Words And Wheels

I'mma Tell You a Story...

2010-05-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

...But right now I'm too busy. So check out my other stories here, and my team's antics here. When I get back from being too busy, I'll have lots of interesting things to say about racing, life in Albany, future life in North Carolina (what?!) job hunting, Shakespeare with kids, and my crazy Russian landlord.

Peace,

-n

Good Friday and The Damned Ontario Wind

2010-04-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I raced the Good Friday Road Race in Hamilton, Ontario. Last Sunday I wrote a whole race report about it here, but it is so windy up there this time of year that just as I was about to click "publish" the damned thing blew away. True story. So here is a somewhat abbreviated version.

I love April, I love racing in Canada, and I love it when you have the first race of the season where your legs feel like they have some depth in them. I didn't win, and I didn't even place in the money, but I raced the hell out of my bike for the first time this year, and considering I am only 3 weeks into riding bikes for the year, that feels like a lot.

The race was hard, there was a lot of wind, and those short Ontario hills (glacial drumlins to the cognoscenti ) really sting. It's funny but long climbs tend to be ridden at a steadier pace, whereas 300-500 meter rollers, no matter how steep tend to get raced full gas, bottom to top. With 5 of them per lap, I got a pretty solid high-end workout, and it definitely highlighted what I haven't been doing so far this year.

With most of Ontario's best amateurs on hand (DSJ notably absent) and Spidertech p/b Planet Energy's Andrew Randell making a solo appearance, it was mostly clear who to watch. The bizarre x-factor of Canadian racing is always hard to figure, though. And you can be sure that in every race up there you will encounter some completely innocuous looking guy in generic kit on a 10-year-old bike, and that guy will shred. This race did not disappoint.

The crosswinds were a notable factor, except on the parts of the course where the headwinds were a factor, and that took a little remembering on my part. The JetFuel team was aggressive, as were Garneau and others, and everyone sat on Randell, predictably. One break went, stayed out for a lap, started to look threatening and therefore inspired serious bridge attempts. I jumped across to one (ouch! first time this year) and we motivated a large group behind us, so by the end of the 3rd of 5 laps we were 15 chasing 7, with the rest of the field more or less put pf contention. I took a fair share of pulls to bring us back in contact with the front, covered a bunch of counters after we were all together, started to feel the efforts, and found myself lacking, out of position, or both when the attacks that counted went.

In the end a final 6 got away with one tt'ing dude in between and my group racing for 8th. JetFuel won, Randell got 2nd after a monster solo bridge, and me, I burnt my last match closing a gap with 500 meters to go and sat up in the sprint.

This was actually a motivating result for me, because considering that I am 3 weeks into my season, I don't have any reason to expect race-winning legs. So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I was able to do at the pointy end of the race, and the uphill accelerations are not at all bad for early April. Go figure.

So now comes the much-ballyhooed Battenkill, which sadly I will miss the first, Pro-Am round of. Life calls, this time in the form of a conference in Montreal where Charmaine is presenting. And considering that I don't have any teammates in the race and my form is iffy, I am making the surprisingly mature decision to bag the race in favor of grown-up responsibilities, relationship time, and training. The part of the season I am choosing to care about this year starts in late May, so for now I am biding my time, and keeping things in balance.

Next up will be the Tour Of The Battenkill Pro Men's Invitational (UCI 1.2) on 4/18, which I am really looking forward to. If you aren't getting excited about races like that, you shouldn't be racing. I am definitely getting excited, though I have no idea what to expect from myself. Not a bad place to be in; it makes enjoying the moment easier.

-n

I'm not blogging today...

2010-03-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

...nope, no time.

If I was blogging today, though, I would be writing a little about Johnny Cake #2, a little about the upcoming Good Friday Road Race in Hamilton, Ontario, and a little about the naked, fat old guy rumpus I endure every time I go to the gym. Hint: possibly bad manners to stand at the sink, en flagrante, and dry you entire body with the hair dryer. Just sayin'.

More on all of this, for better and worse, soon.

-n

Yeah Yeah, I'm Still Here

2010-03-24T06:10:00.000-07:00

Hey there blogland! It's been nearly 3 months since my last post, and I feel like a bit of a heel. A couple of you have been really sweet and asked me why I haven't been posting, which was a nice reminder that people actually read this blog. So here I am, large as life and twice as handsome. Eh?

The simple story is that following 'cross season I was seriously burned out and needed a break from bikes. Then my longtime training partner and teammate, Matt Purdy, retired from racing, I started playing tournament chess again, it got to be 9 degrees outside and I got depressed as hell. So there went January and February.

But now it is spring, the days are getting marvelously longer, and I care about bikes again. And thanks to my students being on break and the weather being ridiculously good, I actually rode 19 hours last week, which is more than I had ridden in the previous 8 weeks combined. So it's a start. I got in my first race of the season last Saturday at the Johnny Cake Lane Spring Series #1, and the team worked incredibly well together to deliver Big Dan Greenfield for the win. We were pretty pleased, because despite the fact that it was just a training race, there were some really good guys there. We managed to have guys in every break, and on the last lap we just took over setting up a train for our designated sprinter, Brad Warren, and leaving room for The Danimal to play the role of spoiler, which he did perfectly. Ca-Caaaw!! (cried the paisley Hawk).

Thanks for reading, happy spring.

-n

Boxing Day

2009-12-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

Nationals? It sucked. I'll get around to a race report, but the significant detail is merely that I had a sinus infection for ~10 days before leaving, and I decided to take antibiotics rather than risk getting really sick since I wasn't getting better. Infection gone, form gone with it. You ever raced on antibiotics? Then you know what I'm talking about. But more on USAC's annual fundraiser/bake sale/Ice Capades later.

Today I am recovering from Christmas, and by recovering I mean playing with the Wii I bought my daughter now that she's back at her mom's house. I haven't lived in a house with a televisi0n for nearly 5 years and I never had a game system as a kid. It isn't so much that I can't leave it alone as the fact that my elbows are really sore and hyper-extended from boxing. 2 weeks off the bike and I'm a wreck.

Life is good, though, the job hunt resumes, interesting doings shape up for 2010, and some buddies of mine are racing a World Cup today. Lots to catch up on.

Until then, Merry Christmas and thanks for reading.

-n

Layover-d: Sterling and Warwick in Hindsight, and Too Many Hours in an Airport

2009-12-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

I have been in the Seattle/Tacoma airport since noon (local time) and it is now nearly 3:30. My flight leaves at 5:55. Oops. Funny how I got on a 6:05am flight out of Albany for this...have to plan the itinerary a little more carefully next time.

In any event, having explored the nether regions of the terminal to a fare-thee-well, and finally located a quiet corner with an outlet where my computer actually believes in the Wifi signal, this seems like as good a time as any to relive some recent moderate successes by way of a race report or two.

Sterling, MA Day 1, 11/28:
(Yes, I have arrived. That's me in the click-through photo for the gallery)

I always feel good and ride well on this course. And no I don't think I just jinxed myself. For some combination of reasons having to do with the holiday weekend (more sleep!) and the fact that true 'cross season is now in full effect and road fitness has faded, I always feel pretty fresh and motivated for this race, and my results over the years have been consistently solid. It doesn't hurt that Tom Stevens designs this race and as far as I am concerned he is absolutely the man. His courses are fast and flowy: you pedal a lot, generally on flat ground, but you also turn a lot, and at speed, meaning that good bike handling and smooth riding will save you energy. My kind of course, for sure. Though I was sad to be missing whatever was in store for day 2 of the race this year, I was psyched to be able to spend my one racing day this weekend on the classic Sterling course I have come to know and love, featuring the nearly-rideable run-up and the infamous horse jump.

So the race started well for me and I went through the first turn in 5th wheel or so, right behind Jeremy Powers. Somewhere on the run-up I bobbled and got passed by the horde, then passed some guys back (including a super-sketchy inside pass underneath Peter Bradshaw, sorry Pete!) and settled into 11th, with Adam Myerson, Jerome Townsend and Luke Keough right in front of me. Somewhere along here Luke had a mechanical, dropped back, passed me after he got a bike change, and then once he caught Myerson and Jerome again they all sort of stalled and nobody seemed to want to pull into the headwind on the track...except me, so I did, and I caught them.

I tried tailgunning the group a bit to recover, but inconsistent and somewhat negative riding between Luke and Jerome, vying for the u23 win, meant there were a lot of gaps to close at the back, so I started to pull instead. I was really happy to be in this group because these guys have been riding better than me all year, and we were 7th-11th on the course, which meant for one thing I was having a good ride, and for another UCI points were a more realistic possibility then they have yet this season.

Anyway, hijinx ensued, and Luke and Jerome continued to make work for Adam and I by attacking a lot. Eventually Luke paid for some of his efforts and fell off the pace, and/or quit racing for awhile, but in any event he left our group. Somewhere in here we picked up Mike Broderick who had been alone in 7th for much of the race, but our surges had reeled him in. A solo flying Justin Spinelli was just ahead and I was hoping that with cooperation in our group 6th place was still up or grabs, but it wasn't to be. Feeling optimistic, I attacked hard after the barriers on the last lap but was shut down and passed immediately by all three of my companions. Broderick basically started the sprint by surging well before the last corner, but Jerome gapped us, followed by Myerson, and I got around Broderick, and that was how we finished 7th-10th, respectively. My first UCI points of the season, some reasonable prize money and some seriously restored confidence made for a pleasant drive home, and I was in such a good mood I didn't even mind not racing on Sunday. Especially because I was missing the race to take my daughter, Silas to see the Nutcracker ballet, which was awesome. But that's another story.
Warwick RI Day 2, Verge Series Finale 12/6:

Of course following one of my best rides of the year in Sterling, I got sick. I had a nasty sore throat that turned into a sinus infection and laryngitis, and kept me off the bike Wednesday, which I had planned to be my last hard training day of the season. (And, truth be told, it would have been my first one in many weeks.) I got out on the road for 2 hours Thursday and managed brief spins on Friday and Saturday, but I was still sick and had no idea what to expect from this race. I decided once again to only race one day this weekend, partly due to being sick, but more due to the fact that My Awesome KidTM was playing the part of the Sour Kangaroo in her school's production of Seussical, and there was no way I was going to miss it. I, you see, am not the biggest blame fool in the jungle of Nool.

But sick or not sick, I was in a good mood when I got to Goddard park on Sunday. I love this race venue. It's a nice shady pine forest on a calm little bay, which reaches so far inland that the water is almost totally flat, and it looks almost more like a lake than the ocean. There is always a great community vibe at this race, too, because it's the end of the Verge series, and the end of the season save for nationals. One of my favorite times of the 'cross season is hanging around in the carousel building trying to stay warm after the race, and catching up with, and saying good-bye to, friends from all over. Even for me, this is a hard race to feel at all morose about, except maybe for the fact that it has two sand runs in it. Eeek.

So owing to my newly minted UCI points and the small, late-season field, I was graced with a front row call-up, which is a first for me in a UCI race and was pretty cool. On the start line I noticed that the buckle of one of my shoes was broken and while still fastened, could basically fall off any time. 2 minutes 'til start time, nothing to do about it now. And anyway, that wasn't as bad as the fact that at 5 minutes to start time I had crashed on my way to the start when I overcooked a slippery corner and had broken the rear shifter on my ti bike into two pieces. Really. So, broken shoe and once again no pit bike. Let 'er rip and hope the bike stays in one piece. Honestly, I have no more angst to spend on bike racing this year, so I put it out of my mind and focused on the racing.

Good start, 5th wheel, sand run #1, staying in line, pass Lindine over the barriers, and hang on we're halfway through the lap and I'm still in 5th position! Immediately I began to remind myself not to do anything stupid. The cold air was wrecking my throat but interestingly enough I had good legs, so I went with it. And, finally, there I was having the race I feel like I have had in me all year but haven't been able to get out. Rested enough? Relaxed enough? Who knows, but based on my road season and overall fitness, I really felt like I should belong up front in the local/regional C2's this year, and it's nice to finally be racing at least somewhat near my potential. Really that's all I want is to know that I'm getting everything out of my body that it has to give, whatever that may be...but it's so bloody hard to get there. Anyway.

The course was an absolute blast of slippery tacky corners, one groovy mud puddle, 2 sand runs, one of which approaches the UCI 80-meter limit--or feels like it--and some really cool woodsy sections, capped off by a long pavement stretch and a series of parking lot criterium style turns. I love this course! I managed to stay in the front group for 2 laps, which felt like a lot, and to stay within hailing distance for a 3rd. Knowing my limits and not totally trusting my lungs, I listened to the pain when it told me not to try to stay with Will Dugan as he gave chase, and now I don't know, but I think I made the right call. Eventually Dylan McNicholas popped off the front group some time on the 4th lap or so, and we settled in together in 7th and 8th spots and kept racing, consistently putting time into the guys behind us but not making anything up on Will, who would eventually catch and drop Luke Keough and finish alone in 5th place.

Dylan and I seemed evenly matched, and worked pretty hard, though I felt like I was doing more pulling. I made a couple of attacks in the last lap and a half but he didn't seem to have any trouble shutting me down. I noticed he wasn't attacking, though, and having lost the sprint out of the last corner on this course twice before, I knew that my plan had to be to lead into the last wooded section from 3 corners out. That's what I did, and it worked. I came through the last turn pretty hot and tight on the inside line to avoid getting schooled again like Jerome did to me last year, and then I sprinted like I meant it, which wound up being pretty convincing. 7th place was good for 6 UCI points and 104 bucks, and put me in another good mood for another drive home. All of a sudden I am really looking forward to nationals! Go freakin' figure.

And as a by-the-by: Dan Timmerman won both days at Warwick, thus sealing up his truly dominant win of the overall Verge series title this season. My steadfast teammate and anti-Internet hermit friend, Justin Lindine, proved that his Belgium-bound form is coming well with a strong 3rd place on Saturday and a 4th Sunday.

Nationals in Bend, OR this weekend, with the Master's 30-34 race on Saturday and the Elite race on Sunday. In some respects I wish I had another month to keep racing and building this form I seem to have going right now. But as always, I feel the year going to sleep and I am looking forward to family time, snow activities, reading lots, and staying up too late, and generally not having to pack the car and stress about being places on time on weekend mornings.

Stay tuned for updates, and thanks for reading.

-n

Decembering

2009-12-07T10:08:00.000-08:00

Wow, no blogging for ages! I have missed the blogosphere, but for a bunch of reasons have been lacking in time and wherewithal to write.

November was an interesting month from all angles. I finally started to come around form-wise and have had some good rides, most recently at Sterling, MA and Warwick, RI where I finally picked up my first UCI points of the year, just in time for nationals!

In other news I also got laid off and don't have any classes for the spring semester so it looks like temping is in my future.

I'm looking forward to having more time to write in the coming weeks, and I'll have some recent race reports up here in the coming days. Thursday I fly to Bend, OR for Cyclocross national championships and that should produce some good stories. More to come...

-n

The Right Race

2009-11-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

After Saturday's Wicked Creepy 'Cross in Bennington, I wasn't sure I wanted to race on Sunday. Yes, I had a good ride there, but I felt flat and couldn't get the power to the pedals when I needed to. Really I think I was just blocked from not opening up hard enough on Friday, but mentally I am at a point in the season when I feel like any more bad luck or crappy rides could really break me. So I was actually riding around in 2nd place contemplating dropping out. What the hell is wrong with me?!

Anyway I got over it. I was pre-registered for the HPCX UCI race down in New Jersey, but I was dreading the 6 hour round trip and felt ill-equipped to score UCI points given the relatively strong field.

So after putting racing out of my mind and going to see Paranormal Activity with Charmaine for Halloween, I wallowed around Sunday morning, packing the car while protesting that I didn't want to race, and really testing Charmaine's patience to its outer limits. Finally I decided to go, but then decided not to once I was on the road, so I turned around and went to Vermont, instead. Really.

Ethan Gilmour and Me, running the Birch Logs
Photo Courtesy of Alan Atwood

I mean, I love racing, I love Vermont, and I love cyclocross. I even love the solitary drives through the fall foliage that are a part of cross season, and I love getting amped about prize money and UCI points. But what I really love is that feeling when the balance between community and competition is just right, and for some reason the folks at the West Hill Shop in Putney always manage to get that right. In fact, this was the first 'cross race I ever did (2005, 5th in the B race) where I felt like I might actually be good at this, and it was under similarly unlikely circumstances. Maybe it's the mountains, maybe it's the foliage, but Vermont is good for my soul. A solo drive to Jersey in search of UCI points that I may or may not have had the legs to get, however, did not seem good for my soul. I was right.

The field was small this year, owing to the fact that there were a ton of local races scattered around New England this weekend, but my buddy Al Donahue was there and we had agreed on a no-holds-barred rematch from the day before. Kirt Fitzpatrick was there, too, and he has been riding well lately, as was local Vermont lad and U23 Euro mountain bike shredder, Ethan Gilmour. So it promised to be a classic Putney: laid back and fun, but with just enough fast guys to make a real race out of it.

Al got an uncharacteristically quick start, but I sneaked past him for the hole shot and led through the barriers and onto the first batch of slick, muddy turns before the birch log two-step and the whoop-de-doos. Man I love this course! Honestly, there are few courses around that are simply as much fun to ride bikes on. Anyway, I stayed in front all the way around the corn field for the first lap, then Ethan came past me and led us into the run-up the first time. At this point Ethan, Kirt and I had about a 5 second gap on Al, who looked to be closing, and the rest of the field looked far away, save for Evan Huff who was chasing on his own in no man's land. Things stayed this way for the next two laps with Ethan and I doing all of the work until Kirt attacked us as we approached the run up for the 3rd time. He railed the turn at the bottom and sprinted up the hill, opening a small gap which he then lost when he couldn't get into his pedal. It looked frustrating. Once he clipped in he proceeded to sprint out of every turn for the next lap really keeping the pressure on Ethan and I...and then he blew up. After the 4th time up the run-up we kept at it and when we looked back the next time through the corn field Kirt was fading fast and Al was now about 10 seconds down as well.

Me leading Ethan into the woods
Photo Courtesy of Alan Atwood

This was motivating and we stayed on it, trading pulls, working well together and running the legs off of each other each time up the hill. We kept it steady until 3 laps to go when Ethan got frisky and started to attack me. I didn't really attack him back much since he didn't seem to be hurting at all. I took the opportunity to jump around him and lead the technical stuff a couple of times, hitting it hard out of the corners and hoping to gap him but each time he got right back on with no problem.

Now anyone who knows the Putney course knows that if you're racing against an evenly matched rider, then the race is to the top of the run up since the finish line is less than 100 yards away at that point. As a rule, the first rider to clip in at the top of the hill wins the race. I felt like I was pulling a little harder than Ethan, but I also didn't think I could drop him and ride it in solo, so I decided to bank everything on a last lap attack through the cornfield, and if that didn't work I would do whatever I could to win the race to the top of the run-up.

Sure enough he jumped me first in the cornfield, I stuck it, then countered, he got right on me, and stayed glued to my back tire through the back-to-back 180's leading to the road. I led onto the road but didn't pull hard and kept my eye on his shadow. When he jumped I made sure he didn't gap me, and then I countered hard to his left when he was looking over his right shoulder. Yes, I did go around the cones in the middle of the dirt road, but in a situation like that, cones seem like a suggestion to me more than a hard and fast rule. We drag raced to the last turn rubbing shoulders, and basically it just came down to him braking first. Fortunately we didn't crash coming into the hill. I'm no great runner but I sprinted as hard as I could up the hill, clipped in and wound it up to the line. Judging by the shadow on the ground it looked like I had enough room to sit up and celebrate but something told me not to, and it's a good thing because Ethan surged hard at the last minute and in the end I only won the sprint by a wheel or so. But I won!

Sure, it's a small, local race, but it's a New England classic and honestly, I don't get to win all that often. Given my fatigue and frustration lately, and given the fact that (no secret here) my biggest competitive enemy is my head, I was just really happy to stay focused all the way to the line and not make any mistakes. And taking the win in front of guys I respect like Ethan, Al and Kirt felt really, really good. Maybe November is my month again...I never do exactly the same thing in September, but invariably I seem to go better in November every year. Go figure.

Thanks for reading,

-n

Retro Race Report: Maine #2

2009-11-04T07:28:00.001-08:00

So to rewind a couple of weeks, let's get back to Sunday Muddy Sunday in Maine.

Following that Saturday's freezing cold slip-slop fest, there was a lot of work to do in the way of bike maintenance and laundry. My teammates Justin Lindine and Emily Curry and I set up a sort of assembly line in the hotel room (Justin did most of the work, he's like that) and soaked and then re-soaked all of our gear, stuffed shoes with newspaper, etc. Sunday morning was spent finding a laundromat and re-cabling our non-shifting bikes. This was not really so unpleasant because the sun had come out and graced us with a beautiful, New England fall day, the kind they make postcards out of.

We rolled up to the course a nice leisurely couple of hours early, speculating optimistically that the sun would have dried out the course some, and besides, they can't really be using the same track as yesterday, right? Right?! Wrong.

As soon as we saw a mud-drenched Roger Aspholm come through for his bell lap (way off the front, nice one Rog!) we knew we were in for another hard day. Only given that it had stopped raining and the sun was out, the mud was no longer soupy, but of a chunky, peanut-butter consistency that sticks to everything and adds 10 lbs to your bike and about 2 lbs to each shoe. The proverbial long day loomed, but at least it was warm and sunny.

The long and the short of it for me was a bad start, then a bad crash that left me tangled up with another rider on the ground in 6 inches of mud, still clipped into my pedals. By the time I got up and moving again (this was 2 minutes into the race) I was the last man on the course and about 30 yards--the length of the run/ride up--behind the next rider in front of me. Yes I wanted to quit, but I had been pretty determined to finish both races this weekend because I haven't finished two races in a weekend in many weeks, so I slogged on, passed a lot of people, and much to my surprise worked my way up into the top 15 after a couple of laps. I was finally having a good ride after weeks of crap legs and bad luck! Then my seatpost came loose.

At first the bold slipped and the saddle just tilted back at a 45 degree angle, which sucked but was bearable. After a lap like that and with 2&1/2 laps to go in the race, the bolt loosened almost completely and I was left with a saddle that had about 3 inches of travel, fore and aft, and almost as much side-to-side wiggle. For whatever reason I was determined to finish my reasonably good ride, so I dealt with it and pressed on, hollering at everyone I knew in the pit that I needed a bike (since I only have one at the moment) but of course nothing was available. I thought about getting my pedals fitted to a neutral bike but it seemed like I would lose more time than if I just kept riding, so I just kept riding. Then I got a flat.

Fortunately the flat came about 1/2 a lap to go and the mud was so thick that I was actually able to ride it a good portion of the time, though it did give Phil Wong the opportunity he needed to get away from me before the finish. Through a combination of running and riding on the rim I managed to hold off the next couple of guys behind me for 16th place, but a much more interesting 16th place then the previous day's.

And Justin got 2nd, missing the win by a wheel or so, but that's old news.

-n

November Redemption?

2009-11-01T18:46:00.000-08:00

So last Sunday in Maine I endured every kind of bad luck imaginable and finished 16th, same as Saturday. Yes that does mean that I was actually riding well and feeling good, but that turned out not to be worth a whole lot.

Yesterday I got 2nd at the wicked awesome, Wicked Creepy 'Cross in Bennington, and I had a good time rocking around the course with Al until he dropped me and took the win. But more on that later.

Today however I had a lot of fun at one of my very favorite races up in Putney, Vermont. And I won! Sure it's a small local race, but it's a New England classic, and I have actually had my heart set on winning it at least once for years now. After all of my existential moaning and frustration lately, a little good news, some sunshine and just enough slippery mud to be fun, paired with pretty good racin' legs was just what the doctor ordered. UCI points are for suckers. And hats off to Ethan Gilmour for racing hard all day and coming within about a wheel of stealing the win from me.

Full reports to follow, now it's paper gradin', tryin' to sleep, confused body clock post daylight savings time uh-huh time. KnowhadImean?

-n

The Rain in Maine Falls Mainly in the Bike Race

2009-10-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

Verge NECCS Race #7: Long drive, cold rain, more cold rain, sloppy-slip-slop course conditions, warm-up in the car, shivering, line up, race, crash, race, pass guys, get passed, ride clean lines, fall down some, finish 16th. Pineland Farms is pretty.

