Downeastbound and Down

Photo: Ernest Gagnon

WALKING TOGETHER down the middle of the highway after getting thrown out of Applebee's, Ricky tells Reese Bobby that "he thought everything was going good".

Reese tells him "That's why I had to go and blow it up."

For me, everything was going good last week with mid-pack magic at MRCx.  So I went and blew it up! this week at Saturday's Cat 3 New Gloucester Poop Dash Duathlon.

I won't recount this in great detail, but what a fucking mess.  It could literally have been just as fast to toss your bike in the pit, run half the course without it, and then pick it up on the way back through.  You accomplish two things.  One, you run much faster, not carrying a 30 pound shit-covered bike.  Two, you pick it up again just in time for the section of the course that you actually get to RIDE.  With about 2 to go, they widened the nastiest sections of the course, but it was little consolation at that point.  I was a day-of entry, so I started DFL, battled with about three other guys, and that was the race.

I had just left the woods with about a lap to go and my chain went into the spokes.  I stood there for I don't know how long, trying to pull it out to no avail.  I did appreciate the words of consolation from whoever offered.  That fucking thing wasn't going anywhere, no matter how hard I pulled.  I had all but conceded the DNF, and as I began walking the bike along the poop-strewn earth, somehow it came free and I had the misfortune of being back in business.  I gained something back on one of the guys I had been hopscotching with, but with no laps left! I was firmly cemented in the cellar.  So for no better reason than why not, I sprinted a junior at the line instead.

Given that Saturday's course was absolutely disgusting, I checked out the top 30 or so finishers, curious to see if people had more or less finished where they staged.  And, for the most part, that's what happened.  With one glaring exception.  Marty Allen.

Marty Allen (Cyclocrossworld) finished 9th, but he appeared nowhere in the list of pre-registered racers.  Since (like me) he didn't pre-reg, he would have been relegated to the back.  And so I thought his result was curious for two reasons: one, because that finish would have been nearly impossible to pull off.  Two, I'm quite familiar with the Cyclocrossworld kit because I own one, and I didn't line up at the back with anyone from that team.  So I ping Marty on Twitter, and try to understand what really happened.  And it seems quite simple:  Verge call-up.

However.

And Marty, I don't know know you or have anything against you, but somethin' ain't right here.  And none of this is necessarily your doing, so roll with this one.

According to the Downeast registration page, which is not unlike almost every other registration page for every other race we hold:

Pre-registered riders in USAC events will be staged by NECCS standings where applicable, then Crossresults.com rankings, then order of registration.

The problem is, it doesn't say this:

Pre-registered riders in USAC events will be staged by NECCS standings where applicable, then Crossresults.com rankings, then order of registration.  Riders who do not pre-register but have Verge points will be called up to the first few rows and will not have to start at the back like everyone else who did not pre-register.

If this is common practice, that does NOT seem okay.  Verge points should not be a golden ticket for terrific staging for racers who do not pre-register.  And that is apparently what is happening.  Marty wasn't registered to race until that morning, had Verge points, and was placed in the second row.

What a whole lot of other racers wouldn't have given for that kind of opportunity.  Roll out of bed, assess your health, check the tweets, get plenty of recon as to what's going on out there, get the right equipment together, then commit to racing, then get terrific staging, and since the course was such a mess, barring a mechanical, a terrific chance at a terrific finish.

I knew by registering day-of, I was going to pay a price for registering day-of.  I knew I'd be doing 4 hours round-trip in a car to essentially go nowhere.  But that logic only applies to Verge-series packfill like me.

As someone who will never factor into Verge anything, I see the writing on the wall at this point.  Verge series races are not for me.  They're for the 60 or so guys who have Verge points.  And given that these are the largest events, where the field size is already off the charts, what really is the point in participating if you don't factor into the series.  Paying $40 for the privilege of having no shot at anything is getting a little old.

