GamJams Reviews: Winter Tights - Various

All of Gaul was divided into three parts, and so are winter tights. There are base layer tights, then lycra tights without a chamois, then lycra tights with a chamois. All three types serve their own purpose; all have pluses and minuses. I don't much like riding indoors during winter so I have a lot of cold weather gear. Bear with me on this rambling review of a number of products. I haven't bought tights since last year, and lookie, lookie, everybody has a new name for all of their tights. I've stuck to reviewing those products that still appear to be made, even if they are under a new name, and where possible point you to identical or very similar items.

Base Layer Tights

Base layer tights work with a pair of bib shorts. You can wear them over your shorts if you must, but they really work better under them. They are a great option because they are generally inexpensive and allow you to use your normal bib shorts through the winter, and if it gets really hot out, or you blend your training into your commute, you can strip them off for a ride home. Yes, we do get plenty of days in the mid-atlantic where it's 30 in the morning, 60 in the afternoon. Additionally, many are available in matching pairs with base layer shirts; some of the active weight base layers are essetially thermal underwear and can do double duty if you hike, go to football games, or find yourself homeless and sleeping on steam grates - you'll appreciate how a good baselayer wicks excess moisture.

Base layer tights suitable for cycling will be light, flexible to the point of unobtrusiveness, fairly thin, and reasonably warm. They should also have flatlock seams, or a seamless crotchal/taint area. This keeps you from wearing an extra hole in your ass, unless you find you need one. If your baselayer tights do not have flatlock seams, or are in any way abrasive, you'd better wear them over your shorts if you're doing any sort of long ride. Base layer tights of any kind are generally perfect for winter mountain biking and shorter mountain bike rides, though marginal for super long basebuilding rides.

1) Columbia Active Weight Tights. Cost: $24. Availability: Bass Pro Shops and elsewhere. I got mine on clearance for $12/piece. Pluses: inexpensive, comfortably fleecy basic tight. Durable. Minuses: The seams aren't flatlocked, so they are limited to shorter road rides and to mountain bike riding - or cross training. They are slightly heavy feeling on the legs; good for training, maybe not so hot for Tradezone races. They have a fly so if you wear them on the outside - the logical place for tights that lack a flatlock seam - your friends will mock you and stare at your package. They aren't sold under that name any longer; they are now sold as Steens Mountain Lightweight Bottoms. Bottom line: Good cheap basic training tight for shorter rides; don't get 'em if you can't handle the mockery of wearing actual underwear on rides. (If you wear 'em under your shorts, nobody will know but you and I).



2) Terramar Tech Skins. Cost: ~$24. Availability: various web and outdoor sporting goods retailers. The Tech Skins are no longer made but they are pretty much the same as the current Thermasilk line. Matching tops and bottoms are available. Pluses: Nice lightweight tight that is unobtrusive on the legs. Basic flatlock seams decently placed - but make sure you use plenty of chamois cream if you're wearing them under the bib shorts on a >90 minute ride. Minuses: a little fragile for mountain biking; they seem to tear pretty easily in crashes that merely scuff lycra bib shorts. They wick okay but get really heavy and saggy (and obtrusive) when they get soggy. No use at all when they are wet. Bottom line: good all around training tights. Get a few pairs for daily use.



3) I/O Biocompatibles merino wool Contact Tights. Oh my word... these things are sex with stitches. They are paper-thin wool tights with truly flatlock stitching, thoughtful stitching patterns that seem to preserve my taint and sit bones, and all the benefits of wool. Pluses: they are long wearing, the smartwool-like fabric wicks decently and seems to regulate my temperature a bit; they insulate nicely even when wet; they feel as nice as silk on the legs, are very light and form fitting. Minuses: you have to wash them with care, they aren't cheap - around $60. They are in the same basic upscale top-tier market as Smartwool, just a little less expensive. Bottom line: if you are committed to doing long base rides on the road in winter, but the sheer discomfort of the cold wears you down, get a pair or two of these tights. If the Terramar tights are a 7 on a 1-10 scale, these are a 9. It's a lot more money to get marginally better performance, but oh how nice marginal goods are. They are a little bit of work to clean, but if you're committed to those 3-5 hour cold weather basebuilding slogs, these tights will make it a bit easier to stay committed.




Lycra Tights with Chamois
Just as baselayer tights come in several different styles, these tights come in a couple different styles - tight style, bib style, and wind front bib style.

1) Performance Century Tight - non-bib. Availability: Do you really need to ask? Cost: ~$40. Chamois: a basic, thin, durable cloth-type chamois. Pluses: the fairly thick lycra on these insulates decently. The chamois, despite being simple and inexpensive, is reasonably comfortable assuming you ride regularly, and it wicks really well. The tights are inexpensive and you won't cry if you wreck them. Minuses: they are pant-style tights, not bibs. Unless you're a plumber, you won't like how they show 3 inches of your butt crack. Yes, they are cut really low for a pair of bike tights; you'd think they were running tights that somebody sewed a chamois in as an afterthought. Hey, wait a minute... Bottom line: These are okay basic tights. Get 'em if you're really tight on money as a stop gap, but understand the lack of a bib makes them less comfortable and less practical for serious riding.

2) Performance Century Bib Tight - Availability: not any longer. Comparable product: Performance Century Tight. Pluses: all the good features, except in a bib style, which is mandatory if you're going to do any serious winter riding. Minuses: it's still a minimalist tight; will keep you warm enough, comfortable enough. Bottom line: you can get the comparable Performance Radiator Bib tight which is probably pretty similar. Bottom line: like a lot of Performance's stuff, it's good utility wear and plenty good for day-to-day riding. Perfect for 90 minute road rides in cold weather. I wouldn't try a winter epic on that chamois though, not without a whole heap of lube.

3) Voler Bib Knickers, with chamois. Availability: Um, you'll probably need to do a team order, though maybe you could get some through Velowear. Price: ~$90 at retail. Pluses: Nicer lycra than the standard Voler team bib shorts, which frankly wear out a bit too soon and which are cut funny, with very long legs. The chamoises seem to hold up pretty well in the knickers, and they are nicely warm. These are really great on super long rides, nice for 'cross, just good all around winter tights. They are a bit long for knickers, BTW. Minuses: Voler doesn't seem to retail these very hard. Bottom line: good value for the money. Like Stuart Smalley, maybe Voler kit isn't the best stuff in the world, but gosh darnit, it's just good enough. Their knickers in particular are a standout in their product line. Get them if your team orders kit from Voler, or if you can talk the good folks at Velowear to scare you up a pair.

4) Castelli Leggerezza bib tight, with chamois: Availability: fine cycling shops everywhere, or Amazon. Cost - normally ~$159, but sometimes on sale for less. See below link right away for that... It's 23 degrees out. You've put off your spring base rides long enough and you're supposed to go for 3 hours today. But dammit, it's 23 degrees out. And a bit windy. What are you going to do? You're going to strap up in a pair of bib tights like the Castelli Leggerezzas. They're outfitted with the reasonably comfortable KISS chamois, the basic chamois of the bottom half of Castelli's excellent product line. The back and upper of the tight are made with that extremely silky, supremely comfortable lycra that Castelli is known for. The front panels of the tight are some type of slightly heavier windproof lycra. The inners are also lined with a fine layer of fleecy stuff. How do they work? Well. Quite well. They aren't for everybody and you probably don't need these unless you are a damned determined outdoor cyclist, a roadie who hates the trainer. Mountain bikers don't normally ride fast enough for long enough to need these; they're really made for roadies on long cold rides. Pluses: Yep, they really do keep you warm. You don't need base layer tights on these until you're into serious, serious cold (sub-20). They are reasonably priced considering the high quality (premium) and the specialized, technical features of the tights. Minuses: anything this stout is going to be somewhat heavy. They are a bit of a drag on the legs. Your base pace will drop from 18 to 16.5 with these. Bottom line: A great product. If you're serious about riding through the winter, get some of these. Buy them slightly large though; the wind blocking surface on the front is less flexible and a little more binding than normal lycra.

Try this link first - discount! $103 but limited sizes.