Not my best ride today, and not my worst. Given the conditions, I'll take it. The victory for me was keeping my head in the race and being competitive enough to keep at it and finish the durned thing. I felt like I had more in me, and I was riding the slop well, but I couldn't run up those hills AT ALL. My legs got so cold I felt like I was dragging cinder blocks around. Then there was a badly timed chain drop and when I took big risks on the sketchy descent to try to make it up, I got stuck in a bad rut and crashed pretty spectacularly. Slightly bruised back, no big deal, keep it movin'. Some good guys dropped out of the race today, so I felt pretty good, given my recent failures and tantrums, that I found a place in my head I could go to have fun and stay mentally present. Small victories.

It's still raining, I'm huddled in a hotel room at the Super 8 Motel in Lewiston, Maine, and they don't have a laundromat. Off to find one in the car tomorrow morning...too tired to do it tonight, and we already murdered the bathtub. So much mud!

Tomorrow? We'll see.

-n

Toronto #2: Better

2009-10-24T19:01:00.000-07:00

I sat on that last post for awhile before I put it up, and although my mood has improved considerably since then, I feel like the hard times are as blogworthy as the good times; it's the arc of the whole experience, the whole season, that creates any sort of story at all.

So Sunday in Toronto was much better. The result(a lackluster 24th) doesn't reflect it, but I had a solid start, worked my way up to 15th, and was racing well in a shape-shifting group of 3-5 guys for most of the race. With 2&1/2 to go I got a shifter caught in some course tape when I came wide through a turn and I spent the next couple of minutes wrestling with my bike/chain drop/tape wrap/shit storm. Needless to say a mess of guys passed me while I was doing this and the gap quickly got too big for me to catch them back. That was a bummer, because I was having the first reasonably good ride I've had in weeks...and I still managed to screw it up. Oh well, at least I had fun this time, and Charmaine was skulking around the course, popping out from behind trees, smiling cheerfully, taking pictures and being awesome, which helped. And how about that sunshine? It was a really fantastic weekend, and the Midweek Cycling club is to be commended.

Still not there yet, but I'm getting a little closer.

-n

Toronto #1: Again

2009-10-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

I'm running out of ways to describe bad races. I suppose that considering the burnout, and the fact that I only rode my bike on Wednesday and Friday (for 45 minutes) this week, and the cracked rib and the sore throat I've been walking around with...well, I suppose the real surprise is that I actually felt good on my wee spin last night and was looking forward to racing today.

Long story short, I was having a tough day following a solid first couple of laps when I slid out on an off-camber and dropped my chain. I was in a hard-earned 25th place out of about 40 guys and I was sliding backwards like a stone, the ski hill was killing me. Putting the chain back on took longer than it should have and I was stuck in the middle of the damn hill, or more accurately, right at the bottom of the final pitch. When I contemplated running to the top or trying to remount mid-hill, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, so I quit.

I'll start tomorrow and try to have fun and re-discover the reasons that I do this. It's funny how when things are going well with racing it all seems so self-evident, and when it's like it has been for me this past month, well, all of the positive stuff seems pretty far away.

Better days.

-n

Coldtober

2009-10-14T05:31:00.000-07:00

It's cold in here. I can see my breath, actually, in my apartment. Yes I have spoken to my landlord, no I am not confident she will figure out before the day is over.

On a lighter note I actually finished a bike race on Sunday with no crashes or mechanicals. I did stack it pretty hard in warm-up trying to get used to riding clinchers again, and I bruised a couple of ribs, but what can you do.

So yeah, day 2 in Providence was a lot of fun even though I had a pretty mediocre ride. The depth of North American 'cross is getting really impressive, though, which is both encouraging and discouraging all at once.

And this week I finally committed to getting all of the rest I actually need and not trying to squeeze in confidence building, energy draining workouts between race weekends anymore. Hopefully my good legs will show up in time for Toronto this coming weekend.

That's it for now, back to work.

-n

Divine Providence Part 1

2009-10-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

I quit bike racing yesterday. It didn't take, though, probably because I was actually riding my bike at the time, and I had to ride for at least long enough to get home, or else ditch the bike and hitch-hike home in my superhero costume. And I thought about it, believe me. I have been slightly sick, and really tired, and awfully frustrated in my last few races. I've been worrying about UCI points, series standings, prize money, sponsor expectations ans a host of other shit that I would really like to think I had evolved beyond the need to measure myself by. And the beauty part is, for today, I have. I had fun racing my bike today, which is a hell of an accomplishment considering that I wasn't convinced I would even start today when I woke up this morning, and I got two flat tires in the race and DNF'd.

Last night I got a solid pep-talk from my amazing, brilliant, sexy and fun partner, Charmaine, and that helped me feel like all answers were right answers. Thanks, Baby! Whatever happens in the races, I have an amazing woman to come home to, and that's really as much as I could hope for. If I have to be a head case, and apparently I do, at least I bounce back quickly.

So yup, another DNF. The difference was that today I felt like a bike racer again, and I felt pretty snappy, which was a nice surprise. Good enough start, not so good I was likely to get myself in trouble trying to hang with my betters, but just good enough that as the first lap shook out I was comfortably top-20 with good guys all around me, and I was completely confident that I would settle into a group of guys who would race hard for the full hour. And really, that's all you want out of the start. It's a race, and you have to let it happen. But racing close enough to the front that all of those intangibles like UCI points and simple accomplishment are actually within sight produces something my friend Al Donahue refers to as "awesomeness". When you're in among the awesomeness, you keep going fast. When you're in the weeds with the back-markers, it tends to slow you down a little bit, in mind, body and spirit.

So why did I DNF? 2/3 of the way through the first lap I got a squishy tire, due either to the fact that the course was paved with glass, or to a sharp curb we had to ride every lap. I rode the tire flat for as long as I could, ran some technical stuff, and rode some technical stuff, which was actually pretty cool in its own disappointing way. Unfortunately I don't have a pit bike yet (this week, I'm hoping) so I got a super fast wheel change from Joe and Joe's Garage stalwart, Doug Aspinwall (thanks guys!) and got rolling again but I was nearly dead last at this point. Bummer.

One thing I have learned is that early bad luck in a race takes all the pressure off, if nothing else. So I resigned myself to a race of catch-up and settled into a groove. I was picking guys off at a pretty good clip and steadily moving up. My friend and teammate, Justin Lindine suffered a mechanical, as well, and I caught up to him just as he swung into the pit for a bike change. We were together for a bit but he dropped me pretty quickly. Nevertheless, seeing him killing it kept me motivated and I started to see a pretty large group of guys about 2 sections in front of me, which looked attainable. And then I got the second flat tire, in just about the same place as the first one...

I was half a lap or more from the pit, and I really couldn't see what was to be gained by running another half a lap just to try to spend the rest of the race fighting for the lead lap, so I pulled the plug.

At least I was mad about it, though. If I was as burned out as I thought I was yesterday then I would have been secretly happy. Sometimes mechanicals are like that: a relief. Not today, though. Today I wanted to race my bike, I was hungry for it. And that was a victory in itself .

So tomorrow is another day, and another race down here in Roger Williams park in Providence, RI, which I have to say is still one of my favorite cyclocross venues. And whether I head to Toronto next weekend or stay at home and race in Troy, I'll be more focused on the simple joy and effort of racing than on the outcome. Because, really? I am a pretty lucky human being.

-n

Gloucester Race Reports, Etc.

2009-10-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

There were 'cross races in Gloucester, MA this past weekend, so I hear. I was near them, and I had numbers pinned on, but I couldn't really see the racing from where I was. For the interested, there are a mess of really cool videos over on Cyclingdirt, including the infamous and highly entertaining one. Intentional or not, professional or not, grudge matches can only be good for spectating and sponsorship dollars. But I digress.

Saturday at Gloucester was ludicrously muddy. I rode well in the mud, better than I ever used to in fact. But an overly aggressive start combined with some mistakes relegated me to racing somewhere in the high-20's, where I stayed, and that was that. I don't have a pit bike yet (next week?) so I pitted onto Joe's 52cm bike with the saddle 3cm too short, which was pretty entertaining. But that has nothing to do with my result. I think my suckiness is attributable to a little fatigue and the need to do some engine work. It's hard to get the balance right between high-end training and maintenance/recovery. With 2 'crosses per weekend it's really easy to overdo it, and the racing pretty much takes care of the high-end work on the weekends. So this week is diesel week, and hopefully I can participate in the races in Providence next weekend.

Sunday was just frustrating. I had a better and more reasonable start where I avoided blowing myself up and I was in and around a respectable group racing for 20th or so, with good prospects for moving up when a series of bobbles and dropped chains, some mine, some others', cost me a mess of time. I hate to admit it, but my core is weak, and my back hurt on the bumpy ground, so crunches here I come. After having resigned myself to another ignominious day in the high-20's, I had a final bobble in the buttonhook coming into the barriers with 2 to go and I just couldn't make myself care enough to run. Off came the helmet, exit smoothly under the tape, rest forehead on handlebars for a couple of minutes over by the gazebo, roll to the car, get a drink. Sometimes a little "wasn't-there-didn't-happen" is preferable to actually finding out how bad the result would have been if I had stuck it out. And sometimes not, for sure. But when I come unglued mentally, and the riding stops being fun, it's usually time to bail for the day. No sense getting hurt or breaking the bike when you can't keep your head in the game. So, better days.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed with where my form seems to be, but the 'cross season is still relatively young. I do seem to be yards better at driving my bike than I used to be, and it is a definite confidence builder to know that I can drop people who are stronger than me in the mud or in technical sections. But it seems like there are a lot of people stronger than me, and that's a little hard to take. I know my body pretty well at this point, though, and I know that I won't be worse than this a month or even 2 months from now, and a lot of guys will be once road and mountain bike season fitness is a distant memory. The 'cross season itself is like a race in a lot of ways, and while a good start is key, steady consistency can pay off, as well. So I'll be tuning my engine, building my threshold and hoping for better results. If I could just get my 2nd lap fitness to match my starts I would be all set, and that has to be coming. Hope so.

And in other news I teach English, do awesome dad stuff, and have started to do some freelance editing as well as coaching a few bike racers. Doing knowledge work feels good, making a reasonable living would feel even better.

So now that I have caught up on several months worth of navel-gazing, race report style blogging, I will leave you to your workday. Don't forget to check out my articles over on Embrocation Cycling Journal. I get paid by the hit, true story. So click early and often.

Thanks for reading,

-n

I Miss You Guys...

2009-10-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

It's been like that for a few weeks, and I miss blogging. True, I have been writing and if you're curious you can see what about at Embrocation Cycling Journal.

But writing here is different, and you folks who read this are my friends. So, an apology for being absent, and a brief account of why, to be followed by more interesting stories.

- Teaching is a new challenge. Sometimes rewarding, sometimes maddening.
- One win in a local 'cross race
- 2 good-enough-but-kinda-disappointing rides in the first Verge Series UCI races of the season last week in Vermont.
- Gloucester coming up this weekend
- Silas's new school: The good, the pretty damn good, and the unintentional comedy of 21st century liberal intellectualism.

Off I go, looking forward to getting back on a blogging schedule.

-n

September

2009-09-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

It must be September because I haven't touched this blog in two weeks and I have that constant feeling of stress and busy-ness. Too much to do and not enough time to do it in.

Later this afternoon my most recent column will be up over on Embrocation Cycling Journal, so check that out.

In other news, I'll have a recap of the road season including race reports from GMSR and Univest.

'Cross season is here, just poke your nose out the door and sniff. Yup, it's time for that.

And call me Mr. Adjunct. In an effort to actually make a living using my degrees and also doing the things I have worked hard to become good at outside of school, I am now teaching everything I know how to do. Seriously. Mostly I'm teaching English Composition at a community college, but I am also coaching now, and even teaching guitar lessons again, which I haven't done in years.

I'll assume none of you are interested in taking English comp, but if you are interested in cycling coaching, contact me at than(removethis)ward at gmail dot com. This is a new adventure for me and I was on the fence about it for awhile, but I love bike racing, I have worked with several really good coaches over the years, I train a lot, and not for nothing but I'm a pretty damned good teacher. As I often write about here, I haven't always been an athlete, and I tend to have a lot of other irons in the fire at any given point in the year. I like to think this makes me a good coach because of the perspective I have on a variety of things, like learning to be competitive later in life, fitting in training around kids and family, and stuff like that.

And now back to it. More later in the week, thanks for reading.

Cheers,

-n

The End of an Era

2009-08-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

Silliman isn't usually all that sentimental, but he is today. RIP Ted Kennedy.

Sure we still have the King of the Filibuster, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, but being that he is both older than dirt and was late to the civil rights party, he's really a horse of a different color.

I won't make any grand statements for good or ill concerning politicians, but I will say that this morning I am feeling nostalgic for a bygone, Modernist sensibility concerning politics and world affairs. For all of their short-sightedness and failings of one kind and another, the so-called greatest generation approached civic life with a sincerity that not only preceded, but optimistically failed to anticipate today's universal irony. The baby-boomers had different causes, different priorities, but dammit they could still believe in something without cracking a smile or rolling their eyes.

Obama's easy skill as an orator and effortless and inspirational command of a room give me hope, but I have to wonder how long it will be before we have only leaders who have never known either true hope nor true struggle. I wonder what kind of a country we will live in when we are governed entirely by the children of comfort and privilege, by the generations that know no history and live entirely in the taken-for-granted present.

Today, in honor of Ted Kennedy and those who went on before him, I want to do something in analog; in black and white.

-n

Li'l Somethin' for The Kids

2009-08-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

No races this past weekend, 'cross season just around the corner, and only two of the hardest races of the year (GMSR and Univest) between now and then. Lots of training, monstrously hard Euro-pro workouts, low cadence work, speedwork, swimming, campfires, novels, it's been a good week.

In other news, I seem to have gotten a teaching job. Adjunct instructor of college composition, that's me.

For inspirational purposes, I offer my favorite 'cross video. I thought this song was awesome before it was put to this purpose, now I see its true brilliance come to life.

Diggin' the Dog Days

2009-08-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

It's Monday again, I'm behind in blogging, but life is pretty good. Today instead of doing bike things I am cleaning my apartment and heading up to Saratoga to go to the horsey races. I have lived my entire life within 45 minutes of the track, one way or another, and I have never been. Poor me with my conscientious, Bohemian parents...never any mainstream fun. But today I shall sweat and bet, and hoot and holler from the cheap seats. I'm psyched!

My latest column is up over on Embrocation Cycling Journal, hope y'all like it. While you're there I highly recommend also taking a look at Jeremy Dunn's latest, which includes a hilarious video, truly worth it.

I have a teammate or two who are on me to update the team site, and rightly so. This past weekend we acquitted ourselves admirably taking 2nd, 3rd and 6th at the Capital Region Road Race on Saturday, and then winning the Fall River Crit, plus taking 4th, 5th and 1oth in Eastern Mass on Sunday. Not only are we the nicest elite amateur team in bike racing, we throw down pretty hard, too. Full reports from this weekend, plus recent history dating all the way back to Montreal-Quebec will appear on the team's website this week. Look forward to it, it will be good reading.

-n

New Column at Embrocation Cycling Journal

2009-08-05T10:09:00.001-07:00

My new, bi-weekly column is now live and online over on Embrocation Cycling Journal. Check it out, it's a great magazine, both online and in print.

And that's it for now, busy day. Later this week I'll have details from Montreal-Quebec and some exciting news about the upcoming cyclocross season. For now I'll just say I'm going to be riding some pretty bikes.

-n

Canoes, Quebec, and Late Summer Recalibration

2009-08-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

I'm still overdue on my complete Tour De Quebec race report over on the team site. It's coming up today, I promise.

Post TDQ, I took three days off the bike, then headed to Ontario with Char for some light bikin' and quality hang time with her parents. That was followed by another 4 days off the bike that included a marvelous journey deep into the wilds of the St. Regis canoe wilderness with Charmaine. The mosquitoes were the size of my fist, it rained, there were goblins, I carried a canoe on my head for 5k, we ate many marshmallows. Pictures to follow.

This past week I got back to training, putting in a big block of 24 hours and ~410 miles or so from Friday through Thursday. My ass is pretty thoroughly kicked but my legs feel like a bike racer's again--which is to say that they hurt.

The hurt leggies probably owe more to the fact that I raced La Classique Louis Garneau yesterday, aka Montreal-Quebec, which was 154 miles of rainy bike riding. It was a great race, I flatted 3 times and made it back to the group each time, which was an adventure in itself. We had good luck, then bad, and only put one rider in the money. I did win the field sprint (good news!) but it was for 26th place (bad news..). C'est la vie. Driving home alone from Quebec city took a looooooong time.

Today I play catch up and get another job application out to another Community College. Hopefully I'll be gettin' my teach on come September. If I don't get hired somewhere it's going to have to be substitute teaching, I think. We'll see.

Race reports and more thoughts to follow.

-n

Time to Rant: on Sandbagging and why I race

2009-07-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

This post began as a reply to a thread on Colin Reuter's blog but I realized it was much too long for a comment and hey, I have my own blog, right? This is what happens when I don't race for two weeks...I rant. For the uninitiated, we are discussing cyclocross racing, and the categories into which cyclocross racers are sorted based on ability and results. Umm, yes. This is uber-nerd stuff, You've been warned. And yes, I do occasionally have arguments with my girlfriend over the pronunciation of spells in the Harry Potter books. Though just yesterday she astutely pointed out that in the beginning of "The Half Blood Prince" Luna shouldn't have been able to see through Harry's invisibility cloak because it's a Deathly Hallow, and as we all learned in "The Deathly Hallows" you can't use a spell on a Deathly Hallow. Yes, we had this conversation. I digress, but only just.

So without further ado, here is my mini-dissertation on sandbagging, why it more or less doesn't exist, and why--in the cases where it does exist--it doesn't matter.

Is there an obligation to race "up" a category? Is it dishonorable to do races you can win easily? Is it silly to do races where you are almost guaranteed to get lapped? Does anyone care? Would anyone pay any attention to their license category if we didn't live in the age of Internet stalking? And yes, by the way, this all has not a hell of a lot to do with Colin's original post. But it got me thinking, and then I drank a bunch of Jet Fuel coffee after several caffeine free days, and damned if the rant didn't just start to flow. I needed something to blog about anyway...

To me, "sandbagger" is an over-used term, and we're all too concerned with category, mostly because of the Internets, and guys Colin and me who manage our OCD and time between races by mining the racing lifestyle for introspective, ego-boosting minutia. The sandbagging that feels unfair to me is when I used to play chess against Russian immigrant teenagers who were internationally ranked experts but would move to the US and buy a novice license to enter into $20,000 prize purse tournaments and steal the entry fees of hapless patzers like me. In that case, there is a deliberate concealment of ability in pursuit of profit. On the other hand, everyone knows who the guy is who won the B race 3 weeks in a row, there's no concealment. And given that there is an overall season prize, and a B national championship, I think the dominant B's have every right to race in a category they can win right up through nationals. With the new category structure, I think cat 3's have the same right. After all, what's the use of accumulating points toward an overall series win if you're going to be "honor bound" to upgrade after a win or three?

For all of us except perhaps riders like Katie Compton, Alberto Contador, or Sven Nys, any time we win or place in a bike race, it is directly related to the fact that there weren't many riders in the race who were better than us. You could fill an oil tanker with riders who can beat me in a 'cross race. Lucky for me, most of them don't live in New England, so I get to feel like a top 10 or top 15 placing in a Verge series race means something. Really what it means is that, in those races there is an echelon of guys who train a lot and are very talented, and then there is a rearguard of guys who train some, and maybe aren't as talented as the front group. In between those two echelons, there is me and the group of guys I race with every weekend: we're sorta kinda talented and we train quite a bit. In that group, I do ok. Yes, I jest and oversimplify, but not by a whole lot.

In all seriousness, the main reason I race bikes--other than the fact that it is fun and there is part of me that is perpetually 7 years old, and completely swept away by the simple joy of self-propelled speed and wind whooshing by my ears--is that I have the opportunity every weekend to find out where my limits are and what I am made of. 21st century life is short on opportunities to discover our simple, primal worth, and I think there is tremendous value in involving yourself in games that stimulate the fight-or-flight response under controlled conditions and give us the opportunity to release endorphins and focus the mind intensely, if only for a little while. I get preoccupied by race category, and what people think of me, how my results look online, when my reimbursements will show up from my sponsors, etc etc. But none of that has anything to do with why I really do it, month after month, year after year. When I rant like this, I am mostly reminding myself to focus on the joy and the effort of racing, and what a privilege it is to be able to pursue it to the extent that I do. Seriously.

-n

Ne2c Climbing Extravaganza live video feed

2009-07-21T05:12:00.000-07:00

So my brother Pete puts on the biggest, baddest and most multi-media rock climbing competitions in the world. Seriously, he's becoming a mogul in the outdoor industry, and sells designer clothes on the side.

Today (this evening, beginning at 9:45 EST) in SLC at the Outdoor Retailer trade show the pro men's and women's finals of the Mammut Bouldering Championships will be video streamed live at this link and live blogged here at the most trafficed climbing blog on the net.

North America's top boulderers will be putting on a hell of a show, and the wall they had built this year is really cool. Check it out!

-n

I shouldn't have...

2009-07-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

...But I did. 3&1/2 days off of coffee and I cracked this afternoon at Jet Fuel in Toronto. I was caught off guard by the fact that there was no decaf, no brewed coffee at all in the place. Just a stoner behind the counter with a 'spro machine and a bunch of cycling jerseys. No biggie, my adrenal glands can continue healing tomorrow when Char and I head out into the St. Regis wilderness for our 2nd annual canoe rumpus and disappearing act in honor of her birthday (happy birthday, Baby!). But for now, I'm insomnia boy.

Anyway, it's good for the writing and I'm finished with my column for the upcoming online edition of Embrocation Cycling Journal.

Keep an eye on the team site, too. The full TDQ report will be up shortly.

And:
- There are no hills in Ontario/There are nothing but hills in Ontario. Hard to tell.
- Having spent nearly all of the last two weeks in various parts of Ontario and Quebec I am now more convinced than I usually am (which is a lot) that where I live sucks. Dang.
- Resting is good, but stressful because what if fitness go byebye? Little bit of fitness go byebye=good because it means body heals up, fitness come back in hurry, lasts longer. So I hear.
- The municipal workers in Toronto are on strike. So the public washrooms are closed. I peed on a tree.

Until Thursday...

And how 'bout that Tour De France, eh?

-n

Midsummer Travels

2009-07-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

Just back from the Tour De Quebec, which was cool, and will be written about in detail on the team site. Suffice it to say that I raced hard, rode a solid TT, and made a key break, but I ain't Josh Dillon. He smooshed the race.

Up to Vermont tomorrow to bring Silas back to summer camp and go for a wee mountain spin, maybe check out the GMSR TT course and eat some Ben & Jerry's.

I'm in the middle of a little rest block and a bunch of days off the bike, or off the proper training, anyway. Char and I are headed to Ontario for a bit, which usually means lots of downtime and is therefore good for blogging. I also still have a stack of Toronto area gift certificates to cash in on from the crit in May, so shopping spree, here I come! After that it will be back to full bore training and a pretty full month of racing in August, all of which will lead into 'cross season which is delightfully close at this point. Montreal-Quebec, aka the Classique Louis Garneau is coming up soon on 8/2, and I am super excited for it. After most of a week up in Quebec and some time practicing my French, I'm looking forward to 250k worth of time to annoy the Quebecois dudes with my bad pronunciations and badly conjugated verbs.

I just got my cat 1 upgrade last week, which is pretty cool, though it doesn't change all that much. Still, it's validating, and with GMSR having a pro/1 field this year and Univest coming the week after, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to do some big kid races before the season is over.

And that's all for now. More race reports to come, and hopefully pictures from canoeing in the 'dacks next week.

Cheers,

-n

Ups and Downs: Update from Fitchburg

2009-07-04T15:02:00.000-07:00

I'm home on the couch, drinking tea, instead of being at the bike race in Fitchburg.