If you guys want to do this, fine.  Cat 3 should be the highly competitive sibling of Cat 1 and 2.  But do this for the rest of us: open Cat 5 for beginners, and give the rest of us Cat 4.  Right now, the local races seem like the only ones where many of us have any fun at all.  That's messed up.

Give the recreational racers - the guys who can't make it to every race of every weekend - two levels to race in, and if we're fast enough, we'll cat up to 3 and get involved with Verge.  But as someone with far more experience and skill than a beginner, and nowhere near enough time to train to be a Verge racer, I need something else.  5-4 'recreational'; 3-2-1 'competitive/professional' is an equitable solution.  I'm not out there to pretend I'm working toward Cat 2.  So take me out of the equation.

Or I'll just train my face off all year and completely alienate my family and friends to chase one Verge point in Vermont, and then enjoy the spoils of staging no worse than the top half of any big race for the balance of the season, no matter how I finish, no matter when I register.

Maybe I should have just done that instead.  Then I wouldn't have had to write all this bullshit!

ASCENSION TO MEDIOCRITY!

Photo: Russ Campbell Photography

I have been racing this godforsaken sport since 2008, and mountain bike races disguised as cyclocross races aside, I have never had a mid-pack finish until yesterday.  And this is largely of my own doing, because I upgraded out of go-karts (4) and into Nascar (3) well before I probably should have.  (Incidentally,  Pro/1/2 is the Indy 500, which has been cleverly identified by a reader.)

Yesterday it was the confluence of actually being healthy, great equipment, good fuel, reasonable staging, ideal temperatures, cooperative course, ample pre-ride, good tire pressure, some skills, mild intelligence, some amount of prior week training, fantastic shoes, and dipping into embro that holds up surprisingly well having sat in the drink well of a car door for over a year straight which propelled Van Dessel's most and least promising NH native to a 35th/66 finish in 3/4 Masters at MRC Cyclocross.  I'm either getting back to normal, or I just peaked and this will never happen again.

I was one of the privileged few who got to race "the new flyover".  What a fucking abortion this thing was.  I know what they were trying to do - make it cooler than last year's flyover.  At first glance from a distance, I was like, oh rad - ramped on BOTH sides now(!), this is going to be sick.  I've seen enough euro flyover stuff to know that stairs aren't cool.  Problem being, conditions what they were & the way the tape was strung, you couldn't get any MO.  In practice, I got maybe a 1/3 of the way up and had to bail.  That left hoofing it, and that was straight up frightening in the context of a sloppy race.  They had screwed lengths of strapping across the ramp to serve as footholds, this really does not work unless you sidestep the whole way up, it was a huge fucking wtf and I'm thrilled to have survived it.  Actually in warmups I found a terrified girl at the top, and gave her my sage all-purpose steep stuff descending advice: just keep your butt back and let the bike do all the work.  Voila, she made it, elated to have extended her time on this earth.  I should totally coach.

Anyway realizing their folly, race organizers ganked the flyover for later fields; I'm sure they'll work out the issues; they're good folk.  I like their race & wish we had more like it.  It's very fair, it won't break you in half, and that lends itself to lots of actual places to race.  Which I had the fortune of doing myself.

I was systematically hunting down racers, and I find myself in reasonable shape with 1 to go.  I latch on to a new guy with about 2/3 to go, and I'm just biding time, waiting for a good spot to pull the trigger and move up.  Then we start sweeping through turns on the back side of the course and I hear (because I'm wired to hear certain words) a spectator say the word "singlespeed".

Huh?

FUCK.  I didn't even realize that I'm strung off the back of a guy running one gear.  IMMEDIATELY I have this seemingly irresolvable inner conflict.  Singlespeed is family.  This is how I got into this sport.  This guy is like an anonymous brother-in-arms; I don't want to race this guy.  Wait, but he did enter this field.  But still, should I, but then, but he, but #%!@#%!@#$!@agaggggggagagagagagagagagagh!!!!!   It's fucking kryptonite.  I don't even know what to do.  So I just sit, waiting for him to make a mistake.  Which he doesn't.  The guy flows along pretty good, and once we clear the final barriers, I figure it's going to be a perfectly fair fight.

