactics of power jibes with my experiences and supports my views on the importance of individual liberties. I think the free-er we are the better off we are; but being free doesn't come free and in fact it's a harder life than one spent encompassed in a safety blanket that other people pay for and still other people manage. One of my in-laws is like this; she's been on the dole in England for roughly 30 years. Recent changes - they've run out of money for health care and the dole - have forced a lot of people to work. Sis-in-law, mortified, reports this week that her doctor has given her a clean bill of health. Most people would like that but for her, it wiped out her last claim to drawing pay out of the public till, a fraudulent disability check that she (as of next week) will no longer collect. (See, that's the problem when your doctor is a government employee, he operates according to government spending rules, and as of now, diabetes and idleness-induced carpal tunnel syndrome are no longer paying disabilities - damn those Tories and Lib Dems!) She now has to get her first job, at age 47. She is horrified about this, not realizing that actually earning money will leave her free to do things. She won't have to get permission to move from one state housing development to another. She won't need to use her money only to buy certain things on an approved list. She won't have to go to an office once every couple months and beg a government representative to keep subsidizing her. It will be hard for her, but maybe in a couple years, she'll realize that enslavement to personal responsibility - being a servant of one's self - means freedom from enslavement to others. The police won't arrest her if unauthorized people show up and stay in her house for a couple days - like one of her sons or her ex-husband. She wont be getting an endless, implicit lecture on how she is required to live delivered by a handful of entitlement benefits that come with strings attached. She will be free to choose her own course. This prospect is, of course, terrifying to her. It shouldn't be, but the extensive benefits she has received for her entire adult life have induced this infantile state of mind.

People often conflate "small l" libertarianism with Ayn Rand's paean to selfishness, objectivism. It isn't the same thing; Rand provides an infantile, convenient straw men for statists to skewer. Hayek isn't easily skewered, particularly in his advanced works, like Constitution of Liberty. He makes a critique of power and attempts to centrally plan the "economy" (i.e. humans and all their significant actions) that is based in part on his personal views as an Austrian Jew who escaped the Holocaust; and as an economist who saw informational advantage as a key to making markets work, and saw price as a mechanism by which information is adjusted and spread, while central control works as an obstacle to the sharing and employment of information. As the theme goes in the first video, who knows better how to run your life - you, or some distant person? As you guys know, I just want to be free, to ride my machine and not be hassled by the man. So natch I cling to the political economics that best support my inclinations. But then I'm a weirdo geeked out civil liberties attorney so I may be completely wrong, and YMMV. I'm throwing this stuff out there because I think the country's in a crisis, and it behooves us to try to educate ourselves about the mechanics of it, whether we're civic minded and paying attention to what government's up to, or just self-interested and trying to stay a step ahead of the jailer. You may not agree with me but it would probably serve you to understand at a fundamental level what the stakes are when pundits are talking about government takeovers of economic sectors, or deregulation of other sectors. So don't believe me or the videos. Go read the two authors whose ideas are at the heart of the controversy and make up your own damn mind.

If you sat through that stuff, and better yet if you understood it, you deserve a little non-economical non-polemical music as consolation.

And, in the interest of equal time for opposing viewpoints, RATM.

Now have some mellow, and go away for a while. Okay?

March or Die.

2011-04-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

Some of you - the three people who occasionally stop by - are probably wondering what the hell is wrong with me. The surest way to tank a blog's hit count and basically destroy it, is to not post regularly. Wellll... some things are up.

The biggest thing is that I'm not getting in enough rides. Riding is my muse, not just here but professionally. My subconscious does "work" as Dr. Freud would say, while I am riding. When I am not riding, my subconscious doesn't really focus.

The second thing is that a lot of stuff that I'm thinking these days, is sitting-at-the-bar-staring-into-a-double-of-Makers type of thoughts. I'm not depressed, but I'm angsty at what seems to me to be a great societal unraveling of sorts, an undoing of the social institutions that 'oppress' us but also keep us out of trouble. People are no longer happy putting up with misery, or lying media, or hypocritical political leaders, or shit, anything for that matter. The revolutions in the Middle East aren't half of it; Newsweek selling for a dollar, the NY Times dropping below 100k subscriptions, the utter and abject hatred of most honest folks I know for politicians of their own party, as well as the other; the death of the pieties of the age, whether it's feminism and abortion, civility, whatever. Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with a lot of the institutions that are getting punished, but I don't want to see social institutions destroyed by what appears to be a big human race-wide nihilistic streak that is getting aired out right now. Institutions are what govern our behavior; take those voluntary associations away, and you're left with a bunch of rules, along with a bunch of people who don't give a fuck about rules because they aren't invested in them. Our media and political elites are leading the nihilism; most of us are going along and enjoying the ride, because some nihilism is fun. But at some point, we don't learn 8th grade math until we sit down in the seats and listen to teacher- yet I get a sense that most of us have decided we're never going to listen to teacher ever again. Killing authorities off sounds like fun. It frequently results in a new regime that's a lot worse than the old one. We're in the midst of the murder of the old authorities, whether they were fraudulent, neutral or meritorious; it doesn't seem to matter much. Tom Friedman can crow all he wants, but China is a big facebook outburst away from a revolution too. Nobody is safe right now. This great unraveling weighs on my mind.

The third thing is I'm done being amused by myself, at least in this forum. I've said all I can say about me, though that doesn't prevent me from using the first person pronoun, in some permutation, six times in the last two sentences. I'm just not that interesting to me at this point, and I presume that if I'm not amused by me right now, you won't be either. So this reduces my writing here to stuff that is only tangentially about me - good rides, races, music. Which is cool but there doesn't seem to be as much cool stuff to pass on to you.

Fourth, and maybe least significantly, I'm working on doing some other writing. Nothing I want to talk about right now, but it's personal, maybe it becomes commercial at some point, but for right now it's about creating something. This is taking a lot of my writing focus and it's taking a lot of discipline. I've been dreading writing this post for a while because doing so will commit me to pushing through on the project I'm working on, but there it is. Instead of squandering my talents on you all, I'm squandering them on something... that will probably never see the light of day. But we all have to have our projects. Don't worry Womble, it isn't an anti-environment manifesto that ends with me lobbing burning Snowy Owls into the Sierra Club's headquarters.

Fifth, I've been doing a lot of reading lately. Only a little bit of non-fiction, but working my way through the sci fi canon, and uncovering for myself some modern books that probably deserve to be called classics. Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep? Amazing book. Engrossing. Speaks to current information infrastructure problems and security challenges. Whoops, there goes four evenings... So you see what I mean?

Sixth, I'm making a concerted effort to double down on the riding and fitness, including making an honest effort at the Word That Begins With D But Which Shall Remain Nameless. This is a Shut Up And Ride thing for me. I gotta do it, and the less I talk about it, the more I'll have to focus on the task at hand. I'm sick of being "pretty fast for a fat guy." I'll say no more about this and concentrate on showing my intent as the season goes on.

That's what's happened to this blog. I want to keep on working with it but right now I just don't have the gas to treat all y'all like you deserve to be treated with regular entertaining writings from planet Jimbo. So I apologize, but on the other hand... well, you ain't payin', so I ain't apologizin' all that much. I suggest you put me in your Blogspot favorites, or get me on the RSS feed (that's around here somewhere...) so that you get pinged when I do publish. But I don't want to let you guys down. I've got a good readership, I've made a lot of friends through this blog, but I'm just not that into it right now. I got some other shit I gotta do, and although I may not blog intensively after it's done, I'm damn sure not going to blog intensively until it is done. Sure, I have a couple canned posts in me. But don't be upset when I go AWOL for a week or two here or there. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, even a man who is just pretty fast for a fat guy.

Capisce?

Baked

2011-04-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

The documentary about Team CSC’s difficult assault on the Tour de France, 2004, is called “Overcoming.” I’ve long thought that is the truest name one could give any story about bike racing. Good hard racing strips you down to your essence, makes you question and examine yourself, and scores you - in a couple meanings of that word - on the other side. It is a graded essay test, in which style, effort and results all count, and riders are graded on a curve with those of higher potential graded more strictly than those who have to make do with less. There is only one question on the test: did you, or did you not, overcome?

The Baker’s Dozen in Leesburg is a classic mountain bike endurance race. Unlike the usual 12 hour or 24 hour tilt, it is 13 hours (hence the name) and is spectacularly popular, with BikeReg registration usually closing out in under 10 minutes. In the past the course was a very non-technical 7+ mile loop, a test of legs and lungs. Significant changes made it moderately technical, and increased the length of each lap to over 9 miles, a test of legs, lungs, handling skills, fortitude, and mental discipline. The added technical sections reward those who can maintain concentration despite being short on oxygen, tired, and emotionally drained; and they punish those who lose focus for a second.

After missing last year’s edition while recovering from a herniated disc, this year’s version was at the top of my priority race list, up there with the mountain and cross bike races at Granogue, DCCX, Charm City Cross, and a couple other local gems. I originally signed up for the solo 13 while at the movie theater watching True Grit (‘Droid phone be praised) while my teammate Mike entered me, provisionally, on a three man 40+ team. We agreed on this arrangement because Mike was registering 4 three man teams with no certainty of getting everybody registered, and I was not going to get shut out again this year. I eventually sold my solo entry and prepared to ride this year’s event with Mike’s neighbor and hard riding buddy, Chad.

One of the nice things about Baker’s, like a lot of 12 hour races, is you can camp there. This usually entails drinking a beer the night before the race, socializing with friends, getting a great night’s sleep, and waking up at 6:30 or so with the dawn, to eat a leisurely breakfast and amble to the start. It’s usually fun to camp out before the events, a real upper.

This time around, however, we had heavy storms the day before the race. If not biblical, the rains were at least church missal heavy. After driving west to Leesburg through a downpour, I was happy when it let up a bit as I put the tent up and chatted with a couple of the crew Mike was bringing. Even minimal vehicle traffic in the cowfield where we were camping was leaving deep muddy ruts, and it was clear that conditions were going to be extremely muddy the next day. With a forecast in the mid-40’s, it would be cold too because the exhaustion from the race seems to subtract 15 to 20 degrees from whatever the actual temperature is. Mike’s pals asked what I thought race day would be like, and I was blunt: “Get ready to buckle down. We’re going to suffer like pigs tomorrow, but if we’re bloody minded enough and just keep going, we’ll get good results because other people are going to quit because they are soft.” They gave me a funny look and one of them, Tom, later admitted that he thought I was a buzzkill, but realized during the day I’d actually helped get his mind right for the race.

I said hello to a few friends who rolled into camp, then hooked up with The Seibold Experience as they set up their camper, and we enjoyed a beer and some heavy rainfall. Snoop’s Daddy came out and released Snoop Dogg – an Australian Cattle Dog – much to the consternation of the bulls in the next pasture, all of whom came over to the fence, and lined up as if Snoop was practicing some sort of Jedi mind trick on them. Pizza at Fireworks in Leesburg, a quick stop at WalMart for a 2 liter soda (to make fenders if I needed them) and it was off to sleep, in the rain. The night before the race is usually a festive social event, but with the rain most folks didn’t come out at all and those who did hunkered down. One could hear voices around the field – but only hushed, subdued voices from inside buttoned down tents and campers.

I slept okay in the rain. It woke me up a few times in the night, and the combination of dampness and cold was absolutely penetrating, and I woke up shivering cold a few times. It wasn’t a bad thing when 6:30 rolled around and the sound of voices woke me up, with the promise of breakfast, getting moving and getting warm. A quick breakfast of pancakes and bacon and espresso, and I was ready to roll. We worked out our rotation order (Mike, Chad, me) and got ready to ride through the slop.

Then it was waiting. After about an hour, Mike rolled in, dotted with mud. We did a quick change of the ankle timing chip, and Chad was off. Mike said it was sloppy but drying, and he’d benefitted from a great start, killing himself to get a near holeshot to avoid the huge confusion that occurs when 200 people get crammed onto a piece of narrow, twisting, and newly technical single track. Roots were apparently going to be a problem; log crossings were slimy and also a problem; and rock faces were muddy and another problem. I decided to roll the rigid single with Patapsco gearing, 32-20, which is awfully low for a place as flat as Plum Grove Farm, but in the mud I figured it would be about right.

The fastest riders rolled in around 45 minutes – in contrast to the old, dry laps which had the fastest riders blowing in around 32 minutes.

When Brad rolled in about 60 minutes after he departed, he said it was getting sticky. I blew out of the encampment (Forward Operating Base (FOB) Hogleg), sprinted up the sloppy muddy hill, got onto the single track past the start/finish, and found myself on a 9 mile peanut butter track. The mud wasn’t really flying up; it was just sticking to the tires and on the sides of the tires, making it very hard to pedal, as if the ground was half-dried Superglue. There was little traction on the steeper uphills; that was the one place the mud wasn’t sticky, and standing climbing wasn’t an option so everything was a slippery grind upwards. The false flat ups – grades I can pound up at speed when dry – were like quicksand and it felt as if I was pulling a sled up the mud into the rocks. Downhills did not offer relief – any easing of pressure on the pedals slowed the bike to a walk immediately, and even steeper downhills weren’t much use. This made each lap a one hour threshold level effort, with ragged breathing, aching back, and spasming legs.

It wasn’t all grim, however. Cross racing and snow MTB riding have honed my ability to ride in the slippery places, and pretty much every corner was slippery, so I didn’t have to use the brakes much. That way my pads were preserved (a single mud race can easily destroy a set of brake pads) and I was able to capitalize on what little momentum I had. I enjoyed many little pleasurable moments when my improving handling skills allowed me to smile a bit through the hurt.

There were problems though, too. There were a lot of off-camber roots on the hills and in the turns, and plenty of roots that ran north/south, with the direction of the trail. This led to a lot of quick track changes – the bike would suddenly slide a foot to the right or left. No big deal, it didn’t cause me any crashes, but it did take a lot of upper body horsing the bike around to keep upright and moving forward rather than slewing into the trees like a drunk driver. Logs were trouble too; they were slimy and a number of them had off-angle approaches, so I walked several of them on the first lap. Mel Svenstrom had warned me about a big double log crossing where a guy went down and apparently broke his wrist in front of her, so I was extra careful and dismounted there.

How hard was I going? Hard enough that my breathing was ragged and hands numb the entire lap, and I couldn’t think about anything except for turning the pedals and picking lines. Toward the two thirds point, I was catching up to a guy in a blue jersey on a geared Trek. I was trying to keep my momentum up so I eased it off just a tick, to 9/10ths for about 15 seconds, so that I would catch him and pass him right at a wide point, on a turn, about 30 yards up the trail. As he climbed a little rise he missed a shift, and his bike made a grinding and clunking noise. “Going to break that chain,” I thought. A few pedal strokes later he reached again for another lower gear, missed that shift, and snapped the derailer off. “Stop, derailer broke off” I hollered as I passed. An hour later I found out the unfortunate soul was one of the guys I’d eaten breakfast with and hung out with for a couple hours that morning; from the back of the pain cave, I couldn’t see out far enough into the woods to recognize him. *That* is how hard I was riding; buried, dug in, deep in the cave.