Or this one - regular price:

Water Bottles: Thin Midweek Gruel Edition

- Had a great base ride with Jon, Mike and Sean on Sunday. Nothing hardcore, just a steady L2 pace for a bit under three hours, about 50 miles or a little less. Just how it's supposed to be. In spite of heavy wind I think we came in with a >18MPH average speed. Efficient training, punctuated in the middle by a triple espresso. A *damn* fine day, though as Jon noted in the last couple miles, "it suddenly turned into a death march and got awful quiet just now." That's what good base training will do to you. You don't pop in epic fashion like you do when your legs blow up in a crit; you just quietly die, still able to pull a bit and wheelsuck a bit, but it's hard and your battery is empty, devoid of energy. You could not accelerate to save your life. All this from slow, *easy* riding. I measure that ride as a success.

- Frame maker, shop operator and high quality elite crosser Molly Cameron is getting a link. I've hesitated for a long time because Molly is a complicated person to discuss, and frankly, I'm afraid of dropping the wrong article in a sentence and pissing her off. Molly sure looks like a dude and as far as I know has XY chromosomes, and races men's elite pretty well, but tells us he's actually a woman, hence 'she.' I'll try to respect that preference. Like I said, Molly is complicated to talk about, but I respect her courage and ability to absolutely throw down on the cross bike. Anyhow, Molly was setting a personal best for Personal Worst at Zolder last week. Since the legs totally weren't coming around, and she was in dead last, she snagged a beer handup, swigged a little, and drove the fans absolutely batshit wild. Now some people approach racing with a real sense of total purity. I think some of that is appropriate, but you have to respect an elite racer who can bring the fun, and when you're sitting in DFL... it isn't hurting anybody. There's a time and place, and Molly judged it right IMAO, and maybe the Cross Gods smiled as a result. Molly finished 25th in Middelkerke.

- Want to read an article that will uplift your spirits so hard that it will squeeze water out of your eyes? Check out this story about a football team that played against the team from Juvie Hall. You have to read it to believe it. The story reminded me about the value of good sportsmanship. When you can be gracious to fellow competitors, you should be. You have no idea what kind of wonderful effect it may have on them.

- Can you smell what David Kirkpatrick and NCVC have got cooking? It looks like a hell of a new road race.

- Congrats to reader and regular commenter Big Mike. He's finishing up his doctorate in physics, and will now spend the rest of his life teaching ungrateful kids how to... um... I'm not sure. I flunked out of engineering school and as far as I can tell, physics education is what they have you do in gym class. Anyhow, good on ya Mike.

The Style of Carbon Wheels for Cross

A local roadracer emails the local roadracing listserve the following information:

From:
To: mabra-uscf
Subject: FS: Non-dimpled Zipp 404's; Tubular; Shimano - $500

These wheels are too good for me. I can't even look directly at them, I'm so ashamed of my weak legs. Please, someone take them away from me and end the maddening torment that confronts me every time I hop on the trainer with these carbon beauties hanging directly in front of me, taunting me, laughing at my chicken legs.

(They've seen a couple races and no crashes. Rims are in great shape, hubs have new bearings, and the wheels are as true as my reasons for selling them) Contact me if interested in buying or seeing the wheels, located in ______.

Wow, great price on the wheels. I guess the seller upgraded to Cat 3 and realized, with horror, the error of his ways.

Not one to miss an opporunity, Teammate of the Rouleur KenBob sent the following message to the club listserve:

Would be good 'cross wheels.

Well yes, perhaps, but the combination of carbon tubulars, Zipps in fact, discount pricing and melding with 'cross is incongruous, simply unacceptable, if a rider wants to do it with style.

Yes, that's right. You heard me. You can't go buying discount carbon tubulars for 'cross. It's just not done.

Running carbon rims in cross is like being in a family with a major history of heart disease and eating lunch at Five Guys every day. No offense there, Verne, but you're not risking disaster or even courting it; instead you've got a hand on it's knee, moving upwards, and you're thinking about its daddy's shotgun. You are going to break the damn wheels.

This fact, this ineluctable fate, dictates how you must handle the running, rocking or other employment of 'cross wheels. Did the diggers go over their top and meet their end at Gallipoli whinging and whining? Did the Kamikazes head back to base for a bit more mild green tea before making a fatal plunge? Did you really wear white shoes and a seersucker suit a week after labor day? Of course not.

Style and manliness dictates you handle things in a certain way. To look for discount carbon tubular wheelsets for 'cross cheapens the things, kind of like getting drunk before a duel.

Truly, if you have to ask how much they cost you shouldn't be running them in 'cross. The attraction of carbon fiber wheels in 'cross is the dire financial consequence of destroying them - an event almost certain to occur thanks to the completely inexplicable presence of rocks, bumps, transitional surfaces, wooden barriers, roots and first turn crashes in cyclocross racing.

Showing cost-consciousness in your purchase of carbon wheels for 'cross is akin to asking your friends if they think your significant other may be cheating on you. The only thing more un-stylish and unsightly than the fact that such a disaster may be occurring, is publicly discussing your worries about it.

No, the proper way to rock carbon wheels in 'cross is to have a $3000 set of the wicked light Campy wheels, and to ride them with devil-may-care aplomb. If you have them, you simply must flaunt them. You should go looking for opportunities to catch big air mid-race. Post race, you should initiate an impromptu roller derby and put up a hundred of your own money for the winner, or at least have an impromptu bump drill with an arch rival. You should take your 'cross bike mountain biking at the Watershed, or at least at Patapsco. Build a half pipe in your back yard and start a new sport - X-treeeeem-O-cross. See if it's true that the Zipp Clydesdales really are bulletproof, and shoot them, with a .460 Weatherby.

Even thinking about buying a pair of lightly used, heavily discounted Zipps is unthinkable.

A chap in the B race at Wissahickon last year showed us all how to do it. He converted his front carbon wheel - I think it may have been a Ritchey - into a square shape in the first turn. He then sprinted into the pits carrying the bike and hopped on an identically equipped bike and rode halfway around. When he came around his "A" bike was ready, with a new carbon wheel. He snatched it on the way through the pit and flung it under himself rather heavily at the top of the runup, not even blinking at the $700+ loss he'd just suffered. This perfectly demonstrated how to rock these tragically light wheels - with gusto and fearlessness. My teammate Dave B. is another example; he rides a set of carbon wheels that he openly hopes will break. Dave, I applaud you.

So while I wish this seller the best of luck in selling this wheelset, I cannot countenance the idea of purchasing them to be a 'cross wheelset.

No, if you're interested in carbon Zipps or any other carbon wheelset for 'cross, I suggest you look into paying full retail, preferably at one of the Squadra's bike shop sponsors like Contes of Arlington or Bikeman, or at my friend Jon's shop. Anything less is a fashion crime, and will not be tolerated.

Water Bottles: Spiked Egg Nog Edition

I watched Godzilla 2000 with my 5 year old son today. He really liked it and kept saying he hoped Godzilla didn't get killed. The boy has a thing for lizards and snakes. But here's my question: What's up with Godzilla and sparks? He doesn't really do explosions, but everywhere he goes he's running into high tension lines, stomping on power plants, and generally throwing off more sparks than a dude trying to arcweld a bunch of July 4th sparklers while walking around in a steel foundry. It's not just Godzilla 2000 with its luddite / enviro themes, but every Gojira movie has been that way since the start. Being his rubber glove and safety boot supplier must be a tough job, tough but lucrative.

We also watched Star Wars (Episode IV) for the first time tonight. The kid was amped by that. I'd forgotten how magical that film was when it came out during the summer of my eleventh year.

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Here's one for my friend Gwadzilla. Not exactly the D.C. scene but I think he'll like it - it's Public Image Limited, Johnny (Rotten) Lydon's 'next' band. Any of you guys post-punk / hardcore fans? DKs, Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, that stuff? I suspect a few of you older Gen X'ers know what I'm talking about, and I also suspect BettyBetty knows exactly what I'm talking about and is now scared of me.



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While I'm on the subject of post-punk and hardcore, here is the wrongest music video of all time. It's The Dead Kennedy's, Rawhide, with an all-midget cast and a western theme. It's not good, just so, so wrong.



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Okay, after inflicting that bit of leftover juvenalia on you, I feel obligated to show you to some good tunes. Here's a jam featuring Les Claypool, Buckethead and Bernie Worrell. It's guaranteed to put funk in your trunk, or double your money back. I like Les because he's a great, innovative slapping bass player, for one thing; plus he plays well in a number of genres, from metal-ish (Primus), to alt country, to straight up funk and jazz. Amazing musician, very creative artist, and serious fisherman.