I have mixed feelings about this. I have a slight, but annoyingly persistent cold, and yesterday during the circuit race I felt absolutely horrible. I sucked it up, rode a smart race, tried to be a part of the actual racing, and rolled in with the pack to an ignominious finish. The thing is though, with the form I have had in the last month or two, I should have been able to pick that race up and spin it on my finger like a basketball. Instead I suffered all day, had heavy legs, felt crappy, and descended into a spiral of negative thinking, self loathing, and general unhappiness. Not a particularly rational reaction to having a bad day of bike racing, but nobody has ever accused me of being particularly rational.

So I pulled the plug. I don't want to get sicker, I do want to race well at the Tour De Quebec next week, and racing when you're sick, trying just to follow wheels and survive, is no fun at all. I have never dropped out of a stage race before, and it doesn't feel very good, despite being sure that I made the right decision. After dropping out of Housatonic two weeks ago feeling the beginnings of this same cold and suffering from short sleep, I'm starting to feel a little all-or-nothing about my season, which was going really well until a couple of weeks ago. Being sick is being sick, though. So what? It's a good opportunity for me to catch up on some life stuff and settle for a few days while I get better. And given the time of year and the volume of racing and training I already have in the bag, the extra rest will likely do me a heap of good.

In much better news, my good friend and teammate, Matt Purdy, won the cat 2 road race today at Fitchburg in fine style. He dropped his early break companions to solo for the last two laps, which on that course is no joke. In the end he held a minute and a half gap over the chasing duo of Dylan McNicholas and Cameron Cogburn, who had both looked pretty unbeatable over the last couple of stages. He got the win, the points jersey, and moved himself way up on GC, possibly onto the podium but the results aren't in yet. I have said it before on this blog, but Matt is a seriously strong and motivated bike rider, and he has trained, and sacrificed, and suffered in anonymity for a long time now. He deserves this win in a big way, and I am really proud of him.

I'm a little sad that I wasn't there to help and to share in the victory, and to tell the truth I feel a bit like I let my team down. I have this "what if?" feeling like maybe I should have started today...but I know I shouldn't. I know my throat hurts and I'm achey and lightheaded, and pedaling up that hill yesterday--which usually makes me feel like a tough guy--made me feel like a chump. But I have a score to settle with that road race, and I was really hoping that this was my year. And with Wachusset removed, it looked like it might be. But the nice thing about bike racing is that it's a team sport, and there's always another race next weekend. But damn I wish I was there to see my boy come across that line with nothing but air behind him! Next time.

-n

Pre-'Burg Thoughts

2009-07-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

It's still wet. Everywhere.

Fitchburg starts today, which means I will likely ride a squishy wet time trial later this afternoon. I used to get really excited for this race, to the point of it almost always being a bit of a disappointment. The race comes right around the time that many folks start to feel like a mid-season break is in order, and given that it's the only NRC stage race in New England, and one of only 2 four-day stage races in the region all season, it definitely is a high point on the calendar. But it's also kind of a mediocre race around a truly depressing little town that I can't imagine wanting to visit for any other reason. And yet, I've grown pretty fond of the rolling hills and tree-hidden ponds and reservoirs out around Princeton.

Don't get me wrong: the road race is beautiful. And this year, with the mountain top finish on Mt. Wachusset taken away the race actually suits me better. And the crit and the circuit are cool, and this year's tt course is pretty well right up my alley...but. But something. The race is a cruel mistress and seems every year to be both more and less than the sum of its parts. I had hoped to race this year as a cat 1 and do the NRC pro race, and I probably could upgrade at this point if I were so inclined. But it seems like a good idea to do one last cat 2 race where I can ride to win and really put the stamp on my cat 1 upgrade. And the 2 race is no giveaway--I can think of two guys I know personally who were in the 2 race last year and are pro this year--but it's more of a level playing field than the pro/1 event, which is unforgiving enough to stretch the limits of the definition of the word "fun".

In any case, I am definitely feeling the need for a mid season break coming on, but I am still pumped to race hard. I'm just feeling a bit conservative in my expectations, which is a good way to start a big race. I've been so close to a good result at Fitchburg for years now, and it always gets away from me. So nothing to lose, right? Apart from that, after Fitchburg finishes on Sunday, I will be home for 2&1/2 days and then head up to race the Tour Of Quebec in and around Quebec city. Now that should be fun.

So today, a rainy Thursday, I sit in my brother's kitchen in Northampton, MA, and I think about bike racing, about missing my daughter, missing my girlfriend, getting a job in the Fall and feeling scared of trying to become the teacher I want to be. And in the midst of all that, as much as I don't want to clean my bikes, or race in the rain, or deal with bike racer attitudes sometimes, I am grateful. I'm grateful for this sport that pushes me so hard and tells me where my limits are. And I'm grateful for those limits presenting themselves immediately, and frequently. It can take a long time to really, honestly discover for yourself how good you are as a parent, or a teacher, or a lawyer. But bike racing is intensely honest, for the most part, and you are revealed to yourself, for good or ill, awfully quickly, week in and week out. I suppose that can be jarring, but it's also reassuring in a way that is addictive, I think. I look forward to a more balanced life some time soon where my self-definition week to week is more well rounded, and where intellectual limits present themselves to me with the same clarity as physiological ones. But for now, today, it's Fitchburg. I'm racing, and if I'm going to bother to pin on a number, I'm racing to win. But first, breakfast.

-n

Settling into Summer

2009-06-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

My garden is in full bloom with soccer ball sized heads of broccoli and 24" tall potato plants already. Yesterday I packed my daughter off to Summer camp in Vermont, where she is happy as a clam and enjoying all the best bits of being almost 11. I skipped the bike races this past weekend in favor of domesticity, relaxation and sleep...and my apartment it still a mess.

I have been pretty slack about blogging lately, but I am on a plan to be less slack, generally, starting now, so I'll start by playing a little catch-up and then get to some interesting recent developments.

Bike Racing:
Over the weekend of 6/13-14, teammates Matt Purdy, Matt Mainer and I descended on the little mountain town of Jay, NY for the 2nd annual Wilmington-Whiteface Road Race on Saturday, and the Saranac Lake crit on Sunday. This is a new race weekend put on by the Placid Planet club, and they have done a great job. I really hope people continue to support these races, because racing up there in the region around Lake Placid is just awesome.

Given that the race is nestled nearly in the heart of the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, and that a DEC trailhead for Whiteface and surrounding peaks was all of 500 meters from our hotel doorstep, this was a good weekend for my long suffering girlfriend to come along to the races and have some fun of her own. No, not in the feed zone!! Perish the thought. Purdy's parents had that under control. My girl was gettin' her hike on in style, covering Whiteface and Esther while we were racing. Interesting factoid: Esther is the only peak in the 'Dacks named after a woman, and it got its name when a 15 year old girl went out and charged her way up it, solo, against her parents objections in 1839.

In any case, the race is pretty cool, and a high quality field showed up including Colavita's Dan Vaillancourt and CCB's Dan Cassidy; a semi un-retired Kevin Bouchard Hall, and a respectable smattering of strong French Canadians, Vermonters and New Hampshire folk. The race proved tactically interesting given that many of the strongest riders lacked teammates, and while the course is selective, with one notable climb and many rollers per lap, the group kept splitting more or less in half with 15 or so apparently evenly matched guys at the front, eyeballing each other. On lap three of four, we decided to send Purdy up the road to a growing break while I annoyingly brake-checked on the front of the field. He made it, I snuck off solo a bit later, and then a chase group containing all of the favorites caught me at the top of the feed zone climb. Mainer had made the chase group, so with Purdy up the road, we exercised our right to sit on the group, hoping Purdy could pull out the win up front, and figuring to be fresh for the counter-attack if he got caught. This left a group of 8 chasing a group of 11, so there was still plenty of uncertainty in the outcome, and plenty of racing left to do.

Thanks to hard pulls by Vaillancourt, Cassidy and rising strongman, Cameron Cogburn, the break never got more than about 90 seconds ahead of us, and the last time up the feed zone climb we began catching stragglers from up the road. As we made the turn to head back toward Whiteface for the finishing climb, we could see Purdy still going strong in a group of 4 or 5 about 30 seconds up the road. Cogburn continued to pull like his life depended on it, Vaillancourt also worked hard, and everyone else either started playing cagey or was simply too tired to pull anymore. As we began the 1.6 mile, steady 8% climb to the finish line, Purdy's group had a lead of about 20 seconds, and Vaillancourt, Cogburn, and Michael Joanisse of the Quebecois Nativo Concept team crossed the gap almost immediately. Mainer hung on to this train as long as he could making an impressive effort, and I settled into a sustainable (for me) pace, picking off riders one at a time. In the end, Cogburn won in a seriously impressive effort, with former mountain biker and first year roadie, Joanisse, taking 2nd, and Vaillancourt 3rd. Purdy and Mainer were hot on their heels in 4th and 5th, and I put in a painful effort to catch a couple of guys in the last 200 meters and take 9th. In hindsight I should have just hurt a little bit more and caught 7th and 8th places, too, but I was a little lazy. All three of us in the top 10 was pretty solid, though of course we had hoped for the win. We were beaten by really good guys, though, and there isn't much you can do when the other dudes just pedal harder, so we were happy.

Sunday's crit looked to be a blast on a rolling, tight, 3 corner, 1/2 mile circuit with the finish line on Main St in Saranac Lake. But with only 18 starters in the 1/2/3 race, and rain falling on the slick, painted crosswalks as we lined up, "fun" began to seem like a relative term. I was aggressive early, getting away immediately, getting caught, then getting away again with one other rider. When I got caught, 4 guys rolled away, we missed it while I was catching my breath like a wanker, and that was that. A 10 or 15 second gap doesn't seem like a long way, but when it rains and the corners have an absolute top speed, in order to close the gap you have to go significantly faster on the straightaways than the break is going. I tried for the entire race to get across solo, and once with a willing partner. Each time I would close to within about 5 seconds of the break, the field would chase me, I would get caught, and then we would ride slowly. It was the most frustratingly negative race I have been in recently, and I was pissed at myself for missing the move. Eventually the inevitable happened and I finally got away for good (I say inevitable because I was the only one trying in earnest) and the field was lapped by the break. Michael Joanisse continued his good run from the day before, taking off from the break to win solo, and I rode in with him, having never worked harder for a crappy 5th place in a tiny local field. Anyway...

Back to Olde New England:
Until last week I had never raced in Ninigret park down in Charlestown, RI (for the uninitiated: zoom in on the figure 8 in the bottom left corner of the aerial view to see the permanent "ten-speed bike course"). As a fairly experienced Northeast/New England bike racer, this really seemed like a serious omission, so I decided to head down to the Mystic Velo crit at Ninigret last Saturday with Al, Mukunda, Sullivan, and the form-building Dan Greenfield. Seriously, if Dan keeps riding his bike he's going to get back to the form he had in '05, and then everyone else will be really, really sad.

The field was a classic New England mix of everything from cat 3 juniors to stalwart veteran pro's, like Myerson, and perennial contenders like my teammate, Al, and CCB's Amos Brumble. Early on in the 41 lap race, a break slipped away containing Al, Amos and two other riders and the rest of us did a good job of frustrating any chase attempts, confident as we were in Al's chances fromt he break. Myerson remained aggressive, as did Alister Ratcliffe of Bikereg/Cannondale and a few others, but nothing was going. I made a solo bid to bridge and made it to within "I think I can" distance, but overreached, blew up and got caught. Oh well, it was a good interval. The pace remained high, the juniors aggressive, but the break continued to gain time on us until it began to look like they would lap us. Ultimately a chase group got away late in the race, and the break did lap the field. Al won the race with a little leadout help from Myerson as well as our guys, and I took 5th, getting bested by half a wheel in the chase group sprint by Luke Keough. I got a little cocky and shifted into my 11 cog instead of just winding out the 12, whereas Luke had no option but to keep his head down and spin out his 52x14 junior gearing. My mistake, shifting always costs you a second's hesitation and that was enough for Luke to keep accelerating. Good for him though, those kids are badasses.

After the race local boy Sullivan guided us to a magnificent wharf-side seafood joint, satisfying Al's hunger fro Quahogs, and we all ate more fried seafood and french fries than you would imagine possible for a bunch of skinny bike racers. Really: we may or may not win the bike race, but I promise you we can eat any other team in the country clear under the table. Al alone put away about $40 worth of deep-fried happiness.

Sunday was the classic and painful Housatonic Hills Road Race. Long story short, I slept a horrible and fitful 4 hours Saturday night and felt lousy on the start line. Maybe it was the friend food? This is a really hard and unforgiving course, constantly up and down, and there really isn't anywhere to hide if you're having a bad day. I was having a bad day. After two laps of riding like and idiot, starting the climbs at the back of the group, getting dropped, chasing and getting dropped again, I pulled the plug at 52 miles of the 80 mile race and logged my first DNF of the season.

Purdy and Tremble made the front split, however, and hung tough to finish 7th and 13th, respectively. Had Purdy had better positioning in the sprint he looked good for a podium and Tremble had really bad luck and flatted about 10k out. Mainer and Al rolled in in the second group, and that was that. A funny takeaway from this day for me was that I was reminded how sometimes hanging out at bike races is more fun than racing in them. Honestly, I haven't talked to some of the people I caught up with that day since last Fall.

Writing:
In addition to the flash-fiction contest from a couple of weeks ago, I have been busy at work putting together a job letter and application packet for a couple of community college teaching jobs. Honestly I think some of the most important work done in the landscape of public education is done in community colleges. It's a great place to really teach, and to do so for folks who haven't necessarily had a great time of it in terms of educational opportunities. Anyway I am looking forward to it.

And some time soon I will have a regular, bi-weekly column appearing in Embrocation Cycling Journal. They are launching a new, online format and it looks like it's going to be one of the top cycling cites on the web in short order. Check it out.

More to come.

-n

Happenings

2009-06-24T05:45:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot going on lately. I am in arrears on bike race reports, which I hope to make up for by the end of the week; I've been working on a job letter to actually try and land a teaching gig come Fall; my daughter is "graduating" from the 5th grade today, and my garden is going amazingly strong. My fellow community garden plot sharers are coveting my broccoli. Word.

Upcoming posts will recap recent races, address the bizarre trend of graduation ceremonies for elementary school aged kids, and talk a little bit about my non-blog writing. It looks as though I will have a column coming up soon in an online cycling journal.

Until then,

-n

Tidbits of Good News

2009-06-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

Apparently the reputation of elite cyclists worldwide is on the upswing. News from the UCI reports that the majority of riders in the ProTour peloton are clean. Now if the Euro pro's are clean, and the domestic American and Canadian pro's are slower than them, and if the domestic amateurs are, on average, a notch or two slower than the domestic pro's, well, you get the picture. Believe in your local elite racer, believe in Euro pro's, too. Just don't start asking too many questions about NFL football, the UFC, or professional soccer.

And I had a short-story published online as part of a flash fiction contest put on by Canadian publisher, Biblioasis. The winner gets a stack of books, a token amount of money, and his or her story published in a Canadian quarterly. Guess whose idea this was...

In other news, the Adirondack North Country Race Weekend went well for us, and Mukunda managed to win a 30+ masters crit in Connecticut. Another weekend of geographically diverse solid results for the Spooky crew. Full reports to follow.

-n

The Ride: Spooky "Skeletor" Review

2009-06-14T07:58:00.000-07:00

I get asked a lot of questions about my bike this season, and a lot of people aren't yet familiar with the Spooky brand. I thought I would take this opportunity to get in a little plug for my team's main sponsor, but also to offer an honest appraisal of the bike's performance.

The Spooky "Skeletor":
*Pics to follow

Spooky bikes are manufactured regionally, for those of us in the NE anyway, in Easthampton, MA. The legacy of the brand is definitely mountain bikes, and going back to the early-mid 90's they had quite a cult following. Current owner, propriety, engineer and purveyor of all things Spooky, Mickey Denoncourt, apprenticed as a frame builder with them while racing mountain bikes in the 90's, and resurrected the brand in recent years, maintaining the traditional focus on mountain bikes, but introducing a road bike line, as well. Mickey's philosophy is "bikes for bike people" and he chooses to focus on engineering and ride characteristics over pricey paint jobs and slick finishes. The result, in the form of the Skeletor road bike is a light, stiff aluminum all-race machine that handles better than any road bike I have ever ridden. The finish is no-frills anodized black aluminum with tidy, kitchy decals, and some models leave the shop matte black with no stickers at all.

Part of the philosophy of keeping the bikes priced within range of real world, workaday bike racers is an emphasis on stock sizes. With a compact geometry, steep seat and head tube angles, and beefed up and reinforced chainstays, almost any size rider can be comfortably fit to a stock Spooky. To help with this, fit Guru and Spooky partner, Carl Ditkoff has his Retul fit shop set up in the Spooky shop, so the perfect fit for your ride is all part of the package. Custom geometry is available for special needs at no upcharge, but those cases are the exception.

So what should a race bike do, anyway? Well, it should want to race, and the Skeletor does. This bike is twitchy, in the sense that it accelerates fast, and goes where you point it, but it tracks with unbelievable stability, owing in large part to the Edge Composites fork around which the frame is designed. I have raced a custom IF Crown Jewel, a Cannondale, a Specialized, and a Giant TCR Adanced 0, and I can say without hesitation that I have never been so confident while descending or cornering at speed as I am on my Spooky Skeletor. This is consensus within the team, as well, and all of our guys are delighted with the bikes.

Another common observation among the riders on the Spooky / NCC / Kenda team is that almost to a man we are set up with more aggressive positions than on past bikes, meaning more handlebar drop, but we are also more comfortable. The geometry of the bike and the seat tube angle have allowed me to shorten up my reach by a centimeter or so, better positioning my center-of-gravity over the bottom bracket, but at the same time lowering my bars by a full 3cm compared to my Giant. I am much more aero, the bike handles better through corners, and my back still doesn't hurt. What more could you ask for?

Now it might seem like I would be unwilling to say anything critical of my bike given the importance of keeping sponsors happy, and it is indeed hard to look a gift horse in the mouth. We have all been instructed by said sponsor, however, to be as honest and critical as we can in the hopes of making the bikes even better in the future. Nevertheless, I have no complaints, and genuinely love this bike. Given the price tag of $1295 for frame, Edge fork & headset, (and the Edge fork is arguably the best racing fork on the market, and American made, to boot) or $850 for the frame alone, I would be hard pressed to recommend a better buy for a race bike. And built up with Rival, with carbon race wheels on, my ~56cm model weighs in just under 17 pounds, and that's with aluminum bars, stem and seatpost. With Red, Dura-Ace or Record and carbon bars, the bike would easily skim 16, if one cares about such things, which I don't.

Aluminum is stiff, of course, and that's the point. I won't pretend that 6 hours on this bike doesn't get to feeling a little rough, and it is certainly not a touring bike. If I were to suggest one structural improvement it might be the addition of carbon wishbone seatstays, but that would jack up the price and might also compromise the stiffness and handling that I love about the bike, so I'll say leave 'er as is. You don't expect an Indy car to have plush leather interior and cup holders, right? Right. Race bikes are for racing, and whether you're into fast club rides, training crits, or full time avocational/semi-professional/professional-amateur racing, the Skeletor delivers in spades.

Basically the Skeletor just begs to be raced, it is a joy to sprint on, as it seems to accelerate itself, and it climbs as responsively as you could want it to. And as I already mentioned, the handling on descents is just about perfect.

So if you want a race bike for racing, and if performance is more important to you than brand recognition, and if you like the idea of American designed and made bikes that have truly emerged from grassroots racing culture, then get yourself a Spooky.

-n

A steady Diet: Then and Now

2009-06-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

Racing, travel, training, racing, travel, training and occasional and much-needed down time in between. I tend the garden with Charmaine, we go on dates, have fun, we're a pretty annoyingly happy couple, and I like to think I'm a pretty damn involved and on-top-of-things dad, too. But these days, what I am is a bike racer.

This past weekend was the Balloon Festival Classic close to home in Cambridge, NY on Saturday, and a local crit on the (in)famous Bethel course on Sunday. Full race reports are up on the Spooky / NCC / Kenda team site.

My net takeaway for the weekend was positive: a little bit of prize money pocketed, some quality team bonding achieved, and a couple of more solid results added to bolster my recent confidence boost. I've also had some quality time to reflect on what it is that I get out of being so committed to cycling these days.

I have worked really hard at riding bikes this year, and it feels good to get something of a payoff in terms of results after the last couple of years, which have felt pretty lean at times. It's such a small thing, and I'm sure the really talented guys take it for granted, but for me, to have finally put in enough time that I can show up at local races and not struggle, not worry about getting dropped, and actually start thinking about how to win the bike race, well, it's gratifying to say the least.

This sport is so hard, and so many people quit. It isn't the physical difficulty that kills people, though in objective terms I think we work harder than most other professional, or elite amateur athletes--MMA fighters being a possible exception--but it's the physical difficulty with no guarantee of immediate reward. In the end, no matter how fit you are you still have to respect the sport, you still have to drive your bike and make good decisions, and you're still subject to that mysterious collective will of the peloton, which is a completely unique aspect of bicycle racing shared by no other sport. The drive, the inertia of the aggregate ambition of every racer in the pack manifested in unstoppable forward motion. A bike race lives and breathes, and to win one you have to wrestle yourself free from its grasp, and this grasp is not subject to the control of any other individual racing. It's an is.

That's the alligator I'm wrestling with these days, trying to win a big one. But I feel more evenly matched than I used to, feels like a smaller 'gator.

So I scored 6th at Balloon Fest, soloing in from a group of 3 thanks to some stellar teamwork from my teammate, Matt Purdy. We had Mainer in the break, I soloed half a lap trying to get across, didn't make it, and was joined by Purdy and Ron Larose of CCNS. Hijinx ensued, we raced bikes, etc. We put over 2 minutes into what was left of the field, (led home by Al, also solo) and there was a time when that alone would have felt like a victory. These days, though, I want more.

I got a dose of perspective on Sunday, though. When I arrived at Bethel for the 3rd annual Connecticut Coast Criterium, I immediately ran into Dan Greenfield at registration. Dan is racing a bit again this year, and has been coming along, fitness wise. He's been rocking the Spooky kit with us when he can, and he even bought a bike from Mickey, because why shouldn't one of the stronger guys New England ever produced race one of the better bikes New England ever produced? I got 3rd in the race after taking a risky inside line and winding up boxed in. I got out too late, and got beat. But that isn't the story.

When I started racing bikes in 2005, Dan was The Man. He won Bear Mountain, was 2nd at Palmer, 3rd at Jiminy and seemed to be top 5 in every pro 1/2 race in New England that year. He turned pro the next season and after a pretty solid year with Targetraining, he found himself totally burned out and overtrained, so he bailed and started a PhD in economics at Northeastern. He can still pedal wicked haahd.

I used to stick around after my cat 5 and, later, cat 4 races that season to watch the finish of the pro 1/2 race sometimes, and those guys--my teammates now, Al, Mukunda, Dan--on Louis Garneau, or CCB or Fiordifrutta, or the regional pro's like McCormack, they were untouchable to me. I came to cycling late, came to sports late, for that matter, at 26 after a lifetime of cigarette smoking and worse, 70 lbs overweight. That all ended in July 2004 when I bought my first road bike and the rest is, well, the rest, and here I am. But back then, still sporting a head full of Jesus hair, and half expecting to wake up in the morning with all that hard-lost weight back on due to some unfortunate, magical fluke; back then the local elite guys I saw every weekend were effing rockstars. I just couldn't imagine being that good no matter what I did, or for how long, or how many intervals, it just couldn't happen. But something was there, some little drive, some spark, some blast of energy that wouldn't go away, so I stuck with it. And now I quibble about missing the breakaway.

So getting a leadout from a guy like Dan, on his way back up, racing for the love of it, for the rush, the sensory overload of flying along at 35 mph, buried in the peloton, colors and sounds unified, just loving life, that's a reality check I need.

I love this sport.