The only real relief was the last three miles. At that point, the trail (after a long stairstep) deposited me in a field, where I charged up a hill, and had a long downhill/false flat into the piney woods adjacent to Route 15. This was wet but not sticky, with a lot of sand in the ground it was a little slimy but that is no problem when you’ve been grinding out every pedal stroke for the last 45 minutes. I floored it, charged over the little ups and downs, slogged up a last muddy stretch into the last bit of pine forest, and handed off the timing chip off to Schiavo after a 5 second anklet change by Chad.

After that it was refueling time – a turkey sandwich with olive oil mayo, a banana, a pickle, a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of water. I struggled to get that down, the effort had made me nauseous; but I managed. In just about two hours even, I was getting back on the bike with a pit in my stomach, a dry jersey on my back, and a little more optimism about trail conditions.

The optimism was misplaced. If anything, the trail was stickier than it was before, and it was harder to turn the pedals over. I took the geared bike hoping to be able to spin it out on the downhills and flats to make up some time, but that didn’t work out because the downhills were just as sticky as every other place. The gears did allow me to ease off slightly on the uphills, in the hope of preserving some legs for areas where I could motor a bit. “Easing off” is relative; on the single, I’d be going all out to get over some of the muddy hills, completely straining at maybe 250% of threshold. On the geared bike, I was maybe at 150% of threshold power going up the hills, still a redlining effort, but not burning matches quite as fast. So it was still damned hard but I wasn’t dooming my efforts later in the day by burning all my matches early. Now that I was familiar with the course, it also rode smoother; I cleaned all the rocks except for the vertical rock face (upward) and I cleaned all the logs except for the double log and one particularly craptacular log pile that had softball-sized lumps of mud on it. As St. Marc of Vettori puts it, “when it doubt, walk it out.” I recall approaching the pile, seeing the mud, thinking, “this would be a bad place to break a wrist, and this is *exactly* the place to do it, and I eased off to cyclocross dismount and run it, and to let a hard charging rider pass me. He took the log pile straight on, had good form, got the front wheel over it, and then it slipped out to the right side on the downhill slope of the pile. He ate shit, went ass-over teakettle, and went down hard. I ran past him and don’t recall seeing him again on that lap (though he may have passed me back, I wasn’t too observant of anything outside the JimBubble at this point).

I got back into the pits coughing hard, having blown a lot of effort on the last three miles, really laying down power and taking advantage of the one area where I could build some speed. It made for a 60 minute lap again. I followed the same food routine. I felt crampy – my own damn fault for not bringing the Hammer Perpetuum.

So it went through the day; I kept reminding Chad and Mike to hang in, there would be huge attrition from the difficult trail conditions. I discovered this the hard way on my third lap. It was around dinner time and the woods were starting to get a little dark. Down past the river, I lost track of time and where I was. You know that state you get in on very long drives, where you’re not fully conscious, but you somehow get to your destination safely, ticking off the miles but not really being cognizant of it? That was how lap 3 was for me, only I wasn’t doing it safely or efficiently and was definitely not traveling fast. For maybe 15 minutes, I was in this never-never land, totally unconscious of what I was doing, not going very fast, just grinding along. It was like a bonk, only worse because I didn’t realize I was in it. It was some other, not purely physical depth that I was plumbing. I don’t recall anything that happened along the river, up until the end of the swoon. That occurred when I reached a rock face I had to go up, then down over the crest of a little kicker. I picked a bad line, got over the top, and found myself at a spot where the face just dropped off a couple feet. The angle was all wrong and although I got my ass over my back wheel, I found myself riding a nose wheelie for several feet in the mud. As I got to the left hand sweeper just past the rocks, my rear end dropped, a huge shot of adrenalin hit me in the gut like a karate kick, and my mind came back to the present.

I struggled through the rest of that lap and got in with a 63.

I was in trouble though, clear bonk territory. I know from the Powertap that an hour at threshold or near threshold makes me burn up to 1400 calories, and I was on a mountain bike getting in a lot of upper body work along with the leg workout. I just couldn’t put that much fuel back into my body. Not with turkey sandwiches and pickles anyhow. So I did the responsible thing, and hit the pan of big, moist brownies. I ate 5 of them. Then I went to Seibold’s camp and stole a couple huge oatmeal raisin cookies. Then I came back and at some chips and pretzels and God knows what else, basically anything I could get my hands on and if I stole something from your tent, I apologize. I will plead non compos mentis; I was out of my freaking mind at this point and needed calories.

Chad and I also had a heart-to-heart. Mike had crashed earlier and was losing time. If we were going to have anybody do a 5^th lap it was probably going to have to be Chad. I told him straight up before he left, “look, no bullshit here – you need to think about how you feel. If you’re up for a 5^th lap, I’ll ride my balls off for you, like a starfish, stomach coming out of my mouth, to get in before the time limit to get you out for another lap. If not, no big deal.” He nodded, Schiavo rolled in, I put the chip on him, and pushed him out of the pits at a sprint. He left, and I got my lights rigged, stood around shivering violently, and resigned myself to putting my wet gloves and helmet back on one more time. Like an asshole, I left the extension cord for my helmet-mounted light home, so I packed a Petzl light in my back pocket as a backup. There was nothing to do but wait.

Chad got back about an hour later. We did the fast chip switch, and I asked if he was able to go one more lap. “No way.” Fair enough. Schiavo said, “okay, it’s a parade lap, ride safe.” I boogied up through the camping / pit area, and out onto the single track. The new lights worked great, and I managed to negotiate around pretty smoothly. I had to walk on three of the stiff uphill kickers; my legs just weren’t having any redzone efforts at that point and the mud, if anything, was even stickier. This was hell and I was in it.

I had a surreal moment out there. I passed this really good looking dark haired woman, helmet off, standing on the side of the trail, looking angry. “You need anything?” I asked as I rode by. “No!” she shouted at me, angry sounding. I am pretty sure that I did not imagine that but it’s one of those things, it was so weird that I have to wonder if I hallucinated it.

It got really hard at this point. My upper back was achy, and my triceps were cramping from all the bike horsing-around. It was pitch black; I looked up for the stars but saw only inky black darkness. The lights worked great but the trail was ueber sticky, so I rode with the presumption of traction. That only made the surprise shifts caused by roots and rocks that much more treacherous and unexpected. Parade lap my ass; I was trying to go easy but it wasn’t possible and soon I found myself breathing hard and going as hard as my legs would go, backing off to 8/10ths whenever the legs felt like they would blow. I started to get into that mental no man’s land again. My hands were achy. This was the dank, cold inside of the cave. I crawled in and decided to sit in the lawn chair and have a beer.

I was stripped down to my bare essence at this point. We can kid ourselves that things would be different, and often do. "I didn't train much this winter." "I need to lose some weight." "My skills aren't where I would like them to be." We say all this stuff to ourselves and our friends as if we actually aren't that untrained, fat, unskilled person. Thing is, maybe we weren't that person a few months ago, and maybe we won't be that person in a few months from now. But right now, at this moment, it's who we are. And the question that is answered when we race very hard, when we put it all out there and race right up to our limits, is who we are.

At that moment, there was nothing but me, the bike, the sticky mud, some rocks and logs, and pain. There were a lot of things I could have done better in the months or years or whole life prior to that moment; but none of those things were with me, inside the cave. Excuses don't matter in the cave because nobody is in there with you to hear them.

I kept trying to focus on riding smooth, reminding myself how much I love night riding, and thinking back to how much of it I’ve done this year with the TMR crew. That didn’t work. My body was falling apart, and I was desperate to just keep it together to finish the lap. I thought about how I should ride in a way that makes my kid proud of me and is consistent with my admonitions to do his best always. I thought about being more committed to training. I ached, my lungs burned and I was coughing up chunks. I thought that I should be grateful for being able to do this, grateful my wife is cool with my hobby and that my kid likes to join me in the woods… I even said a prayer thanking God for giving me the chance to do this, and asking Him to make me a better husband, father, and bike rider. My triceps ached, my arms threatened to fail, I was even riding with my hands reversed, trying to put the load on my shoulders or biceps…

And then my little personal corner of hell ended. It was through. I turned onto the stairsteps up into the field, did a standing effort up and over that little hill, shot down into the dimly lit farmhouse meadow and was soon off into the piney woods. Sweet mother of flow! It was three miles back to FOB Hogleg but it seemed like it only took a couple minutes. There were cheers when I passed the tents, hollers when I boogied up past Seibold’s tent and the AFC crew, and I swear I rode those noises like a gust of wind underneath a glider’s wings. I passed the Start/Finish line, and went to turn in my chip. With 12 laps, we should have finished around 12^th; unless some hardcore people – who were behind us well into the evening – hung on and passed us some time after 10:00 PM. It wasn’t a bad finish for us, considering there were 30 or 32 teams in our field; and most of the names in front of us were really, really solid racers, and a lot of the people behind us were good racers too.

If I was a better man, more determined, stronger, I’d have just rolled the S/F line and done another lap. I’m not better though; wasn’t more determined, was not stronger. My teammates were shattered, and so was I. This is what we had in us. I could have struggled through; sure. But as I sit here typing with numb fingers, occasional cramps if I turn too quickly, and an overweening sense of weariness, I realize I made the right choice. I finished where I deserved to finish. That was what I, and my teammates, had in us yesterday. It was a solid effort, and a number of elite level riders managed – just – to complete the same number of laps each of us did yesterday. I’ve done short races that were harder; and I’ve done longer races that were hard; but I’ve never gone that hard for four hours, ever. I was destroyed. There was nothing left to give.

I’m proud of what we did, very proud of Mike and Chad. When you strip us down to the essence, Mike and Chad and I are workingman low level amateur racers, guys with jobs and families who focus on that rather than training. Even then, maybe we aren’t the most talented guys. But we worked really hard in very rough conditions yesterday, showed a hell of a lot of determination and out-toughed a lot of people, to pull off a finish that was a bit above our heads. The conditions on the course were terrible; it broke us down and if my teammates had a similar experience to mine, they were forced to look deep inside themselves, with each pedal stroke testing their resolve, each little rise questioning their willpower, every hiss of mud sucking at their tires telling them that they couldn’t do it. How bad do you want it? We wanted it. It makes me think that maybe I should expect more of myself; my old notion of how deep I could go was wrong. I can go further, and faster. It’s not easy, but it can be done. This gives me hope.

Some race only to win, but I race for the fight of it; and on the odd occasion where I've had good results or a podium, it's been a nice benefit but it doesn't compare to the sting of the fight. The struggle of racing is in beating other people, but to do that we must first beat ourselves, get past our current physical limits, get past the internal thoughts processes and superstitions that hold us back more effectively than any lack of natural talent or fitness could ever do. We only defeat others in a race by defeating our own weaknesses first. The desire to quit, to give in, to avoid the suffering, is stronger than the legs on our opponents. Beating the desire to give up, accepting the suffering, resolving to work through it, winning the inner battle first, is how we get ourselves in position to win the outer battle.

That is overcoming. It is why I race.

Friday Shower Time

2011-04-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

I'm heading out to Leesburg tomorrow to get camp set up for the Baker's Dozen. Going to be joined by Snoops Daddy, BB, and the Seibold Experience. Could be raining pretty hard, I'm not too stoked about that. I'm teaming up with Bike Mike S and his buddy Chad on-the-Rocks. I have no idea how it's going to go 'cuz the weather is a wild card, and the camping may be a little scheisty.

But I've done this mountain biking thing enough now to know that if it's a muddy sufferfest, we just need to buckle the fuck down, grit our teeth and pound it out, and if we persevere we'll do okay and even kick the asses of some folks who are a little less bloody minded about it.

Son of- and Wife of- can't make it so I'm going to pack an extra case of beer, and have the big ol' tent to myself after the race. During the race? I'll go as hard as I can, then between laps, I'm going to offer bacon handups, and rest as hard as possible. I'll try to be a good teammate, be supportive, don't bitch no matter how cold and awful I feel, and above all other things be ready to roll when my teammate gets into the pits with the bike. It'll be tough. It'll be fun.

I can't wait.

Now pardon me while I get all emo on you.

I like Five for Fighting, but they're more saccharine than an FDA investigation of weight loss additives. Something a little more bitter is in order after that.

There. That gets the sweet taste out of your mouth, right? Nice. How about a little taste of barbecue?

That's one of my favorite videos ever. Just somebody taking a home video of Junior Kimbrough, playing some epic guitar licks, in a little juke joint somewhere. No big deal... that's just Junior, knockin' it out. Speaking of Mississippi blues...

Chain of fools. Sounds about right for a mountain bike race huh? That, or Shake 'em On Down. Maybe that's more appropriate to the Baltimore County side of Patapsco, or Gambrill or something.

I've got sort of a weird feeling going on right now... haven't raced in four or five months so I get a little edgy. Here's something weird from Primus that I really like. Turn this one up to really appreciate it.

I'm afraid that's going to be the theme song for this weekend's racing. Have a good one. I'll make every effort to do a race report on Sunday or thereabouts.

ToT 28: Chain[ring] of Fools...

2011-04-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

Saturday was a nice 2.5 hour ride, punctuated by three brief rainshowers. Stuck with the shop ride for 45 minutes and it struck me how group riding isn't necessarily training, and vice versa. Some of the guys apparently planning on going short kept attacking each other on hills. At one point I'm rocking 750 watts up this nearly minute long hill, going about 18 MPH uphill - that's an uphill speed I don't touch unless I'm in a car, a strong car - and it occurred to me that a series of extremely hard 1 minute efforts is exactly what I don't need prior to Bakers Dozen. So when the opportunity came to take a different turn, I took it, and kept it steady L2/L3 for another 1:45 or so. Mission accomplished - didn't do any high effort work but ended the ride with blown legs, a sure sign of effective aerobic base training.

Sunday was... well... 5 minutes of really enjoyable flow at Rosaryville. I hooked up with Baler and Snoop's Daddy hoping to get in two hours of steady riding and handling practice. That lasted about 5 or 7 minutes, until after the first creek crossing. I stood up on the nearby hill, did a hard stomp to get some acceleration going, and busted the chainring. Not the first time that's happened, but doing it on a 32 ring rather than a big old flexy 53? Those little suckers are supposed to be stout-er than that. Oh well. At least it wasn't a bad walk back; I only had to walk maybe a third, and pump-tracked the rest of it. I sure hope my pals had a nice ride. Me? I went to Family Bikes and asked Jon for a new ring, hit Home Depot for some plumbing fixtures and went home and sweated some new joints on the laundry room pipes so that I could get a new faucet installed in the tub.

Yep. Not everybody could handle this kind of glamour. I've got it well in hand, though.

ToT 28: I Call It
The Trail of Tears for a Reason

Friday Music

2011-03-31T18:52:00.001-07:00

I'm gassed right now. Wiped out. But not so bad I can't find you some good music.

Ahh. Nice. How to wrap it up?

How about Lemmy knockin' out some Metallica? Yeah, I thought that'd do it.

Have a nice weekend. There's a lot of racing coming up... so let's get to work!

GamJams Review: Gloves

2011-03-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago I rode the Bakers Dozen solo. It's a 13 hour mountain bike race and I rode for about 8 hours of that, which was roughly 4 hours than my previous longest mountain bike ride.