If your trunk is still short on funk, check out a little more Les Claypool here, here, or especially here.

The Rig, Pt II: Drivetrains and Fenders

Merry Christmas to my Christian friends; Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends; and may your virgin sacrifices be pleasant for my idolatrous pagan friends who are enjoying Saturnalia and celebrating the Solstice.

Sorry this is late. I've been busy at home (getting hammered and giving gifts) and at work (where I'm screwed, screwed, screwed under a dung-mountain of work) and it's taken a while to improve this post to the point where it is merely reasonably bad.

In Pt. I, I argued that your Rig need not be a fancy schmancy ueber lightweight race bike. Any comfortable, durable frame you don't mind beating up will work just fine. The folks weighing in via email about their Rigs made it clear that there is something like a consensus on this. You're better off with heavy, over-engineered, older, rugged Rig, than with light, narrow focus, new and slightly fragile state-of-the-art race bikes. Greyhounds to go fast in the summer; hairy sled dogs to go fast in the winter.

The same thing is true of components. Reliable and durable takes the cake; subtlety and the last 10% of high performance, is the icing on the cake when you are in a race or showing off at the local coffee shop. It isn't impressive on a Rig you're going to beat the heck out of in bad weather training.

Drivetrain

The drivetrain strikes me as the most delicate part of any modern bike, at least operationally speaking. Although you can seriously damage a "fragile" carbon fiber frame by dropping a sharp edged bit of metal on it, or snap it in a race, few people do just that, so it's not a common type of failure. On the other hand, most people experience drivetrain problems of varying magnitude on a regular basis, whether it's shifting problems from stretched or gummed up derailers, more shifting problems from worn cogs or dirty cables, or busting the rear derailer off or simply having the derailers freezing. These are normal drivetrain ailments.

This is a problem if you're doing the typical off-season long distance training rides in adverse weather, on roads that have been salted or gritted. The risk of equipment malfunction is always there when you're doing long rides from home. The likeliehood increases, however, along with the penalties for equipment failure, when you add water, road salt, grit, and severe cold weather into the equation. Bust a chain in 70 degree or even 90 degree weather a couple miles from home, and you're in for a walk, some discomfort, and maybe the Call of Shame. Bust a chain in 20 degree weather, 35 miles up into the hills past Charlottesville, and you could die of exposure. The stakes are higher. Reliability is at a premium when you're doing things in bad weather.

If you're going to train seriously outdoors in winter, the drivetrain on your Rig should be more robust than your regular 10 (or heaven forefend) skinny 11 speed drivetrain.

There's no reason you can't use the latest and greatest gear - it's plenty reliable most of the time. Think though. A 10 or in Campy's case 11 speed chain is going to be thinner and weaker than a 9, 8 or fewer speed chain. It's not a bug it's a feature - that's how you fit so many cogs into the 130mm of space available in the rear of a typical road frame. That skinny chain is lighter than bigger chains, which is nice for racing acceleration and climbing. Unfortunately, it's also more prone to breakage. The twist from crossover is one culprit, sudden shocks from ghost shifting or hard shifts under heavy pressure on hills and in sprints can do it. I am the master of snapped chains; I think I've broken 5 or 6 in the past two years. Skinny chains also seem to just wear out quicker. Along with the chain concerns of a 10 speed, you also have to worry about the derailer or the somewhat delicate integrated shift levers getting gummed up. With complexity, comes a greater range of things to go wrong. You want simple, pal. The simpler the better.

The first step toward simplicity and reliability is a 9 or 8 speed with integrated shifter. The chain is a little wider and heavier, the derailer adjustments don't have to be quite as precise, and the crossover on some models is incrementally less severe. That's a good option. I break 9 speed chains *less often* than I break 10 speed chains.

The next step in the direction of rugged simplicity is friction shifters. Bar end or downtube friction shifters are wonderful things. They aren't perfectly foolproof, and nothing can be made damnfoolproof, but they are pretty close, especially the non-indexed shifter. They have some downsides. They do not shift as fast as STIs unless you are well practiced. The downtube version can be harder to reach if you're doing a standing climb. But they are wicked reliable and much lighter than integrated shifters. Yes, you still have to rely on a goofy rear derailer and a whole bunch of gears, and if that derailer gets some water splashed in it on a really cold day with falling temps, it will still freeze up. But you've eliminated a couple possible failure point and if something does go wrong, they are reliable and easily fixed if something goes wrong.

The next next best option is to rock a singlespeed or fixed gear, or in a perfect world, or at least one where people have access to the Surly line of simple hubs through Quality Bike Products, a bike with a flip-flop hub. The downside to rocking a fixed gear is that it sucks for serious climbing because you're going to be chronically over-geared, until you start going downhill, when the opposite problem arises. It also sucks for serious descending If you're hitting Thurmont, it is going to be one long muscular endurance ride, until it's one long extremely high cadence ride. No offense meant, but unless you are a strong elite level cyclist, if you ride at normal intensity you're going to be so popped after 30 miles that you want to die. The other upside to that is that you can get great training value out of a two hour ride. So it's a tradeoff. The flip-flop hub is a nice option if you're going to be doing serious climbs and going a long way from home. It allows you to flip the wheel around and freewheel down the big hill, after stopping at the top, loosening the rear axle nuts with your trusty Surly Jethro Tule, and flipping the wheel around. Again, there's another other downside. Until you are practiced at it, you'll get a little cold and get dirty fingers when you stop to flip. The concurrent, other other other upside is you can smugly remind yourself that you're following in the cold, shivering, cursing-Henri-Desgrange footsteps of Fausto Coppi, Alfredo Binda, and a thousand other great fixed-gear-riding champions who were dead before you were born. Very hard core, very old school. Very, very reliable.

So those are the drivetrain options. Which one you choose depends entirely on your preferences. For me - based on the drivetrain disasters I've had in races and training the last few years - several busted chains, a busted front and rear derailer, a couple shattered chainrings (not like I'm going to do stomps on these rides, but just worth a mention) - I should be looking for a $75 old 8 or 7 speed with downtube shifters and tuning it up. And doing winter training on the fixie, a comfortable Surly Cross Check rigged with an 8 speed mountain bike chain, looks better and better to me all the time.

Fenders

I have a fender fetish. I'll admit it. It's not just about having a dry @55 and a dry face though. It's about faithfulness to the style inherent in high functioning gear. While prettyness has a certain style to it, and is more immediately pleasing, an aesthetic based around high performance has an attractiveness of its own. Functional excellence has some appeal out of the box, and it gains a fine patina with age; whereas merely pretty things tend to start fairly spectacularly but dull with time. Objecting to fenders on aesthetic grounds is like ditching your well-stocked small or medium tail bag in favor of a small flat wallet in order to look more like a pro. It is a great idea, until you bust a chain or bend a wheel 40 miles from home, and calling for Bjarne or the neutral wheel van, neither of which appears to save you with your spare bike and wheelset. There you are on the roadside, looking, ahem, cool, as you hike to the nearest Qwick-e-Mart with your oh-so-aesthetic tailbag-free roadbike. As you are walking, if you are introspective at all, you may realize that your slavish devotion to high fashion was actually kind of stupid.

Pros ride without tail bags because neutral support or the team car is only 10 seconds behind them at all times. It's a real Cat 4 type of maneuver to sacrifice the ability to get home under all the circumstances, in order to look good to other Cat 4s. Just because you race Cat 4, doesn't mean you have to act like a Cat 4 in all things.

Fenders are in the same category as tail bags. You know why pros don't rock fenders? Because when you see pros, they are only in races on TV. It's one less thing to break, makes the bike marginally faster, and when they get off the bike there are hot drinks from the team bus, dry clothes, masseuses, doctors, and food waiting for them. Unless you are incredibly lucky, or you have a really gullible significant other who was born with the Soigneur Gene - a variant of the co-dependent/enabler gene - there's no way you're getting this treatment. Moreover, if you like to the very top of this page, you'll see something on Lars Michaelson's Team CSC bike. Why, it's my friend fenders! Yes! A lot of pros actually train with fenders. You know why? Because they aren't stupid. You should consider not being stupid too. There's a lot to be said for not being stupid.