-n

Perspective

2009-06-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

I won a race on Sunday for the first time this year. It was the combined 30+/40+ field at the Saratoga crit (aka Marshall & Sterling Racing City Grand Prix and NYS Criterium Championships, but that's a mouthful) and while I could be (and have been) accused of being a sandbagger, I wasn't the only one, and I don't really consider myself so good that doing a masters race is unfair. As long as Mark McCormack and Roger Aspholm are racing masters, I'll call it fair. Anyway, winning is never easy, there were some good guys there, including Ciaran Mangan from CCB, who has won his share of races, masters and otherwise. Considering that I attacked to establish the winning break, then crashed myself in a slippery corner, and attacked again to get away for the W, I'll say I earned it. My teammate Al Donahue was with me in the break, which was fun, and he took third behind a strong effort from NAV's Steve Francisco who is looking good this year. Steve and I came through the last turn a couple of lengths ahead of Al so he had a little ground to make up and Steve just squeaked through. Mark Sumner of Keltic seems to get stronger with age and he took 4th overall to win the 40+ race ahead of our remaining break mate, Gary Steinberg of Global Locate. It was a fun break to ride in and everyone worked well until about 4 to go when with the gap unthreatened at about 40 seconds, the other guys stopped doing much work, which they had every right to do with Al and I both up there. Mukunda took the field sprint for 6th, or 4th in the 30+ and Purdy, not liking sprints, particularly in the rain, didn't really contest, figuring to keep his powder dry for the 1/2/3 race later in the afternoon.

The event was quality and a lot of fun, and the community seemed supportive, so hats off once again to Dieter Drake and Andrew Bernstein for putting the race on.

The 1/2/3 race was canceled due to a tragic accident, and that really put things in perspective. I ended the day reminded on the one hand of just how insignificant the act of winning a bike race is, and at the same time feeling acutely how important it is to live fully in each moment you are granted.

Peace,

-n

A little Spontaneity: The Toronto Twilight Crit at St. Lawrence Market

2009-05-30T08:09:00.001-07:00

The T-Dot.

I took Wednesday and Thursday off the bike this week, partly due to weather, and partly due to needing a little rest after a hard race weekend. Last week was another 19 hour, 650k week capped off by 3 races, so it seemed a little R&R was in order. I spent the week catching up on bills, doing housework, getting my daughter set up for a visit at an amazingly cool independent Montessori school we're considering for next year, and I even entered a short story in a flash-fiction contest. All in all it was a good week for non bike related life.

Friday I was planning to ride for 3 hours or so just to get rolling again, and was looking forward to a low key, no travel weekend with just a local crit on Sunday. Around 10:00am, with Silas off at school for the day and on to her mom's for the weekend after that, I was hanging out with Charmaine, eating pancakes and contemplating the day, not in any kind of a hurry to do anything. Then she got an email from her dad up in Ontario about a twilight crit in downtown Toronto with a $10,000 prize list...starting in 9 hours. Char just got her Visa renewed, and sometimes when that happens she gets antsy to go home for a bit, just on general principle. She gave me a bit of a grin and said "let's go."

At first I was unsure, considering two days off and legs stiff as concrete, not to mention seeing the leader board of last year's race full of Symmetrics and Race Pro (now Planet Energy) riders. But a quick phone call to Toronto cycling legend and race promoter, Ziggy at ZM cycles and Fitness confirmed that I could in fact get into the race, and that there would be primes galore in addition to the advertised prize list. Given the fact that I'm done with my MA, don't have a job, and do have pretty good form right now, the opportunity to make some money was too good to pass up, besides the fact that the event looked awesome. So we were off.

Of course we made good time until the Peace bridge past Buffalo, where we sat in traffic for 20 minutes waiting to get through the border, and then once on the outskirts of Toronto on the QEW, we found ourselves stuck in Friday evening, Blue Jays game traffic, plus the throng of political curios headed to the George W. Bush & Bill Clinton conversation (?!). Who knew? The race start was at 7:30 and I still had to register. 6:00, in traffic, 6:30, in traffic, 6:45, in traffic. In the end I made it just in time, managed to beg the ladies at registration for a number, and made it back to the car at about 7:10. Sweet. Adrenaline warms up the legs as well as spin-ups do.

The course was a pretty straightforward and short rectangle, with the long sides about 350 meters and the short sides 100 meters or less, with the last corner coming at the top of a slight hill, and corner 1 leading into a downhill, followed by corner 2 which was really fast. 2000+ people lined the course, cheering enthusiastically and, being Toronto, everyone was so nice, it was weird. Even the riders, even the cops, for that matter. The whole course was lined with cattle guards and barriers, and looked to be about exactly 3 meters wide, a lot like all of those Giro finishes. Basically, the whole event just felt legit. The cops and volunteer marshals were really respectful of the riders and the fans were unbelievable, really psyched, and really into the racing. Like every other amateur bike racer or domestic US pro, I spend a lot of time racing my heart out on farm roads in the middle of nowhere, with no one around to notice except cattle and angry motorists, or in industrial park criteriums. So I am not yet so jaded that racing in front of an enthusiastic crowd and being treated like a professional athlete is old hat to me, I was psyched.

Me on the inside, Ryan Nye in the foreground

To the business: Planet Energy had a squad of 6 or so riders, including Andrew Randell, and they were the clear favorites. Garneau, JetFuel, and Mazur Coaching had a bunch as well. The MVP team from Rochester was representing with a few guys and beyond that it was an assortment of Canadian cat 1/2 guys from whom I had no idea what to expect. The vibe was friendly but tense, definitely more friendly than any big money American race I have been to, and guys were cracking jokes as we started our neutral parade lap around the course to stage on the finish line. I had lined up near DFL but made up 40 or 50 spots on the parade lap and was starting midfield in the pack of 100+ starters. The course looked fast, and the funny, narrow, uphill corner was sure to be problematic, so I figured I would need to move up as soon as possible.

The start was fast, but not ridiculous, and as the laps started to tick by, I started to loosen up. The pace was high, but inconsistent, and the general level of criterium skill and resultant cornering speed seemed quite a bit lower than what I was dealing with in NJ last weekend, or in most New England crits, for that matter. Guys were going fast, but in a weird way: brake through the corner, then full sprint down the straightaway. So rather than a smooth 50kph pace like I expected, it was more of a cyclocross effort, or like a points race, sprint after sprint after sprint. This actually suits me pretty well, physiologically, but it's a funny head to get into, and the racing was pretty negative, tactically.

Early on Andrew Randell from Planet Energy got away solo, and by the time I got up to the front of the field about 10 laps into the 90 minute + 5 lap race, he already had almost 30 seconds on a course where the lap times were averaging around 1:20. I have no idea how Garneau and Jet Fuel let this happen, and hats off to Randell. Not only was he the best guy there, he has Optimus Prime tattooed on his calf, so he's not exactly hard to keep track of. Had I been there, I would have covered it, instead I was warming up and discovering that my legs actually felt ok, though my top end was lacking a bit. There was some confusion about 30 minutes in when Keir Plaice, one of Randell's teammates, crashed out in turn 2, and most people thought that Randell had gone down, so the chase lost its impetus, and Randell proceeded to lap the field with ease.

With about 45 minutes left to race the light rain that had started got heavy, and eventually became a hard, cold rain. Somewhere in here I won a mess of primes, which was cool, and the crows was great. Since Planet Energy didn't care about the primes, they chased me slowly so I was able top stay away for 2 laps on 2 occasions and both times the announcer was nice enough to give me a second bell to race for, so I cleaned up on gift certificates, like whoa. What was odd was that none of these adventures was followed by a counter-attack, and the field, with one or two exceptions, seemed content to let the Planet Energy boys set tempo until it was time to sprint. As the rain really slicked things up, we got into a rhythm of near-stop in each corner, and full blast down the two long straightaways. There is no more exhausting way to achieve a slow overall average speed.

1 lap to go. That's me with zombie eyes on the right about 6 wheels back

Toward the end of the race, it became really easy to hold position because the attrition was ridiculous: 102 starters and 24 finishers. It was aggressive, but not dangerous and everyone seemed content to race with their legs and take few chances, which was nice. I was just argy-bargy enough to maintain my spot in the top 10 for the last lap, keeping an eye on Ryan Nye from MVP and one of the Bicicletta riders who looked all trackie muscular. I should have been more aggressive and attacked into the last two corners, as this was how I won primes all night, and it seemed pretty foolproof. But it's amazing the deals your psyche can make with itself when you're tired and cold and wet. I figured the PE guys would be too cooked from setting tempo to sprint and with three of them on the front, it seemed that 4th wheel or so behind their train was close enough for the 250 meter sprint. There was a bit of a tailwind, but I was pretty sure that whoever jumped straight out of the turn would blow and get passed by the line. I wasn't wrong, but the guys in front of me were all good sprinters, and that goofy uphill off-camber corner in the rain had us all basically sprinting from a near trackstand. So I passed a few guys and wound up 6th in the sprint, 7th in the race. Definitely a solid result considering I was solo with no teammates and woke up Friday morning not knowing I was going to race, but I think podium was realistic if I had kept my mojo working just a little longer. Live and learn, and I won 500 bucks for the placing on top of my month of free coffee from Jet Fuel, 200 dollar bike shop gift certificate, etc. So it was by far the best payday I have had at a bike race in a while, and a hell of a lot of fun.

I made some new friends in the Canadian peloton, which was cool, and I was seriously impressed with the community support for the event. The people just loved it. A late dinner just off the race course with Char and her parents capped off a pretty stellar evening, and I always sleep well up there in Ontario, it's just so quiet.

Cheers,

-n

*Photos courtesy of Canadian Cyclist

Lenny Bruce: Thank You Masked Man

2009-05-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

A classic from Lenny Bruce. The pacing is definitely old school, but it's worth your patience. And it's a fine lesson in ethics, as well.

Race Reports: Jersey once, Jersey twice, Somerville weekend's pretty nice

2009-05-27T16:54:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of race reports on the Spooky / NCC / Kenda team site from this past weekend in New Jersey. More to come, as always, and some other thoughts to share here, as well.

As a side note: Go to the Saratoga crit this weekend! For heaven's sake, people, we need all the small town, 6 corner, good payout criteriums we can get, let's make this one a success.

Until later,

-n

Update from New Jersey

2009-05-25T06:29:00.001-07:00

So I got in the winning break at the Bound Brook crit, in front of a pretty strong field, and took third. It downpoured, we got filthy and wet, and a good time was had by all, except the guys who crashed. This is my best result in awhile, and my best ever in a field of this caliber, for sure.

That's me on the podium. I was actually quite pleased, despite having been pipped by the guilty looking Quebecois who promised not to sprint after doing very little work the whole time we were off the front. You can't trust those guys...Oh well, 3rd place in a field that looked like the picture below isn't so bad.

That's Team Type 1 looking mean on the front of the race.

That's me taking a big pull with Vincent Quiron (Garneau Chausierres) and Matt Wilson (Team Type 1) behind me. I felt pretty legit today.

Full report to follow, as well as news from the Hills of Somerset County Road Race and the tour of Somerville.

Cheers,

-n

*Photos courtesy of the Team Type 1 website

Midweek

2009-05-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Thought I should mention that sometimes (like this week) I skip putting race reports here and instead I put them here, on my team's website. When races are particularly interesting and I have fun and introspective things to say about them sometimes I double up, but y'all should check out the team site anyway. We're interesting fellas.

This past Saturday was the Lake Sunapee road race up in New Hampshire. Driving over Friday night through central Vermont I was reminded of how very much I want to live there....soon enough, I hope. The race went well and I was in one breakaway or another for 100k, first the ill-fated ones that didn't stick, then the good one with really fast guys that stayed away. I pedaled wicked haahd, as they say, finished 8th, split up some prize money and spent a little quality post-race parking lot time with the boys, had an incredibly good sammich from the Vermont Country Deli on route 9 just West of Brattleboro, and was home by 4:00. Not a bad day of racin' bikes for all that.

I should be training now, but instead I am waiting for my kits to dry in the dryer and wishing I was still in New Hampshire where my allergies aren't. Time to Neti pot and produce some adrenaline to keep the itchies away for a few hours. Lots of climbing today, Rotterdam Junction here I come.

Cheers,

-n

PS - Spooky apparel for sale soon at a bike race near you. Classy and cheap, just like us. Check back for more info soon.

Now what? School's Out + Early Mid-Season Racing News

2009-05-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

Five years, soup to nuts, may not be all that long to sink into a master's degree, but it's a relatively long time, nonetheless, to be up to the same thing. Now I'm done...

Before I set off on my journey of temp work and earning my share of the hundreds of dollars that are out there to be made as a community college adjunct writing instructor, I have a little time on my hands in the coming weeks.I plan to spend most of it on my bike.

The funny thing is, though, that I need more of a balance than that to keep me focused. When I'm overwhelmed with school, riding seems like the best thing ever, and now with no school, I miss it and I find myself picking up books that were on my exam list that I never got through. That must mean I am studying the right stuff, headed in the right direction. And it gives me stuff to ponder, to have a little field-of-flowers time with myself when I'm out training later. It's always a struggle to find a balance, and as I said to some musician friends this past weekend who were horrified that I haven't been playing lately, sometimes you juggle 5 balls, and sometimes you juggle 3 but you throw them a bit higher. (Jokes, please) Still, I've been spending a lot of time kitted up and wandering around the apartment lately. Gotta get on a schedule.

Recent Races:

Quabbin Reservoir Road Race - Meh. The team did ok with two in the break (would have been 3 but I popped like a balloon after about 20 miles when Aspholm and Matt White accelerated up the longish climb and sulked my way back to the field) but then the race turned into a bit of a fiasco with the field being led off course, slaloming through downtown Ware (where?), MA with no traffic control. It was the first hot race of the year and the body wasn't quite ready, plus given my new high-volume-low-intensity pre-season approach, I have found my overall fitness to be higher, but my muscle endurance (i.e. ability to tolerate surges and pace changes) to be a little slow to come around. Spinelli 5th, Al Donahue 7th, Tremble near the front of the field sprint in 11th. Me? Pack fill.

Jiminy Peak Road Race - This was the first race of the year where I felt like I was racing with legs that would do what I wanted them to do, and it was an early indication (I suppose Battenkill was the first) that the extra hours this winter are paying off, in that 150k really didn't feel all that long and I felt better the longer the race went on. Muscular endurance better, hard intervals during the week = good. Again Spinelli made the break, I nearly did with a bridge attempt, but I may have screwed myself out of it. I was marking bridge moves by Justin Lindine and Matt White from Bikereg and a couple of riders from Empire and I wasn't pulling through. See, those guys are strong, Spinelli was already up ahead in a group of 9 including rockstar Jamie Driscoll, who eventually won. So bringing more strong guys up to the move, even with me along, didn't seem to be in our favor. There was a brief moment when we got within 10 or 15 seconds of the break when I considered trying to jump the gap myself in one hard sprint, but I chickened out. It was windy and the effort would have been big, and we were about 1.5k out from the climb at that point and I thought, "hmm, go anaerobic now, and try to recover while climbing in the breakaway while the gap is still being established and the pace is still high? Nyet." Judging by how I felt later in the race, I probably had the matches to burn and should have gone. Every year I have one early season race where I remind myself not to race like a conservative punk, and this was that race. In the immortal words of my good friend and mentor Andy Ruiz, "pain is your friend, don't be a p*$$y."

The finish, for me, was good from a developmental perspective, and bad in terms of the actual result. I had great legs and swam up the climb, wondering when it was going to be hard...then I got to the front and saw that the group of 10 or so who were actually racing (oops, missed that memo) had already gapped the rest of the field. I jumped at about 300 meters out and got most of the way across the gap, passing a few stragglers from the front group and finishing just behind Jeremy Powers. The frustrating thing is that if I hadn't been riding like a wimp coming into the climb, and if I had positioned myself top 10-15 coming through the corner, I definitely had the legs to score and at least place in the money. Instead I made a "heroic" effort to finish 19th....but there's no such thing. Heroic efforts win races, or get caught at 1k to go after being off the front all day, like Jens yesterday in the Giro. Impressive efforts that yield no result aren't heroic, they're just ill-timed.

Bear Mountain Spring Classic - This one went a'iight. For a full race report, look here.
While my result (17th, break of 9 up the road, so 8th in the field sprint) was just ok, I felt like this race was something of a high-water mark for me in terms of long, hilly road races. My track record here is lousy, having broken my chain on the second lap last year, and gotten lost on the way to the race the year before, resulting in my number being given away to someone on the wait list, and me then becoming very sick with allergy-induced bronchitis. This year was make or break: I was either going to finish the race well, or have another mishap and join the legions of disaffected Northeast bike racers who swear the race is cursed and refuse to ever go back. It was even money which way it was going to go. I can now safely say, however, that I am drinking the Kool-Aid: after one good race there I am convinced that people are right, Bear Mountain is one of the best courses around. It pains me to agree with the NYC racing community, but on this I have to.

So the day was good, I raced my bike for 1oo miles, felt strong on the climbs mostly, hung in when I felt less strong, and even attacked hard over the dam at the top of Tiorati one lap. Who, me? Aren't I usually hanging on for dear life near the back at that point on climbs? Not anymore, apparently. No the climbs aren't steep, but I have always struggled in hilly races over 100k or so, mainly because I have never put in the time to have the endurance that one needs to be competitive in Pro 1/2 races. This year I have done a lot of work on my climbing going all the way back to January, and the payoff feels pretty damned good. I got boxed in in the sprint, had some bad luck, dropped riders coming backwards through the field jammed me up a bit...yeah, that's life. And maybe I could have been more aggressive, given someone a push, really gone for it, and racing for the win I would have. But racing for 10th place, it just didn't seem worth going down at speed, so I was a little cautious. The good part was that I was up there winding out my 53 x 11 at 100 miles which is new for me, for sure. It gave me a warm fuzzy that good things are to come. Plus I love my team.

This coming weekend is a bit more laid back with the Lake Sunapee race up in New Hampshire. Serious New England bragging rights and double digit prize money on the line. Woot. Should be a blast, though. I love little races, it's the best part of being an amateur--showing up to have fun and not stress every weekend like it's Nationals or Fitchburg or something. And after that it will be a fine-tuning week before Memorial day weekend in New Jersey. Somerset Hills on Saturday, Bound Brook on Sunday, Somerville Monday, and then most likely back down for the Ricola Twilight Crit on that Wednesday. All of which should stack up to bring me into June with some serious form, all other things being equal, which they rarely are. I'm looking forward to it all the same.

Then I'm going to have to get a job.

-n

Coming Up...

2009-05-07T04:32:00.000-07:00

- Where have I been?
- What happened to Spooky / NCC / Kenda at the races the last two weeks?
- How does it feel to be done with my Master's degree?

Plus a rant or two is brewing. It's been awhile, so could be good.
Back soon, I miss you guys.

-n

Act Like You Been Somewhere (A Guest Editorial on life in the Feed Zone)

2009-04-28T18:31:00.000-07:00

Usually this blog is just a representation of me and whatever is on my mind. For a special treat, however, in the first of what I hope will be a series of guest posts, today I offer you a soigneur-to-the-amateurs view of life in the feed zone, by the lovely Charmaine. Here it is, unabbreviated, and unabridged. Personally I think it's worth printing out and giving to the next poor soul you manage to hornswoggle into humping bottles for you in your next road race, but y'all can decide that for yourselves.
____________________________________________________________________

Rob Serling has narrated a lot of my Saturdays and Sundays in the last couple of years. He whispers a little something that goes like this: "There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Feed Zone."

It's scary. Seriously. I think a lot of racers don't know that when they ask their family, husbands, and girlfriends to help out. I've taken some elbows, for instance. And I've come back from a weekend covered withblack fly bites and sunburn. Injured teammates sometimes show up to help out–and maybe experience some of the horror. But mostly y'all go flying by. So, the first part of this post is hopefully a 'race perspective' that's a little unusual.

I hate generalizations. Masters 40+ fields tend to be the most aggressive–and you wouldn't believe how some of the men talk to their wives if they miss a bottle, or can't spot them. Blue streak. It's too bad, because usually some kids are around spectating. Women don't eat (or drink) enough during races. And dropped riders hate, hate, hate to be cheered on by folks in thefeed zone. To be honest, it's usually well-intentioned. But like I said, I hate generalizations.

Most of what I've learned about bike racing comes from the magazines on Nathaniel's coffee table (ok, bathroom floor), and from volunteering a bunch. I've brought team snacks, motorpaced, hosted racers when they're in town, marshaled, and stood in feed zones. I've never raced, but I love bikes, always have. I love riding, too. And Nathaniel. And riding with Nathaniel.

One of the things I've heard most often at races is 'if you want to stay happy as a couple, stay away from bike races.' Where I'm from, we don't do that. We show up for each other when we can, how we can. But I understand the sentiment. When I tag along on race days, I'm not writing my dissertation. I'm not visiting family, doing laundry, catching up with a friend, or riding my own bike. I'm there, really, just to help out.

But, as the non-racers in your life know, bikes take up a lot of space–whether it's literal space in your sheds or basements or trophy rooms, or general life space like the time it takes for maintenance or training or travel, team training camps or stage races, dieting or buying new components or physio appointments–ring any bells? So…maybe the 'stay away' advice means 'enough is enough.' From my point of view, though, it's always been something that's pretty easy to share in. And it's a fun way to see a race–even though it's an endurance test.

There are downsides: There's nowhere to pee on the side of the road. A lot of gossip flies, and you can't get away from it, which reminds me of why I didn't like my high school cafeteria. The upsides are better, though: I've gotten really good at off-road driving (and parking). It's also fun to ride the course when the race is over and get a sense of the place you're in; one of the best parts about bike racing are the more off the beaten path kinds of places you find yourself. And, I've met some great people.

I suspect a lot of these great people (even the non-racers) have picked up a lot about the sport. From those bathroom floor magazines, from hearing managers and coaches talk about riders, from hearing the play by play about every race. I also suspect that we'd surprise you with what we know. Really.

That's pretty well what it's like. Not as fun as driving a wheel van, or taking pictures from the most scenic places. These are not the sidelines, but the front lines.

The second part of this is for people who have been pressed into service, who are scratching their heads, saying "WhadoIdo?"

The basics about feed zones:

Clothing. Most importantly, you must wear a team jersey or team vest. If you're on, bring a raincoat, sunglasses, pith helmet. Wear comfortable shoes. Expect that you might be standing in poison ivy, nettles, or a happy mosquito breeding ground. Repeat: bike racing is fun.

Fill your tank. You'll likely be driving on back roads, and trying to beat the field at some point…to get to the finish, to get to another feed zone. Also, fill your tank: bring water for yourself, too–and some kind of snack.

But what about emptying your tank? Those of us that have done this more than once know you're likely going to be standing on the side of a road for a l-o-n-g time. And rushing around. There aren't bathrooms. Um. Yeah.

Bring a map. And, if you can, print out the race bible. The start times and number of laps each field does can help you keep track of when it's time to go.

Hug a tree. Think about carpooling with feeders helping with the same field as you. Doesn't have to be the same team, just the same field. I've met a lot of great people this way. Parking can sometimes be tight. Less traffic=happy sky. Also think about bringing a garbage bag or two to help clean up the wasteland of uncollected bottles after the race–if you still want to pitch in at that point.

Extras. Lots of people bring folding chairs. Coolers on wheels are popular now too, mostly because sometimes feed zone parking is, say, at the bottom of a steep hill. Find your inner sherpa. Bring extra jugs of water. I usually bring a book, and always my own bike or running gear. The races are often in really pastoral areas, so enjoy.

What not to bring. This is probably the most controversial thing I'm going to write, so I feel like I need to preface it with a defense. I am a dog person. I had a dog for 18 years. I like them. I understand that you think your pet is part of your family, and so well-behaved--unlike those other hell-beasts that people call pets. But even very special dogs should probably be left at home. There's a lot of chaos in feed zones. A lot of bodies. A lot of bike traffic and vehicle traffic. A lot of property owners who are not as taken with Fido as you are. I repeat: chaos. The fewer obstacles/moving pieces/sets of needs, the better. Right?