In addition to finding out all sorts of new things - pickles taste great on a hot day, for instance; or yes, you can poop 18 times in a single night following a mountain bike race - I found out that the choice of gloves is really important on a long ride.

I'd struggled off and on with hand pains on the road, particularly in a few 200km randonees. But a quick shift of hand position, and the pain would be alleviated. It was rough, but not horrible, it's the kind of routine suffering everybody deals with.

On the mountain bike - because I rode like an unskilled mooo-ron back then - there was no way to relieve the hand pain. I was giving it the death grip, riding around with painful hands, and soon the pins and needles arrived. Then the serious numbness set in. I tried to relieve it with different sets of gloves: I started with Descentes, that left my hands raw; switched to some Pearl Izumis that did nothing to help the problem; then switched to some Performance Elites, which were the best of the bunch but which still didn't stop the problem, they just slowed down the degeneration of the skin on my hands and the numbness. in my deathgrip.

By the time I was 50 miles into the day, my hand was incredibly numb, and the numbness in my left pinky and ring finger wound up taking 8 or 10 months to go away. My palms looked like fresh ground hamburger.

I vowed to find some better gloves.

After a lot of searching around, I happened on Spenco gloves. A bunch of guys in one of the mountain bike forums were swearing up and down that these gloves solved major hand pain problems for them. So I decided to give them a shot.

They worked. They are anatomically designed with three pads to provide relief to the nerves and the blood vein that run down the middle of your hand. The pads are really stout and thick on the higher end models; they offer quite a bit of padding. Some of them are minimally padded but even those work very well compared to other gloves I've tried. The quality is good; they're durable, and comfortable. They are also crash tough, and do a good job of holding together and protecting my hands in crashes.

You'd think that the big pads - 1.5 inches wide by maybe a quarter inch thick - would be so prominent as to be painful. You'd be wrong. They've proven superb on all sorts of long rides, including a couple 4 hour mountain bike rides, where even the usual amount of pain, the sort I'm willing to put up with, did not set in. Hand pain is a bit of an issue in mountain biking, more than on the road. You need to keep closer track of what the front end is doing because it bounces around all the time. For many of us - many = the unskilled jackasses who death grip the bars - this leads to a death grip that in turn makes the hands very sore. It helps a lot to have gloves that are resistant to our own stupid habits. Spencos are those gloves.

So Baker's Dozen is coming up next week. I'm going to get started packing for it next Monday or so. I have maybe 20 sets of gloves. The only ones I'm bringing are 4 sets of Spencos. That should tell you something.

TOT 26: 55 Minute Lap at Rosaryville

I climbed pretty badly with sore legs but frequently found myself spun out, riding on flats and downhill between the trees at a pace that kept me about halfway between "somewhat scared" and "thoroughly terrorized" for most of the ride. Boys and girls, meet my old friend, Flow.

Meeting the Dawn

2011-03-29T19:09:00.001-07:00

Today was an early ride day for me at Rosaryville. Doesn't mean that I missed out on my Daily Injection of Teh Stoopid though.

I was lazy last night and noticed that the Frankenbike was set up to run Ultra Rigid, that is with the fixed gear on it. "No big deal," I thought. "I'll just flip flop that wheel in the morning if I don't feel like riding fixed."

Well... I got to Rosaryville, it was still a little dark, and I damn sure didn't feel like riding fixed. So I got the wheel off, flipped it around, and realized... the cog is bolted into the disc mounts so there's no disc brake on the damn thing!

Like a moron, I'd been thinking about the bike as if it had rim brakes, the way my single speed / fixed cross bike does.

Jackass!

So I put the wheel back on fixed and rode it that way, which was fine. Good things happened. I'm finally starting to relax a bit on the fixie, so I can actually ride at something approaching normal speed. My back has loosened up, and I'm developing some weird little knots of muscle in my upper quads, so the hundred little half-standing efforts per hour (necessary to get the butt off the seat to smooth out roots and rocks) don't cause cramping any more. What's more, is I actually caught flow a couple times for a minute or two. It didn't last much longer than that, however, because I still have to spend too much time thinking about how to approach various little features, so that state where the riding is fast and my mind is at ease, peaceful and somewhere else, is still a little hard to reach. Even so, it was pretty amazing, hitting that state on a fixie. Maybe it was just because it was the first time I got going like that, but it seemed more exciting, a little more manic and high speed, than reaching the same mental & bike handling state on a freewheeled bike.

I got around in about 65-70 minutes, even with a photo stop. It was a great way to kick off the day.

Tomorrow: Same thing, only with a freewheel. And a brake! [Yeah, I know, I'm totally pussing out... but this time I'll hit the extra credit inner loop and maybe a bunch of the logs.] It sure is nice to start racking up the rides, finally. Maybe I'll manage to Ride 180 this year after all.

TOT 25: Riding With Giants, at Dawn

TOT 22, From Friday Two Weeks Ago:
Toaster McBabyhead, Esq., Has Concerns About My Chainline

Back At It

2011-03-28T18:16:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the week's absence. During a cub scout trip [trap] with Son [Sun] of Rouleur, 9 other assorted [assrotted] daddies, I contracted the Catoctin Catarrh. Very nice crew of folks, and I've got nothing but admiration for what the Scouts do for the kids, but let's be real - a primitive open bay scout cabin filled with 10 kids and 10 adults is essentially a giant festering petri dish that promises to do it's duty to God and country and to always be prepared.

Arriving back early Sunday morning, I took to bed, and slept until Tuesday, pausing from my repose only long enough to get up, stagger around the house racked with severe body aches, thence to return to bed. Tuesday morning I got up, ate some food, then got hit with the worst [wurst] case of the shiznits that I've had in several years. I spent most of the rest of the week either at work, or sleeping. No bikey-bikey for me until Saturday, and I was not a happy camper then and I am still not quite right now. The flu is mostly gone but I'm managing to make some amusing typos (in [brackets]), and I'm dead tired, plus I also got to check Facebook several times from the bathroom at work today. Life proceeds apace, unfortunately it's a 4 minute mile pace and at my best in much younger days now long, long gone I was only about a 4:45 guy.

There is some riding going down. Saturday I knocked out close to 3 hours at a modest (at best) pace at Rosaryville, much of it with the excellent Schiavo posse. To paraphrase BB King, the Flow is gone... the Flow is gone away from me.

I did manage to remount the horse today and make the commute with Fast as Schidt Sean, and I'm hoping to get in 90 minutes of mountain biking tomorrow AM. So it's not all grim news on The World's Most Haphazzard Training Plan In The World.

Today's ride was very cold indeed; it was the coldest 34 degrees I can ever recall feeling, probably some combination of the wind and humidity made it that way. This was compounded by my stupid choice to wear a great pair of Castelli shorts - let me clarify that: a great pair of Castelli hot weather shorts. My thighs and ass cheeks got so cold this morning that they went past the point of pins and needles. I also stupidly wore a pair of light duty knee warmers, that really only cover my knees and which slipped down repeatedly, thanks to their short length, and the short leg length on the excellent Castelli hot weather shorts. I only thawed out after taking a super hot shower at work. I did feel like the Pasha after that, sitting at my desk and tossing down espresso shots, but I noticed on one of my many visits to the rest room - a room of no rest at all for me today - that my face was all chapped from the ride. The ride home tonight was alright, with a lot of wind, only sometimes from helpful directions. It was also 10-15 degrees colder than the forecasted 50 degree high, so that was a little disappointed, and can I tell you, 37 degrees is one of the hardest temperatures to dress appropriately for. The body also reacts weirdly; one's junk neither ascends into the upper protect-us-from-all-cold position (where it is safe from the depredations of the saddle's nose), nor does it drop down into the oh-just-sling-us-around-anywhere posture where it is fine no matter how badly the saddle beats on the Boys. So basically it was like a stiff boxer's speed bag for the entire trip home, getting punched around a lot but not exactly oscillating with the required flexibility. It was rather uncomfortable, like everything else about the riding today.

Upon arrival at home, I again took a hot shower, put on the flannel pajama bottoms and an old triple weight sweatshirt that belonged to my father. I sat there after dinner tonight, snugged up in my reading chair in that sweatshirt, reading Don Simmons' Fall of Hyperion and feeling like I was 7 or 8 years old and curled up in my dad's embrace on a sick day. I haven't figured out whether the ghosts of people reside in particular old sentimental things, or if our memories burnish the old things with our gold-tinged sentiments. It doesn't matter in the end; what matters is that sometimes the things of loved, departed ones can give us great comfort. That old sweatshirt is like the echo of a hug from my old man. I miss him still, miss his wisdom and his dry sense of humor and his patience. I'd thank him for the sweatshirt if I saw him tonight and give him a hug like one of the long hugs Son of Rouleur likes to give me. For now I'll have to settle for being right here in this impossibly thick, warm hoodie, and with the warm feeling his memories give my heart.

The short term planning is in place to get ready for Leesburg, the Baker's Dozen. I'm patently not in shape for it - fat, not enough miles in my legs, blah blah blah. The plan is to ride my ass off for the next two weeks, take the Thursday before the race off, ride easy on the Friday, perhaps knocking out a tour lap at Leesburg; then ride my balls off, or at least ride them into a stretched and attenuated position on race day.

This plan guarantees nothing but pain, but it's all I got. It'll be a good kind of pain... if I can find my flow before then.

TOT 23: Field of Dreams
Rosaryville State Park Perimeter Trail

TOT 24: View Down M St., NE,
From Met Branch Trail Bridge

Friday Fun

2011-03-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

It's been a great week, got a couple rides in, looking like a third tomorrow, and I'd ride over the weekend too but for a camping excursion that's in the works. Nice!

Before we get to the tunes, a few short thoughts.

First, I don’t know what is a sadder statement about American culture… that I texted a friend today, a college graduate I was to ride with “Where U at?” and that we both understood; or that my smart phone, so-called, didn’t autocorrect that the way it constantly autocorrects all the grammatically correct phrases I type in.

Second, it was nice getting in the third ride of the week today, just an hour and ten or so with Seibold and Todd B., who I hadn't seen since 'cross. Took the fixie out, and man, was that painful to try to keep up on the wheel. Painful but good, it's the quickest way to get fit, providing you don't hurt yourself. Spun out if it's even slightly downhill, standing climb if it's even slightly uphill, panting the whole way to keep up with a couple fast guys who were just cruising on geared bikes. *Good*.

TOT 21: The Elusive Seiboldus Hirsuticus Trackstanding Behind a Tree

Third... spring just broke today. It felt damned good, didn't it?

Fourth, you need a really good, stylish wool jersey to ride in next winter, right? Well get yourself over to Stevil Kinevil's place and put an order in for one. No, it's not cheap. Uh huh, it's a Smokey and the Bandit jersey. Yes, it's going to be really well made by Earth, Wind and Rider, who make some beautiful premium merino wool gear. Plus it'll make Farrah Fawcett crazy about you, and if you go camping with Ned Beatty, it'll ensure that Ned's the one the hillbillies take an unnatural shine to. You can't go wrong! Stevil is closing the order in a couple weeks so get your order in now. And as if you needed any extra motivation, he sponsored the *$&% out of the Tacchino last year, so 15% of you are wearing or riding on stuff he *gave* you. Support those who support the sport, right?

Finally, let's have some music. I think we're going to do some mashups this week.

First off is some mountain biking with a great musical mashup of Black Sabbath's War Pigs, and Ludacris' Move, Bitch. Yeah, I know, it's garbage. I don't care. I love it. NSFW and an unlikely couple of songs but it works just fine. It also features some shred-o-matic MTB riding.

That was good. But this one is so old school that there's ivy growing up the sides of it.

Now this next one is nice. Mixing Queen, Weezer and Joan Jett is kind of like having a cupcake that's equal parts cake, frosting, and candied cherries. It's not exactly nutritious - not a lick of fiber in it - but man, it's tasty, and amazingly no one part overshadows the others.

Now this one... well, the songs aren't equal. But it will make old hippies cry. And it's damned good. I don't know why. It just is.

Hey, what's the difference between the Beatles and Metallica? One's an overrated, self-important sellout band fronted by a pompous ass, that plays simplistic music with trite lyrics that millions of T-shirt wearing stoners inexplicably love. And the other one plays heavy metal.

I actually like Metallica a lot. But what if Metallica and Lady Gaga had a love child? Well... this:

Yeah, that adds a new dimension to head banging. I was banging mine on the desk just now. It's compelling in a really disturbing way. Or maybe it was disturbing in a really compelling way. I don't know.

The best mashups work because they put some things together that you'd never imagine working, but somehow they work pretty well. I hate to say it but Lady Gaga and Metallica are like that.

So are Jay Z and Verve.

Wow. It's a bitter sweet smack my bitch up, if ever I saw one.

Sometimes a mashup works fine and makes you smile - like when Run DMC meets the White Stripes. If you're a person of a certain age - about 38 to about 50 - this one has to make you smile.

And sometimes a mashup just works beautifully as a piece of music. This one is complex, and beautiful at the same time. Wow, good call to put them together.

Have fun this weekend. Ride hard. Drink deep. And do whatever other Verb/Adjective combination makes you happy.

More Stuff & ToT 19 & 20

2011-03-16T19:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm listening to ABC News on the radio on the way home tonight, post-ride, and they tell me that "Japanese officials are desperately trying to stave off nuclear winter."

Really?

I'm old enough to remember what the concept of nuclear winter actually is. The theory went that a full scale exchange of nuclear warheads between the U.S. and the Warsaw Pact would result in enough dust being kicked into the stratosphere, that significant global cooling would result, freezing crops in the summer, and devastating life around the globe. Y'know, if the blasts of several hundred to several thousand warheads and ensuing radiation didn't do it.

Worst case scenario for the Japanese nuclear disaster right now? The area immediately around the plant is thoroughly contaminated and a no-go area for a year or two, and a 20 to 30 square mile area is contaminated for quite a while, and in need of remediation.

That's not a nuclear winter. Not even close.

What it is, is a good example of the media absolutely shafting us by not giving out accurate facts, reporting advocacy group hyperbole (or maybe just makin' shit up) as fact, and trying to scare us and sell more better spots to advertisers.

It's not limited to one side or the other. The ubiquitous Drudge Report is sensationalizing the living shite out of this disaster too, and from the looks of it is specializing in scaring the bejeezus out of Californians. Sure, it's fish-in-a-barrel, and something most of the rest of the country has fantasized about doing from time to time... but that doesn't make it right.

Our media is failing us badly, and failing the Japanese too. They aren't even close to telling us the truth and they're ignoring the real story, which is the brutal, massive humanitarian disaster, and the Japanese people's desperate need of charitable donations.

I'll repeat again. Despite the best efforts of Japanese engineers to foul things up, and despite the most horrendous natural disaster we're likely to see in our lifetimes, or our kids' lifetimes, and despite a 40-50 year-old plant design, this is no Chernobyl. [Worst case scenario discussed rationally here.] It's not nothing; the damage is significant and we will need to clean up, and learn lessons, and yes a number of people will be hurt. But it's not Chernobyl, or nuclear freaking winter for that matter. Keep hope, give generously, and say a prayer for the Japanese.