I've tried several kinds of fenders in the last couple years. The best kind are... whatever works best for you under your particular circumstances. As a general principle, the more coverage they have, the happier you will be, and the more coverage and the happier you are, the more likely that the fenders were a bit of a PITA to install and tune in. No surprise there - the better the fenders work, the more effort they were to fit. Note the CSC water bottle mud-flaps on Michaelson's bike above. That is a courteous hack right there friends; he isn't throwing *any* water into Jens Voigt's face, which is both polite and a good survival tactic if you're regularly racing with Jens; a survival trick in the same genre as "don't poke bear with stick" and "Warning, lions: do not put arm in cage." Here's the lowdown on different styles of fenders that I have tried.

The most basic kind of fender is the mountain bike style of clip-on fender. The benefits are really easy installation, very low cost, ruggedness, and basic protection from water and grit. If you picture a wheel as a clock, most of the water sluices off between about 11 O'clock and 1 O'clock, with the real concentration at 11 to 12. Some water and grit is going to splatter your feet, face, and the front part of your drivetrain, and a lot is going to splatter anybody riding on your wheel in the rear. Your rear and chest will stay fairly dry, but you're not going to make any new friends on a group ride. Your mileage may vary, but my thought is these are mainly okay if you're training alone, won't be out too long, or where you are riding off road and the stuff thrown up is heavy (like mud) or flying up at lower speed, and therefore less likely to get big air blast your face.

The next step up in coverage are the clip-on road fenders. These install pretty easily and provide decent coverage, and they are moderately priced. The downsides are that the coverage, while reasonable, is not perfect, and they can be a little tricky to bring into perfect alignment with your wheels. Hearing "rubrubrubrub" halfway through the ride after you hit a little bump is not uncommon with these. It's no big deal, you just slid their rubber band-like mounts around a little bit to adjust them; but it's one more little hassle to cope with. They may also be limited to 700x23 or 700x25 width, so pay careful attention to the specs when you are buying them. They provide good coverage from about 9 to 12 O'clock, so you will get some spray coming up into your face on the front wheel when your speed starts to go up. A pretty good alternative though, if you are using your normal, non-eyeleted road bike for bad weather training.

Bolt-on clip-ons are the next step up. If you are using a cross bike, or an older road bike that has plenty of seat stay and fork clearance, along with holes for center mount brakes, the Planet Bike clip-ons, which aren't actually true clip-ons, are a pretty good option. They are inexpensive and offer good coverage, from about 9 to about 12:30 on the front, but only from 10 to 1 on the rear. They are sturdy and wide, with most models accepting up to 700x45 tires, and holding their position well once installed. The disadvantage is that they are sort of wide and won't fit on bikes with very limited seatstay and fork clearance, and the front fender is also a little bit shorter than it might be, allowing a bit of face spray, while the back is only a bit better than plain old blades, letting your wheelsucking friends enjoy a cool schpritz. These are the ones I rock on my fixed gear and I'm very happy with them - though I may be riveting on a cut up water bottle on both the front and rear to cut down on the last 15% of water spray.

The final option are the full-sized, bolt-on fenders. It helps to have eyelets, but they aren't completely necessary since some clever guy on the internet came up with a simple hack to help you mount full fenders to your non-eyeletted Rig. These are the best option, IMAO, because they mount up solidly, stay in place once properly adjusted, and give great spray protection from about 8 O'Clock to about 1. The downside to these is they can be a little more expensive than the very basic fenders, they are a bit of a PITA to install and get properly adjusted, and you need to have sufficient fork and seatstay clearance to install them. If your bike doesn't take tires a millimeter over 700x23, these probably won't be an option. Once installed, they are very nice, and you will stay surprisingly dry even on fairly rainy days. The degree to which tire spray causes you to be wet and cold is truly surprising, and only really understood once you've ridden with full fenders. I ran the set below on my Giant OCR for two years and really truly enjoyed them - most of all when I popped the wheels off and hose them out, and watch rivulets of mud drip off the fenders, rather than my drivetrain or my kit or face.

So enough about fenders and drivetrains. Like everything else, this is my opinion about what works for me. What works for you? And do we have any really strong anti-fender or pro-11 speed opinions out there?

Pt. I of The Rig, here.

Friday Night Drink Specials

To help you recover from the epic post about Rigs, Pt. I, I'll tell you about what I'm drinking tonight.

Tonight I'm drinking my Facedown Martini.

What's a Facedown Martini, you ask?

You start with a big sized shaker like I have. The cap on top of the shaker holds, no bullshit, about 2-2.5 normal shots. I think it's big so that drunks can pour liquor into it without missing too badly.

You put some ice in the bottom of the shaker. It's a big shaker, but don't overdo it on the ice there Admiral Perry.

I like my martinis about 5:1, with a couple green olives in 'em. Stirred is better than shaken, but I'm in the ManCave tonight, and damned if I'm walking upstairs to get me a spoon. Stirring doesn't bruise the gin, which I guess is a consideration if you're on the Tanqueray or the Bombay Sapphire or some other delicate flower of juniper-inspired rotgut.

Me, I'm on the Beefeater tonight, which is a damn good gin, but it's like God's own diaphonous straight razor to clean the muck out of your mouth and your throat. It's real good at getting the bad taste from your mouth if you just spent the week litigation footsoldiering with the 82nd Chairborne, as I just did after several years mercifully removed from that scene. Beefeater is really sublime in a gin & tonic; it's a bit too broad-shouldered, too Carl Sandburg, for a good martini, but it's all I got right now. Like beef, it's what's for dinner, so that's what I'll use.

Now you put some ice into the shaker.

Because I'm a jackass and went to lawschool to avoid doing math (cue Malibu Barbie: "Math is hard...") I'm not going to do the delicate calculations required to figure out how much vermouth is required to produce a 5:1 ratio when opposing two shots of gin.

No, because I'm a jackass, I'm pouring 5 of those stout shots of gin into the shaker, and 1 shot of dry Vermouth. Yeah, we're going top drawer tonight with the Martini & Rossi. Going top drawer with Vermouth is like asking the barkeep, "Give me a mug of your best draft Schlitz." Frankly Vermouth is a bit of a broken down whore when it comes to martinis. People do drink Vermouth, but they are like absinthe drinkers, without the tasty booze, the high class bohemianism, and the opioid addiction. But it's not about the Vermouth. The martini is all about the gin. What the hell Vermouth is even doing in the drink is a little beyond my kenning, but that's how you make a martini so that's what I'll do.

If you skip the vermouth in your martini, it's probably a signal that you're an alcoholic and so desparate that you are okay with pounding big glasses of straight gin. So I'll put the Vermouth in, in some ratio. Some people like a 9:1 or 12:1 martini. That's where you take the Vermouth, wave it in front of the glass, yell "PSYCH!" at the gin, and then slam whatever's in the glass. 12:1 is a little too dry for my tastes. I still think 12:1 is a feasible argument that you're drinking a martini, at least as feasible if not more feasible than the Straight Martini, which involves drinking the gin straight from the bottle before you get to the cash register at the liquor store. Yep, some people love 'em a 12:1 or similarly dry mix.

But not me, I'm a 5:1 man, which is medium-ish. Plus I've got the big shaker, and a bad case of innumeracy and have trouble even counting to 12. So in go 5 shots of Beefeater, the number 5 is easily counted on my bare foot which I have on the desk in front of me as I write this. That's followed shortly thereafter by a single shot of Vermouth.

Gently shake the mixture. You don't want it really shaken. James Bond is an asshole. If you go and shake a bunch of gin real hard while it's in a bucket of ice, you're probably the kind of guy who shakes your baby, and slaps your wife around just on just for fun. Gin is delicate, alright? It's a flowery drink. So you stir it, the little flower. It's frail. Which is a pretty weird characteristic for a drink that was the 19th century equivalent of Mad Dog mixed with crack, causing one wave after another of ridiculous social problems in the England of that era... but there you go.

After a couple seconds of very mild shaking, you stop shaking. It's better if you never shook but stirred, but like I said, it's 11 steps to the upstairs and I'm boycotting the stairs for now. When you're done shaking, pour some out into a glass.