So I start grabbing gears, and this is my biggest disadvantage, because this dude totally hears that and starts LAYING DOWN WATTS.  The one gear revolution will not be televised or humbled.  You stake your turf.

So we're drag racing into the final turn.  Shit is definitely ON, we're totally level, and it's totally awesome.  He has the inside, I'm on the outside digging for china and OH AWESOME THERE'S A RACE VOLUNTEER STANDING RIGHT INSIDE THE TAPE OF THE FINAL TURN HAMMERING IN A STAKE.

If I didn't have my head up I would have annihilated this guy.  It would have made Joey look like newborn babies on a fluffy down comforter.

In lieu of killing this person, I hold up for just long enough to make sure I don't, and between him and me and singlespeed guy you could have fit a dryer sheet.

SS guy now gots himself half a wheel and I start dipping into the special savings account where the bike actually leaves the ground and starts it's suborbital ascent with soviet space program, it's so high up here and there's a monkey in a rocket! but the line is way too close and its game/set/match, one fucking gear.  We had a great chat afterward.  FUN.  Finally.  What it's all about.

He later told me that he thought I was the race leader coming up to lap him.  I felt this massive sense of relief that someone thinks I look like I am capable of winning a bike race.  PRO

And this is like the Hooksett 5k.  Race winner came up to me afterward all terse and nervously impatient and was like WHAT WAS YOUR TIME, WHAT WAS YOUR TIME.  Do I look like I fucking won the fun run pal?  That sprint you just watched me lay on?  That was AFTER YOU FINISHED.  Holy shit.  I must look like the terminator.  I gotta tap into this somehow.

December Comes Early: It's Not the Title of an Adult Film, it's a Midseason Cat 3 Intervention.

I wrote It's Almost December last year.   Fifteen hundred of you read it, and the video has been seen EIGHT THOUSAND TIMES.  I put that shit ON YOUR RADAR and you were like HELL YES.  And dudes did right.  They put in a quarter, they got on the horse; it goes up and down and around.  Circular. Circle. With the music. The flow.  All good things.

I had planned to write a follow-up this year, and I wanted to wait until December.  But gentlemen and it's unlikely that ladies read this blog, events have forced me to communicate with you on this topic much sooner than I expected.  So let's get right to it.

WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING IN CAT 3 RIGHT NOW?!!  WHAT DID YOU DO!?

It's a fucking romance explosion up in here now.  Cat 3 was the first field to fill at Gloucester this year.  138 racers, biggest field of the weekend.  I mean, look at this merry go-round of FUCKING BULLSHIT!  I'm in this photo, very bottom right corner with the red dot on my back.  You know what I should have done instead?  Ridden in the exact opposite direction, hopped the wall at the beer tent, and gotten PLOWED.

Now Providence is tipping the scales at 159 pre-reg'd.  Sunday's pre-reg'd Cat 4s have 80.  In Northampton, you'll be able to start at the back, take that little choo choo train for a spin around the park, pet a goat, and eventually get back to the queue at the run-up and have lost PRECISELY NO SPOTS.  You'll probably have time to order one of those goddamn waffles and actually get it before there is actual racing of bicycle.

EVERYONE is in this field now.  And you might say that is exactly what I asked for, and you may be right.  But the other half of the equation is still BLANK.  We put MORE TURDS in the bowl, but it still only flushes HALF WAY.  LOG JAM.

And we all know by now that USA Cycling isn't going to save the situation any time soon.  But truth is, it's on their radar.  I had the good fortune to chat with Marc Gullickson, USAC's "cyclo-cross" program manager.  The man in charge.  The BOSS of CROSS.  He doesn't know I'm nobody, so he talked to me.