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

TOT 20: Delonghi EC 155:
a $75 Slice of +1 Post-Ride Espresso for the Office

ToT 19: On My Fixie,
Out W/t Fast as Schidt Sean

Off Topic Stuff

2011-03-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of pretty mind blowing stuff going on the world right now. I have a sense that I'm doing okay, and my friends are doing okay, but the world's physical and political arrangement seems to be unraveling. The middle east looks like Europe in 1848. Japan looks like something at the end of the world. The U.S. looks like a nation that is afraid to move forward and afraid to move back. It's the end of the world as we know it...

But I feel fine.

It's important to remind ourselves not to take counsel of our fears, to not let our fears overwhelm us in tough times. My mode in tough times is to hyperventilate for about 10 seconds, remind myself that it's time to pull the big girl panties up, and then buckle down and get going. This is hard because as more information about the Japanese earthquakes, the tsunami and the suffering becomes known, the only plausible reaction from a sentient, caring human being is along the lines of "fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck fuck fuck."

Seriously. I think I may have actually said that the other day when the news broke.

But as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reminds us:

DON'T PANIC!

Infantile reactions to any disaster are usually pretty counterproductive in the long run, but they're the first reaction most of us have. So let's get our heads on straight together, a'ight? And if anybody is trying to politically capitalize on this Act of God, kick them in the nuts, for the sake of our collective sanity. Mother Earth is not angry at us for poking her with oil derricks and mining implements. 500 year earthquakes have nothing to do with global warming. And it's not God's revenge on gay people either because believe me, there's precedent for God kicking our asses about various things, and he usually makes a point of telling us that's exactly why he's doing it, at least if any of the religious texts can be believed.

The two most sensible things I've heard about what's going on in Japan are:

Don't freak out about the destruction; it's terrible but this is a 500 year earthquake, the kind that hits the Earth only once every 500 years or so at the most. We should be mindful of earthquake and tsunami risks but remember this one is a black swan hitting the Pacific Rim of Fire and probably not a good justification for rebuilding our society to with stand a 9.7 earthquake (an X thousand year earthquake); and,
The reactor fire / meltdown Japan is undergoing is not nothing, but it's not going to be Chernobyl, either. The latter comes from this article that I would strongly encourage you to read. It appears to be a pretty sensible and knowledgeable discussion of that part of the disaster, and based on my limited technical knowledge of reactor design - I won't bore you with the details of how I came to have any knowledge about them - sounds about right. The short version is that bad things can happen and some significant amount of radiation will likely leak, but US and Japanese reactor design is radically different from the Soviet design that blew at Chernobyl, starting with the triple containment vessels we use, versus the uncontained reactors the Soviets used. Nobody really knows what's going on or how bad it will get, but what we do know is the folks who are in full fledged panic have no grasp of the facts whatsoever. The only real flaw is that the author ignores the fact that people on his side of the political aisle are using the cynical reaction of the professional no-nukes lobby as a fundraising gambit just as the no-nukes people are using the disaster - but that's a fairly small flaw in what appears to be a sober assessment of the problem. So read that article, and go read some more actual facts about nuclear reactors, it will make you smarter *and* less worried at the same time. Oh, you'll still be concerned and damned worried for the Japanese in the region around that powerplant. But your concern will be appropriate and measured.

At the same time you may want to ignore what a lot of other people are saying, including the US Surgeon General who just recommended that everybody go out and buy Potassium Iodide in case there's a ginormous nuclear explosion and then a huge cloud of radiation floats 7,000 miles across the pacific and hits California. I won't get into the factual implausibility of that scenario, it's akin to stocking up on a 5 year supply of chemotherapy drugs just in case the saccharine in their Diet Coke this morning gives them cancer. In fact I'd wager that the odds of getting acute radiation poisoning in California from the disaster in Japan are probably a lot lower than the odds of getting cancer from that can of Diet Coke. But that's just me, I'm not an authority on nuclear reactors like the Surgeon General is. Oh wait a minute...

I'll repeat: DON'T PANIC!

So what should we do?

The real answer to "what should I do?," besides "pray for the Japanese people," is "give generously." The Japanese people are fast friends of the United States - they happen to be strategically important too, BTW - and they need our help.

CNN.com has a very useful page that lists some of the charities that are helping in Japan. Please feel free to give a money if you're so inclined. Water, basic shelter, food, and soon medical care will be essential needs that the charities can help with - if they can get enough lift to the affected areas. The scope of the humanitarian disaster is simply soul crushing; it looks to me like Katrina, if you packed the full destruction of three states into an area the size of Rhode Island. Charity Navigator offers a searchable database of charities that rates them for effectiveness and efficiency; I like to give to charities that have a low overhead cost and a high program cost - in other words the money goes more to helping people, and less to paying the admin staff and fundraising.

Anyhow, that's been your moment of halfway clear thinking.

Now go ride your damn bike, say a prayer, appreciate what you have, hug somebody you love, and chill the hell out for a while.

This too shall pass. It always does.

The CX Mothership Connection

2011-03-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

Word to the wise, people.

Those who have ears, hear. And those who don't, are gonna get funked up.

Listen up. Mark your calendars now. The Tacchino has moved to September 25th. That's right. It's going to be the MABRA Super 8 opener, falling on the Sunday after Charm City. And yeah, we'll be bringing the funk again this year.

In fact, we're in negotiations to bring at least 20% more funk than last year, and if my star-shaped sunglasses hold up through the negotiations, we'll be delivering a king sized trunk of funk to wiggle your hips and shake your junk.

Sure road season has just started, and mountain bike racing season is barely off the ground. But *those* disciplines have repeatedly failed to bring the funk.

Not us.

This race is The One. Like Bootsy says, don't forget The One.

We're bringing it this 'cross season. I don't know how we're going to improve the Tacchino, but I've started mainlining espresso and cheap bourbon in the hopes of having some hallucinations that bring me some inspiration. That, and I'm listening to a *lot* of early 70's George Clinton, staying up all night dancing around in my basement, deranged sweat lodge style, and the ideas are bustin' loose.

We're gonna tear the roof off this sucka, people.

You hear?

Yep. I thought so.

Now scuttle off and mark your calendar now. You don't want to miss the CX Mothership Connection.

And would somebody drop me an email offline tell me how to get this Jeri Curl out of my hair? I gotta go to work tomorrow.

Hard Rain is Gonna Fall

2011-03-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

I was driving home tonight in a pretty heavy rain on Rt. 50 and heard the emergency signal on the radio. "Oh, it's a good idea to test that right about now. Smart." Only it wasn't a test.

Some heavy rain passed through the area today. It put me in mind of some rain songs.

I like this version of Dylan's classic.

They used to play this around 2:00 AM in this German bar where I used to get just obliterated. I liked it the first time I heard it. Then I hated it for a very long time. Then I liked it because it put me in mind of all the friends I used to get hammered with in that bar. I figured out there that Germans are incredibly sentimental. It tends to be hidden under about 10 cubic yards of granite, and a thick loden coat. But it's in there. Germans seem to love this song. On the merits. Which is weird.

And this is one I kind of liked before I figured out John Cougar Mellencamp was insufferably smug.

And this is just nice.

Yeah man. Everybody in music has to do a Rain song. It's the Rules.

Everybody.

Everybody.

And I guess some bands are just rain-themed.

Have fun this weekend. Ride strong.

Mice, Men & Plans

2011-03-08T19:00:00.001-08:00

I went to the soiree at Twenty-20 cycling in Baltimore last night to greet Richard Fries and Tim Johnson and a crew of bikey people who had ridden down from Boston for the National Bike Summit in D.C. Hell of a ride, from the sounds of it - cold, snow, rain, and the boss man from Pedros crashed out and destroyed his shoulder doing a townline sprint. Nice. My main mission was to try to steer them onto a safe route. They planned to ride down Route 1 into D.C., leaving Balmer at 8:00 AM.

Yeah, I had the same reaction my D.C. / NoVa readers just did. Anyhow, I linked up with them, got them the route, agreed to join up along the way, drank two beers (Resurrection, very nice), missed out on the pizza, tried to joke with Tim Johnson but only insulted him, chatted with lots of nice people, and peed in the corner.

I only made one of those things up.

This morning I rolled out early to get to the designated Rendyzvous point. Did I mention that they made the youngest guy on the trip, a good young framebuilder from Boston, the navigator, and that he apparently was good at getting them lost, based on the jokes? Well anyhow, he was supposed to bring them along the route into D.C. and I'd meet up with them... so anyhow, after waiting near the northern terminus of Powder Mill Road for an hour and 10 minutes and hearing no radio response, I decided it was time to take my hypothermic ass into D.C. So I probably scored more points with those guys, which is great, because you never can have enough people mildly disliking you.

I had to hustle to work. This was interesting because there was a small but steady and significant headwind the whole way in. I was a little spent when I got to work, 40 miles is a little more than my usual weekday riding dose.

I learned something at work though. That is, Sportsbalm Hot embrocation doesn't come off under the pulsating blast of a 1.2 gal/min high efficiency shower, and the dregs of a two year old Suave Body Wash (Motto: Fine, we're not as good as Axe. But we only cost half as much) only serve to help spread the remaining embro to the genitals and eye sockets.

Interestingly - and by interestingly I mean painfully - I sat in a couple meetings with my legs basically on fire. This would have been bad, but after being all hypothermic and shivery, it actually felt kinda good. And it smelled like the start line of a cross race. Which was *awesome*. For me anyhow. I'm sure it smelt like burnt underwear to my co-workers, but I'm there to make me money, not there to make them happy.

The ride home was just as significant. I was sure that it was Wife of Rouleur's Garden Club night. That's right, it's a G. thang. Some last minute emails generated one of those situations that wasn't life threatening, but which required attention lest the big boss start asking obvious questions, and, God forbid, hard-to-answer non-obvious ones. So it took a solid hour after my scheduled leaving time to answer the obvious ones, and I trotted out of work sorta late, convinced it was my butt if I didn't get home fast. You don't mess with a G. thang, shorty.

I didn't go super hard. But what I did do was a steady L3/L4 tempo the whole way, and on every little rise where I started to slow, I stood up and tapped out an effort until I crested it.

By the time I was rolling down the far end of Good Luck Road, I was about 80% on the rivet, and I had that tight-all-over feeling that you get when the bike is holding you in the harness. Muscles that aren't related to pedaling are locked into position, in place. You feel every pedal stroke, and can tell if your circles are starting to get squared...

It felt pretty damn good. I wasn't on top of the pedals, that'll take a month more of work. But I felt about 3/4ths on top of them and it'll be interesting to see what the power numbers look like.

Do you know, it's March 8th? Last year at this time, I had just finished my first real training ride after being totally laid out with the blown lower back. It was about 23 or 25 miles, easy. It crushed me. Here's what I said:

It wasn't a good kind of hurt that I felt at that point; it was a bad, ill-used sort of feeling. The first thing my wife said to me was, "you look really haggard." But I was looking haggard at the end of the ride and I had earned the right to look bad. The nagging fear that my back wouldn't hold up proved irrational, and I proved to myself that I can get through a ride of decent length despite the layoff, and despite the discomfort of the ride itself. It was the first hammer blow on the block of metal I hope to build back up into a decent cyclist.

Well, here we are. I may have done a bunch of things lately to seemingly try to make people cars, my friends and Tim Johnson hate me, and I'm fat as a monk right now, and my attitude frankly sucks and it's going into my permanent record... but as a cyclist I feel okay and I'm way ahead of last year, and looking forward to a good MTB racing season, and then to cross.

Be happy. Find progress where you can. Make the most of what you got. Be good to your family and friends, and for God's sake, try not to pick on Tim Johnson after he's just had the Day From Hell. You only get one chance to live each day, then it's gone. And be grateful for what you get.

TOT 18: My Headlamp Rig
AKA Wall-E

My Weekend

2011-03-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

Saturday I linked up with a substantial chunk of The Morning Ride, DirtDevilDivision, for 2.5 hours of mountain biking fun. It was the first MTB ride for me since meeting D'Brickashaw, and I was a little rusty. Ordinarily I would take the boinger for any ride longer than 90 minutes, but I seem to have gotten some solvent on the brakes that makes 'em slippery, and they need bleeding anyhow and there's not a Tektro bleed kit anywhere to be found in the house... So it was onto Frankenbike.

It was a lot of fun despite being in crap shape. There were maybe 5 or 6 potholes on the trail but we did the regular Tour De Patapsco lap of the park, and we only needed to walk in that handful of places. Everywhere else the ground was as tacky as gum rubber, dream conditions. Would have been a perfect day to ride the boinger since I can flat out bomb down hills with that... but the rigid single acquitted itself nicely. The highlight of the ride for me was cruising up a couple little kickers that normally brutalize me... the momentum lesson I've learned riding w/t the TMR crew is staying with me. The threshold power... not so much, I was off the bike on Vineyard which is unusual. Maybe it was being conservative; I didn't want to blow up at the 50% ride and then have to totally struggle back in. Most of the people on the ride seemed a bit cracked for that matter; it's been a long winter and nothing really prepares a body for that.

It was a bit of a fitness wakeup call too. I'm doing better than I usually am at this point but theres a hell of a lot of fat to be lost and a lot of fitness to be gained. Time to get after it. Despite being near the bottom of that hill, I felt good because the joy of just riding the MTB again and hanging out with friends carried me. I capped it off with lunch w/t the Rouleur Family at The Honey Pig, a very good Korean diner on Rt. 40 in Ellicott City / Catonsville. They have the best tasting kimchi I've had in a long time and the kimchi jigae (sold there as pork & kimchi soup) was remarkable. Wife of Rouleur's bibim bap was also pretty remarkable, no fried egg on top but otherwise quite normal, only better.

This all left me amped up enough to consider taking the fixie on the commute to work tomorrow.

Release the Hounds!
A Small Cross-Section of TMR at Ride Start

What I Did Sunday Afternoon
1 Wheat, 1 White

And if you're havin' trouble with demonic thoughts about women, or a dirty above ground pool this week... well, you know who to call.

A Substantial Delta

2011-03-03T21:24:00.000-08:00

I feel a little raw this week. A little at loose ends after a couple (but not enough) rides. Too much work. Not enough sleep. Time for some music. I'll start with perhaps the greatest Blues threat this side of R.L. Burnsides' famous "I got a ass pocket a whiskey, an' a front pocket a gin...& etc."

T-Model Ford is going to remember you sorry fuckers how it's done.

Word.

Let's talk about the blues this week.

Yeah, The Taildragger, T Model Ford, killed a man once. For real. You got a problem with that? He'll put his foot in yo ass, you understand? He ain't done rememberin' you yet, neither.

That's beautiful music right there, but it's not pretty. It's beautiful the way a mean ass good looking drunk redneck farmgirl is. Do not mistake the beautiful bones in that music for softness; there is a very hard edge that lurks in the lyrics and what he sings about and what a lot of the old bluesmen sing about. It is authentic.

That said, you shouldn't make a fetish of authenticity. If you're going to make a fetish of anything, make a fetish of the truths that authentic artists try to tell. Authenticity is nice but it's not the only thing. A lot of new, synthesized stuff - music and consumer goods - is just great.