Now it just so happens that I have these 10 ounce frickin' Margarita / Martini glasses that I got from Ikea for a buck a piece, or maybe 99 cents. It doesn't really matter how much they cost, that price difference, unless you're buying a couple thousand of them or something, just isn't relevant. The salient point about these glasses is that they are big, they have the appropriate triangular sort of shape on top of a long stem and small round base, and they are stout. Stout enough to withstand getting damn near dropped on the coffee table. They are a serious drunk's martini glass.

After you pour the glass to about 93% full, drop a couple green olives in. Now I go with the green olives because that's just how I roll. Some people like those tiny little cocktail onions. I'm cool with that, but these cocktail onion people... man, they just can't leave it alone. It's like a religious thing or something. An olives-in-the-martini guy will just talk about martinis. It's implicit that martini = martini with an olive or two, no big thing. It's like getting cheese and tomato sauce on a pizza. Okay, there's such a thing as White Pizza, but it isn't really pizza 'cuz there's no sauce and thus it isn't really pizza, so the name's different. To us, a martini has an olive, and if it doesn't, it should have a special name reflecting that fact, like, "olive-free martini."

Wait, did I just write, "free martini?"

Okay, thanks. Don't mind if I do.

Where were we? Oh yes, the onion people... they can't help themselves. They're like PeeWee Herman in the adult theater, skulking around furtively. You say, "I'd kill for a good martini" and they seem to be required to say, "I love a martini with onions." They are the kind of people who get upset about white pizza being called white pizza. They'll tell you this too.

At this point you can just look at them and send a telepathic message, "Shut the fuck up about the onions before I kill you." Right about then they say, "Ever had a martini with onions? Damn, it's good." At this point, you're free to take up bourbon drinking. If you really need to shut them up you can take a small jar full of cocktail onions, gently soak it in warm water for 15 minutes, then cram it down their onion-lovin' throat.

Whoa. That was an epic digression. Now where was I again? Oh yeah, pouring the drink. You pour it into the big-ass glass, sit at the computer, and tell your friends about it. Watch out - you don't want to spill any of it. Granted, with a 5:1 ratio of gin, any you spill will evaporate pretty quickly. And it's not like you're going to notice. But you don't want to stink like gin the next day and give people the (probably correct) impression that you are a drunk.

The first few sips will be pretty raw. You didn't shake much (right?) so there isn't a lot of water in the drink. The flavor of the olives hasn't really infused the drink (Have you tried it with onions? A martini with onions totally kicks ass man! I'm telling you. It...) so it's a bit raw on that count too. You can really truly taste the gin. (Hope you didn't use Gordons here... that stuff is really kind of nasty).

After the first couple sips, your lips go pleasantly numb. You can check in a mirror and notice your lips are still there. But mentally they're in Ipanema, dancing with a local girl who is wearing a fruit basket for a hat and nothing else.

About two thirds of the way through the glass, the drink will become inexplicably smooth. Actually, it's pretty explicable; you've drunk 6 ounces of gin in about 10 minutes, and your taste buds just shot out your ears along with your good judgment. As it warms, you'll notice the taste of liquorice. That taste is either coming from the Vermouth, or from your medium hot Quoleum embrocation, which you are spooning into your mouth like peanut butter.

You get down to the bottom of the glass, munch on the olives and pause for a second. You realize, life is pretty damn good. You chuck out the pits, and take a peek in the shaker. Holy schmoley, it looks like there's a whole 'nother glass of martini in that shaker. This one is lightly watered thanks to your modest dosing of ice, and it promises to go down real, real easy.

And this is the point where I'm going to retire from martini blogging for the evening while I'm still capable of typing. Seriously - fingies are numb, lips are numb, brain is slowly disengaging.

As I'm passing from semi-functional into oblivion, it occurs to me that the legendary three martini lunch explains a lot of the things that went down in this country in the 50s and 60's. A lot of things that rate as clinically insane probably seemed like good ideas after the second or third martini.

And there we are. That's what my famous Facedown Martini is all about. In case you wondered, I enjoy having guests over for Martini Night from time to time. It's not really Martini Night until somebody is sitting in the rocking chair, snoring as if they were suffering from a grade 3 concussion. That's going to be me in about 5 minutes. Right after I finish this next one.

The Rig, Part I

It's that time of year again. Nobody ever summed it up better than that crazy, brilliant, fascist-sympathizing, completely off-his-f***ing-rocker lardassed lunatic, Ezra Pound:

Ancient Musik
by Ezra Pound (No relation to Dick)

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,

Freezeth river, turneth liver,
An ague hath my ham.
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Yep. Winter is icumen in. That can only mean one thing to the dedicated road cyclist. It's time to break out The Rig. The winter training Rig that is.

I'm going to do a short series of entries on what comprises a Rig, how to build it up (if you're building) or what to look for on a Rig. I'll share a few hacks I've figured out, and I hope you will contribute as well. If you have some comments, leave them below; if you have pictures or more detailed discussions about what needs to go into or on a Rig, drop me a line in email. My address is on my blogspot profile over yonder a piece on the right side of this here blog.

A Rig isn't your ordinary fluffy race bike with fenders on it. No, it's special.

What is The Rig? It's that rugged bike you keep around to keep you company on long, cold winter rides when you're struggling to build - or merely maintain - some basic level of fitness despite the short days, long hours of work, family commitments, cold and precipitation. It's a trusted companion that will get you up the mountains and over the over side, then back again in spite of freezing sleet that starts icing up your bad self along with and frailer running gear. It's a bike that will keep running, even when other more delicate road bikes are starting to freeze up and fail you. It's your daily pal that you treat worse than you should ever treat a friend. It won't complain if a washdown means hitting it with a semi-frozen spray of water once or twice a week, and if "detailing" means squirting WD-40 on the chain, wiping it clean, and using the back of your glove to wipe the mud and ice off the seat. And on those days when you can't get outside to frolic in the road grit, salt, high wind, and occasional patches of black ice, it's cool with you strapping it to a trainer and riding hard, which is the most abusive thing you could ever do to a bike other than sell it to me or maybe Joel Gwadz. The Rig doesn't care if you're fat ass is sitting there in front of the TV watching The Burning Bed on Lifetime, weeping and drenching the headset with bitter tears and sweat while you do L3 intervals.

It won't let you down because it's rugged, it's unpretencious, and it's got nothing to prove to anybody. It's just a damn bike but it's the only way you're going to be able to make enough deposits in the pain bank to buy yourself some decent finishes next spring and summer.

Fancy dancey little French poodles of bikes need not apply. Yes, you can doll up your Pinarello Prince to pass for a Rig, with little strap-on accessories like Knog lights and strap-on fenders and so forth, but we all know that other than a particularly well-made brand of tools, strap-on accessories are a poor substitute for the real thing. Yes, I'm talking about fenders that bolt on. A rig usually has places you can screw things, like eyelets on the forks and rear dropouts and seat stays. Things like fenders, and maybe even a rack. It might have braze-ons for three water bottles; not like you'll need them in these temps though. The seat might well have some brass brackets on the bottom side that facilitate mounting a really large tailpack, perhaps a Carradice bag or even a rack if you commute on it as part of your training - or train as part of your commute. It could even come with a little protrusion from the handlebars that is nice for mounting a set of lights. The Rig is built to handle some accessories.

The Rig isn't skinny either. A Scott Addict could never be a Rig. But an old steel Ross that originally retailed for $279 at Sears could if it's got a decent saddle and pedals on it. An ancient Colnago can become a Rig, with the proper modifications, but a nice carbon Colnago Extreme Power with the pretty blue, yellow and white paint job can only look on its great uncle with admiration and awe.

The Rig doesn't care that it's heavy. The Rig knows that it needs to be stout to stand up to the inevitable low-side crashes, the load of accessories, and the occasional surprise hunk of road debris or pothole that would crack a lesser bike's frame. The Rig also knows that when it gets put away in favor of the 12 pounds lighter Wunderbike, that you will feel much stronger as a result of pushing the Rig's weight up and down the mountains. In its dinged up, rusty, salty, scratched self, it is comfortable. It will miss you but it knows you will be back; you'll come back after next season in your time of need, when you know the lesser bikes will fail you. Until then it will sit in your attic, your shed, or out in the rain waiting. A little water and a little rust doesn't bother the Rig. In fact, the only thing that bothers it if is you don't ride the damn thing.

I come to praise The Rig, not to bury it.