My last part here is really basic. A step-by-step what to do if this is your first time volunteering to pass out water bottles.
-Arrive early enough to grab bottles and food from the team you're helping. Ask if there's any preference about where they want you in thefeed zone (some riders swear by getting their bottles early, others like to get them at the end). And ask if anyone has any particular food needs, like bottles filled with Coke on the last lap. Someone might want you to keep track of splits, too.
-Drive out to the feed zone. Make yourself comfortable. Get some bottles ready, etc.
-If there's a pace vehicle, usually the name of the field is displayed on the windshield in bold letters. Watch for your field. When you see your field coming, make sure you have your bottles ready.
-The field inevitably breaks up. Watch for your riders, and try to keep track of how many go by. It's impossible, so don't worry too much. But don't go running off when there are still a bunch of riders to come through.
-Give yourself space from other feeders, but don't be afraid to use your elbows. Sometimes, it's a contact sport. I took a musette bag to the face the other week.
-Be fearless, and don't move. Hold your bottle loosely by the top, arm outstretched. If you're passing a musette bag, hold it by the top of the strap.
-When your riders come through, pick up their ditched bottles.
-If there's another feed zone, hit the road. Repeat.

I hope this helps demystify what it's like--and what you can expect.

Tour Of The Battenkill Part II

2009-04-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

There are hundreds of stories in every bike race. That's one of the things that makes this sport so captivating and beautiful, I think. More than the obvious truth of the old adage that the winner and the last placed rider of a race suffered equally, the peloton is a rolling anthropological goldmine of co-constructed narrative and lifetimes full of back-story.

My mother was a folklorist. When I was young, in the 80's, she spent much of her time in the wilds of rural Washington County, interviewing the old-time tradition bearers and doing field work for various projects. For several years she directed the "Festival at the Fair" at the Washington County fair in Greenwich (Green-Which, two words. This ain't Connecticut, people) which created a venue for everyone from legendary local fiddle players, to champion pig-callers to the old blind man who carved chains from solid sticks of wood, to be seen and appreciated by their community. That's the ethic of folklore, see, finding the extraordinary in the everyday. The art we live with every day and come to take for granted is no less worthy of study than the art we deify (and reify) in museums.

Because of this I know, for example, that there is still at least one (more, I think) church in Granville, NY where the services are done in Polish and Slavic, and there are others where the congregation is largely Welsh. This is because of the slate quarries around the Vermont border and the migration of European master stone workers to the area in the nineteenth century. I know, too, that Bernie Ouimet has a house full of old pump organs and accordions, right on Meeting House Rd in Easton, just a stone's throw from the Battenkill race course. So this race, for me, it runs deep. My mom isn't around anymore, and I am several lifetimes removed, in some respects, from the kid I was on all of those interminably long and hot Spring and Summer days, tooling around in her little, orange VW Rabbit that year she put 60, 000 miles on it, commuting back and forth from home in Rexford to Argyle or Cambridge every day. But roots are roots, and I feel something for those hills, feel like I owe something to this race. Some year I'll pay the debt in full.

My story of the Pro Men's Invitational (I didn't race on Saturday in hopes of having fresh legs and good JuJu on Sunday) is that I raced for 150k, felt like I belonged there, rode my heart out, committed several acts of daring-do, flatted around 80 miles in, got back in the group easily, and ultimately rolled in 21 minutes down to be scored an ignominious 56th. I had never previously started a race of more than 105 miles, and I've never finished well in a race over 80 or 90, so I feel pretty good about my ride.

The story of the race itself, apart from my insignificant role in it is that Scott Nydam of BMC rode away 15 miles in, because he could, and stayed away all day, largely alone, sometimes with company. The only serious or convincing bridge attempts came from Francois Parisien of Planet Energy, Karl Menzies of OUCH, who eventually caught and dropped Parisien for 2nd place, and Justin Spinelli of li'l ol' Spooky /NCC / Kenda. The first time the field hit the climb of Joe Bean Rd about 30 miles into the race, Justin took off after the break (Nydam and Bobby Lea from OUCH at that point) with Toby Marzot from Mountain Khakis. The field didn't react and they got 2 minutes up the road almost immediately. A little while later Toby was back in the field having suffered a flat tire and he reported that Spinelli was absolutely killing it.

In the end it was not to be and after getting within a maddening 5 or 10 seconds of Nydam, Justin was eventually swept up by the field just before the second pass of the covered bridge in Eagleville, having spent a valiant 40 miles in mostly solo pursuit. The man is going well, he will win something big this year. You heard it here first.

After that, attrition did its thing, flat tires were suffered, guys quit and climbed in team cars, and ultimately I was gapped off the group about halfway up Joe Bean Rd the second time as guys started blowing up and moving backwards. I had enough gas to climb at tempo, and I was still hauling on the flats pretty good, but 90 miles in my high-end was pretty much done and I couldn't accelerate across the gaps that were opening, so when the field made the turn onto Ferguson Rd and picked up the tailwind, I was done. I managed, with the help of Keir Place from Planet Energy, to keep the gap to the field at around 30-45 seconds for a couple of miles, but it was hopeless. We got caught by Peter Morse from Jet Fuel, Jake Hollenbach from Empire, one of the Bikereg Cannondale boys and some others, and my teammate Adam Sullivan was in there, too. Eventually the group reshuffled a bit and Nick Bennette from Metlife caught us on Meeting House Rd. From there on in it was a cordial but quick paceline, and a nice, gentlemanly pace up Stage Rd the final time. When we came through the feed zone at Christ The King church we were about two minutes down. We lost another 19 minutes in the next 30k. Now that is a bike race.

Two moments of particular satisfaction from the race:
1) Making the selection the first time up Stage Rd when the shit hit the fan. It was hard, and some impressive riders didn't make it. When we came back through Cambridge and through the finish line the first time, it was absolutely full gas racing with attacks going constantly all the way up 313 to the covered bridge. And I was still there? Well yeah, I was.
2) On Mountain Rd on the first lap I didn't like my position, so I scooted into the gutter and rode up to the front of the strung-out field. We weren't going flat out, but it wasn't easy and I was like "hang on a minute, I ride this stuff well." So I rode Becker Rd up front with the OUCH fellas and started Meeting House Rd in good position. Which is good because the field got cut in half there. I realized just how hard it was when I saw one of the BMC guys just sit up and stop pedaling, leaving a huge gap to close, which I did. The funny part was a few minutes before that when, immediately after reminding Adam Myerson to be careful of the sketchy descent, I took a bad outside line, wound up in some really loose sand, and had to ride offroad into the grass and then cut back up across the shoulder to save it. It was pretty cool, and the exit looked like this (thanks to Andrew Franciosa). A second earlier I was out of the left border of the shot. Yikes.

So obviously the chance to race in an NRC caliber field in my own back yard was pretty fantastic. And beyond that, huge props and hats off have to go to Dieter Drake for having had the vision to start this race 5 years ago. Many people, including me, didn't think the race could grow to the extent that it has, and Dieter has proved us all shortsighted. Chapeau. I believe I saw some UCI types lurking around and it would seem they were evaluating the course and the organization for UCI certification next year. Fingers crossed. I'm already looking forward to it.

-n

Tour of The Battenkill

2009-04-20T18:50:00.001-07:00

I'm going to write about it properly, but not right now. It's over, it was epic, I finished, and it was an experience I feel pretty damn good about.

160 starters including seasoned European professionals and several of the top domestically based US and Canadian pro teams. 62 classified finishers, with me the 56th. I'll take it.

Sometimes on Monday after a tough race weekend I am so useless. The adrenaline goes away and...I'll function well tomorrow. And I'll tell my story of the race then, too.

-n

In Celebration of Poetry Month

2009-04-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

April is poetry month, and for reasons tangentially related to this fact, the League of Canadian Poets just published one of Charmaine's recent poems, check it out.

It isn't easy for her, trying to keep up creative output while juggling a dissertation and the job market, to say nothing of being stuck with a bike racer for a partner. So her publications make me happy. Plus the LCP is kind of a big deal, and you need to have a book out and meet the approval of a panel of their reviewers in order to make the cut. So good for my lady.

I take a selfish interest in the piece for fairly obvious reasons, but apart from that, I find it a privilege to have someone in my life who I am continually impressed by. And the girl can make words do some pretty impressive stunts.

Happy Easter,

-n

Moby Dick I

2009-04-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

When I linked to that Melville page the other day, I was hoping to highlight a couple of my favorite passages, so I decided to present them here.

In particular the first, and most famous, introductory paragraph speaks to me because it has a lot to do with why so many of us ride and race our bikes. The bike is where I go to find myself, to reflect, to challenge, to retreat, to subvert, and to join, all at once and severally. I know more than one fellow bike racer who feels their life was saved by discovering racing, and in some ways it is certainly true for me.

Melville was from Albany, and apparently somewhere in the ancient archives of early print journalism and folk tales there are stories of a white whale that swam up the Hudson from the sea some time in the 17th century. Some suggest that this was Melville's initial inspiration for Moby Dick.

The Hudson shapes, or has shaped, all of my rides, really, though I don't think about it much. Living in a river valley can be a profound reminder of human insignificance, with patient ancient mountains on all sides changing the weather with their moods, the seasons. Sometimes when I head across the river on 9J, or South on 144 down to New Baltimore, I ride along the river and try to imagine being a farmer in 1650 or 1750 or some equally unimaginably (from my modern perspective, on a bike made with as much technology as the early NASA craft) ancient year, and looking out on that muddy estuary to see the massive hump of that white whale. Or before that to have been a true American, a Mohawk, or Iroquois, and seen the unfathomable spectacle of Henry Hudson's Half Moon sailing up river in 1609.

As for the second excerpt, I think every bike racer with a chip on their shoulder owes a little something to Ahab. And of course, in terms of American literature, Ishmael is the patron saint of dreamers.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.-- (Opening Paragraph, Chapter 1)

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.... Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.--Chapter 41 (Moby Dick)

Off to ride now,

-n

Old New England: Team Bonding at Marblehead, and the Calvinist Geographic Heritage

2009-04-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

I have suggested, for a couple of years now, that Northeastern New York belongs in New England, and Southeastern Connecticut belongs in Westchester County, NY. Everyone would get along better that way, and claims to regional identity would be more in line with personality type, I think. I am, however, not a native New Englander. I was born and bred here in upstate New York, I feel no special love for NYC, I think the area I live in is silly and provincial, and I feel quite at home most places 30 miles or more to the East.

Eastern Massachusetts doesn't care.

When you're from here, and you go there, you get, well, maybe not lost, but indirectly found, certainly. Reoriented, you might say. See, the puritans who settled the region were Calvinists and, as such, they believed that the salvation or damnation of the soul was preordained. God had chosen your destiny and as an earthbound, sinning mortal there wasn't anything you could do about it. You certainly could not presume to make a good impression on the almighty, but you could adopt the no fun, no frills puritanical work ethic in the interests of maximizing your purification potential and, perhaps, making sure you got a good seat in Beulah land when the time came. Deft logic, certainly, and logic that requires great leaps of faith and not examining too closely in order to avoid the sin of presumption. But I digress.

Some of the roads around Eastern Mass, particularly in the areas of the North Shore that have now been inhabited by Europeans for 400 years, require acts of intensely counter-intuitive faith to follow. Signage may be absent, or misleading. If you ask a friendly fellow motorist for directions, you may be told "yah caant get theyuh from heeyuh". And, as an out-of-stater (non-believer) you have no right to determine yourself worthy of, say, getting to a bike race on time. But if you get up early, work hard, take few pee breaks, and follow the directions of the race promoter, the powers of the Universe may reward you with punctual arrival at your destination. Thank you, John Calvin.

____________________________________________________________________

Saturday was race #2 of the Johnny Cake Lane Series. Read a full report of Nathaniel and Purdy's exploits here.

Sunday was Marblehead, the classic New England season opener. The weather was pleasant, but cool and windy with a stiff salt breeze, and the rolling neighborhood course with a punchy 10-second hill 200 meters before the finish, and a tricky 120 degree corner promised a quick race with many accelerations. Following Saturday's long breakaway effort at Johnny Cake, I wasn't sure what to expect of my legs in today's race, but with Mukunda, Al, Spinelli, Matt Mainer, and Eric Tremble rounding out a respectable sized squad-of-Spookiness, I figured my job was to have fun, stay safe, try to get Justin in a break and, failing that, save energy for a field sprint, if one materialized, and see where my finishing speed is at this season. With Tim Johnson, the whole McCormack Family, Cervelo test team Euro-pro Ted King, and Adam Myerson in attendance, I didn't so much like my chances in a field sprint. Lucky for me, Spooky can has cards to play.

Early on, maybe on the 4th lap, there was a split in the field due to a lot of attacking up front. Our own Mukunda launched a pretty good one that was brought back but led to some gaps opening, I countered and was covered by Josh Dillon, who pulled through, and some other guys who didn't. Then the big kids started to play and the split was forced, about 35 guys off the front and I was the last suffering soul to make it across.

My immediate plan was to sit in and recover for a bit because I noticed that the split contained all of the pro's, all of the Bikereg/Cannondale team, and Spooky men Al, Tremble, Spinelli and myself. Considering that our chances of placing guys in the money had just quadrupled, things looked pretty good. After another lap or so, still pretty early in the race, another split of 8 or so guys rolled off the front including all of the favorites, and we had missed it. Poop.

It wasn't a huge gap, probably only 15 seconds or so, but it was enough, and with the horsepower up front it was certainly dangerous. From about mid pack I saw Al and Tremble and Spinelli immediately and dutifully line up on the front and start rotating to bring it back. Clearly this was an all hands on deck situation, so despite my flat leggies and need to recover, I put the Spooky's handling to good use, dive bombing the S-turn downhill and making up about 20 spots in as many meters. That bike is amazing. I rolled to the front just as Al was finishing a pull and, careful not to gap my guys off, I got in front of him and started hammering into the ridiculous headwind coming off of the ocean. When I looked under my arm to see who was there, it was Spinelli, not Al, and I was starting to hurt. Right about the time I was thinking I was finished, Justin yelled for me to take him to the corner. "Sprint!" he said, so I did. That pull cost me dearly, and it was the longest 300 meters I have pulled in many moons, but when we rounded the 120 degree corner and hit the tailwind, we, and only we, were there. Justin jumped into the breakaway, and I swung over to the curb, shifted into the small ring and watched the rest of the split go zooming by, trying in vain to close the gap I had just created. This is one of the most cheekily fun moments in bike racing, and one of the things that is cool about pulling domestique duty for stronger teammates: making hard efforts that you don't need to follow through on! Had I bridged that gap on my own, I would have gotten dropped at the hill 30 seconds later, for sure. But the beauty was, I didn't have to stick around. Job done, team leader in the break, time for some snacks. And to tweet our Spooky horn a little bit, the total elapsed time between us missing the move and depositing our fearless leader in the break was about 3 minutes, with nary a word said. Not bad teamwork for a new squad.

Long story somewhat shorter: the break stayed away, and Spinelli got 7th in a hard sprint against hard sprinters. His efforts to get away were thwarted by the Bikereg boys and the McCormacks, all of whom desired a sprint, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Ted King (I would link Teddy, but there is hacking badness going on at Missing Saddle right now, so I can't) won in front of TJ, and Myerson, apparently after giving himself a leadout, which is a neat trick, so chapeau to him. Al and Tremble stayed up front with the rest of the initial split and finished well, while Mainer, Mukunda and I hung out in the field 2 minutes back taking turns doing intervals off the front, for fun. Mukunda finally snuck away with two laps to go and came within meters of sticking it for the glory. He was caught at the line by Fuji Family riders Shawn McCormack and Tobi Shultze, but his point was made: Spooky came to play.

By the end of the race the sun had come out, and as we cooled down with a nice 30 minute spin in the fresh salt breeze, the vibe was good, the future looks bright, and the team is starting to feel like a team. Proper.

Keep a weather-eye out for a white whale, and some Spookiness this coming Saturday at the Chris Hinds crit in RI, and the final Johnny Cake series race in Coxsackie, NY.

-n

Story 1: Getting Closer | Story 2: The Thing About Luck

2009-04-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

Story 1: Getting Closer

I was caught in the rain twice this week, on my brand new Spooky. Mr. Spooky, he's anodized, though, so he just brushes the dirt off, like no big deal. Yesterday I rode home in a solid inch of water on the roads, it was pretty cool for 5 minutes. I went across the river to Rensselaer County trying to beat the rain, and just for a change of pace. The view out there is pretty cool when you get down a little to the South--the Catskills to the West and the Berkshires to the East. Looking back toward Albany, I saw Bugs Bunny's rain cloud, you know the little one that followed him around? Sad sack city I live in has its cloud, and yesterday it was of the black/purple Mid-Western variety.

Plus today's forecast called for snow showers. So bike racing? Seemed an iffy prospect.

So today, Saturday, was the second race of the Johnny Cake Lane Spring series in Coxsackie, NY. Several things are cool about this, not the least of which is the fact that, once upon a time, the legendary Frank The Welder used to manufacture Spookies in a machine shop about 100 yards off of the race course. Also cool was the fact that several regional strongmen were registered including Justin Lindine, Roger Aspholm, and a contingent of Quebecois including Maxime Vives of the pro Planet Energy team. Even cooler, though in a more literal sense, was the wind, the drizzle, and the threat of snow flurries that, thankfully, never materialized.

The field was smaller this week than last, owing no doubt to the weather and the fact that the New England season opens officially tomorrow at Maaahblehead. But a field of only 40 guys with winds gusting to 30 mph promised a hard race with much time spent fighting to stay out of the gutter. Sure enough, just out of the first turn a small group jumped clear including Andrew Bernstein from BVF, and old school hardman and legend of New York and New England bike racing, Andy Ruiz, now racing for Keltic. Once the field turned on to Johnny Cake lane and started heading South with the strong Westerly tail/cross wind, this split rolled back, and almost immediately Vives and a couple of others jumped, I covered and the move of the day was gone, 2 miles into the race. Ruiz came back across almost immediately, and about 5k later Troy Kimball of Westwood Velo capitalized on his teammate, Aspholm, being heavily marked and bridged across solo, an impressive effort. All in all we were 7 including the aforementioned(s), one Bluberi/Specialized rider, Ron Larose from CCNS, and a Pro Pedals rider whose name I didn't catch.

There isn't much to tell about the break--first a 1 minute gap, then 2, then 3, then 4, and about 5 minutes back to the field by the finish. We rolled a near-perfect echelon for 52 miles and there were no attacks until Vives jumped at 2k out, followed by Larose, then Vives again, we all laughed at each other a little, good-naturedly, came back together for the sprint, and rounded the final turn more or less as a group, with me in 3rd wheel.

Now a word about this sprint: it is a long, long way from the corner to the line. 350 meters, I believe, and once we left the shelter of the trees and got the full force of the wind in our faces, it looked like about a mile. Vives and Larose jumped too early, I waited for them to fade and dove hard for the right hand gutter at 200 meters out, the W was there. Alas, I was overgeared--sat down--spun up--jumped again, 1, 2, 3 riders come back and I'm gonna be 4th and that's it. Larose won, Kimball 2nd, Vives 3rd, a wheel or so in front of me. Headwind sprints, man...

The good news, for me, is that I have been piling on the hours, by my standards in preparation for the Big Boys' Battenkill race, and I had put in a hard 105 mile day with many climbs on Thursday, and a steady 2 hours of light tempo yesterday. No this isn't usually the recipe for great race legs on Saturday, so I was happy to get in the break and just be able to stay there. Contesting the win was icing on the cake and while missing out on the W was disappointing, there are bigger fish to fry, coming up shortly.

Story 2: The Thing About Luck

Sometimes you get to watch a friend have a very bad day. Sometimes my friends look at me, and my can't-find-my-whatever shenanigans, and my messy race bag, and my always lateness, and my cluttered apartment and they look at me like, "boy, get it together." Once in awhile, though, like today, the stars align and I get to the race on time, don't knock anything over, I eat enough, I don't flat, I don't crash, I race ok, and seem generally like a more-or-less functional grown-up.

My friend and teammate Matt Purdy wasn't going to race today. "Not worth it" he said. Too early in the season to waste mental energy racing in bad weather, was his argument. But this morning, when the weather looked better than it might have, and the wind was high enough to have dried out the roads--which looks appealing from the indoors side of a window--he decided to follow through on our preferred plan of riding down to the race from Albany, racing, and riding home. For him that makes for a solid 120+ mile day and some good work. Me, I bailed a bit, claiming the excuse that my car was committed to the race as a wheel vehicle to be driven by my dad. So my plan was to drive down, and do a mellower 30 minute warm-up followed by an hourish long cooldown post-race. I was right.

Matt was rained on. He was bivouacked under a bridge. He flatted a brand spanking new race tire and had to ride hard tempo for 30 miles in order to get to the race on time. Then, because he was half not paying attention, and half trying to be good and follow the rules, meaning not ride in the left-hand gutter of the road, crosswind be damned, like the officials had instructed us, he got gapped off the group early, and time trialled around for 50 miles, picking up stragglers one by one and recruiting them into his merry band of wind riders.

Plus someone knocked over his Spooky. Right before the race. It bumped his front brake. The front brake was rubbing, while he was riding around wondering why the hell he didn't stay home and work on his house today. I'm pretty sure a band of renegade ninjas ambushed him and tried to steal his water bottles, too, but he got away from that one. I hope he forgets this all soon so he'll keep racing.

The thing about Matt, though, is that he'll do 6 hours tomorrow. And I promise you, his 6 hour ride can beat up your 6 hour ride. My boy is built for naked, foodless, ultra glacier marathons, or some such sport. Look for him off the front of a hilly race near you, some time soon.

It's worth remembering when you're having an exceptionally smooth, or an exceptionally maddening day, that there is often little in either case you can take credit for. My dad likes to say "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."

-n

It Must Be Spring: Johnny Cake Series #1 Race Report

2009-03-31T05:19:00.000-07:00

In March of 2005 I went to my first bike race, the first race of the Johnny Cake lane series, then in its 2nd year, and I have toed the line at every one since. It's hard to believe that my life as a bike racer began that recently, and life before then seems sort of a world away at this point. Maybe it's because of this sort of nostalgia, maybe it's just nice to be pinning on a number and racing for the first time since Cyclocross season, but every March I look forward to these races as much as I look forward to any other races on the calendar.

For those of you unfamiliar with the regional scene here in the NE, the Johnny Cake Lane Spring Series is a three race road race series promoted by CBRC (Capital Bike Racing Club). There are earlier races in and around New England and New York, but the JC series has a little something special going on, owing mostly to the fact that it is a nice flat/slightly rolling circuit on quiet farm roads (as opposed to a parking lot criterium) just outside of Coxsackie, NY. Yes, where the prison is. I always imagine the inmates serving long sentences looking forward to our arrival every year for a change of scenery. The prize money is paltry, and the distances--54 miles for the A race, 42 miles for the B race, and new this year 18 miles for the C race--are short by road race standards, though each year for the last race of the series a hill is added that slightly changes the course and adds 1 mile per lap, pushing the A race up to an honest 100k.

Nevertheless, without fail people come out to race at this race, and Saturday was no exception. With the legendary and ageless Roger Aspholm in attendance, as well as the always-fit Aidan Charles & Co., a full contingent of the CCC/Keltic master's squad, somebody was sure to want to put on a show.

We of Spooky/NCC/Kenda fielded a full squad of 12 riders including the legendary Mr. Spooky himself (aka Mickey), Mukunda Feldman, Matt thrice (Brewster, Mainer & Purdy), Al Donahue, Adam Sullivan, J Baer, Eric Tremble, Ward Solar and Colin Murphy. Under some circumstances we would have felt obligated to control things, make a point and generally behave like the dominant alpha-team we will be in May or June. But we live where it’s cold, we have jobs and grad school and kids, and, lucky for us, we remember to keep the “training” in training race. So for the most part we were just looking forward to a good showing, whatever that meant.

True to form, the first couple of laps were fast and actually a bit more challenging than usual if one failed to maintain position in the field owing to the (largest ever?) field of 80 riders. Eventually after a few ill fated breaks were absorbed, including one promising one containing Spooky/NCC/Kenda muscle man Ward Solar, a pretty convincing move containing Aspholm, Spooky's own Matt Purdy (aka Old Matt), a Keltic rider and some others rolled off and gained about 30 seconds--a small gap, but in March, on a fast and windy course, you would be surprised just how hard it is to go across even a small gap. Both Spooky an the Keltic gang gathered on the front and started a fast rotation to bring the break back within bridging distance in order to make it possible, ideally, for some of our guys to jump across to the break. At the crest of the short steep kicker hill on the homestretch of the course, an unknown rider (red & white old school Saturn jersey, dirty white bike, good form on the bike, fast legs) jumped clear of the field and I jumped on his wheel. He must have been pretty experienced because in addition to going really hard, he never once asked me to pull through, knowing that it was my right to sit on since he was bridging to a break containing one of my teammates and another, Al Donahue, was coming across to us.