A fifth category was the topic of conversation, and I get the sense he thinks that makes sense.  LOTS OF SENSING.  But how the hell do you implement it; the day is only so long.  He has much to discuss with promoters, and his parting advice was "USAC is working hard to make sure the racing stays fair and fun" and we will take that as direct quote gospel and KNOW better days are ahead.  Are you relieved?  Me neither.  But listen, in the meantime, I have to do something.  So I present you with this.

THE CATEGORY 3 CYCLOCROSS SURVIVAL GUIDE

Cat 3, for the foreseeable future is going to be a massive innavigable rolling expanse of fanciness.  Use these tips to improve your experience.

1.  DON'T SUCK.  Once you upgrade, you have to stay fit.  You can't not ride all year and then roll up in September and think you'll just "sort of do okay".  Doesn't happen.  Dudes will flatten you LIKE A CRÊPE if you do that.  I took most of this year off and I'm getting DESTROYED.  Also you need to stay away from shitty habits like not drilling it out of every corner.  If they don't have the skills, 3s at least have motors, and MOTORS CAN BEAT SKILLS.

2.  DON'T FORGET TO PREREG.  You know where you get to start if you forget to register before the day of the race?  RIGHT IN THE RACE'S ASSHOLE.  You can almost get away with this at the lesser attended races, but at the big shows, forget it.  You've just screwed yourself.  I just did this at a big 3/4 event.  I started DFL, picked off more riders than a lot of my friends who staged mid-pack, and still ended up with atrocious points because THE BACK.  Which leads into my next series of points, which are about...

3. POINTS.  Crossresults is like a video game; it will kick your ass sideways to Tokyo if you don't know how to play.  Some bad decisions, some bad results, and you are lining up in toilet country, swirling the rim and going nowhere.  Here's a breakdown of the fields you can enter as a Cat 3 FANCY 4.

3 Also now known as ROLLING ARMAGEDDON.  If you aren't in the first half of this field, you've just signed up to not race.  You can have a nice casual spin around the grounds of Stage Fort or Roger Williams Park with a number pinned to your back, casually engaging in competition with happenstance others of similar misfortune.  It's a lot of money to pay to go nowhere, so assess your chances accordingly.  If you get strung out at the back, the point drop combined with the sheer size of the field will leave you with a result you'll probably have to wait 12 months to get rid of.

3/4  This can be a sucker field.  These seem like better opportunities for 4s than 3s.  Because there's usually a 1/2/3 field at races that hold a 3/4, there's a better chance the 3/4 top 5 will be filled out with higher points, because 3s with better points will probably man up and do 1/2/3.  Check the entries carefully.  You don't want to mid-pack and think you did well, only to find out some super fast 4s with astronomical points found the podium and blew up the average.

1/2/3 The world of hurt.  Technically you are eligible to race in this field, and technically you will get destroyed.  You know when a Nintendo game has EASY or HARD, and you can barely beat EASY with a strategy guide and savestates and HARD is just fucking inhumanly difficult like the original Mega Man?  That is 1/2/3.  You will be left behind with the tumbleweeds, unless you convince a few of you friends to come up and take the beating together.  These races are also longer - 60 minutes - which means you'll probably be racing even longer than that, providing you're not PNP'd.  But you do get one great, and very special reward:  AMAZING POINTS.  Masters is no exception.  When you do your time here, the return is worth your while in both fitness and future staging.


Now as I mentioned earlier, Cat 3 still isn't that idyllic throne you see at Home Depot that will flush a bucket of golf balls in one shot.  It's still packed up with guys who won't take the jump to the Deuce (man, the toilet humor is coming so easy right now, and I don't even have to go).  So what's the deal with these guys?  I'm not them, so I interviewed a couple of anonymous contributors who HAVE been there.  I wanted to know what the hell is going on.  And you know what they told me?