There are two approaches to The Rig. You can buy a rugged, pre-built (overbuilt) utility road bike and add a few accessories to turn it into a rig. Or you can run what you brung and convert an old bike on hand - or near at hand on Craigslist or your LBS - into a Rig.

The key considerations for The Rig are availability (this ain't no $8500 exercise, pal), ruggedness, the ability to fit accessories, reliability, and an understanding that this bike may be lovely but it is going to get systematically destroyed, sacrificed so that you can do the stupidest thing possible with it, ride through the winter.

The Rig: Bike Options

Good new bike options for The Rig are utility 'cross bikes like the Surly Cross Check or the touring Long Haul Trucker, the Soma Double Cross; and the Salsa La Cruz. Fitted out these will run you $1000 - $1500 which is probably a bit steep for a Rig, but if you commute year-round or do a lot of dirt road rides, they can be useful. The higher end pure racing cross bikes can sort of be fitted as rigs, as many of them have useful eyelets and such, but they are more fragile race machines, not as suited for constant heavy beating as the utility bikes, and really, do you want to known as That Guy Who Jury Rigged a Cargo Rack to an Empella Carbon SL? Don't be that guy; do go for a rugged, economical, versatile options.

Good used bike options include older rugged road bikes (e.g. Cannondale Criterium, Raleigh Technium, a Schwinn Varsity, a Fuji Dynamic, a Bridgestone XO-1, Fuji S-12 touring bike... you name it. If it's older, more heavily built, has a gruppo on it that you don't mind destroying with road salt (such as 105s, or something with reliable downtube shifting) it will be perfect. I would recommend something with relaxed geometry - a touring or cross frame, or "traditional road geometry" with slightly higher bars than your race bike. You'll be bundled up, trundling along, and not super flexible; plus it pays to be very comfortable when you ride at this time of year. Every bit of effort adds up, and you want get the most mileage out of your energy reserves, not burn them up fighting with an uncomfortable machine. If you don't have one of these older, rugged used bikes around you can hit up Craigslist (they don't sell fast usually) or your local bike shop and pick one up for anything from $50 to $250 dollars, depending on the quality, age and condition of the bike, and market conditions on the day you are looking.

I recommend against building up a mountain bike as your winter trainer. Based on my limited experience commuting on a mountain bike, they aren't comfortable over long distances with steady pedaling. And you are going to go long, right?

We'll discuss drivetrain, brakes, and accessories in other posts.

Tires

Tires are the next consideration, and we can touch on them just briefly thanks to the excellent work by the GamJams network in evaluating winter training tires. Go here, and follow the linkage. You want a training tire for The Rig. There is a lot of gravel, busted glass, bits of wire, staples and other debris that accumulates on the side of the road during the winter. You are also going to be doing your base miles training, logging some big miles. You need tough, flat-resistant tires that are also durable over the long run.

On the Surly, I'm partial to fat (700 x 27 - 32) touring-style tires like Continental Contacts, Specialized Armadillo All-Conditions, or comparable thick tires with a mild tread pattern. They have relatively low-ish rolling resistance for such fat tires, but they are also thick, puncture-resistant, and durable. There's a lot of crap on the shoulders of the roads in winter and frost heaves bust up the surface, and there are more expansion joints and potholes to deal with.

For bikes with narrower clearances, a 700x25 tire is good. The gold standard in pure winter tires is probably the Specialized Armadillo, but be advised, like most tough tires it has crummy traction when it's wet. The Continental Gatorskin is a bit better, and is light and offers low rolling resistance but without the extreme "f*** you broken glass!" attitude offered by Armadillos. The benefit to Gatorskins is that if the weather is dry out, they are a perfectly decent-handling tire, and the kevlar-belted (folding) version is particularly nice riding and race tire light. There are a lot of other options in the cheap, durable training tire realm, and you should check them out.

If you're rocking tubulars, there are a lot of stout tires sold as "training tires." Many of them probably work fine, but I'm actually familiar with the Tufo S22 and S33. Both have thick rubber and a nicer ride than even the best clinchers, and although I've never tried them the Continental Gatorskin tubulars look like a fascinating possibility. Tubies are indeed wonderful; that smooth ride makes even the longest, most boring training rides a lot more pleasurable, or at least a lot less painful. Just make sure you're packing a spare tubie or some Vittoria Pit Stop or comparable sealant - you don't want to get stuck out in the cold, miles from cell phone coverage, on a bike that is unrideable.

Tomorrow or the next day: Drivetrains, and Fenders

And who hasn't heard this...

You Spent HOW MUCH on those wheels?
They're just wheels! Carbon isn't even a metal, it's just burnt wood. And furthermore...





Stolen from here, h/t to this guy. I can't stress enough that neither of those guys is safe to click on if you're at work. Unless you work in a particularly downscale brothel, anyhow. Proving it sometimes pays to click through to Hoovis, even if website leaves porny little cookies and other embarassing web content in your cache.

Water Bottles: Fermenting Accellerade Edition

It's been warm enough out the last couple days to ride in shortsleeves, without knee warmers. Amazing - probably the last great road riding day of 2008. The highlights were not crashing going into the parking garage, not getting curbed in Georgetown, and feeling so exuberant that I hammered the fixed gear up the Cap Crescent at enough pace to be spun out the whole way up. With rain socking in the D.C. area there won't be much riding until we're closer to the weekend. Riskus tells me I passed his wife at some point in front of the White House, but unfortunately I was too busy dodging new construction of the grandstand and bleachers for inauguration to be paying attention to the pedestrians, no matter how comely and gracious they may be. On the way home, some NCVC guy downbound on the Cap Crescent yelled at me as I passed about my lights being too bright.

I guess you could take that as a strong endorsement of the Cateye Double Shot: "Cateye, buy it because it's TOO BRIGHT!!!"

I have the last generation Cateye Double Shot, which is still on sale and which is still a great light at a very good price. I've never discharged the battery completely, and have gotten 7-8 hours out of this light. It's a great light if you don't mind the very bright, harsh white LED glow.

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If you wear a tie, do yourself a favor and check out ToTieATie.com. They have investigated it out and found that mathematically, there are 85 ways to tie a tie. There are only about 20 which are aesthetically pleasing, and of the 20, I'd say there are only about 10 that look really, really good. They have easy-to-follow instructions for tying these knots.

My favorite? Probably the Cavendish. A large square knot that looks good with my spread collars, and it usually results in a stylish dimple down the middle of the tie.

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I'm getting ready to do a post on winter training rigs - rigging your bike so you can ride in bad bad weather. I'm down with fenders, old beater bikes, lights, fat tires, fixed gears you ride further than to the local Caribou Coffee, and all the stuff that makes winter riding not just possible, but a feasible training choice. If you have pictures of a bike that you have rigged for bad weather and you'd like your bike to be famous, send me a picture and if it fits the theme I'll use it. (You can get to my email address by the link to my profile below the links on the right). More importantly, if you have good ideas about how to winterize your bike or a unique idea about how to winterize yourself (wearing gloves and a baselayer doesn't count, we've discussed that before) then drop me a line. Most really smart bad weather riding tips are hacks, the kind of knowledge that needs to be shared because it doesn't come pre-packaged.

[Pause for the obligatory comment from Big Mike: "It's summer here in Oz. Just rode 50 miles this morning... got a sunburn..."]

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And, in other Smelly Hippie news... it seems that weeks of attempts to supress rioting in Greece by outraged utes - people pissed off at police shootings and encouraged to riot by the Greek communist party I'm guessing - have depleted that nation's supply of tear gas, and the Greek government has had to rely on a store of nearly 30 year old gas. This is causing some problems. Protestors claimed:

corroded chemicals were causing some demonstrators to collapse and need medical attention.

“We found tear gas canister dated from 1981,” said one demonstrator, calling himself only GK. “The old chemicals make us sick, people have fainted and have trouble breathing,” he said.

See? How many times have I told you that everything was better back in the old days. When I was a kid, just like our illicit drugs, our tear gas was stronger, it kicked ass, man! Even our hippies were tougher back then. They were worthy adversaries for the 1968 vintage Chicago P.D. I can't even see old Mayor Daley's bronze being willing to lift a finger to beat up on today's hippies; they just aren't worth the effort. Old hippies now working in accounting firms, investment banks, leading universities, politics and law firms must be cringing to see how soft today's modern streetfighters are. They're never going to pull off a violent revolution and establish a worker's paradise if a little bit of tear gas makes them fall down and cry and puke. Pathetic.