But it's March, and we all do silly things in the first race of the year, so when Al finally got to us
and told me to start pulling, I rolled through the fast downhill corner before the finish just a little too hard and gapped them off without noticing it. That was dumb, as it left me in no man's land about 15-20 second behind the break and about the same distance in front of the field. I stayed out there, working hard and going nowhere for about 5k, or half a lap, and was absorbed halfway down the headwind blasted back stretch.

Various hijinx ensued at this point, the chase got more or less organized again, the break came back, another one went with Al and another of our guys in it (Mat Brewster, maybe?) and as that came back I snuck up the gutter on the wheel of Hot Tubes rider and 16-year-old phenom, Anders Newbury, and just as we started to counter attack--crunch--there was a crash behind us, we accelerated, some riders jumped across to us, and we were gone. A lap later Aspholm came up and the break of the day was solidified, if uneasily.

The problem with this break is that it was big, being 10 or 11 guys, and consisted of 7 solo riders, Roger and his teammate Todd Cassan, plus Aidan Charles and one of his teammates. Roger and Newbury seemed intent on getting rid of the rest of us and riding in solo, respectively, even with 40 miles still to race. So much fun to race with two physiological mutants in the break instead of just one...but I digress. So the break was disorganized since the rest of us were either outnumbered or outgunned and therefore, rightly, not willing to contribute to the break's overall success. This made the racing really hard as there were more or less constant surges, attacks, and both deliberate and accidental opening of gaps for 3 full laps until eventually, the embarrassing happened and Roger and teammate Todd along with Aidan and teammate unidentified snuck away, leaving Newbury and I bickering slightly about who was going to close the gap. The answer was nobody. Although we kept them under 20 seconds for 2 laps, it was not to be. With a lap and a half to go, Newbury attacked the rest of us and impressively soloed in for 4th place (the CCNS rider having been dropped up front and rolled back to our group) leaving me and the very strong Ethan Atkins to do the bulk of the work to bring us in.

In the end I blew the sprint, which is funny because I think I could win that sprint in my sleep. But perhaps not with a tailwind, and not with cramps. The almost-always prevailing NW winds of the area had turned Southerly for the day and the finish, which tends to be a merciless 300 meter grind was actually a spun-out drag race owing to the wind. Two guys snuck off the front of the group and gapped the rest of us, I cramped, and the guys who had been sitting on for the last 10 miles all sprinted hard and came around. I sat up, a little annoyed, a bit before the line and finished 10th on the day just behind strong master's rider Mark Stotz and my good friend and race promoter, Tom Butler of Keltic. Under normal circumstances I would be pretty annoyed with myself for finishing last out of the group like that, since I tend to be pretty good at small group sprints. But the first race of the year is not normal circumstances, and with no prize money and little glory on the line, I was happy to have gotten in a solid LT effort with many accelerations, lots of muscular endurance work, and a good bit of speed in the old legs. Earlier this week I did a solid AWC workout of 8, 30 second all-out efforts, but other than that I haven't yet ridden at any real intensity other than steady climbing efforts. So the racing form will come, and hopefully the later start to the year and extra base miles will lead to better top-end fitness for a longer period of time than in years past. Broad base to the pyramid, high peak, and all that.

Thanks for reading, and happy Spring. Time to do enough school work in the next two hours to justify taking Mr. Beautiful, my new Spooky, out or his first road ride.

Cheers,

-n

More to Come...

2009-03-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

I hate to let a week pass without a blog post, but it has been busy around here.

This past weekend was my first road race of the year as well as team Spooky / NCC / Kenda team camp. Stories to tell in the near future.

Also upcoming:

- Detailed review of my new, amazingly sexy Spooky Skeletor. Oh yes.
- A race report
- A post from guest blogger and my esteemed better half, Ms. Charmaine Cadeau. She will have something of a column here, of sorts, in the coming weeks and months. She will be shedding some light on the life of the partner of a (mostly) full time bike racer. Yes the early Saturday mornings, and endless hours in the car; the hot afternoons spent sweating on the side of a lonely country road, miles from nowhere in the mysterious and ethereal Brigadoon of a locale known as The Feed Zone; the maddening food habits of cyclists, and the dishwasher full of water bottles; the grease stains in the car, and the occasional glimpses of genuine human effort and potential, all of which are the very stuff of life for those brave and optimistic souls who partner themselves to bike racers. Look forward to it, she's a good writer. I took one of her classes as an undergrad.

For now:

See that glow of magic coming off the gear cluster, there?

And I'm not one to get all het up over handsomely machined objects, but you have to admit this SRAM Powerdome cassette, machined from a solid piece of aluminum, is pretty darn pretty.

Until soon,

-n

The Show

2009-03-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

We (meaning my team, Spooky/NCC/Kenda Elite Cycling) finally got the official invite to the Pro Men's invitational race at the Tour Of The Battenkill, to be held on 4/19. This race has grown, thanks to the efforts of founder and promoter Dieter Drake, from a small but cool regional affair in 2005, to one of the larger and more talked about amateur bike races in the US. This year, in addition to the amateur, Juniors, and Masters category races to be held on Saturday 4/18, there will be an additional pro men's race on Sunday.

The race has grown (in)famous for its extended sections of dirt roads, steep climbs and beautiful scenery winding through the towns of Salem, Cambridge, Greenwich and Eagleville in Washington County, NY. For those of you not from these parts, that's basically the same thing as Southern Vermont, and it's beautiful country.

In addition to being 200+ kilometers this year, (an actual distance of just over 126 miles) the pro men's race will include most of the top domestic professional teams in the US. There will be riders who have ridden in the grand tours of Europe; riders fresh off the Tour Of California, and many, many guys who have won many, many pro-level races--in short, it is quite likely that it will be the hardest and most legitimate bike race I ever participate in. For those of you who follow cycling, some of the teams that will be there include OUCH pb Maxxis (rumor has it Floyd Landis himself will be there), Colavita, Rock Racing, Bissell, Kelly Benefits, BMC, and every other elite amateur team in the Northeast. 200 riders in all, and none of them are chumps.

If you live within driving distance of the race, I strongly recommend coming out to spectate. It is going to be the coolest thing to happen to bike racing in this part of the world since the Tour De Trump in the 1980's. And I remember those days, in fact a stage of that race, some time around 1988 was the first bike race I ever saw up close and personal. It definitely left an impression.

So it's a pretty cool full circle for me, considering that the first Battenkill Roubaix, as it was then called, in '05 was my third bike race ever. I was a category 5 racer then, brand spanking new to the sport, having just quit smoking cigarettes and lost 70 pounds over the course of the previous seven months. I took 2nd place in the race, winning the small group sprint from what was left of the shattered field and if I had had the nerve to follow the guy who soloed in for the win, I quite possibly would have won the race. Woulda coulda shoulda, that's beside the point. But it was that day, still surprised to discover that I could possibly be good at this sport that I started to believe in myself a little bit and think maybe I should keep at it and see what I could do. My attitude today is more or less the same, I just do longer races against faster guys.

Today was my first real rest day in awhile, following 25 hours on the bike this past week, Sunday-Saturday and ~440 miles. I'm not sure how ready I am to take my racing up a level, but I'm getting near to being as ready as I can be.

-n

Try Hard, Often

2009-03-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

I am neither angry, nor lonely, but I am both hungry and tired. My daughter's science project is done, I am finally getting in the week of training I have been close to but just shy of for the last month, my reading is getting back to being near caught up, and I feel the need for a rest week coming on. And how.

I have to remind myself when I worry that my 15, or 17 or 19&1/2 hours of training in a given week isn't enough to win bike races, that the guys I know who are putting in consistent 20, or even 30 hour weeks on the bike this time of year are generally both living in more temperate climes, and not trying to juggle graduate school and parenthood. Ok, I'm only getting a Master's, so it's like tee-ball grad school, and I share custody of my daughter, so that's only four days a week of daddy duty but, still. Riding over 300 miles a week is a hell of a stress on the body for someone who sleeps an average of 7&1/2 hours a night, maybe 9 on weekends.

Generally speaking I try to stay away from jargon heavy, number crunching blathering about my training volume or intensity, as I find it kind of distasteful and largely beside the point. But my blog has taken a decidedly less bike-focused turn in recent weeks, so I figure I can let myself off the leash and spray a little, just for fun.

Why I don't train with power anymore - My Powertap broke, I don't wanna buy another one. Plus, for me, I have been training on the same climbs, more or less, for interval training anyway, for several years now. So I know from previous Powertap usage that if I can maintain 13 mph in the 19 cog on a given 7-8% climb, say, that means I am having a good day and if I do it 5 times, that's a good vo2 workout, provided I am rested enough to see my HR responding well. Or, if I can ride steady LT effort on a 5k climb with my good friend and longtime training partner, Matt Purdy, then I will do better in road races this year, since I tend to get dropped in hilly races where he makes the selection. Maybe I'm cheating, having as I do a sense of what those magical numbers might be. But I don't think so.

I know, I know, everyone loves their numbers. They're so bloody concrete and hard to argue with, so damned masculine. But good decisions win bike races. And the reality for a guy like me is that I still have a hell of a lot of room for improvement left to gain by simply riding more and improving my endurance, eating less/better and sleeping more. When I look around at my life and see before me the ideal of structured athletic purity, well....I'll be bored silly. But I would also, at that point, begin to micro-manage training data in an effort to eke out that last few percent of potential. Realistically, though, I think the best training plan for a guy like me is to a) know my body really well--meaning know my HR zones, know my tendency toward fatigue, how I respond to weight loss, stress, etc; b) train the hell out of my weaknesses, particularly climbing. It isn't rocket science, either--I put out plenty of power to not get dropped in 95% of the races that I do, but I don't feel like a rockstar when I train on climbs, which creates a natural disincentive to train on climbs, because everyone knows training is supposed to provide an ego boost, right? Group rides are the opportunity for you to beat your friends at the thing you're already good at, right? Nope. Oh, and c) Try Hard Often. Really, trying hard is awesome. It will make you a better athlete/student/parent/barista/entrepreneur.

Maybe it's ten years of parenthood talking, but I love training alone, I love ice cream/recovery rides with my girlfriend, and I love rides with one equally matched training partner that are just structured enough to be productive. I seldom do group rides, and these days, if I do, I usually structure it into the middle of a longer ride. I don't often have the mental bandwidth to be competitive more often than on race days, so I try to bottle it, and race hard. This makes me a nice guy to train with--I won't half wheel you, unless we're doing an interval or race simulation, in which case I will try to eat your lunch, steal your teddy bear and kick you in the nuts. But I'll be all huggy afterward.

One of the neatest bits of training wisdom I have ever heard came not from a cycling coach, but from a chess coach, of all things. (Yes, who knew there were such people?) USCF National Master Eric Schiller said in one of his books, that rather than having a "style" most novice chess players have a set of weaknesses that they try to compensate for by avoiding games/positions within games that highlight those weaknesses. This reminds me of my own 170lb inclination to avoid hilly road races and training rides. So many of us have heard the advice, "race your strengths, train your weaknesses" but have failed to consider that as intermediate, or even budding elite bike racers, we really don't necessarily have any strengths yet, beyond an ability to push hard on the pedals...sometimes. Simply put, getting one's ass kicked is of tremendous value. But for me, as a Cat 4 cyclist a few years ago, hey, I was new to this, I had a decent sprint, I could go hard for 200 meters, so, "I'm not a climber" I said. "I'm just too big to go uphill quickly" I rationalized. Bullshit, and I do sprint pretty well, but mostly an internal monologue like that is just an excuse not to try hard. Like not being good at math, or not "getting it" in English class.

So I ramble, I digress. That's why I have a blog, no?

In all seriousness I absolutely respect and value the work and the expertise of cycling coaches and physiologists, and I understand fully that heartrate is a trailing metric, whereas wattage doesn't lie. I would not suggest to anyone that they stop training with power, and I don't have anything against it. But I am a humanist to the core, and I absolutely believe that the emotional and spiritual condition of the human being on the bicycle--assuming, of course, some baseline threshold of "fitness" within a given category or ability range--is the key determinant to performing well, or winning races.

The Humanist's Touchy-Feely Guide to Fast Bike Riding - For many of us who race bikes seriously and close to full time, while juggling the commitments of professional, family and academic life, training time can be a source of enormous stress. Time, weather, fatigue, relationship commitments, etc can all conspire to get us on our bikes and out the door is a pretty preoccupied, harried and minorly (or majorly) stressed condition. In such a condition, I may very well not produce the sort of effort I am capable of producing under not even optimal but at least better, more well rested, less harried circumstances, i.e. a sunny Saturday in June at The Big Bike Race. BUT AT LEAST I CAN GO TO BIKE PRACTICE! Really, this is key. Showing up is more than half the battle, and if I get dressed, I will train; if I am already riding, I might as well ride to the hill; if I get to the hill, I will climb it; having climbed it once, I will likely convince myself to climb it again; thrice is barely more than twice, and having done three repeats, 5 is within sight and I'll feel guilty if I don't, so, before I know it I've done my intervals. And, hey, I was good and went to bed at 10 last night, my weight is down, my HR is responding well to the hard efforts and rising quickly, I feel good about myself for going to bike practice, like, I feel confident! Any coach will tell you that confidence and trust in your training helps produce results. And I think it is also likely objectively the case that most of us never come anywhere close to getting everything out of our bodies that is there to be gotten--it just hurts too much, and we interpret the pain as failure, we're hard-wired that way.

Sure we are all different animals, and different things make us all tick. But there is so much literature out there on sports psychology, so much wisdom about positive visualization, and I know it may sound ridiculous, but I think sometimes having hard, irrefutable data that I am not going as fast as I would like to, or as fast as I did last July, can be really destructive to athlete performance. This athlete's performance, anyway. Plus, like I said, I'm to cheap to replace my Powertap.

Over a certain threshold of basic fitness, if I want to make it to the winning breakaway of a hard road race, I have to want to hurt, and I have to believe in that hurt. We're pretty simple animals, after all, different though we may be.

The numbers that I am proud of, though, are the ones that tell me I have ridden 30% more hours so far this year than at the same time last year. That's an increase of approximately 30 additional hours of training over a 9 week period. I must be trying hard, often. Works for me.

Plus I read a lot of books and I know how to make a model comet.

Peace,

-n

Cool

2009-03-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

That there is a comet. In my kitchen. No photo enhancement, no special effects, just a comet, in my kitchen.

OK, so it's a model comet, and my daughter's hand has been photoshop'd out of the picture, but the tail is real, and it looks like something from Alien, right?

I am not a particularly organized human being, and I often feel like kind of a shitty parent when I have to help my kid get it together for school science fair projects and the like. Sometimes (ok, a lot) we're late to school in the mornings; I forget to go through her backpack and check homework and stuff and, yeah, I'm that guy. But this year at least she has a genuine far out cool-as-shit model comet to show off. In fact she's a bit of a champ at making them now. Neat.

Plus it's fun having dry ice kicking around the house to play with. Makes for dramatic dinner table conversation.

-n

Spooky Time: A little something for the bike geeks among you

2009-03-10T04:33:00.000-07:00

Some words and images foreshadowing the upcoming season of road racing with the
Spooky / NCC / Kenda Elite Cycling Team. These from my new teammate, Justin Spinelli.
And all of this just the other side of the Berkshires...

-n

Very Full Days

2009-03-06T06:15:00.000-08:00

Charmaine and I like to joke that we have uncommonly full days. We do.

Yesterday morning I rode a hilly 70 miles in 4 hours and 6 minutes. Later in the evening I participated in three hours of 5th grade homework with my darling, maddening, and seriously behind-in-her-schoolwork daughter. Care to guess which was more difficult?

This is a blog post of the less structured variety, more just checking in since I realize it has been almost two weeks since my last post. So what have I been up to in the meantime?

Well my post entitled "Space" earned itself a link on the widely read and highly respected blog of poet Ron Silliman, so that was nice. Other than that it has been the usual books, bikes and parenthood.

My form is building on the bike, and I am climbing much more strongly than I ever have in early Spring, so that's a plus. I am looking forward to the start of racing season--which for me will be on March 28th at the low key but high quality Johnny Cake Lane spring series--but I am more optimistic, less anxious; more confident, less stressed about the start of racing season then I ever have been before. Maybe it's the fact that this will be my 5th season of racing bikes and I'm just a little more accustomed to the rhythm of the seasons, good luck and bad, the ebb and flow of my form, etc. Or maybe it's the fact that I know I have been working hard on the bike and I'm quietly confident. Whatever the cause, I am feeling excited and relaxed about racing bikes this year, and I feel like my attitude can only lead to good results. So there's my positive outlook for this morning.

Today's immediate excitement is that Char is doing a poetry reading tonight here in Albany and I am thrilled to play the part of sound system handling, book selling, supportive boyfriend. Apart from the fact that she's my partner and I am supposed to say nice things abut her, I really admire Charmaine's craft as a writer. Before we were a couple I remember picking up her book in a bookstore once and reading some of the poems and thinking to myself how I wished I knew that girl better. And now I do, lucky me. Objectively, though, I find her work ethic as a scholar and poet pretty damned inspiring (it certainly gives me a nudge away from my natural tendency toward slackness) and I am looking forward to hearing her send her little poem babies out into the ether tonight.

And I seem not to be behind in my reading, as per meetings with my two respectively distinguished adviser's last week. So it looks like I'll be scheduling my comprehensive exam for early May or so, and then I'll have a Master's degree. Me. Cool.

Plus today I get a new battery in my Honda, Ellie. She'll be so zippy and happy I can hardy wait to drive her home.

Cheers,

-n

She's a beauty, eh?

2009-02-22T20:50:00.000-08:00

My Canadian girlfriend.

Remember the Adam Sandler skit from SNL some time in the mid '90's--the one about the game show for High School liars? The kid has an alleged Canadian girlfriend, parties with Eddie Van Halen, etc, all of course on vacation and out of verifiable range of his peers.

I have a Canadian girlfriend. No, really, she's awesome. She writes books, is finishing her PhD, she's beautiful and brilliant, hell she even rides a bike. I know, sounds like I made her up, right?
Well I didn't, she's real, and I'm lucky.

But the Canadians, they struggle with irony, you see. They're a sincere bunch, and I say that to their credit. I am constantly teasing Charmaine about her inability to lie convincingly, so clearly gleeful and giggly does she become any time she begins to successfully, as the Brits say, take the piss. I have, however, been had.

This past week we got into a conversation about what constitutes good music to work out to, specifically for riding bikes on indoor trainers. I am a life long musician, I play guitar and mandolin, I compose, I sing, I have spent a long time studying music in various forms. As a kid I was in punk rock and hardcore bands, I devoted myself to jazz for a period of years before totally burning myself out; I play Old Time Appalachian music--diverse is a fair word to use to describe my record collection. I really don't think there is much to be gained by trying to correct a person's aesthetic choices, really. As Duke Ellington said "if it sounds good, it is good". I do think, though, that there are some fairly empirical do's and dont's when it comes to workout music, mainly having to do with tempo, energy level, aggression, groove factor and general ability to make you want to move, try, sweat and be distracted from the business of trying real hard on a bike that don't move.

The girl, she begin to give me the eye, yes? She begin to...how do you say? Take the piss. No hardcore, she says; no post-hardcore Emo, no Samiam, no nothin'. No metal, no cruncha-cruncha, no rockin' out with angst. Rod Stewart, we both agreed, is awesome (I will fight for Rod, don't talk shit.) But I maintain that there is good, and then there is good and suitably aggro for working out to. She remained unconvinced. The tension mounted. It was clear that this was not, for either of us, a free-to-be-you-and-me moment, but a moment of stark choices: a potentially relationship-defining moment.

Then she hit me -

Lionel Ritchie: Dancing On The Ceiling.

It took me a week to find out whether she was messing with me or not. She was. Chapeau. Canada - 1 : USA - 0

-n

Space

2009-02-19T07:38:00.000-08:00

Not up there, but around you, me.

"I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America"
--Charles Olson Call Me Ishmael

No surprise I find myself thinking about space given my studies of Charles Olson's poetry and essays of late. Better still, I discovered a bit of a missing link for myself between early 20th century pedagogue and guru of progressive education, John Dewey, and Olson's geographic language art borne of the individual's movement through space.

Says Dewey "The unity of all the sciences is found in geography. The significance of geography is that it presents the earth as the enduring home of the occupations of man. The world without its relationship to human activity is less than a world." - from "The School and the Society".

Also in my mind is Michele de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life particularly the essay "Walking in the city". What I think of, more so than the act of an individual moving through urban space becoming textual--the individual inscribed up on the landscape and the landscape shaping the individual--is the way I have come to relate to space through life on a bicycle. Though I suppose it's the same thing.

In many ways I feel like I didn't really know the area in which I live until I started riding bikes seriously. Things are both much nearer and much farther than I had imagined them to be, more accessible and less, too. The immediacy of the Self to art, to politics, to society at large, as experience by the pedestrian is what de Certeau is getting at. From the perspective of the cyclist, though, it is different yet again in that the physiological transformation that equates to greater fitness allows spatial relationships between geographic points to become diminished. So my world is larger as a competitive cyclist in that I can ride my bike from Albany, NY to visit my brother in Northampton, MA, for instance--a ride of roughly 85 miles--and at the same time it is smaller. Smaller in the sense that an average day's training ride has the potential to bridge a social and emotional distance, and larger because what this amounts to is a choice. And choice amounts to social mobility.

What I feel I am moving closer to, as I move closer towards completing my current degree, and as I commit myself to an ever-greater training load on the bike, is some sense of cogency of self. How do I find myself, musically, athletically, intellectually, mapped throughout the space I inhabit? And how can I move toward living some harmonious balance of these elements of self as a practice?

I have been thinking a lot about the necessity of public education as a means toward social mobility and fluidity of social roles, thanks to Dewey. And thinking, of course of space from Olson.

I sit and wonder what I want to be when I grow up, when it will make itself apparent to me, and there is some self-satisfaction in realizing a personal and developmental, as well as a sort of proto-professional connection between my bike racing and my love of/belief in education via literature.

An American

is a complex of occasions,

themselves a geometry

of a spatial nature.

I have this sense,

that I am one

with my skin

Plus this-plus this:

that forever the geography

which leans in

on me I compell

backwards I compell Gloucester

to yield, to

change

Polis

is this

--Charles Olson, from Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [Withheld]
(forgive the formatting, Blogger doesn't like the tab key)

For the cyclocross folk among you, the significance of Gloucester will not be lost. Olson's life's work was grounded in the geography of Gloucester, this poem from the perspective of Stage Fort park, where we race each October.

And it's a rest week. After 20 hours and 500+k on the road last week my body needs a little bit of rest. So this week I am mostly at home with my daughter who is on school vacation. The weather is shiite, I ride the trainer. I think the trainer is something of an antithesis to all of this mapping of self through space. It's like an intellectual and artistic vacuum.

So.

-n

Man in Motion

2009-02-08T20:13:00.000-08:00

Me, that is.

In motion on my bike. 17 hours this week, all but 90 minutes of it out on the road, as opposed to the trainer, capped off with a rollickingly windy 4 hours today around Southeast Ontario while I'm up here at C's folks. This past Friday afternoon was the toughest one yet--it was 18 degrees when I left the house and had only warmed up to about 21 when I got back 4&1/2 hours and 120k later. I didn't used to have the sack for that.

It's not like 17 hours on the bike is all that much, really, but for me, for the first week of February, it's a lot. And it feels like more than that because it has been accompanied by generally good sleep habits, better food habits, and pretty damn good study habits, as well. Killing it is a strong term, and I'm not sure if I'm killing it, but I'm certainly wrestling it...It.