But authentic stuff carries in it a grain of something enduring. You're looking at a piece of history here, an older style of music that is passing away, and life stories that are just damn hard. Appreciate the authenticity in it but don't yearn for that kind of authenticity - authentic hard, a lifestyle I've lived now and again for a couple months at a time and thankfully I don't have to do it any more. Because it sucks. You shouldn't don the rose colored glasses and yearn for the hard old days to come back. Life is easy now because a lot of people dragged themselves up out of hard times, and we're living on the social capital. Civilizations rise and fall, if not us then our kids or their kids will have it damn hard, and if you could zip forward in time, they'd put a foot in your ass for not doing more to prevent the hard times from coming.

For now, you and I can crow about the authenticity of this music and how cool it is, but what we should really think about is the truths in it. T Model is an interesting curiosity to us, a leftover from an age that was a little less artificial, a little less cushioned from reality. There's a heartfelt genuine-ness to it that appeals. It contains an honesty that is striking today because most of life today is so many people blowing so much bullshit at each other. I see a lot of people who are mildly famous, look at what they're doing, and realize their main talent is self-promotion of their mediocre selves. They'd be selling snake oil - and starving - in an earlier age. If I wanted to self promote like that I could, it's not terribly difficult once you see it. But it's hollow. The self promoters are narcissistic. They've mastered smoke and mirrors and there's money in that particular end of show business, in politics and media, but there's no substance. The blues are not like that. They are not like Justin Bieber moaning about his heartbreak or wanting some girl. What the fuck does Justin Bieber know about anything? Nothing. T Model maybe isn't a brain surgeon, but he knows some stuff that he picked up at the University of Hard Knocks. He isn't telling you how great he is, he's never going to fail, and blowing cubic yards of smoke up your ass. Instead, he's going to tell you some hard truths about how it is, about what he's like and about what life is like. When he sings in another song that he's a good hard working wood cuttin' gravel road living man, that means something. It is freighted with significance and he's telling you about his identity, who he is at the core, a man who comes from a rough, rural place and does what he has to do, damn hard labor, to keep food on the table. What he's saying is *attractive* to a woman who lives just up the road, who is hanging out in the same juke joint. She's not going to throw her panties at him and scream, but she's going to find him interesting, and in the world he comes from - where that bluesman is doing hard physical labor during the day to put food on the table, that kind of thing is worth something. Your I-Pad is not.

Never assume that people who speak softly and soothingly to you and tell you nice things, are conveying anything meaningful to you. They may be doing so, but often, meaning, significance in life, usually comes in rough packages rather than wrapped in shiny paper and ribbons. I would bet that the true-est, rawest moments you've experienced in your life have mostly involved bitter disappointments. *That* is what traditional blues are conveying information about.

Skip James recorded this one when he was dying of cancer.

Damn. That is some honesty that cuts to the bone, served up on a plate by a waiter who has one foot in the grave. He was doing that performance to raise money for an operation to try to cure his cancer, to no avail. So tell me, what are the problems that are troubling you in your life today?

Robert Johnson was singing this next one about segregated, gangster-ridden, corrupt Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling Chicago.

Sweet home, Chicago, eh? Loving a city as rough as that was when Robert Johnson sang about it, must have been as rough as being in a marriage with a fun, physically abusive drunk. Robert Johnson may not even have gotten there by the time he sang about it... how tough does your life have to be, to view 1920's Chicago as the land of milk and honey? Rough jobs, tenements, crime, corrupt ward heelers - is heaven to a 1920s bluesman. What is that telling you about life in Tunicaville, Mississippi in 1921?

You've heard about a suitcase full of blues, right? Well, Sonny Boy Williamson appears to have traveled with an attache case full of blues. He sang a lot of songs about people doing him wrong, and if you get a good look at his face when he's singing, you can see he's thinking about some particular people, or a person. There is an intensity in his lyrics that one doesn't get from Lady Gaga.

And when Son House sang, "Here Come the Blues," well, you get a sense he's a guy who can see 'em coming from a long ways off. His music will help us deal with them when they get here, be a midwife to our sorrow over a woman leaving, a spell in jail, or things just plain being tough. Yep, here come the blues.

Rough people get comfortable around elemental truths, I think, because life is a little more honest around the edges with you when you're living hard. There's no cushion if you're living rough. No use lying about your predicament; you can't spin doctor it if you're poor, crime ridden, a down-on-your-luck blue collar drunk, or in the case of these old blues artists frankly oppressed black men living in grinding poverty in a segregated nation that doesn't give a fuck if you live or die. So Blind Willie Johnson asks what Justin Bieber can't even conceive of, "What is the Soul of a Man?"

I saw a crowd stand talking, I came up right on time
Were hearing the doctor and the lawyer, say a man ain't nothing but his mind
I read the bible often, I tries to read it right
As far as I can understand, a man is more than his mind
When Christ stood in the temple, the people stood amazed
Was showing the doctors and the lawyers, how to raise a body from the grave

We like the blues because most of the time, for most artists who sing them, the form works to express some elemental - and what I think will ultimately be proved permanent - truths about life. Much of the time, we spend our lives avoiding the truth, because the truth tends to hurt soft people like us. Maybe it takes people who've lived in a world of hurt, to introduce elemental truths back into our lives. Yeah, life and the truth and everything hurts. SO WHAT. Talk about it. Sing about it. Get off your chest and dance about it. We can deal with it and move on, and R.L. is comin' up to the juke joint next Thursday. Get a cooler of Pabst and we'll dance our asses off and get our drank on. Alright?

It's not for nothing that Ulysses had a rough trip home. The damn story wouldn't be worth telling if his biggest hassle was the cruise line losing his luggage. Wouldn't have had any meaning, and we'd have gotten tired of hearing about his pissing match with Achilles during the war, this hot chick he cheated with who wouldn't stop emailing him and bugging out his friends, and the morons running the cruise line. That his friends get killed, his mistress turns his men into pigs and every time he gets near the ocean he gets shipwrecked because he pissed off Poseidon, makes it worthwhile. We look at Ulysses, and we learn what not to do, and we are reminded that life is a hurt locker, at its core. A vale of tears. A tough challenge when we leave the friendly confines.

I just wanted to remember all you sorry fuckers about that.

Have a nice weekend y'all. Ride some, have fun, hug somebody you love. That's my plan.

Commuting: Lessons Re-Learned.

2011-03-02T18:24:00.001-08:00

I rolled into and out of D.C. today on the Great Northern Scared Bike Commuter Route, the one that transits Bowie, Goodluck Road, the Northeast Branch, Rhode Island and Montana Ave, thence to L Street.

Holy crap was it a hairball ride today. Along the way in, I had plenty of time to ponder bike commuting. The ride only took 1:20 or so, but when your whole life flashes before your eyes in a second 6-8 times on a single ride, the time between near death experiences seems like whole millenia. So there was plenty of time to figure out the secret to life, death, bike commuting, and how Item 3 is liable to lead to Item 2. Here is what I figured out:

The odds are pretty good everybody who hasn't ridden a road bike in 4 months has completely forgotten how to ride around traffic and stick to a straight line. How I got to work this morning without getting snared in a DWI stop is beyond my comprehension.
The probably-unlicensed-uninsured day laborers everybody is worried about colliding with? Don't sweat it. They're your friends. I had a collision with a van today, driven by some guys who appeared to fit that description. It was my fault, I clipped the mirror pretty hard with my shoulder trying to lane split. As I unclipped and waited to hear something from the driver, he peeled out and took off like a scalded cat. Wanted nothing to do with me. See? They're my friends.
There is no safe way to handle shoulderless roads in P.G. County. Sick drivers who like to buzz and swerve in to make a point, lanes that appear then disappear for no rhyme or reason. I rolled up a lane of maybe 10 cars at the junction of 201 and Goodluck, and passed, in order, texting, texting, phone, checking email, phone phone texting, dark windows, angry muttering to self, texting. You could ride with flashing red lights, an air raid siren, a pair of Barrett .50 Cal rifles in a handlebar mount and vivid magenta flames shooting out your ass, and it still wouldn't get anybody's attention. Not in P.G.
Changing a flat tire in the dark in the woods on the edge of a road is harder than doing it in the light. It is especially hard when your tire 'iron' breaks the moment it touches the tire's sidewall.
Maryland has nicer roads than Virginia as a rule, but when Maryland decides to let a road go to hell, it doesn't screw around. The potholes are big enough to eat other states' potholes two at a time.
At this time of year, leaving the office in summer jersey + knee warmers at 5:05 PM and 63 degrees, means it will be 47 by 6:10, and you will only be able to avoid hypothermia by telling yourself you're a hard as shit Belgian flahute. The realization that you're actually a complete pussy will then cause you to double over in laughter, and the combination of warmth from the muscle contractions and the heat-conserving doubling over will help you avoid freezing to death.
When I stopped to fasten on my headlight, a guy in blue club kit stopped to ask me if I needed anything. I gave the "Nah, I'm fine thanks" response and as he rode away I thought about how that was really classy; I'd have been in the doo doo at that particular spot if I was having a serious problem. I wasn't but hearing another cyclist basically saying he had my six, was really cool. You should always stop to help people who look like they might need it... well, unless you're going for that unprecedented fourth straight Giant Asshole of the Year Award, in which case, you should just keep on riding...
My ride was made safer by Fast as Schidt Sean, who gave me a CatEye Orbit Spoke Light the other week. You should consider getting one if you ride in the dark at all. This is what it looks like in the dark.

TOT 16: It's Brighter Than Me, For Certain

Thanks Sean! I'm never going to ride at night without one.

Monday, Bloody Monday...

2011-02-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

This is the first time this year that I have faced Monday morning with slightly sore legs. That is a good feeling. Not just that, either. Over the weekend, I discovered my ass is really out of shape. No, I don't mean I'm fat and riding slow, although that would be truthful. I mean my ass isn't used to doing 2+ hours at a clip on the roadbike. I haven't ridden more than 2 hours straight on the road bike since perhaps early October, and my butt just isn't used to that narrow leather torture device we call a saddle. I would call the pain from my 2:25 and 95 minute rides exquisite if I was into that kind of pain, but I'm not so let's just call it excessive and overly detailed. I was reminded there are roughly 6 kinds of butt pain from the saddle.

1) Rub marks on the sit bones. Those are two dime-sized red raw spots that nicely mark out where your sitbones are, just in case anybody was back there looking around and wondering. With some luck - some bad luck - these ripen into saddlesores. I didn't ride enough to get these.

2) Sitting-on-nails pain you get right under the sitbones. Sometimes this is coincident with #1, but often it's an early season pain when you haven't ridden enough to beat the nerve endings into submission. It does indeed feel like a nail is half driven into each sitbone, and with each pedal stroke you drive it a fraction of an inch deeper. It goes away once your nerve endings cry uncle.

3) Monkey Butt. This happens when some combination of sweat, chamois cream, klingons, and your butt cheeks rubbing together make your Grand Canyon feel like Hell's Half Acre. It is characterized by an unsettling feeling that 'somethin' ain't right back there, I tell ya..." followed by tears when the soap hits the area in the shower. It is called monkey butt because, well...

Cyclists After an Early Season Long Ride

4) Taint Scrape. This quarter-sized raw spot on the taint is usually the result of low quality shorts, bib knickers that are a little too stretchy in the crotchal region, or bad bike fit. Taint scrape is noticeable because of the pinching feel the cyclist gets after about an hour in the saddle. It is as if tiny people with long fingernails were actually in the cyclist's shorts, pinching away at either side of the cyclist's taint. Which they are. Seriously, check sometime while you're riding. It's true. Until you've checked, you can't say I'm wrong.

5) Manscaping Failure. An epidemic among swarthy cyclists of Latin heritage, this involves forgetting to do the manscaping (or womanscaping? I can only hazard a guess) after which the bike administers a Brazillian Bikini Wax, one hair at a time, until the offending Crotchal Dreadlocks have all been plucked. The sensation is akin to being singled out in 9th grade to do an algebra equation on the blackboard in front of the class, except not as painful.

6) Scrotal Speed Bag Abrasion. Have you ever seen a boxer whacking a speed bag? That is what riding does to your Balzac when you ride. If you haven't ridden in a while, however, you have probably lost the leathery covering that normally protects your walnuts, reverting back to an almost human-like skin wrapper. The first few times you ride... well, you wouldn't buy an expensive leather sofa, then not clean and moisturize the leather, right? On the upside, you won't notice the searing pain until you remove your shorts and the Boys can roam free and explore the limits of their domain. On the downside, you will probably have to hop up and down with pain when they do hit the limits, so make sure when you take off your shorts that you're in a wide open space where you aren't going to hit and break delicate household objects, like the lawn in front of your house.

TOT 14: FBS Shop Ride

Saturday's ride was fun but it highlighted how out-of-shape I am. The threshold power was there in short 5 minute bursts, at a typical early season threshold level. The VO2 power was only there for 30 seconds at a time, and I had little ability to bounce back fast after those hard efforts. Managed a .87 IF for the ride, despite basically chugging in the last third in low L2 (except on the hills). Not thrilled, but still, I feel way ahead of where I've been at this point during past years. Thank you, TMR and Patapsco!

TOT 15: A Lonely Road

Rode solo on Sunday for 95 or 100 minutes. Stayed mostly in L2, came out of it with a .72 IF, which is what I was looking for. I had a lot of time to think about how much better I feel this year than last, and how nice it is to have a functioning back. I'm not looking to be in any kind of shape until late May, so this is the time to ease back into it.

I wonder how everybody else's early season training is going?

SST & More

2011-02-25T06:33:00.000-08:00

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

1. My scene is the 80's, today. Not sure if you and I had the same 80's though, musically speaking.

2. The first punk (post-punk) show I ever went to. They opened with this song and played the prelude for what seemed like 10 minutes at the old Lost Horizon in Syracuse. The crowd was screaming insanely when Jello finally started singing...

3. The Minutmen really did jam econo. Even their success was pretty small - their talent was pretty outsized though.

4. Love and Rockets struck me as super talented. Their musical style changed a lot with each album and it was pretty good every time.

5. I liked Husker Du. They were pretty good background music - never loved 'em, never minded 'em. If the 80's had a soundtrack for me, Husker Du would hold down the unremarkable sixth slot on the album. Listening to this I think maybe I missed out a little by not paying attention to them.

6. This is a great song, a crossover hit for Los Lobos. The politics implicit in the video are almost innocent compared to today's spittle flecked rhetoric.

7. This is the song that turned me on to music. My buddy Mark got the first Stevie Ray album and put it on the turntable and we listened to this first track together and just say there staring at each other going "holy shit!" and a bunch of other expletives. We played the first track about 10 times. I was about 15. The guitar playing just hooked me and after this I started exploring blues and jazz, and punk. Sorta missed a lot of the new wave stuff unless it was punky or had some interesting musical twist to it. I sort of followed the trail from him to Hendrix to Velvet Underground and so on, started following musicians around and seeing who played with whom, and basically exploring music the way I sometimes do here on Fridays. But Stevie Ray Vaughn is the guy to thank for it. If I'd never head this song and the album it was on, it's likely I never would have paid attention to or cared about music.

Just damn. The day his helicopter went down I was on field exercises in the Army. I found out about it around 2 in the afternoon and had to excuse myself from the Tactical Operations Center and go have a lie down in the dirt for a half hour to recompose.

Friday...