YOU FAST 3s need to MAN UP AND CAT UP.  Just like the 4s who followed my trail of sand over the invisible walkway (not a sandbag reference; sand is just coincidental to the Last Crusade reference), speedy 3s have to do the same thing.  A LOT OF YOU DO.  I have it on good authority that there are a considerable number of you ready to slug it out in the big show.  Will you get smashed to bits?  Maybe!  But you'll be doing it together, and you'll be racing AT THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE LEVEL AGAINST AMAZING SUPERSTARS FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC.  I can't even UNDERSTAND who wouldn't want this opportunity.  This is literally as confusing as someone who refuses sex because they're "too busy".  YOU WERE BORN TO DO IT.

Feeling like you shouldn't move up because the juniors are working you over?  GUESS WHAT, THEY CAN'T EVEN VOTE.  WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THEM.  Juniors are basically children of Professor Xavier and you need to just let them go because they have genetic capabilities you and I aren't going to have EVER.  It's apples and oranges.  It's Wolverines and dudes from The Town who can rob banks good.  DIFFERENT.

 "Most 3s are being pansies, and they should fucking upgrade."

These words were ACTUALLY SPOKEN.  That means IT IS TIME.  When dudes FASTER THAN YOU say that you are ready, you were ready WAY BEFORE THIS.

So I say now to all 3s who actually do not suck at cyclocross bicycle racing, COMPLETE THE CIRCLE OF LIFE.  Your brothers in arms have pulled themselves up from from the guts of 4.  You have friends in P/1/2 that will help you.  YOU ARE WAITING FOR NOTHING.  You know what Apollo's old trainer says to Rocky before he starts his totally ridiculous and intense series of training montages in Russia?  YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.  DO IT.

MEGA MAN.

Semi-Gloucester

Alright.  Time to regroup here.  Saturday at Gloucester was an absolute atrocity.  I knew it would be, and I went down there anyway.

I've been sick for over half the month of September.  I should be resting, but the problem I always have this time of year is that...I don't.  There is so much great stuff happening every week, and I'm too stupid to stay away.  What a waste of a month.

Gloucester is particularly frustrating.  I haven't had one big event all year to look forward to.  And in the days preceding this, the biggest 'cross weekend in New England, I'm out of work & riding the couch, enduring a cold made 10 times worse because of the 5k/SBC double I pulled the week before.

I had to at least give it a shot.  I was marginally better by Friday, finally had new wheels under me, and figured if Saturday went to shit, I'd bag Sunday anyway.  Unfortunately, I got about 20 minutes down the road from my house and knew today was going to suck.  I could tell I was still sick.  But I was packed up, committed, had a good breakfast, let's see what happens.

It was all bad.  I smashed my nuts on a remount 15 minutes before my start, and that was pretty much how today was going to go.  All of the work I put into racing 1/2/3s for better Gloucester staging was pointless, as once we got into areas of the course where actual bike racing could happen, I couldn't.  I had almost no energy.  It was actually quite sad.  This course was an absolute mess - perfect for someone with more technical ability than power - and I was useless.  At times, I'm not sure I've ever ridden a bike so slowly in my life.  In spite of praying for catastrophe, somehow I finished the race.

Missing out on Mt. Washington has been such a killer.  I can see now how much fitness I get from that.  Whether it's the training, or the two trips up the mountain, it's a huge deposit in the bank that I don't have this year.  A lot of other deposits are missing too - White Mountain rides, Kanc, Prouty.  Shit - I haven't done anything this year.  It's little wonder I can't race a bike right now, and this is actually a good moment of reflection.  There are good reasons for not doing all of that stuff; I should be more mindful of that.  Were I at least healthy, I'd have half a chance, but I don't even get that far.

Somewhere around halfway through the race on Saturday, I pledged to stop racing for the rest of the season.  Of course, I also mouthed the words "pull me" to a race official and that didn't happen either.  But I'm dropping out for a while.  Maybe I'll pop my head out at the end of the month or something.  But I need to do nothing and get right again.  So enjoy the picture, and by the way - that was the end of lap one, and we're all lucky it wasn't later, when I was drooling, nose running, picking dirt out of my eye.