Every Spring I intend to ride monstrously big weeks of base miles, and every year I fall short, get excited by the Spring training races, start doing intervals and racing in early or mid March on a barely adequate base after a not long enough layoff following cyclocross season, and every year I get fast, race well for a bit, and then get tired in May or June. The rest of the season is typically spent watching my resting heat rate rise, feeling fatigued and wishing for a do-over. Somewhere in there I usually race God Forsaken Fitchburg and that tends to hurt more than it helps. Last year I really overcooked it and the fact that I was able to salvage any kind of 'cross season at all is likely thanks to the two weeks I took off from any training at all in early September. Unfortunately, that should have been when I was putting the finishing touches on my Fall form, and I found myself playing catch up all season once again.

This year I have really committed to doing things differently and for now that looks like 4&1/2 hour rides even if it's only 21 degrees outside. Wahoo. I'm also going to delay the start of my racing until the very end of March or possibly early April, which seems late but is having the effect of making me very relaxed at the moment.

See, the start of every racing season is akin to flipping an hourglass, for me. And every Friday night of changing tires and cleaning bikes, laundering kits and making PB&J sandwiches; every Saturday of waking up early, weekends of no schoolwork attended to, weeks without talking to non-racing friends...it all ads up. And as much as I love the crazy whirlwind nomadism of my racing life, I need to sit still (see earlier post on focusing) and fill my tanks for a couple of months. So right now, I feel like I am in the best possible place: I am really motivated and really excited about racing, I have only been training for 3 weeks, and I have a solid 4 or 5 more weeks of piling on the base miles before I need to feel obligated to time a single interval. And if (when, dammit) I follow through? If I stack up 3, 20 to 25 hour weeks the last three weeks in March? I could...well who knows what I can do. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But I feel like I owe it to myself to find out, and that's the point. This year I plan to.

It's nice to feel like I finally know my body, too. I started this adventure as a heavy, recent ex-smoker simply looking to fashion myself into a body I could live comfortably in. And today I have been noticing how my metabolism is changing once again, making its annual transformation toward more efficient fat-burning, leaning out. And all of this breeds confidence so, no power data this year, no complicated software, just me and a heart rate monitor and a degree of confidence and focus I haven't had before.

I can't wait to see what happens.

Zoom-zoom, see y'all at the races. Kenda/Spooky/NCC is gonna be on it!!

-n

Facebook in Focus: Some Thoughts on Learning how to Learn.

2009-02-06T06:57:00.001-08:00

This will be long, and it is more musing than argument, more reflection than rhetorical performance. If that sort of thing is irksome for you, or if you like whizz-bang conclusions and "points" and stuff, well, this may not be the post (or the blog) for you.

I have been thinking a lot this week on the schism between the rhetorically celebrated, as opposed to the actually demonstrated values of American life. In particular I've been thinking about the role of education in society and the extent to which it is devalued and viewed as only a means to an end, that end being the accumulation of more dollars. Yes, of course more dollars are important, and I realize that, from some perspectives, critiquing the pursuit of wealth as an end unto itself might seem a hopelessly privileged stance. But it seems pretty clear that the accumulation of wealth hasn't given America its dream back, right? What I hope for from public education is that it can do something in the way of improving the right now--the immediate circumstances--of enough people that lasting change, critical-of-the-status-quo change, is possible. Obama seems like a good start.

It's a little bit hard to justify--in some respects, anyway--wanting to set out into the world as an English teacher. The idea of divining meaning from books and teaching writing in an increasingly digital and impersonalized world of truncated communications seems kind of quaint sometimes. And I occasionally get all insecure and think that people like my friend Marco and his f&!#$%g independent study in linear algebra (Sheesh...) are the really smart ones...because they are, but that ain't the point.

The thing that has begun to be most central to my thoughts these days regarding the importance of teaching, in the Humanities in particular, is the simple and difficult process of learning to focus. And in a sometimes indirect, sometimes not sort of way, I think that blogging, Facebook and digital socializing in general contribute to this, even as we practice these modes of communication in a distracting medium that is constantly reminding us that there is something else we could be doing, something else to watch.* Despite the fact that the default mode of communication through instantly available means--chat, Facebook, text-messaging, etc--is abbreviated, non-unique and in many ways lacks the personality of person-to-person speech, there are happenings like the recent "25 things" chain letter on Facebook that really offer an opportunity for composing one's self, literally, in an extended, written format. The opportunity to deliberate on what you write, and yet to experience the relatively instant gratification of friends' comments and such is great, and I think it is one of the things hinting at online social utilities actually beginning to live up to their name. The sense of community on Facebook has been a little more intimate this past week.

Obviously this is a choice, and OMG the reality of, like, wait brb.....ok, umm what was I saying? Oh yea, got 2 run, wcb l8r. Sure, we can do that if we want to. Or we can read one another, our profiles, pictures, notes, preferences and status updates, like we would any other text, and be changed in the process. Changed not only personally but as a member of a social group, learning collectively and from each other that there is room in our busy days to reflect, to emote, to celebrate, to compose.

The reason I think this is important, and the reason I think it belongs in a conversation about education is that the opportunities for extended reading and writing--long form written interactions--are becoming fewer and fewer in many areas of modern life. There is an "efficiency" expected of work-related communication and even social messaging that is the death of creative speech acts. And, back to focus, I really believe that the opportunity for complex, frustrating, time-consuming thought presented by textual learning is a singularly important aspect of learning to focus and to analyze. The moment of aporia, of not getting it; the experience of experiencing yourself, with a book, being confused*, is the foundation of research skill, and more complex thought. It is the initial hurdle of understanding one's self as a learner. Removing the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating parts of the process of textual learning from that process is like removing the sore muscles from weight lifting. I think there is a real danger in becoming so accustomed to understanding what we read and having our own ready answers so quickly that true understanding of complex subject matter, which takes time, is endangered.

Learning is slow, it takes time. And I think that to a certain extent the deeply ingrained strain of American anti-intellectualism points to a seemingly irreconcilable tension between the capitalist drive for efficiency and the need for the individuals learning how to function as members of that system to sit still long enough to understand their roles in society and the broader implications thereof.

I struggle all the time, in a cage match with my inner Calvinist sort of way, with the notion of thought-labor. I get restless and develop niggling, guilty inner narratives about what I ought to be doing instead of reading and writing for work as a grad student. I never felt the need to justify my labor to myself as a fry cook, or dishwasher, or day-laborer or counselor, because I was preoccupied with the business of task performance. And when engaged in the business of task performance, it is really easy to be duped into thinking you're actually up to something.

One of my favorite teacher quotations comes from Mary Rose O'Reilly in her book The Peaceable Classroom where she describes her pedagogical philosophy as having derived from the moment she asked herself the question: is it possible to teach English so that people will stop killing each other? Any attempt, sincere or theoretical to answer the question rhetorically is beside the point. The question makes meaning for each new class, each new assignment, each new act of service. I haven't found my mission statement yet, but I want to believe, in fact may be coming to believe, that teaching focus--teaching the ability to sit still with new, uncomfortable, hard-to-reconcile-with-what-you-already-know sorts of information--may in fact be one of the more direct means toward bringing a pedagogy of personal and communal reflectivity-toward-change into the world.

Thanks for reading,

-n

* Statements marked with an asterix are conceptually attributable to Richard E. Miller. Many of my thoughts on the subject of focus as an educational value, and on what Miller calls the New Humanities stem from presentations I have heard Miller give or participate in. Such is the inspirational character of conferences, when they're flowing well, that one idea gets hard to distinguish from the next. So I have attempted to credit Miller for the bits of my thoughts on these various subjects that seem more or less directly attributable.

What We're Paying For

2009-01-28T18:27:00.000-08:00

This from The Competititve Cyclist, brought to my attention by the one and only Richard Sachs, and on the eve of my license renewal, no less.

http://www.competitivecyclist.com/za/CCY?PAGE=WHATS_NEW

So let's all take a minute when we're paying our annual dues to fire off an email to the powers that be at USAC and cast an unsolicited vote for cyclocross support. It can't hurt.

-n

And yes, I do intend to follow through on all of those posts I threatened to write last week. I'm just getting warmed up.

Grinding into gear

2009-01-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

I can't ride the trainer today. Nope, can't. Usually it takes awhile for my trainer hatred to manifest itself, but with the cold and all, I seem to have fallen right into it. So far my first week back in "training" has looked like this:

1/15/08 - 25 min run
1/16/08 - 15 min treadmill run, good ab workout, good upper body, 2 sets squats, 1 set leg press, etc. 15 minute sweat in the sauna.
1/17/08 - 22 minutes on the computrainer, solid tempo, followed by light sprinting through freezing water in socks. Solid (for me) bouldering session--actually completed 4 boulder problems at the super cool El Dojo in Northampton in varying numbers of tries over the course of an hour and a half.
1/18/08 - 90 minutes of cx skiing, light effort. Went up to the lighted trails in Glens Falls' Crandall park and it was beautiful! Between my (abysmal) technique, a blister and the fact that the trails aren't groomed for skate skiing, I didn't exactly max out the HR, but I burned some calories and had a great night with my lady.
1/19/08 - 60 minutes riding rollers, endurance/tempo pace.

If I were just a human trying to exercise for fun and better living, I would be doing pretty well, but instead I'm a bike racer and, thusly, have an ingrained self loathing and tendency to believe whatever I am doing isn't good enough. I was going to ride today, but a couple of hours in the books, combined with an early afternoon blood sugar drop conspired to rob me of all motivation.

Tomorrow it's the trainer or bust, and Thursday and Friday it's 4 hours outside, hell or be damned. That ought to remind my body what it's supposed to be doing after a month of slackin'.
That and handfuls of vitamin D, I may even be reduced to tanning again. Oh the northeast Winter...

-n

Apres Moi, Le Deluge

2009-01-17T19:03:00.000-08:00

So I'm back from vacation, re-convinced that sailing is magical, happy of family and girlfriend, and ready to start training again.

Today I went to Joe's Garage for a computrainer session and the water main broke, dousing us all with freezing cold H2o and causing a mad scramble to get all of the equipment out of the way. Amazingly little harm was done, all's well that ends well, and Joe expects to have the computrainers set up and going again in a couple of days. But, as a zany Russian dude once said about flooding his Mom's antique filled, Victorian mansion in a posh Boston neighborhood: dude, it was like fucking submarine movie.

I have three or four blogworthy things on my mind this week, expect to see entries and pictures soon:

1) The British Virgin Islands in words and pictures. Arrr it be a prime season for spinnin' yarns of swashbuckling on the high seas an' foul weather and shipwrecks and all.

2) Bike stuff. Resting, riding, racing, and getting geared up for '09.

3) Blogging, community, and the new technological/humanistic epistemology of the oonterweb.

4) Obama, political change, social transformation, and the tendency (a hot topic in English and Cultural Studies a the moment) for base skepticism to be trotted out as an intellectual virtue or signifier of meaningful and complex thought. It is easier to reject face value, outright, as a matter of course than to engage subject matter intimately and with allowance for enough complexity and ambiguity to truly understand it. So we, the American people say: can't fool me, I wasn't born yesterday and raised in an oven--I know smart, smart means watchful, watchful means I ain't buying your bill of goods. Hence the death of credulity, which seems to have begotten, in turn, the death of any belief that things are worth knowing about. Hmm.

For nighty-night, I'll sign off with sunset off of Anegada. Right after I snapped this picture, the sailboat moored next to us set off a canon (or sunset gun.) Arr, but I'll be gettin' to that later by way of the piracy and yarns of the high seas and all. Until then, stay warm and keep a weather eye out for a seafarin' man with one leg, and for a white whale.

-n

Dinosaurs

2009-01-03T17:27:00.000-08:00

This is just a lot of fun. Leigh Kotsilidis is a poet and musician from Montreal, and a friend of Charmaine's. She has way with the stop animation films. Enjoy.

Life Off The Bike: A return to books, late nights, and....relaxation? Maybe?

2009-01-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

I haven't exercised in three solid weeks. I'm not even all that fat, really, just a couple of pounds heavier than I was all 'cross season. Hopefully, as I start some running and gym work this week, I'll start leaning out and feeling ready for bike riding again.

So far the off-season has been fun, but I feel almost more tired than when I'm racing. I tend to be a bit of a night-owl when left to my own devices and between holiday preparation, near constant travel, and a renewed enthusiasm for my academic life, I am on a terrible sleep schedule. I slept until 11:00am today...for the third day in a row! I haven't done that since I was a teenager.

I have a cold, and that hasn't been helping. The debacle with US Airways resulted in a near all-nighter, which resulted in a sore throat. It is nice not to have to worry about being rested to train, it's kind of relaxing. But it isn't actually recovery time, so I am going to be a good kid and take another week off of coffee and start getting to bed at a reasonable hour. This is/will be my longest stretch off the bike ever. I think it will lead to good things: increased motivation, better recovery from training, and perhaps a later onset of fitness for road season.

On Monday we--brother Pete, father George, daughter Silas, partner Charmaine, and I--are off to the British Virgin Islands for a week of bare boat charter sailing. My dad is a lifelong on-and-off sailor and we did this trip last year. It's an interesting experience to be at once in the middle of what feels like nowhere, and at the same time having a very stable, relatively safe, and entirely demographically marketed and highly socio-economically privileged experience. Nevertheless, the Ocean, she is fickle, and the objective dangers are real. Cruising, or pleasure sailing, is one of those rare experiences in modern life where through a voluntary and essentially contrived activity, you get to have an immediate relationship to your basic needs and experience actual dangers. In that respect, I suppose it isn't unlike bike racing or running or mountaineering--these are all things we get up to in order to experience a grounding of some sort, a relationship to the moment we are in that is unmediated by a graphical user interface or other technology.

Island life is such a mind warp, too, particularly for those of us who spend our time engaged in the practice critical literacy and cultural studies. On the one hand it's idyllic, and incredibly relaxing. On the other hand, it's almost an embarrassingly over-privileged sort of circumstance to find one's self in. Never will the reality of several hundred years of Euro-American colonial rule be so apparent to you as when stepping off a boat or plane on these magical little Caribbean islands and noticing, immediately, that all of the tourists are white, and all of the service personnel are brown.

And so what? Well, so awareness is all. Life is good when it is, and it's to be grateful for.
I turn to Jamaica Kincaid and she tells me,

Of course the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings. (A Small Place,80)

But any good neo-Marxist would tell you that the neo-liberal juggernaut of global, imperialist capitalism makes somewhat quaint any stable notions of the terms "Master" and "Slave". Yes, slavery is gone in its formal sense, and direct colonial rule is, for the most part, no more. But what once was of these resourceful, unique nations of indigenous people is, in large part, no more either. And the opportunities of contemporary, techno-centric capitalism have not yet arrived. What there is, then, is a service economy.

I don't feel bad about participating in my privileged role as a consumer in a service economy, but I do think it's worth thinking about, and considering how the circumstance I will find myself in has come to be. And, to borrow a pedagogical panacea from my favorite scholar, Richard E. Miller, I think it is also worth considering how it, or I, could be different--to imagine a different set of assumptions, which could result in a different set of relations of production, and therefore, in a different sort of economy.

Ahh, thinking out loud in true blogosphere fashion. I read an article this morning by my friend and neighbor (also snazzy, young Rhet-Comp scholar) Janice Wendi Fernheimer, that says a lot of neat things about the role of blogs in public discourse and classroom life. In that spirit, I offer these thoughts and hope people will feel free to contribute.

I leave you with the aforementioned Richard E. Miller's inspiring thoughts on the New Humanities.

-n

US Airways = Bad service, no fun. Boycott US Airways

2008-12-30T21:16:00.000-08:00

It turns out that according to both USA Today and Consumer Reports, US Airways is the best at sucking. They are the #1 airline for consumer complaints in the US.

I am stranded in Charlotte, NC because they got our flight in late, and then refused to let us board our connecting flight, even though the plane was still there, right at the end of the jet way. This is after they lost our bags on the way to San Francisco, to say nothing of the cynical price gouging--it now costs $15 to check a bag, all meals and drinks including coffee and tea are for sale, not complimentary. It's really frustrating. Funny thing, too, because oil has settled down to around 40 bucks a barrel, all of the flights seem to be full, and the tickets aren't cheap. So money is being made somewhere, right? It seems the airlines discovered they could get away with charging for extras and gouging the hell out of the customer and now it doesn't matter what their overhead is, they can keep charging.

Mash 'em, smash 'em, put 'em out of business.

The customer service personnel were completely unhelpful, barely even rhetorically apologetic, and basically only offered pat, scripted answers and no help at all.

Down with US Airways. Sell your stock, use another carrier, tell your friends.

-n

2008 Year In Review, and Sponsor Thanks

2008-12-28T23:09:00.000-08:00

Part I: The Scene and The Racing

Whenever I find myself reading a vocation or avocation specific sort of blog, like this one, a key determinant of my interest is always the ability of the author to situate her personal experience and perspective in a broader context. The interdependent and co-constructive relationship between individual and community is the site at which the specific experience of the I can speak to, and shape, the collective experience of the We, and vice versa. I say this to introduce my reflections on my own 2008 'cross racing season and the shape of things in the 'cross community at large, from my perspective, in hopes that the account may be received as something other than self-reflexive navel gazing. In a blog...no, really.

So to begin with, I would like to extend a sincere nod of appreciation and respect to Eric Schillinger and Pete Avitable of NYcross.com for growing the NYcross series from a tiny, 3-race local series in 2005 to a popular, quality 6-race series this year, with excellent turnout, truly quality courses, and good prize money. The Uncle Sam GP of 'Cross, held in Troy, NY's Prospect park, for the 4th year running this past October 4th, drew the strongest elite men's field in NYcross history, and the largest turnout yet. The NYcross races, including the generally applauded Bennington 'cross race and the new and truly DIY, grassroots first time effort of the series opening Kirkland CX, have begun to consistently draw not only down-staters, but New Englanders as well. This is thanks to the consistently solid turnout, great race venues, creative and quality course design, stellar volunteer ethic and general organizational mojo of the NYcross crew (ably though quietly backed by the CBRC club's core of enthusiastic and die-hard volunteers). The 'cross scene in the Albany area is a beautiful thing and seems only to get better as it grows.

And of course, on the bigger stage, Adam Myerson, Alan Atwood, the Verge crew, Richard Fries et al get huge props for continuing to make national and international caliber racing easily accessible all season long due to the Verge NECCS.

As for me, my season went more or less as I had hoped, with perhaps fewer standout rides than I would have liked, but enough solid performances and spikes here and there to keep me motivated and believing I can set myself up for a possible breakout season next year.

I learned this year, with the able counsel and on and off the bike coaching of my Bikereg.com /Joe's Garage teammates, Matt White and Al Donahue, that the 'cross season is a lot like a single 'cross race: it's important to get a good start, making up ground is hard or sometimes impossible, a single bobble can cost you and more than one may cost you the race. If you get burned out in the middle of the road season, you can usually afford to take a week off, use a race or two as group rides to get your speed back and then get back to hard training, often experiencing a boost in both motivation and performance as a result. In the whirlwind 3 months that is the U.S. cyclocross season, however, there isn't a lot of room for recalibration.

Following a pretty rigorous road season with Targetraining that ended with the Green Mountain Stage Race, I took a solid two week break from training and racing--in fact from riding at all--in order to recharge my batteries, recover a bit, get acclimated to my new semester, and hopefully set myself up for November success by not trying to sustain road fitness for too long and then fizzling, as is so easy to do. My thinking at the time was that , while it would be humbling to be struggling in September while a lot of guys were still super fit from the road or Mtn Bike season, I would be feeling reasonably fresh in November and hopefully all the way through Nationals.

My plan worked, more or less, but it was sort of like getting a bad start in a 'cross race and feeling progressively better as the laps tick by, but running out of real estate before catching the lead group. I now fully appreciate the recipe of a late Summer break, followed by lots of training and racing in August leading to a high level of fitness, and good recovery time. That allows for quick recovery from racing and makes hard midweek training in September possible. That, in turn, equals early season UCI points, which amount to good start position, which amount to more results, etc. Instead what I did was struggle to build form, rest between races because I was only recovering well enough to go hard on the weekends, and finally I ran totally out of gas Northampton weekend and came completely unglued, which resulted in a soul-sucking DNF on Saturday at Noho and an ignominious 18th on Sunday. For perspective, though, had I finished 18th in that race in '07 I would have been ecstatic so, if my standards are getting higher, I must be improving.

I am pretty pleased with the fact that through a combination of adrenal rest (no coffee for 3 weeks. Those of you who know me appreciate the gravity of this. ), solid intervals and endurance rides, good sleep and general keeping-of-the-faith, I rebuilt some form and scored my first UCI point ever at Southampton on 11/22, just three weeks after my meltdown. It was hard keeping perspective through the Toronto races, which were excellent, though hard, but it paid off and I felt like I got back to my better self for the last few weekends of the season with good rides in Sterling--where I managed a couple of more UCI points--and in Rhode Island the weekend before Nationals. Not to mention the fact that, due to consistency and the fact that Justin Lindine didn't do enough of the races to qualify for the overall win, I managed to win the NYcross series overall, which was pretty cool, as well.

The most important thing I began to learn this season, though, by far, was how to really race a full hour. It is pretty easy, especially when you race the same guys every weekend to get into a rhythm of racing hard on the first two laps, and hard on the last lap, but just riding tempo to maintian position throughout the middle of the race. I started to realize, again with the supportive guidance of my teammates, that scoring UCI points isn't rocket science, it's a matter of showing up fit enough to go the full hour, and then making sure you get into the right group with other guys who are actually racing, as well. I only felt it on a handful of days this season but on those days--Saturday at Southampton, Sterling, The Uncle Sam race in Troy--when I was sprinting out of every corner, churning the big boy gears on the flats, and big ringing all the hills, I began to feel like I can learn to be a pretty good bike racer. I moved up a group or two this season, in terms of my peer group in races, and it was motivating, if humbling at times to get used to racing with a more experienced breed of racer. If nothing else it did wonders for my technical skill, and I feel like my bike driving improved a ton this year, which was nice to see. Interestingly, I spent almost no time practicing dismounts and carries this year, I was sloppier than I have been in the past over hurdles, and it didn't seem to matter. Go figure.

So a quality season with a lot of growth, and a lot of room for more growth has me motivated to train better, ride smarter and race faster next Fall, and see what I can do. The nice thing about making training mistakes and sloppy lifestyle and diet choices is that it makes getting faster a lot easier!!! Just cut out the dumb shit and fatty snacks, right? Right.

Part II: The Team and The Sponsors. Thank You!!

And of course all of this would not be possible if not for my incredibly supportive sponsors. Sure it's nice to say that, but really, I feel like during the 'cross season I have the privilege of flying colors that I am proud of and that feel like home. Joe Mai of Joe's Garage in Haydenville, MA (just North of Northampton--the best little bike shop in New England) has been friend for several years now, ever since I started riding bikes seriously, in fact. Over the last few seasons I have had pleasure of watching his shop grow from a little hole-in-the-wall operation to a full-on, packed to the gills, full-service, boutique shop with an enormously dedicated following. Parlee, Pinarello, Redline, IF, Reynolds and Mavic are the core house brands, and Joe has a close personal relationship with Bob Parlee and a neat hand on the fit cycle. So if a custom bike is in the offing for you, you really can't do better than a Joe-tailored Parlee. And for bang-for-buck, off the rack road or 'cross bikes, dollar for dollar, I really do think that Pinarello and Redline have just about everyone else beat. Yes, Joe has been taking good care of me on his 'cross team since I was a B racer, but I was making all of my major purchases at his shop before that, and would continue to if he never sponsired the team again. Shop there, you'll be glad you did. And as for our other title sponsor, Bikereg.com, if you've ever used any other online event registration service, you already know why Bikereg is the best. Use it.

This year, on top of Joe's usual great support we also had the moral, financial, and guy-in-the-pit support of the aforementioned Steve Roszko of Bikereg. And in addition to Al Donahue and myself we legitimized the elite squad with the addition of the one and only Sleep Machine and king of the hole shot, Matt White. We had ourselves a Team! With industry support from Reynolds, Louis Garneau, Time and Sram, we were ridiculously well taken care of. A sincere thanks to all of these companies and people. It is humbling to have your support.

For anyone interested in some good deals, our team bikes (Redline Conquest Team, size 54-58cm, Sram equipped) and team wheels (Reynolds Stratus DV 46's) are for sale. Give Joe a call or shoot him and email in interested.