2011-02-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

In honor of the Virginia Assembly, which killed a bill that would have required motorists to give cyclists a 3 foot clearance when passing:

For people in a hurry, despite the nice weather:

One for my friend Becky, who's kinda partial to old western themes:

Sure, Elmer Bernstein is no Ennio Moriccone, but he's pretty damn good anyhow. So's this guy who wrote a whole symphony about the old west.

Yeah, that's the Beef It's What's For Dinner song. It bears no relation to this song... except that both have been used to sell beef.

TOT 12: Seeing an Old Ghost

2011-02-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

Ghost of Trainings Past

Clubs can pick their race kit by one of two means - by dictatorial fiat, or by democratic methods. Either way, the annual kit redesign on most teams result in a slapfight during which people say stupid things. One of the more regrettable aspects of this year's Annual Kit Slapfight is that a line got drawn between those who think how a kit looks on a commute or in traffic matters, and those who think that the safety issues associated with matte black black are irrelevant. Where the center mass of racers are 35+, and get a good chunk of their training done in traffic between home and work (either on a direct route, or with a diversion to Hains or their favorite hill), and a substantial portion of that training is done in the dark, it matters. I know that concession to reality, the admission that we aren't all in Girona doing daily rides the rest of the world would call epics, punctures the fantasy of "maybe I could ride at the TdF someday," but there it is. Team kit should look good and speak for the sponsors and club, but around here, it should also be high vis.

My commute is one of the more nervous rides I take; bouncing down BikeBreaker at Patapsco isn't nearly as nerve wracking as cruising through PG County on Goodluck Road at rush hour. There are a lot of rough stretches with potholes and no shoulder, and I'd give Lance Armstrong's remaining nut to have better visibility. No, dayglo orange isn't necessary; but I'm really glad my team kit isn't black. I haven't ridden the commute since September or October.

With some apprehension I did the commute with Fast As Schidt Sean yesterday. It had been a little over three weeks since I had done a serious ride. A combination of bad weather, my own wussification, and a couple lower thighs that are *still* purple and yellow had kept me just a couple short casual rides in the interim, and a single aborted MTB ride. (Stupid mud... not stupid trail ethics...)

I was shocked, but it wasn't that bad. My legs felt heavy, and there were places on the ride where we were way slower than last year, but at no point did it turn into the slog that it did last year the first few times we rode it.

Sean didn't do bad; it's pretty clear that he hasn't ridden for 3-4 months (refitting a kitchen will do that to you) and there were places that he normally likes to stick it to me, where he was obviously working pretty hard. But we kept decent speed up and it wasn't a death march as we'd both feared it would be. He very kindly gave me a knog light that goes in the spokes; that added to the taillight / headlight arsenal and gave some side visibility. It's not enough to make me comfortable, but it helps.

Some things were disorienting. I haven't spun steady state in six months. I had forgotten how that kind of effort, even at a moderate wattage level, causes major snottage and a peculiar burn in the legs you don't normally get mountain biking, except maybe on fireroads. I've also gotten conditioned to the Mountain Bike Temperature scale. Starting the ride in 24 degree temps had me expecting a relatively cold but basically comfortable ride; going at an endurance pace, an average speed of 17 MPH turned this into a frozen hell until the sun rose, and had me sitting at my desk shivering until 9:45. But it was alright and nice to be on that smooth, scalpel-like road bike again.

No, it's not the hardest commute in the world. It's only about 20 miles each way. But it is pretty hilly, dotted with constant rises, and there are a number of stretches on it where the traffic situation is dire and you have to ride threshold just to get out of the danger zone quickly. Sean is a fairly strong mountain biker and attributes a 1 hour improvement in his SM 100 time (to a fairly impressive sub-11 as I recall) to doing this commute a couple times a week over the summer.

The bottom line is that hitting the morning ride through December and most of January worked for me, even with the injury-induced layoff. My legs are about 6 weeks further ahead than they are most years at this time.

Oh well. Back in the saddle. I'm a bit behind my pace of looking for 180 rides this year, but I'll pick it up.

Whisky Slapfight: Rethinking the Whole Effin' Thing

2011-02-10T17:53:00.001-08:00

So I'm going to have to rethink this whisky slapfight shootout.

Holy cripes, I'm sitting there yesterday at work trying to talk to my big boss - my boss's, boss's, boss's boss. And it's casual but we're in this little confined space, and I'm cracking jokes, and I'm oozing whiskey out of each and every fucking pore. Not bourbon, but scotch.

Here's a hint, drunks: stick to vodka. If you're a scotch drunk, everybody knows. And by "everybody," I mean everybody from West Virginia to Delaware, assuming you're standing in D.C.

Not like I've been getting hammered this week. I've just been getting a bit tipsy.

But man, am I getting old. Averaging 6 ounces of whiskey, 3 ounces of vermouth a night - and okay, I had a beer or two with dinner once or twice - is killing me.

I'm not getting hammered. Let me repeat that. Hammered Jim is Sleepy Jim at the end of a workday.

Nope, just tipsy. And I'm starting to stink of booze.

I can't do this. I have to throttle back.

So I'm swilling 3 ounces of Knob Creek tonight in an effort to taper. Oddly enough, it's good. Better than a cocktail. I'm remembering now why I eased up on beer in my mid-20's and started drinking hard liquor on a night out. It's because I'd drink 2-4 shots total, at the rate of 1 shot per hour - at the most - and go home sober and not bloated out. Straight liquor forces a bit of moderation. The only people who drink whiskey like cowboys in movies are actors in movies who are actually throwing down shots of iced tea. You didn't think that was real, did you?

So I got onto the bourbon sidecar last night and had to pull the abort button. I just didn't have it in me to go any further. This drinking schedule was frickin' punishing, like trying to do three interval sessions in a short training week.

The whiskey this week has been okay. It's those damn sugary liquors that were fucking me up. This Knob is going down just fine...

So I pussed out. I'll admit it that I had to ease up this week. I'm just not that good of a determined drunk, and that shit was destroying me. So we'll continue with the cocktails over the weekend, and I'll go to the 'cross promoter's meeting stinking of bourbon and making people there wonder about my sobriety and sanity. For now... chilling.

And as for this comment to Tuesday night's post:

Now that you're 40% done with your competition, Jim, I really need to question your whole methodology. Comparing a bourbon drink to a whisky(ey) drink each evening is all wrong. You need to expand the brackets so there is a bourbon/rye champ (something with Woodford would be my personal go-to) and a whisky(ey) champ. Then, after a bye-day or two; hold your Slapfight Bowl with a clear head and somewhat less swollen liver to properly judge the champ

What? Are you trying to kill me? Expand the brackets? Jeebus... who do you think I am? A Kennedy?

In the words of R.L. Burnside, I ain't gon' drink no more.

Of course, I ain't gon' drink no less, neither.

So how 'bout some muzak?

Yeah. That's better. That one was for me. This one's appropriate too though.

This one is for all the people on the MABRA listserve going on endlessly about the three foot passing rule.

And this little bit of Eye-Talian (okay, it's Brazilian but the lie seems appropriate in light of the Ricco debacle) country & western is for the folks who know there's no dopin' in MABRA, can't happen here, wouldn't happen here, doesn't matter, we'd only be a laughin' stock to look.

Speaking of dope... This isn't exactly my sentiment, but I got a special request from a guy who calls himself "Cav," for his "bitch Ricco," whatever that means. (NSFW).

Speaking of negativity... the lack of riding, the continuing cold of winter, and the fact that I'm suffering a perpetual whiskey hangover right now has me down. You know what helps with that? Nice music. You've heard of Vivaldi's Four Season's, right? Here's the "Winter" movement. It's kinda pretty. Prettier than the weather right now, that's for sure.

Time to wrap this up. Here ya go.

Have a good weekend. Try to find a ride, kids.

Day 2: 5 Day Whisky Cocktail Slapfight: Rob Roy Steals My Cattle, & Inner Censor

2011-02-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

The shit I don't do for you people.

I realized two things this morning.

First of all, using the 3 ounce cap on my nice stainless shaker as a one part for mixing these cocktails - as in "two parts whiskey one part vermouth" - is pretty heavy duty. I realized this when woke up and thought there was a cat stuck in my mouth, but it was only my mouth.

Second, this is a heavyweight fight of ten rounds. Each night, I'm pairing up the previous night's winner with a new cocktail.

Two rounds a night, five days.

Classic heavyweight bout, right there.

Which makes perfect sense because each morning I'm going to wake up feeling like I got beaten and picked up a concussion the night before.

Tonight's matchup is last night's champ, the Manhattan, squaring off against his Scottish cousin, the Rob Roy. A Rob Roy is nothing but a Manhattan made with Scotch. Of course that's like saying Ma Deuce is nothing but a machine gun made with John M. Browning's ideas, or champagne is nothing but French wine made with bubbles, or Catholic doctrine made in Rome.

Scotch is the sine qua non of high quality boozing. Sure, you can get some low quality scotch - but even that is usually made from high quality single malts that some Scottish bastard decided could be whipped into a punishing blend to be the scourge of low rent morons who deserve to be punished.

There aren't many Scotch whiskeys, er, whiskys, that I'll turn down on quality grounds. There are plenty I'll turn down on taste grounds though. When Scotch doesn't get along with your palate, it declares war along the lines of Russians-reaching-Berlin dyspepsia. And I... how should I put this delicately... am not a big fan of the blended scotches. The medicinal peaty taste that is so appealing in Ardbeg or Laphroaig or one of the small batch Islay malts, tastes like Listerine in a blend. The cinammon sharpness of the highland malts tends to taste like cigarette butts - to me anyhow - in most blends. And the mildness of the lowland malts tastes like a sandbagger whisky sour left over from a wedding reception when you get it in a blend.

Still, some blends are decent enough, the higher end Johnny Walkers, and most notably, Chivas.

I collect Chivas, actually. People will wonder what to get me because I am the Man Who Has Everything In His Mind, and somebody will mention that I drink Scotch, which is true just as I eat food is also a true statement about me. If they are a scotch drinker, they'll throw me a bottle of Laphroaig 10 year, which isn't the greatest scotch in the world but it's a very nice one, a scotch drinker's scotch in the way you won't find many bourbon drinkers turning down a shot of Maker's. Solid. So I have 4 bottles of that sitting around, give or take. If they aren't scotch drinkers, they'll score me a bottle of Chivas. I have three of them sitting around.

So naturally, I have to figure out how to burn some of the Scottish National Cirrhosis Reserve Stocks, and the Rob Roy is the answer for that, at least tonight. I wouldn't blend a good single malt - unless it was to go into an exceptionally weird & cool mix, like a homemade Drambuie or something - so tonight's assault will be on the blended stuff.

The Rob Roy is a simple drink. It's two parts Scotch to one part Sweet Vermouth, with a dash of Angostura Bitters, shaken over ice, and maybe a cherry and a dash of cherry juice thrown in. It's a nice drink. It's also the first one on deck tonight and I can report, it's going down pretty damn smooth.

What's the taste like? Sophisticated. Scotch has a much more complicated palate than rye or bourbon. Chivas in a mixer is peppery, a tiny bit medicinal, and astringent. The peppery notes really set off the cherry and Vermouth; their sweetness is really set off by the scotch, but without being overwhelmed by it and turned into a sweet drink.

So how will the Manhattan hold up against this onslaught?

I'll tell you in about 10 minutes.

Okay then.

I hate to say this but it's the Manhattan in a rout.

Compared to the Rob Roy, the Manhattan is a more accessible drink. Made with rye, it's dry, and a bit lighter. I will confess to chuckling while drinking the Rob Roy, and inadvertently taking some the wrong way down my throat, a move accompanied by involuntary shivers. I don't think the Manhattan would do that to me.

It's not that the Rob Roy is a bad drink; it's not. But it strikes me as the hard core scotch drinker's cocktail. I drink scotch, but I'm not hard core. In my old age I've turned into more of a bourbon drinker. I like a whisky that is simple, tasty and quite strong, but not terribly challenging to get down. I like scotch but, like canned tuna, there are some days where I just don't have a taste for it, and on those days it's like forcing down cat food.

I will make the comparison here between an okay, strong red wine, and a great white.

Is the white better than the red? Or do you discount the white just because it doesn't kick your ass whenever you try to drink it?

For a while there, I used to discount the white because it wasn't as full bodied as the red. If I was doing this shootout back then, I'd like the Rob Roy more because it's got more kick, just like an okay Bordeaux.

But the more delicate rye Manhattan, like that really good white Languedoc, brings more to the table. It wins tonight's bout.

Wow, I'm having trouble closing this out. Gotta get a shaker with a top cap size smaller than 3 ounces. This shootout is going to kill me.

5 Day Whisky Cocktail Slapfight

2011-02-07T19:37:00.000-08:00

Well.. there's not much riding going on. I've been re-fitting a bathroom up to Mrs. Rouleur's specs. By the time I'm done the damn thing is going to be too nice to take a crap in. You probably think I'm joking but I'm not, I'll post pictures. Working on trim and whatnot right now, the slow part of the job that takes a week. Spectacular tile job, new plumbing, squaring up crooked old walls as best as possible with sheetrock & mud work, that's all done. And the weather mostly blows and I've been mostly off the bike with still-purple knees. I'll be back on the bike this week. But meanwhile...

I was wondering, what's the ultimate, mainstream whisky cocktail? There's a lot of good ones out there. So I'm going to have a Steel Cage, Lockdown, World Championship Rumble/Deathmatch for the next 5 days. I'm going to pit two whisky cocktails against each other every day and see who comes out on top, other than my internist who will be treating my cirrhosis in a couple years.

Tonight... It's the Manhattan versus the Algonquin.

Those of you who know me know that I love the Manhattan. Somebody told me a while back that it was a granny drink... this is true if your granny is Charles Bukowski's girlfriend.

The Manhattan is a simple drink - two parts whiskey, one part sweet vermouth, a dash of Angostura Bitters, shaken over ice, served with a couple maraschino cherries and a dash of cherry juice. I am partial to it with Maker's Mark if I want it real sweet, or with Rye for a slightly dry-er drink.

I made it with Jim Beam Rye tonight, which is roughly 81% better than standard Jim Beam.

To keep things equal, I made the Algonquin with the same rye, and with the same brand of vermouth.

The Algonquin comprises two parts whiskey (or whisky, your call) to one part dry vermouth, one part pineapple juice, and a cherry can be added for a trace of sweetness.

How'd they do?

Well, if it was a hot day, high humidity, and the Manhattan was made with Makers or some other sweet, heavy bourbon, the Algonquin would have stood a chance. It is a dry drink, not a heavy dry like a martini but light, like champagne, but with a mule's kick. It goes down easy; you could serve this as a mini-shot at a party. Like the denizens of the Round Table at it's namesake, the Algonquin Hotel, it would be a perfect drink for silver-tongued bon vivants, as quick to throw down a cocktail as they are to toss off a bon mot.

Alas, it didn't stand a chance against the heavyweight champ, the Manhattan. Leaned down with a good rye, the Manhattan was sweet but a little astringent, and it packed a hell of a wallop (perhaps because it was the second drink, and I was using a 3 ounce measure from atop my stainless cocktail shaker).