Observations

You can be really fat but have a modicum of fitness. Did an 'easy' ride today that was mostly pretty easy, a lot of steady grinding along, until Fatguy Racer left us. (He had to go race fat guys or something). A couple of the guys I was with started laying it down pretty good up St. Stephens Church Road, and I after 2 hours of L2/L3 riding, I didn't have much left. I thought. So I got gapped and Young Tom tried to drag me up, which he did successfully one time, but then we hit another hill and I just didn't have it. Pretty humiliating, right? Well, not exactly. In an effort to hold the tail end of the group I managed to average about 30 watts over threshold for about 15 minutes. If you take out the zeroes it's closer to 11-12 minutes at 100 watts over threshold, broken up over that same 15 minutes. I wasn't quite going all-out, but it was a stiff, stiff effort. So the basic riding form is recovering a bit after cross and there is a surprising amount of fitness left over, just not the kind I'm used to maybe. I'm still fat as f*** though which doesn't help. Fat + surprisingly fit = weird.

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The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are still hot. The NBC cameras are lingering on them just a little more than incidentally. They don't have the skank appeal that some other teams' squads have (I'm lookin' at you, Philly) but they have this wholesome thing going on - great teeth, big but not Long Island hair, fit but not "Um, actually, I preferred to be called a dancer" fit, cheerful without the wired skeletor grin that a lot of cheerleaders have, and none of them look like they were out doing blow until 4:00 AM today. It's either a good corporate culture with the Cowboyts that allows them to preserve one of their living trademark features that well, or there must be something in the water down there in Texas. Quite possibly both.

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The Redskins on the other hand... They got crushed by the Bengals today. Even a furious comeback - furious because it was halting and Dan Snyder was probably chewing through his tongue with anger - wasn't enough to save them, and the loss ended their playoff hopes. The franchise is a good example of an axiomatic principle in life and sports: if it's flashy it probably isn't that good. The Redskins have spent years and many needless draft picks chasing expensive free agent wide receivers and defensive backs, and occasional over-the-hill franchise defensive linemen with big names. When other General Managers see Vinny Cerrato coming, they must get the same tingling sensation that P.T. Barnum got, because the Redskins are about to trade away too much talent and too many draft picks, and pay too much money, to buy Somebody Else's Problem. You know where they haven't been spending draft picks or money? On offensive and defensive lineman. Their highest picked O-lineman is a #3 pick from 2004 or so who has been on the scout squad for a few years. He only slipped into the lineup this week because Chris Samuel is out for the season. But the Redskins did feel the need to burn four draft picks on wide receivers last year - none of whom contribute in any way, unless you count "contributing to the team's headaches by oversleeping and missing practice" as a contribution. Yes, the Redskins have gone for Shiny New Things. Meanwhile, the NY Giants, with a raft load of O and D linemen that they have drafted, are stomping all over a bunch of other teams. The lineman generally aren't shiny, they aren't pretty, and it isn't glamorous to burn draft picks on them. But the Giants have been winning fairly consistently for a lot of years; it just took their young quarterback figuring out a few things to turn them from a solid team into a very, very good one.

The lesson is clear. You want to ride better? Hold off on the 1200 gram wheelset and spend your money on gas driving to Thurmont to do hill repeats, the 30 minute kind; diet better; be stricter on yourself in adhering to rest / work cycles. Bling is shiny and nice to look at, but winning the war is about being solid where it counts. You only need one capstone on the pyramid, but it takes a hella big foundation to hold that thing up there.

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Kevin Dillard took some shots at Reston a couple weeks ago. His photographic observations are always good and worth checking out. He's the nicest guy, a strong rider, and a gifted photographer. His big gallery of velophotos is awesome. Here are some of my favorites from Reston:

"Enough of the negative waves, Moriarty;
It's a beauty-full tank."

Possibly the least credible gang sign evah.
Plus the blue & the red - that'll get both sides shooting at you.

Joel Gwadz giving Gunnar some lovin...
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course...

Joe J. trying to look menacing... Probably ought to lose
the hat with the floppy ears if that's the goal.

Trust the Gorton's Fisherman...
I can haz ur Hennepin alez?

Thanks for another great season of chronicling the races, Kevin.

Uh Oh... Guess This Means War

In other news, Iran - the country, not the usual comment you get from a triathlete in response to the question, "what did you do this morning?" - is angry about their portrayal in a new film. It seems that the new Mickey Rourke film, "The Wrestler," has a character called "The Ayatollah" who waves an Iranian flag around, and wrestles dirty. The Iranian government has lodged the strongest of possible protests about this negative portrayal of Iran, because, y'know, everybody takes professional wrestling seriously. Face it, when you need information about Iran, you go to the WWE website, or the website of some movie about professional wrestling, rather than the CIA World Factbook or other sketchy sources of made up, fictional information.

No word yet on whether the Saudi government is going to go to the U.N. over the antics of The Iron Sheikh, whether Scotland is set to officially protest Rowdy Roddy Piper, or whether People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is going to file suit over the anti-insecta animus evident in the name of Superfly Jimmy Snuka, or Andre the Giant's savage 1983 Tag Team Steel Cage Death Match beatdown over George "The Animal" Steele.

Feeding Your Animals Turnbuckle Padding:
Animal Abuse, or a Good Meal?

GamJams Reviews: Trainers and Rollers - Kurt Kinetic Rock & Roll

I've had the Kurt Kinetic Rock & Roll for about a year now. It's frickin' awesome.

As a big guy with pretty strong legs, stationary trainer time is generally painful for me. If you know how your butt feels after doing a 40k time trial, riveted to the seat, add about 25 or 30% to that and you'll understand what my large butt feels like. Same size seat, bigger dude, pretty big power, greater PSI on the bottom. Add into this the crummy feel, squirming butt (from a completely motionless platform) and unnatural pedaling sensation of most trainers, and you'll know exactly how I felt before upgrading to this machine.

The Rock & Roll is based on the Kurt Pro Trainer. The guts of the trainer is a fluid resistance unit with a standard 6 pound flywheel, and an additional 12 pound flywheel that attaches easily with the help of a counter-threaded screw. The normal 6 pound trim is good for intervals that require snappy acceleration, spin ups, or 10 seconds on / 10 seconds off efforts. With the full 18 pounds screwed on, this trainer is much better for longer duration intervals and steady state training (zone 2, tempo, or threshold intervals). The bigger weight is harder to get up to speed and the tire will slip if you attempt to stomp and accelerate quickly. But once it is up to speed you will swear it feels just like the road. The big weights give this puppy a 25 or 30 second spindown from 20 MPH. In preventing instant sharp acceleration, they also mimic road feel. You can't go zero-to-25 in two seconds on the road; nor can you on this trainer. There is no resistance setting on this trainer. The fluid resistance unit is progressive, and I find I'm putting out close to threshold watts at 22 MPH, maybe three or five lower MPH than threshold on a dead calm day at Hains Point. The resistance unit is almost eerily quiet.

Even without the Rock & Roll base, The Pro Trainer is a great trainer. In fact it's the model I initially purchased last fall because it felt better than the comparable Cycleops model, at least to me. It's a top-of-the-line trainer, great for the serious amateur or a pro.

But it still isn't flexible. That's where the Rock & Roll base comes in. The Rock & Roll base is a flexible mounting bracket for the resistance unit, and it features extra-wide stabilizing arms to keep the trainer steady. Calling this base a "mounting bracket" doesn't do it justice. It is a stack of rubber cushions squished between a stack of steel plates that permit the trainer to rock side to side, forward & back a little bit, and up & down. Properly adjusted, it isn't bouncy or tippy, just mildly flexible in three dimensions.

What this means is that it is bloody comfortable to ride. It is the only trainer I've ever ridden that didn't cause my butt to start going numb within 5 minutes. In fact, it seems to be cushier on the hindquarters than the road itself is. I have ridden as long as two hours on this trainer without a break, punctuated only by an occasional (once every 20 minutes) standing spell. Other than the excruciating boredom - sorry, that's true and nothing gets you around it - nothing bothered me about riding this for that length of time. I use it with a Powertap and get tremendous workouts on this thing. It's possible to ride a workout that produces a power chart that looks like the wall of a castle - just these level, symmetrical square teeth representing intervals. You simply can't do that consistent of a workout outdoors. It's also harder to do on lesser trainers that break your will quicker than they break your legs.