Corporate thank yous aside, being on a well meshed team is a great experience, and one I am looking forward to having more of on the road in '09 on the Spooky/NCC presented by Kenda road team. Until then, it's lots of books, lots of base miles, a little cross country skiing, and another family sailing excursion to the BVI. This is the time of year I remember what it's like to relax. Now let me go find my pirate hat...

Thanks for reading.

-n

Who Stole The Internets?

2008-12-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

Coming up: 2009 year in review, and an extended thank you to my sponsors.

But first, a little reflection on the last 36 hours or so....I'm tired.

Delayed flight, lost bag, 4:00 am bedtime plus jetlag, my daughter off to her Mom's for a week, post-Christmas madness...two weeks off the bike and I feel almost more tired than when I was training and racing. Need more sleep.

So I'm here in San Francisco, for the first time, actually, because my girlfriend is on the job market this year. So we're hobnobbing at the annual MLA conference, which is the must-do shindig for English scholars--think Interbike for wordy-nerdy book people. I intend to crash a panel discussion or two, considering that a couple of my pedagogical heroes are out here representing. Maybe I'll get my learn on a little sumthin'-sumthin'.

San Francisco seems a little shy about publicly accessible Wifi, huh? Funny with Silicone Valley being right here and all. The most provincial, out of the way places back East have free Wifi but here in SF it seems free Wifi is not so common. Maybe I need to go across the bay to Berkeley? For the time being I have been ghettoized and I am posting from an Internet cafe. The indignity!

It feels kind of fun to be thinking about books instead of bikes for awhile. But I'm starting to miss the bikes. Bike-heavy post to follow this evening or tomorrow.

-n

Due Diligence - a brief follow up to Kansas City

2008-12-23T19:09:00.000-08:00

In my initial post, I suggested that I had words with Page's brother-in-law after the fact. I would now like to apologize and clarify that it was Cale McAninch with whom I spoke, this has been made clear to me by the several pictures of him now infamously posted all over the net.

Watching the Cyclofile video in this thread
http://www.velocipedesalon.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4487
it is clear that, whatever happened off camera, it seems Wade was the first to bail out of it, which I remembered one guy doing, but had my wires crossed as to who was whom.

For what it's worth, and perhaps this was shortsighted on my part, I hadn't anticipated quite the size and scope of reaction to this post that it has attracted. In retrospect I wouldn't change my observation at all--I saw what I saw--but I probably ought to have done more homework to make sure I had correctly identified all three of the guys before posting my account.

I am not letting Wade off the hook--that isn't mine to do, of course--he was involved, and as I said all along I was not in a position to *hear* anything over the generators, but I did see. He is probably not to be faulted for asking the guys to shut up, they should have been asked to shut up and it isn't *that kind* of a free country, as I said the other day. How he followed up his request is open to interpretation, and like I said: in junior high, everyone involved gets in trouble for the fight, and when adults act like they're in junior high, maybe the same should apply, no?

However, what stands out most in my mind was my interaction after the fight with a belligerent, unapologetic guy who didn't seem at all sorry for what had taken place. Having mistakenly identified this fellow as Wade, JP's bro-in-law, my take on his involvement may have been skewed unfairly. Or maybe not.

In any case, journalistic ethics ought to apply when a blogger chooses to report on public events. I don't so much care about saying the popular thing, but it was a mistake to name names without being sure I had them straight. Mea culpa.

Now on to brighter things, getting chubby in the off-season, base miles, and Spring training races. Shall we?

-n

Done (a non-bicycle related post)

2008-12-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

Thought I would talk about school for a bit this morning. This is what I get up to when I'm not on a bike. The two things, studying literature and education along with bike racing, actually overlap to a great extent for me. But that is a post for another day.

I just saw the final grade of my MA coursework. It was an (questionably deserved) A!
So now I'm done with classes, and it's on to a large stack of books for my thesis. I should post about that some time soon, and will. Basically what I'm up to is looking at the figure of the teacher as an intersection between individual and institution, trying to get at the nature of how society shapes educational institutions, institutions shape teachers, and students are burped out the other end, which seems largely incidental.

So I'll be starting with John Dewey, and working my way up to current quasi-radical rhetoric and composition texts. The interesting bit, I hope, is that I'll be using the poetry and essays of Charles Olson as one of my sources. Olson wrote on teaching quite a lot, both in the concrete and the abstract, and his Maximus figure functions in much the same way as does the trope of teacher I describe above. Plus he was influenced by Dewey and taught at Black Mountain College.

All of this is quite the catharsis for me, the Angry Young Man who refused to stay in high school.

Next time, an end of 'cross season recap, and a hearty and detailed thank you to my sponsors.

Cheers,

-n

'Cross Nationals Part IIb: The Thug Life + an Anti Heckling PSA

2008-12-21T12:46:00.000-08:00

Like I said yesterday, you just can't go letting a bunch of white people get together in a large group, shit always jumps off.

By now everyone has heard about the brawl between a couple of drunken hecklers and Jon Page's brother-in-law that took place while JP was being interviewed post race. So why am I taking it up here? Well, because I was standing there when it happened. So, here's my bird's eye view account.

So Justin Lindine and I were making our way back to the car from the staging area and were slow rolling along on our bikes, stopping to chat with people here and there. We were standing behind the Verge trailer where there were a couple of dozen bikes laid out on the ground all waiting to be packed up for shipping back East, including all or most of the Richard Sachs team bikes.

I didn't hear any of the conversation leading up to the fight, and I had no idea who was involved or the fact that there was heckling going on or anything like that. All I saw was two guys on one side, another guy and a woman on the other, angry faces, quasi tough guy posturing, and then the bigger of the two hecklers pushed Page's brother in law, he pushed back, then little chubby troll dude (Heckler #2) in work coveralls shoved, they sprawled onto the bikes, chubby troll was the first to run away, etc. Pathetic.

The thing is, though--and this is what I haven't read anywhere else--from my perspective, yes Page's brother-in-law was pushed first, but he not only pushed back, he also stomped hell all over Richard's bikes, and the others lying about as if they weren't even there. All three of them did.

I know what it feels like to take a punch, and I know the moment of primal rage, the urge toward self defense and pure, simple ego that surfaces in that instant. I know it doesn't always feel manful to walk away, sometimes it feels dishonest, unrealistic, not true-to-self. And sometimes it is, genuinely, righteous. And I know that, as Myerson eloquently described on his blog last night, sometimes, if you're a real badass, you walk away.

There was nobody in the right from where I was standing. The problem was not who pushed whom, the problem was the over-arching discourse under which these individuals define themselves and set parameters for their behavior. There is a sense of all too common, petty, middle-American entitlement at work here that folks imagine gives them the "right" to heckle, to play their car stereo loud outside my window, to stick a confederate flag on their truck window. "Dammit this is America and I have the right"... no, jackass, you have responsibilities first, rights after. The first amendment to the constitution was designed to protect us against being stripped of the right to resist. In no way was it intended to be, nor should it be interpreted as being, a preemptive weapon or verbal billy club available to individuals with which to mark their social territory.

I read yesterday on one of the cycling websites, CX Magazine, I think, that one of the two hecklers was grousing about having to pay more than "his share" of the damages. And I shake my head. He should be writing a formal letter of apology to USAC and the event promoter and explaining to as many junior racers as possible why what he did was selfish and wrongheaded.

And for all three of them, at the point that the first guy landed on a bike, they should have woken up a little. You know the saying, your right to swing your arms stops at the end of my nose. Once the private property of innocent third parties was involved, these Baby-Hueys should had the restraint to minimize the damage to the bikes and move the hell on. Instead they stomped all over the place like a gang of Tolkein's mountain trolls playing whack-a-mole with their feet. And the shit heel who started the heckling wants to quibble about his "share" of the damage? Words fail me.

The funny part was that after the fracas was over, I rolled past Chubby Overalls Troll, whom you will remember as Heckler #2, and the tallest and thinnest of the three guys (Page's in-law, I think. Could be wrong) and I said, to Heckler #2 "pathetic, you're an embarrassment". He walked away, but the other guy took offense and got in my face. "What was I supposed to do?" he said. I told him he was supposed to be the better man and walk away. I told him he should have been thinking about where he was, the presence of kids, event sponsors, the media, the police, and that all of that should have been more important than defending his manhood. I do feel for the guy, he did get pushed, that sucks and he was right to tell the hecklers to quit it. Maybe he was the wrong guy to tell off, but it all reminded me of junior high when the teacher doesn't care who started the fight: the assumption is you were both wrong, and you both get punished. And yeah, sometimes that's unfair but you know what? Not usually. At times in my life when I have been making bad choices, I have had to worry about getting punched. When I'm making good, socially responsible choices about the way I carry myself? Not so much.

On heckling: stop it. This seems to be the issue of the season. I have read about it on several blogs, and had many conversations with friends. More than once I have heard people speculate that, like the surge in interest in "Alternative" music after Nirvana's "Nevermind" came out, and the jocks and kids just looking for a fight found out about mosh pits, and the genuinely other-than-mainstream music scene began it's true death roll, 'cross might just crush itself under its own success and popularity.

But really, let's keep this simple up front: saying mean stuff isn't nice.

There isn't so much positive energy flowing around the universe these days that we can afford to piss on the genuinely large and meaningful emotions we manufacture for ourselves by the racing of bicycles. We do it to feel good about ourselves. So why knock that down a peg? I have been a part of a lot of communities in my life: As a musician I've been a part of everything from what was left of the hardcore/punk scene in the early 90's to the New England contra dance and old time scene, as well as the Jazz world. I've played tournament chess, obsessively, and had all sorts of eccentric hobbies. One of the things I think is really inspiring about bike racing is that in order to be any good at it, you have to be reasonably positive and take pretty good care of yourself. Honestly, compared to other circles I've traveled in, the most maladjusted bike racer is still not nearly as misanthropic as your average chess player, believe me.

There's nothing clever or smart about being too cool to care. Particularly about something you spend large amounts of time, money and natural resources to pursue. If you're going to travel to another state, or even just across town, and spend your day at a bike race, and then hang out and watch the elite race, why not act like you care? Show some respect and learn something. Why not support the guys that are still doing hill repeats and motorpacing on the road in December? Why not appreciate that the best 'cross racers in the country--to say nothing of the Europeans--are so much better than the rest of us it almost isn't the same sport? When I was about 13 I thought affecting an air of jadedness and been-there-done-thatitude would gain me entry to the Cool Kids Club. I soon realized that the real Cool Kids--the ones I actually began to look up to then, or do today--are the ones who claim their space in the communities and experiences that matter to them, work to make them better, and ignore the haters and naysayers.

Trebon may not be the most outwardly friendly guy on the circuit but you know what? He's a professional athlete and how many people do you know who are as good at what they do as he is at 'cross? If he wants to be serious, he's allowed. He doesn't owe anyone a beer hand-up. And why heckle Page? It probably stings enough not to be the best in the U.S. anymore, and he seems able to be pretty gracious about it. But man, who has done more to put U.S. 'cross on the map than him?

I guess we each have to make a choice about what kind of community we want to have. And understanding that our individual choices matter and affect the world beyond the ends of our respective noses is already a long way toward taking responsibility for "our share" of our community.

-n

Cyclocross Nationals part IIa: The Race Report (long)

2008-12-19T15:42:00.000-08:00

Well first of all, thanks to everyone who has posted a comment, signed up to follow the blog or sent an email to say hi. For those of you out there with your own blogs, feel free to tack me onto your link list. And if I haven't already, let me know if you want me to do the same.

So to wrap up nationals:
Saturday was a race that was really easy for me to get motivated for. Over the course of the season doing UCI races, often against some or all of the best guys in the country, I am not realistically racing for the win most of the time. The Master's 30+ race at nationals is an opportunity for guys like me to race for a big win, and I had been looking forward to this race all season. I had a lot to prove to myself and, while the W wasn't looking too likely if AJM decided to race, (reality is reality) I was confident that I could podium, all other things being equal. In the end I didn't have the best legs, the hill was hard, I got schooled in the sprint, etc. but I told the rest of that story yesterday.

On Sunday, however, I started really feeling that it was the last race of the season and the temptation to spectate and just cheer for my friends actually started to loom pretty large. Not so much because I didn't want to race, --although the temperature did drop a dramatic 20+ degrees in a matter of minutes and the prospect of a windy race in the high 30's, following Saturday's mid October weather was a bit hard to take--but because I didn't want to feel superfluous.

I remember last year lining up way the hell in the back, something like 12th row and looking at the guy in jeans, and the Rolling Prime dude who had dollar bills pinned all over himself, and thinking that I wasn't really racing, I was more part of a circus.

/Begin Lengthy Philosophical Digression/
Yes I know there are 'cross nuts out there that really feel the costumes and shenanigans are more important than the competition, but I absolutely do not agree. I think 'cross should be fun, and I think that goofing it up is fine, particularly at local races. But I also think that part of the appeal of heckling, mocking competition, and not taking racing seriously, stems from a generalized, postmodern social apathy and post-Gen X ennui that dictates irony and sarcasm as the shibboleth of humor.

Or more simply, it takes a bit of sack to stand up and be counted, to pin a number on and give a damn, and to take seriously--and enjoy, yes enjoy the hell out of it--the business of finding out what you're made of on a given day. Isn't that why we race? Racing bikes is one of the only things I have ever experienced that genuinely stops time, and brings me face to face with the core of who I am and what I can do. I am a pretty lighthearted guy, I appreciate a good prank, and I can take the piss as well as anyone. But I'll be damned if I'm going to drive halfway across the country to act the fool in a national championship.

And understand, I'm not slagging anyone for experiencing racing the way they want to. But I have a 10 year old, and I notice things. It seems like it just isn't cool anymore, in mainstream American culture, to actually try hard. I see a level of pre-teen disaffection in my daughter's peer group that I find kind of sad. So many of our experiences of life are mediated, medicated, softened and made indirect, that I think there is real value in immersing yourself in The Genuine when you can find it. That's one of the things I love about cyclocross.
/End Lengthy Philosophical Digression/

So. Sunday, cold, sitting in the car with Justin laughing, 30 minutes before the race, finally getting psyched to race because, dammit, it's nationals. Watching Will Dugan win the D1 Collegiate race had been pretty inspiring--that boy can hurt when he wants to--and I had actually started to have some of those Great Moments In Sports kinds of feelings.

We stage, we line up, we false start (no it wasn't Myerson's fault) and we're off. And I'm moving up, and I feel pretty good, and my measly handful of UCI points got me a 6th row start, but I'm up with the third row guys 20 seconds into the race. Then the first crash happened, just traffic, someone rode across my front wheel, no big deal, lost a bunch of spots, up the hill, a guy goes weirdly wide, I'm in the tape, the hell with it, I ride it out, break the tape, a spectator says quietly, to himself "that's gonna hurt" I keep it under control and get away clean, leaving Mr. Wobbly Wide-line for good. Down the descent, through the first s-turn, almost t-bone a guy crashed in the middle of the track, next corner and someone else is down in front of me, I lost a lot of ground with my mishaps but now I'm picking up steam and picking off guys in clusters of 1's and 3's.

Eventually I put in as inspired a chase as I could muster and hitched onto a group containing Brandon Dwight, who had just impressively repeated as 35+ national champ, Adam Myerson, Justin Robinson, my good friend and race-dueling partner this season, Matt Kraus, who had been a strong 2nd behind Brandon in Saturday's 35+ race, and Spencer something from S&M racing out West. While farther down than I would have liked to be, realistically this was a good group for me, and those are all guys I respect and feel good about racing with. So I settled in for a lap, trying to recover. A lap later and a couple of guys were shelled, a bobble in the run/ride up buttonhook at the top of the course cost me a few seconds and I lost the group, which was basically how it ended. The S&M kid and I played touch and go for awhile until the last lap when I put in a few hard accelerations and he popped, and I came upon Adam, demotivated and soft-pedaling it in after his now much-publicized run in with Jon Baker. For all of that, I ended up, once again, rounding the last corner onto the pavement just a few feet off of Justin Robinson's back wheel. He got me again. Funny how in 'cross, as I said to him later, your guys are your guys and, most of the time, good start, bad start, call-up or not, you'll find your group by the end of the race. Sure there are exceptionally good and exceptionally bad days to be had, but the statistical consistency of cyclocross is pretty interesting.

So I landed 31st out of 76 finishers, 94 starters. I was one of 33 guys to finish on the lead lap of the race, and as Adam pointed out to me later, that puts me, I suppose, in the top half of elite riders in the country. The thing is, though, all I can see most of the time is how hard it seems, how unimaginable hard at times, to move up from top half, to top quarter, to top...where's my ceiling?

Well that's the thing isn't it? I keep racing because I haven't found my ceiling yet. And when I do, I hope and suspect that I will find new ways to make meaning from racing my bike. But man, running a 4 minute mile is infinitely harder than running a 4:30, right? And in rock climbing, Chris Sharma's new 5.15b route is exponentially more difficult than any 5.14d out there; and Ryan Trebon put 7+ minutes into me in that 60 minute race. That's humbling.

All things considered, I am happy with my season and my ride. My goals this season were to score UCI points, place top 10 in a New England Verge series race, and podium in the 30+ race at nationals. Two out of three, and missing the podium in a sprint feels pretty good for my second season of UCI elite racing.

Nationals part IIb will follow, including my eyewitness account of the now infamous hillbilly throwdown.

You just can't go getting a bunch of white people together, shit always jumps off...

-n

Forever? Forever-ever-ever? - Cyclocross Nationals Part I

2008-12-18T19:19:00.000-08:00

If I were to start this post by saying, simply, that it is a long, long drive to Kansas City, I would feel like I was succumbing to my generation's tendency to default to understated irony for funny.
But really? It's a long, long drive to Kansas City. Made longer by the fact that it seems juuuuuuust close enough to be an almost-easy trip.

I had managed to convince my friend and former Targetraining teammate, Justin Lindine, that driving to nationals would be great fun. He, of the short memory, had actually made the drive last year, in a blizzard, and yet for some reason was easily convinced. Anyone who has ever ridden in a breakaway with Justin will understand that he likes to suffer. I once rode 4&1/2 hours with him in January on a 28 degree day. He forgot his shoe covers and did the whole ride in summer-weight racing socks. I should have been alarmed at his ready acquiescence to this trip.

With me planning to race both the Junior Old Guys race (aka the 30-34 master's race, aka Andy Jacques Maynes TV show where he beats up little kids and takes their lunch money) on Saturday, and J-bomb and I both racing the Elite race on Sunday, we decided to drive all of Thursday, crash somewhere in Indiana for the night, and get to the course in KC Friday afternoon in time to pre-ride. That's more or less how it went. Left Albany, headed to Windham (where? exactly) to collect Justin, re-packed all my gear in his car and we were off.

Only Justin drove the whole way to KC. Booyaa.

We arrived at Tiffany Springs park in KC Missouri at about 4:32 on Friday afternoon. But, not to worry. By my calculations our Westerly location should have purchased us roughly an additional hour of daylight more then we are accustomed to back in the NE. Well, kinda.
We did manage to get on the course, already fast and tacky after the earlier mudfest the juniors were subjected to, and got in about 4 quality laps and a little road spin before it was properly dark. I went from "oh man, why bother?" to "hell yeah I live for this!" in the span of my first lap. I have to say that while the course was relatively straightforward and lent itself to nothing other than a genuine, old fashioned ass-kicking contest, it was a hell of a lot of fun. The uphill was brutal, but reasonable, the obstacles were well placed, and the downhill was super fast, fun and slalomish. The only problem was that after climbing for 3 minutes or so--an eternity in a 'cross--you lost all of that elevation in less than a minute. Ouch.

Anyway, with our legs opened up a little, we settled into the Econo Lodge, and headed into the wilds of suburban Kansas City to find the Chipotle we had seen from the highway. Yes, corporate America, sponsoring a bike racing team will, in fact, pay dividends and create brand loyalty.

And about that burrito hunt: OK, so I'm not the math, numbers and engineering type, but I am not altogether incapable of tying my shoes or reading a map, either. Nevertheless, I cannot begin to imagine what goes on in the minds of traffic engineers. Every road around that wacky place (KC) seems to lead exactly where it seems not to, and you are always routed to another consumer friendly shopping plaza, just not usually the one you set out to find. We ultimately decided on the counter-intuitive strategy of heading away from our destination in order to arrive at it. Zen in the Bible belt, baby.

Anyway, we eventually (and I mean 45 minutes to travel a mile) found the damn Chipotle so we were all demographically appropriate in our dinner choice, as evidenced by the fact that we bumped into Tim Johnson, Jeremy Powers and Lynne Bessette at the next table. Bike racers stick out like (skinny) sore thumbs in the midwest. Food in, magazines browsed next door, back to hotel, TV, sleep.

Saturday was warm for this time of year, a little overcast, pretty windy but definitely dry. The Master's 30-34 race went about as I expected it would with AJM kicking us all in the nuts. I had a bit of a sloppy start from the 3rd row, missed the boat when Schempf and Ali Goulet got away after Andy, also missed Sam Kreig, and settled into the race for 5th and the last spot on the podium with Justin Robinson and Nate Rice. We raced hard, dropped Justin, slacked a bit, he came back, some surging happened, I felt stronger than the other two, and on the last lap I attacked into the last set of stairs, figuring holding the lead through the last 3 turns was a sure way to win the very short sprint on the pavement. The thing is, I had done quite a bit of surgey-surgey and at the top of the stairs, when I jumped back on my bike, I had a bit of an "oh dear" sort of moment, during which Robinson passed me, and proceeded to prove me right that it was in fact an if-in-doubt-lead-it-out kind of sprint. Dang. Justin (Lindine) says I eased up too much trying to be cute and stay in the draft to jump around late. He is so right. Head down, elbows in, don't look at the other guy, because he's only looking at the line. Poop. I never have the sprint during 'cross season that I do on the road, but I think I blew that one no matter what. Anyway, no shame in getting beaten by Robinson. He's been around forever, national team and world's and all, plus he's big as a house and puts out large watts. C'est la vie, and good ride by him. I regret a little bit that I didn't make a do or die effort to drop Robinson and Rice and bridge up to Kreig in 4th place. It was so hard on that hill and so windy at the top that it was pretty confidence draining, or soul sucking, depending on the lap. I didn't slack, and did the bulk of the work in our group, but I just might have been a little too conservative. The good news is my 6th place gets me a front row call up for next year. Andy, I'm comin' back for my lunch money.

So this post has been a pleasant (in segments) diversion from the paper I have been whinging about finishing: Arundhati Roy's "The God Of Small Things" in a cage match with J.M. Coetzee's "Diary Of a Bad Year" with Althusser and some contemporary post-colonial hepcats as a cheering section with Naomi Klein.

The thing about this paper is that it signifies the end of my coursework for my MA. (fanfare, parade, huzzah, fireworks, Souza band, etc) Then I get to spend next semester studying for my thesis exam, which means reading the hell out of all sorts of progressive pedagogy books and Charles Olson's poetry, and then I'll be done. DONE. Charmaine will be DONE with her PhD this Spring as well (yes you will!) and we will parade across the stage together. Still trying to pick a theme song for that cuz, y'know, they let you pick. Right? Seriously, school warrants its own post, and will soon have one.

Next time, Nationals part II: 7 minutes off a Tree Farm, Success, Perspective, Random Redneck Violence, and 24 Straight Hours in the Car.

-n

Welcome to me: some thoughts on blogging

2008-12-18T14:38:00.001-08:00

I read a lot of blogs.

Some I find to be inspired, some are pretty droll; some are written by people I know well and consider friends, some are written by acquaintances or complete strangers. But I read so many that it has started to feel a little one sided. Or perhaps voyeuristic is the better term. I have absorbed so much of the minutia of other people's lives that it hardly seems fair not to share some of my own. It is The Internets, after all.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the blogosphere, and one of the reasons I find it so fascinating, is that it is one of the much ballyhooed, but rare-as-unicorns ways in which I find technology actually does bring people together and create community.

What I'll be doing here is largely talking about Me Me Beautiful Me because, hey, it's The Internets. Apart from that I hope to share the ups and downs of my life as a bike racer, graduate student, parent of a 10-year-old, and citizen of the Universe.

Looking forward to sharing my thoughts and adventures.

Cheers,

-n