So that didn't take long... Manhattan by a knockout, though I'd recommend keeping the Algonquin handy for a hot day, or for guests preferring a slightly lighter flavored drink.

On Deck:

Rob Roy
Whisky Sour
Sidecar

Plus two drinks that you, the readers, nominate in the next few days. Gotta have whisky or whiskey in them and not be repulsive to me.

Superbowl Picks

2011-02-01T20:06:00.000-08:00

Stillers by 3.

Other predictions:

1) Ben Roethlisberger's rehabilitation pronounced a success, now that he's avoided being accused of rape for nearly 5 straight months. It will be a "marvelous story."

2) Aaron Rodgers will rush for 35+ yards.

3) The commercials won't be as good this year.

4) But you'll still get just as hammered.

TOT 11: Somedays You're The Bear Hitting The Windshield

2011-01-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

It was a nice dawn patrol ride today. A good chunk of the usual crew was there, Trevor "The Regular Guy" M. was back in the saddle after a highly irregular experience that landed him in the hospital with more tubes in him than a 1955 Dumont TV. Sven was there after terrorizing young shredders half his age all last week, and even Snoop Dogg brought his muzzle to the hizzle.

Highlights of the ride, for me anyhow, included leading the group up the MC trail. It's a steady, mildly inclined stairstep with a series of kickers on it. Ironically, it's easier for me to go up it fairly hard than for me to cruise, so that's what I did. Turns out it was a decent pace. The downside to that is that when we headed up the next section of trail, 20 minutes of steep ups and downs, my legs were tired and about 2/3ds of the way through that I lost the string of the group and popped. I didn't shoot way out the back and in fact cruised in on the wheel of the next-to-tail end guy. I even got a couple compliments on driving the pace there, which is cool; the only way to get stronger is to bury yourself and that's what I did, so Mission Accomplished. But I was toasted so I told the group to go and I'd ease on in, which I mostly did until I got to the last mile back to the trailhead. That part is downhill, swoopy, and has a bunch of log drops on it. I absolutely hammer that and stick with guys who are way faster there... that part of the trail system just works for me.

Today it didn't though. I swerved left to take this little optional log hop. No big deal, it was only 6" in height. The only problem was I hit it going full tilt, as in eyes-watering, sliding in the turns full tilt. Upon further review, I determined that my front wheel made it over, but I was nowhere near quick enough with the rear hop. I stopped dead in my tracks when the rear wheel hit the log, and shot out over the handlebars, pausing only to let the bike Jeff Gillooly me right above both kneecaps, a square on nasty handlebar blow to my lower quads. I hopped up immediately then started gasping; had to lean my chest onto the bike seat to support myself. The pain was searing. Now I know *exactly* how Nancy Kerrigan felt.

Artist's Impression: The Rouleur, Post-Crash

I was due. It's been about a year since my last Ginormous Mountain Bike Crash, so there you go. After getting my breath back - about 15 seconds - I checked the wheels and the Velocity P-35 rims, those stout bastards, were still true. Me, not so much, I was still doubled over in pain. I got back on the bike though, and pedaled it in, slowly.

Once I got my kit off I checked out the knees. They both have pretty good hematomas, but the one on the right is basically softball sized. Nothing appears to be broken, the joints seem to be working... just it hurts like the bejeezus to bend my legs or touch them anywhere above the knees.

Meet D'Brickashaw
My New Hematoma Best Friend

The kneecap is under the smaller lump there, the one directly in front of the electrical socket.

I'm going to call the big useless lump D'Brickashaw.

Yeah. That hematoma oughtta have it's own zip code. Guess the Trail of Tears (TOT) theme lived up to its name today.

Oh well. Some days you eat the bear, other days, the bear kicks your ass, rips your head off, craps down your throat, and doesn't even say thanks.

Still beats a day of not riding though.

TOT 10: Cold as Ice to Me

2011-01-24T18:08:00.001-08:00

I rode early solo at Rosaryville this morning. I thought it was about 8 degrees or so, but then my smartphone affiliated with the nearest weather observation post, the Tippett station, and informed me the temp at 8:25 was 5. So there's a pretty good chance it was 3 or 2 when I pushed off at ride start.

How cold is that? Cold enough that the inside and outside of my helmet was iced up.

Keeping a Cool Head...

The white stuff there, is ice. The riding itself was okay. The douchebag ruts are getting pounded down into dust, the dry, dessicated earth from the prolonged hard freeze is making them crispy and cyclists are breaking them down. We're supposed to have temps in the mid-40's over the next couple days though, and this thaw will bring water up to the surface, at which point douchebags will go for pleasant, late afternoon rides and dig new, deep, 4" ruts into the trails. For today it was alright however. Took 20-30 minutes for my legs to loosen up enough to stop pedaling squares, but loosen they did. If my feet had been warmer I'd have ridden maybe another half lap. They weren't, and I didn't.

Two noteworthy things happened. One is that my tires, inflated to 20 PSI at room temperature, were bottoming out and I was hitting the rim on every little root I crossed. I guess the cold air caused enough contraction that an event which normally occurs once or maybe twice per ride became commonplace. Second, my lobster gloves - which are too warm for ordinary cold weather riding - actually didn't do a great job of keeping my hands warm. Yeah, it was real cold to be riding a bike.

Even with the ruts and the cold, it was still worth the trip.

Sunofagun...

TOT 9: Many Are Cold, But Few Are Frozen*

2011-01-23T19:37:00.000-08:00

Gatoradesicle.

It was about 12 at ride start on Saturday at 7:00 AM. We did about 2:30 of ride time at Patapsco; not super fast but not super slow, just kinda slow with not much in the way of breaks. I rode with Brad, who is newer than me to the TMR crew. Nice guy, was rocking the single track. I was slipping pretty good - needed to go with lower tire pressure maybe - and wasn't hanging too well toward the end of the ride. My big tactical error was not bringing hot gatorade in an insulated bottle, and some food; after about 90 minutes of steady work I REALLY needed some calories but didn't have any, what with the juice being frozen and no munchies in my pockets. It was still a nice ride, Keith R. bumped into us and we hung together for a while, up Vineyard which I've never cleaned in the winter time, so that was nice. Toward the end of the ride I was definitely getting frostnip on my gut and chest; shoulda stopped to put my windbreaker back on.

Lessons learned / clothing: regular weight bib tights, Terramar lightweight base layer tights; wicking (Starter) baselayer, Terramar poly baselayer, Performance wool/nylon blend jersey, cheapo windbreaker for the first 20 minutes of the ride. Fleece ear covers, fleece ear cover on the neck as a neck warmer, ski gloves. Woolly lumberjack socks layered over standard weight socks on standard shoes. Lesson learned - put the windbreaker back on if the tummy skin gets tingly.

Plans: ride a loop or loop+ real early at Rosaryville tomorrow, probably fixed, maybe I'll see how the Super Secret Technical Inner Loop rides fixed. Write a blog entry bitching about the DoucheRuts and how my back hurts tomorrow night. Dawn Patrol at Patapsco Tues. Maybe there's a Happy Hour Ride Weds? Maybe not. Maybe Dawn Patrol again Thurs. Rest Friday.

That is all.

* Reference to Matthew verse 22:14.

Freakless Friday

2011-01-21T03:52:00.000-08:00

Man, only one ride on the MTB so far this week... the weather has sucked and frankly the investment it takes to drive 30 minutes to get to the trail by 5:50, to maybe have to turn around by 6:01, is a bit too steep, plus there's been a couple early mornings at work. Looks like it may be getting to be trainer time, which isn't as bad as normal because I haven't been struggling to stay on the thing (and being mostly off it and doing jack shit) for 6 weeks at this point, like usual. Time to start gettin' after it with some volume, and to get after the diet. It's been a good winter, and being mostly static is an enormous win for me considering how I usually manage to screw up... now we move forward.

As some of you noted I managed to pick up an extra entry to the Baker's Dozen. I had a contingent agreement to ride on a team. But because of the scramble for entries, I realized pretty quick that I needed to get an entry, any entry, because my team manager hadn't gotten my registration done by 4-5 minutes after 8:00 PM. (Yes, my BikeReg Fu is strong). So I popped for the 13 solo. Turns out, I hit the pay button just when my buddy Mike did, so now I have too. What to do? Right now I'm making the obligatory offers to my closest friends who were shut out and are wallowing in angst over it. If one of them nuts up, it's gone. If none of them do, I'm E-baying it and putting the proceeds toward charity, or a booze-fueled spree in Tijuana, providing I can also get a week off, a cheap flight, permission from the wife, and a gamma globin booster shot.

So I had a discussion with a reprobate about whether Led Zeppelin is better than the bluesmen from whom they appropriated their music. You tell me what you think.

This?

Or that?

One?

Or t'other?

Or the other one?

I think you people know where I fall on this question.

Please discuss in comments: who is better, and why?

Like a Rock in a Pond

2011-01-20T02:40:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when you get to see a display of Full Frontal Roadie Bitchiness, like what's on display in the reactions to the announcement of a new local superteam, you want to recoil from it.

I've got some friends who ride for Harley & Haymarket, they're good guys. They're going to win even more races by combining forces this year and I'm happy for them. It will be nice to maybe see a revitalization of the local 1/2/3 fields, which are generally small. If the new team can do that and drag lots of upper Cat guys out to the races, it will be a good thing.

But yeah, some of the facts associated with this are going to be hard to swallow for a lot of people. As the haters note at GamJams, it's going to be absurd to see a third of the field at some races comprised of Harleymarket guys, and blocking tactics with 15 guys in a race are going to be very tough to deal with. It's going to be a particularly bitter pill given that a substantial minority of the local fast guys - perhaps most of the fastest guys - are going to be riding for one team. The goal is to win though, not to make friends, and the new team should do a lot of the former. It's a big F.U. to mediocrity, and I hope the rest of MABRA is ready to smell the glove, because they sure aren't going to be smelling the podium much this year. If you don't like that, well, you should probably find another sport where people cope with beatdowns a little better, like MMA for instance.

On the other hand, the bitchy reaction to the formation of this super team evident in the comments is fricking foul. Haters gonna hate I guess.

And on the gripping hand, some of the comments in defense of Harleymarket, are pretty foul too.

And on an appendage to be named later, I'm regretting having shown my ass by adding my own unique brand of snippiness to the comments. I didn't need to pour gas on that particular fire. That was particularly stupid on my part. Shoulda just kept my damn mouth shut.

But there it is.

I'm going to be racing in the dirt this spring & summer so it doesn't affect me too much. I'm mainly just amazed by the spectacle and by the vindictive reactions.

TOT 8: Icy

2011-01-19T18:11:00.000-08:00

This is the obligatory just-passin-thru MTB tourist picture from Cascade at Patapsco on Monday AM. Gotta stop there and get a picture when there's ice. This was in the middle of a 2:15 ride up there with John and my old cross nemesis Alain, who is a really nice guy.

I'm on the boinger lately due to a wonky back. It's not terrible, just that riding at Rosaryville (which is getting comprehensively destroyed by assholes who ride it on warm days, leaving huge scars in the mud) really aggravates my disc condition. No, not the undersized rear 160 I have on the rear of my single, I'm talking about the herniated L5/S1 disc in my back. The constant bumping in and out of 1" to 4" ruts makes it super painful, and it takes 3-4 days for the aggravation to go away. You see, because I'm halfway responsible and don't want to repeat some of the backbreaking trail work days I've done, I only ride there when it's dry, or frozen. That means the ruts are like concrete when I ride there, and the rigid just beats my lower back up as if it had insulted its mother.

On the boinger... no troubles.

I am noticing a weird phenomenon though, and that's a convergence of my singlepseed and geared riding styles.

What has bled into my singlespeed riding is the hops. When I get to a low obstacle at speed, like a log, or a log drop, or a rock drop, I flex my legs, hop up, then land using my legs as shock absorbers when I hit. This really smooths out the ride on the rigid single. I noticed that I do this in a really pronounced way on the full suspension bike; this results in an utterly plush ride on that bike, even when bashing through really rough terrain.

What has bled into my geared bike riding is a habit of carrying as much speed as I can into the bottom of hills, and grinding up way harder than I used to do on a geared bike. The result is in rolling terrain... well, my rides seem a bit shorter than they would because I can really tear on the downhills and by carrying big speed into little kickers, I'm up and over pretty quickly. It's kind of like the fatboy road trick on rollers, to sprint down them... except more fun.

In any activity, it's possible to get to a point where it just makes sense, where you feel fluent in it and can do it with a lot of joy. Lately, I'm able to ride that way for several minutes at a time on the MTB. It's a good feeling and I always finish rides in an elated mood.

I think it's going to be a dawn patrol to start the day tomorrow at Patapsco. Looking forward to it. [Big Grin...]

TOT 7

2011-01-14T11:30:00.000-08:00

Destroyed, in pieces, sitting in the back of the truck post-ride. Wondering when the next mountain bike ride will be, and looking forward to it.

Am I talking about me, or the bike? Good question.

Rosaryville, Jan 14.

Ps. Not blogging a lot lately. Riding MTB quite a bit though and that's where my free time is going. Just don't have the gas to blog after I get up at 5:00 to do a 90 minute or two hour dawn patrol before work.

This will, sadly, slow down when the weather warms up.

Fixed, Baby / TOT 3

2011-01-09T14:46:00.000-08:00

There is a school of thought that says if you want to get good at something, get in over your head, try to do what the experts do, and try to blow through your limits. That way lies excellence, rapid growth, and performance beyond your wildest imagination.

In mountain biking, that way also lies regrettable line choices, pants-pissing dropoff-inspired scares, and a guy on the side of the trail who appears to have a broken collarbone.

It's just not responsible to try to do what really accomplished mountain bikers do.

Nobody ever accused me of being responsible.

So with light heart I bought EBae's 19 tooth Velo Solo bolt-on fixie cog, removed the disc from my crummy old WTB wheel - crummy because it weighs about 7 pounds and is basically egg-shaped - and I converted the wheel to fixed gear. The Tommy Cog and Velo Solo fit onto a 6 bolt disc brake mount. According to this degenerate, if you want to spend a few fun hours with your drill press, several carbide bits and some machine oil, you can even drill out a regular singlespeed cog to fit the disc brake mount - though I question why anybody would burn $25 in drill bits, $3 in machine oil and $5 in wear and tear on the drill press to avoid spending $30.

Anyhow, installation was a snap, and the wheel fit on fine, the chainline was straight without goofing around with spacing the cog, converting the Redline Monocog Flight into a rigid fixie.

A cognizant (so to speak) person might ask, "what about the rear brake? You won't have a rear brake? Holy cripes you won't have a rear brake!!!" That last sentence isn't a question but that's what a smart person might say. I'm not that smart so I didn't worry about it. Fools do burpees where angels fear to tread & etc.

So pretty blithely, I headed out and rode fixed at Rosaryville on Friday morning.

In retrospect, I don't see what's so hard about it.

Other than most everything.

Actually it wasn't bad, not *hard* per se, but comprehensively disorienting, like watching a David Lynch film while you're drunk and sleepy and distracted by what your dog is doing, and you're clocking the film at a half-unaware level. Normal sensory feedback - the kind you expect from a mountain bike - isn't there, but you're riding, and going along just fine, you're 'getting it' alright, but it feels completely different from what you're used to.

It is also much more physical. It takes a lot less physical finesse, and a hell of a lot more brute physicality than a freewheeled bike. You don't bump the bike up and over and around obstacles; you kind of ass the bike over them - as in, "that rusted bolt didn't break? Then put some more assss in it, boy!"

It was a very refreshing change, but I was feeling it for sure Saturday morning, and that's with circulating around the perimeter trail about 20% slower than usual, which moves me from Slow to Impressively Slow.

If I go hard at Rosey it takes around 50 minutes; if I cruise at The Pace - you know, brisk, pushing it reasonably hard on the hills, working to get some flow - it takes about an hour. It took 1:15 Friday. Part of that was due to gear limiting - a fixie really slows me down on downhills, where I rip pretty hard and make up gaps; but part of it was do to me being cautious in a few places because I just didn't know what to expect from the bike, even on Rosaryville's minimally technical features. I suspect I could get the time down to 1:05 if I hustled a bit, not killing myself but pushing a little harder and riding more bravely on the downhills.

Slowing on downhills was a bitter pill, one of many in my life like loving beer, an ability to eat like a horse and put on weight (muscle or fat) in a heartbeat, and an urge to write blog entries when I could be doing something more productive. The one place where I'm half quick, on downhills, wasn't there due to the possiblity of pedal strike and the fact that I can spin real fast, but couldn't simultaneously handle the instability of a 140 RPM spin plus turning and bumping over roots & stuff. Where you use proper pedal attitude when you cross logs or rocks, it's not possible on a fixie, and a couple times I did something I never imagined possible, which was grounding a pedal on the *upstroke* after my bottom bracket was already past the obstacle. That was unsettling.

One problem I noticed right away is that the fixie forces hyper-awareness of little trail obstacles; it's hard to keep eyes up the trail 25 feet when things that are 5 feet away have a good potential for pedal strike.

The fixie also revealed little flaws in my skillset. For instance, I discovered that I need to keep pedaling when I bunny hop a log or root instead of putting the front over, coasting the rear wheel into the log then pedaling/hopping, as I do on a freewheeled bike.

As one the road, you spend a lot of time in the seat with your ass glued to it, pedaling. You can do a standing effort, but it's either all standing, or all sitting. This means that there's no way to slide or body english the rear end a bit and slop back into your cornering line when a rut kicks the rear wheel out - you just keep pedaling and bounce forward and ride it out.

The low gearing of the SS MTB means that you really don't need a brake in moderate terrain; you just give a little backward pressure and sow right down. Nothing to it. Skid turns are fun, and sometimes the only way to turn sharply, but they are utterly unpredictable compared to using a hand brake to do the same thing, the "delicate touch" of my quads doesn't match up to the delicate touch of index finger-braking. You also have to ride over the middle of roots and rocks instead of going around them, otherwise it's pedal strike city.

I also noticed that the rear wheel bottoms out more (that coulda been the 700x45 tire...or it coulda been the harder sitting) while cruising. The little dipsy-doodle extra credits - the little gravity cavities - were easy on the fixed gear, and maybe the shock at the bottom of each was lessened compared to a geared bike because my legs were under tension at the bottom rather than paused, as they'd be on a freewheeled bike. Logs were definitely harder and I wasn't about to try to touch the big (>12") logs. Climbing starts out easier because the fixed drivetrain is locked down, but it seems to become harder because there's no recovery period between... well, between any one thing and any other thing. So the legs get toasty much quicker. I stretched the chain a ton - and this on a chain I've used for probably 20 singlespeed rides so far. The chainring bolts all loosened up too. I threw the chain once bouncing down a rooty hill where I was practicing my skidding.

But wait, there's more. The hands get tired faster because you're always pedaling and reluctant to take the hands off the grips (need some trackie skillz here). Lifting the butt a half inch off the seat is a constant occurrence because repeat hits get really uncomfortable pretty quick if you leave the butt locked down, so you might intuitively start doing this pedaling-with-your-butt-1/2" off the seat thing. Oh yeah, this gives your quads had frickin' knots and even today - Sunday evening - I still have a knot in each butt cheek, though my upper back stopped hurting (just a little) within 24 hours. My ankles were also a little beat up, it felt like I was using stabilizing muscles a bit more than on other bikes.

Pedaling up the little hill to the parking lot, my legs were *done*.

The bottom line about riding a fixed MTB is that *everything* - every single thing - about the bike is different on the fixie, in the way that *everything* is different between a fully sprung geared bike and a rigid single. But it's more different than that; although the geared boinger and rigid single free wheeled bikes are distant from each other - say by 30% - the fixie feels different from both of those bikes by maybe 50%.

That is really cool. It makes a familiar old trail seem fresh.

Chapeaux to Seibold and Sven and Baler and BB and RickyD - and all the other guys who are fast on fixed MTB. I'll be riding fixed more, but only at mellow places like Rosey, or if we do a wicked slow Rockburn-focused ride. It would *kill* me, possibly literally, to add the increased technical challenges and to lose my momentum on trails like Ridge or the rocky section of Cascade.

If you're curious about it... try it. It's different in a good way, and not as perilous as I'd expected.

The Un-Reeses: Things That Don't Go Great Together

2011-01-06T19:49:00.000-08:00

Ebae sold me his fixed gear cog so I think tomorrow AM - unless there's some snow on the ground warranting a PDP ride at Patapsco - I'm off to Rosaryville to explore a whole new fixed gear way of breaking my ass. Looking forward to it. Because I'm a dumbass, when you get right down to it.

Now I'm going NSFW with the music choices today. Last chance to turn away kids. And if you're under 18 get out of here, aight? Otherwise I'm telling your parents.

So... Changing subject... it's not often I show ads, but this one is pretty awesome. A couple things about it: 1) Russian tycoon uncouth. I'd swear this is the guy that Putin/Medvedev had sentenced to 50 million years this week; 2) dogs playing poker; 3) Opulence? I has eet. 4) Miniature giraffes! Miniature f***ing giraffes!!!!

Classy. Like Frank Sinatra.

Frank was a great singer but in truth probably wasn't classy, except in the sense that the Hells Angels use the term "class." Or as has been said, "the kind of person who uses the term 'classy,' as a rule, is not." Dude was a heavy drinker, womanizer, sort of uncouth, and hung out with guys who, at best, were basically animals. But he had a glam image so that's why we love him, right? Cake is classy though. For sure. Wife of Rouleur had never really heard of Cake until recently when I had a bunch queued up on Pandora. "Oh, they're interesting," she says. That's a good way to put it. I like interesting music.

Some music is interesting to the point where it doesn't really make sense. For instance, the Butthole Surfers were sort of a metal / thrash band when I was coming up. You might catch them at a show with some post-punk band or another. I can't recall exactly but think they may have played with Black Flag at one point.

Then I hear this song:

Great song, but in the context of the Butthole Surfers doing it, well, interesting.

Of course that's nothing compared to this.

Holy cripes, is nothing sacred to these xtranorml people?

Oh well. As long as I'm sitting here drinking a Dale's and listening to defiled music, might as well go with some Richard Cheese. Whoever put this video mashup together is pretty awesome - it mashes up RC doing Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" with some random Bollywood flick.

Wow, that's horrific. In a terribly wonderful kind of way... And if that doesn't creep you out, then creepy-syrupy-crooner guy Josh Groban called one of his best selling hit albums... you guessed it! Closer! Ick!

Just Ick.

Some mashups we remember because they are sorta epic and unexpected and they work because the stuff that is mashed up is complimentary. There's no irony, no cognitive dissonance.

That was the first of the great rock/rap mashups. It worked because of the musical commonalities, but also because a principle that Sepp articulated holds true: good musicians play good music. This video was also socially significant; it broke down a major wall between "black music" and "white music." It wasn't musicians from one genre co-opting the other's work; it was a collaboration. You watch this, and you realize that it makes the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, Eminem, In Living Colour, and a bunch of other genre-bender, post-racial acts possible. Great stuff.

Then you have Hayseed Dixie... This mashup works not because the two mashed up forms mesh, but precisely because of the sheer distance of the mashup from the original work.

Damned if I don't just love that. But it's mind bending in how it plays off our expectations.

While we're at it, we've got Rouleur Reader Fave Ace of Spades.

Great song. Set to a scene from Bullit. Funkin' A, you can't top that, right?

Think again.

So that probably just totally unraveled Motorhead's version on you. Wow.

How do I top that and end this post? With Hayseed Dixie destroying Greenday of course.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Relieved...

2011-01-05T17:44:00.001-08:00

I made some homemade Kimchi Jigae for dinner tonight. A pork chop, cup of tofu cubes, tablespoon of chili paste, tablespoon of soy sauce, some rice wine vinegar, a sliced onion, a few sliced shitake, a cup of kimchi, boil it up and drop in a Korean ramen at the end of cooking process... damn that was good. I only could eat about half of it, I totally got The Bloat. Still, it was super tasty, and there is nothing better on a terribly cold night than some jigae so hot and spicy that it makes you sweat like jogging on the 4th of July.

Missed riding PVSP this morning, but I'll be back on it tomorrow. Wife of Rouleur is sick, kid woke up a few times - I didn't sleep much last night. We'll remedy that starting in about 45 minutes.

The Trail of Tears

2011-01-04T19:55:00.000-08:00

Some of my friends did Bike 180 last year. They rode 180+ days, and took pictures of it. This made for some neat year-end photo collages.

Me? I'm going to do something like that but it will be focused on my unique outlook on riding. It will be called the Trail of Tears because (1) I bitch and whine a lot; (2) I'm kinda becoming mountain bike focused; and (3) I broke some more shit on the first ride of the year.

Yep, the coming of the New Year was celebrated this morning by the spectacular fireworks-like shredding of a freewheel. Fortunately, it was only 3 miles or so, mostly uphill, to get out of Patapsco Valley State Park and over to Landing Road, which was just a mile of mostly walking back to my truck. What praytell, you ask, does a blown up freewheel look like? Why, like this of course:

The Rouleur Redesign:
The Five Piece BMX Freewheel

Mike W very kindly looped back for me and patiently led me out, taking Jelly's shortcut, which he has apparently used in the past after destroying a freewheel in similar fashion. It's good to know you're following in others' pioneering footsteps.

I'd been laughing about the freewheel for a few weeks. Seibold warned me it was a cheapass BMX freewheel, and the thing frequently froze coming out of creeks, making me feel at home with my fixed gear-riding buddies but causing some surprises as I tried to coast into Patapsco's rock fields with my feet positioned just-so. Yeah, there's nothing more surprising than an inadvertent fixed gear MTB, one that decides to become a fixie conversion mid-ride...

The other failure was the eggbeaters. Up to the point where the freewheel failed, the eggbeaters were doing what they could to destroy my confidence, shooting my feet off every couple minutes whenever I tried to really wrench on the pedals to jump or bunny hop. I'd hoped to ride them until Chris comes through with the used Times, but it's not going to happen. There were also some colossal pedal/rock strikes. Yeah, I was unglued this morning. It was shameful.

Anyhow I wrenched that off tonight, put on a White Industries freewheel, and installed my old bulletproof Shimano 520 SPDs. The Dedline is ready to rock the valley tomorrow AM.

Me? Not so much.

Product Test: Crank Brothers Candy Nubbins Pedals

2010-12-31T05:36:00.000-08:00

I had a chance to test the new Crank Brothers Candy Nubbins pedals at Patapsco today. You may not have heard of these pedals, but they are out there, and they're more, and less than what you'd expect. They have the same durable build quality as all the other Crank Brothers pedals I've used, and have the renowned mud shedding properties common to all Crank Brothers pedals. What's different, is that they are a lot lighter, with a much narrower Q factor, and that's a good thing, right? It makes you more aerodynamic and helps you get up hills faster. And we all want that, right?

My first impression was that they didn't clip in well in the snow, and if you graze a rock or stump with them there's a good chance they'll be rendered utterly useless. That's kind of a bad feature in a mountain bike pedal, really. But if you are willing to run them in full Nubbins trim, you can save a lot of weight over conventional pedals, and when you're a weight weenie, nothing beats that. You can never be too rich, or too thin. And all that comes at a great, sub $75 price.

The New Crank Brothers Candy Nubbins Pedal

They've really taken pedal innovation to "11" with the new Candy Nubbins. They shaved a ton of weight - nearly the whole weight of the old Candy C pedal system - and they narrowed the Q factor by over two inches per side. They accomplished this by boldly removing the platform and clipless mechanism entirely.

Yep, they went where Shimano and Time are afraid to go: they just sheared off the business end of the old style pedals, resulting in a whole new paradigm for mountain bike pedaling.

Shaving Weight Off Your Pedals
The Crank Brothers Way

Sure, there are some drawbacks to this new pedal system. But what product doesn't have some drawbacks? In the case of the Candy Nubbins, it's a little hard to put down full power when you go for a max effort to get up a steep hill. It's also a bit difficult to clip in at times, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it after a while. The only other complaint that I have, is that it's nasty doing a one legged pedaling drill up Lewis & Clark Trail and then down the Log Trail to get back to the truck.

Crank Brothers should be applauded for the innovative method used to spontaneously upgrade pedals to the Candy Nubbins system. Mine spontaneously upgraded from a Candy C to a Candy Nubbins on the middle of the little kicker at the end of Lewis & Clark, when I stood up to crank the bike over that steep little hill with one of the brief, all-out efforts that are so common and necessary in single speed mountain biking. Imagine my surprise when I found myself with a whole new pedal system above my foot. It would have been under my foot but I was upside down at the time, trying not to cry. My friends were thrilled by the spontaneous upgrade, judging by their laughter and the smiles on their faces, and really, isn't laughing and having fun what mountain biking is supposed to be about?

Candy C-to-Candy Nubbins Conversion Kit:
Just Add a 1600 Watt Effort

Crank Brothers should be commended for producing a product that brings so much joy to my riding buddies. Personally, I could give a fuck what they think and will probably get a pair of pedals less likely to have two catastrophic failures in a three month period, and will likely go back to some old Shimano SPDs I have lying around until I can afford to upgrade the fleet to Time ATACs.

The bottom line is that the Crank Brothers Candy Nubbins, Candy Cs, or any pedal in the Candy line is just the ticket if you're into highly entertaining equipment failures. They make the perfect gift, really, for some buddy you like, but also like to play mean practical jokes on. My experiences have been consistent; at everything other than cyclocross use (where I do endorse eggbeaters and will use my Candy SLs), these pedals will let you down, and they won't let you down lightly. They are damned good at what they do, and if you're into that sort of thing, I higly recommend them.* † ‡ **

* Not recommended for use by clydesdales, on hills, for "all mountain" or "freeride" or "XC" or "epic" or "endurance" or "trail riding" or "commuting" applications, or for persons above recommended weight limit of 87 pounds.
† All warranties void if the above described mountain biking pedals are used for mountain biking purposes.
‡ Above bicycle pedals not intended for bicycling use.
** No warranties, express or implicit. Use of Crank Brothers Candy Nubbins Pedals™ constitutes waiver of all legal recourse against Crank Brothers Inc.

Ps. Happy New Years, people. I entered the year with a busted back, and am leaving it with a busted pedal. Let's have a little more fun on this next lap around the sun, m'kay?