It's also easy to snap your bike into and out of the trainer, and it's very well built, stout. You will want to use a heavy old skewer with rounded ends to fit it in tightly, but even so, it needed be as tight as a regular trainer because the skewer/trainer interface isn't under as much stress due to the thing's flexibility.

That stoutness comment brings up the Rock & Roll's only weak point. This human hamster wheel is big and heavy. It's about 34 inches wide, and about twice as long as a normal trainer. It has to be, because you're leaning and maybe bobbing a little (though the bobbing tends to encourage a smoother pedal stroke ad stops once you get your mind, and legs right). It probably weighs around 45 pounds. The stabilizing arms do disconnect easily making it much smaller, and dropping the primary unit's weight to perhaps 30 pounds, but this is the kind of trainer you can realistically only use where you have space for a full size set of rollers. It isn't really a viable option to take to races for warmups, though if you're the kind of person who warms up at races on your Kreitlers, you won't have a problem with it. I keep a cheap older Performance trainer around for that task.

If you are looking to do hard and/or long indoor workouts regularly, you should probably be in the market for E-Motion rollers, Kreitlers with resistance fans, or this trainer. At around $500, the Rock & Roll is a good competitive option, and possibly the most economical option among the three when you take into account bang-for-the-buck. The high end rollers are good options, mind you. Both of the premium roller sets offer have several resistance settings (in Kreitler's case by opening or closing fan doors), in addition to the progressive resistance provided by tire friction on the roller drums. The Kreitlers are wonderfully smooth traditional rollers, but they aren't cheap. When you start packing fans on them they get very bulky, and the price waves at the the $800 mark before passing it at pace. At the same time, Kreitler's standard rollers are not particularly forgiving of even minor flaws in the pedal stroke, so one would have to build up a good deal of roller riding skills in order to be able to do hard intervals on them. And forget about working on your sprint. The E-Motion rollers address this problem by putting the roller frame itself on another frame that allows the roller drums to slide forward and back. There are side bumpers on the E-Motion as well, which prevent slide-off. It's a great solution, and I understand the road feel is tremendous, and you can practice standing sprints on them withough needing superior roller skills. The E-Motion rollers, however, run approximately $300 to $400 more than the Kurt Rock & Roll trainer. Special bonus fact: If you already have a Kurt Pro Trainer, as of last year anyhow you could purchase the Rock & Roll base for it and retrofit the resistance unit. I'm not sure if other Kurt products can be retrofitted, but it would not surprise me.

The bottom line: If you're looking for a top of the line trainer for serious indoor quality time with your bike, the Kurt Rock & Roll is a viable alternative to the higher end rollers, and is probably a better value.

Friday Fun Stuff

First and foremost, with the $450 Campy Super Record starting to hit the stores (and the finance sector bailout, and the putative Big Three bailout, and mortgage market troubles and all the rest), I think it's only fair to ask our friends who race on Campy a key question: How do you afford that Rock & Roll Lifestyle? I'll let John McCrea of CAKE ask that question in case you missed it the first time.



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You want to know the most dangerous place in your town to hang out? Really?

No, it's not where the guys in ricers do street drags on Saturday nights.

It's not at the dive bars.

It's not at the gun shop.

No, it's at Chuckie Freakin Cheese's.

Money Shot #1:

The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child's birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant's music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain's namesake mouse perform.

Money Shot #2:

"There's a biker bar down the street, and we rarely get calls there."

If you read the article it's clear what the problem is - amateur drinkers. Never trust a drunk who doesn't drink. They can't hold their liquor. Pathetic. And can you imagine what kind of frickin' trauma it is to have your birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's shut down so the cops can break up a brawl and arrest your mom, dad, Uncle Bob and cousin Sophie? That's the kind of thing that 40 year-olds have to work through in therapy. If your wife, husband, or SO is having some sort of issues, or has some incredibly strange sexual kink, or is a psychopath, you might be able to help them out by asking one simple question: "Do you now, or have you ever, celebrated a birthday a Chuckie Cheese's?

The time has come to shut down these disreputable hellholes that blight American society. I hope you'll join me in putting them out of business, and putting amateur booze hounds back where they belong - scarfing too much free booze and embarassing themselves at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and the office Christmas party.

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True Story:

My kid just turned 5. He's at the pediatrician on Tuesday, and the doc asks him some questions to test cognitive development.

Q: If an elephant is big, what is a mouse?

Will answers, "Small." The doc checks off the box.

Q: If fire is hot, what is an ice cube?

Will says "cold." The doc checks off another box.

Q: If mommy is a woman, what is daddy?

Will doesn't miss a beat. "A lawyer."

The doc slaps his forehead, checks the box, and cuts the questioning short. "There's nothing wrong with this kid."

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That's enough fun for one day, isn't it?

The Rouleur of the Baskervilles

It's nice doing the combined commute/training ride again. That daily ride, 12-25 miles each way, depending on how dilatory I feel, levels my moods, eats the stress, and knocks my weight down to merely alarming levels. It isn't to say it's without stressors though. Today, I have a tale of two commutes for you.

Tale 1
The forecast for this morning was a 19% chance of rain. How you get a 19% chance, and not, say, a 20% chance, is beyond me. Either way, it was a D.C. 19% chance, which means that 19% of the air will consist of water droplets. So I got rained on during the incoming ride. This wasn't bad, but it was a bit tiresome. Still, the commute went fast. I'm back on the fixed Surly, running maybe 65 gear inches, which isn't tall. So I spin like the dickens and maintain probably 24 MPH on the downhill of the Cap Crescent, and close to 20 on the flats. It's not exactly hammering, and as a matter of fact it feels like a light spin; the fixie is actually easier to pedal at 20 and maybe 105 RPM than it is to cruise along at 17 and 90 RPM, which feels mash-y. I focus on keeping the RPMs up, partly to work on smoothing out my spin and building up my hip flexors, but also to work on generating power via the aerobic system, rather than my usual muscular endurance-based mashing.

When I got to the office I had to negotiate the parking garage to get to bike parking. To enter, you have to go down a roughly 16% grade, turn hard left around this somewhat steeper off-camber, then turn hard right at the bottom of the ramp. Since people drive in and park, waiting for the attendants, the ramp is generally slimy with oil droppings. It was wet out today, and on wet days, the ramp is really treacherous. But a recent move by the property management corporation that runs the building has taken the slimy ramp to a whole new level. They recently painted it with this glossy, super-smooth gray paint. I've seen women spill on the thing when it's dry, but when it's wet...

I started down the ramp with hands on my brakes. I was also putting some back pressure on the pedals. Almost instantly, I was in a two wheeled skid down the ramp. I eased off the brakes entirely, but the front and rear wheel were both sliding - this was like being at frickin' Taneytown a couple weeks ago. Regardless of the slip, I still had to control my speed, since failure to navigate the off-camber is punishable with a collision into the guardrail, and possibly a 15 foot drop if you slide through it. So I tried to slow down by gently applying back pressure, but the bike was having none of that and the rear wheel simply locked up. I tried to get it turning again but I was picking up speed and sliding both ends faster than the wheels would turn. The slide was occurring in part becaue I was slipping across the down ramp at a 45 degree angle. Pretty quickly, I bit the wax tadpole and went down knee first. It hurt like hell and I skinned the thing, even through the knee warmers. I walked it to the bike rack from there. Well, I limped it to the rack anyhow. The butcher's bill is a skinned knee, a bruised, charlie-horsed-feeling calf, and a sense of uncertainty over my handling skills. I'm not sure whether to call the building manager and advise about the dangerous situation, or to keep my mouth shut and hope the building manager takes a spill on the same ramp.

Tale 2
The same basic rainstorm was in place for the commute home, only it was a little warmer out. Going across town was sketchy - when it's dark and rainy people simply don't see you. I did figure out a rule for bike commuting: If the guy behind you at a stoplight has a faulty muffler on his car, yield the lane and get out from in front of him. I got curbed by a couple guys like that tonight cruising up Pennsylvania Ave., and got curbed by a Lexis coming across the bridge into Georgetown . I'm going 25 along with traffic, no gap to the car in front of me, and this wanker in the Lexis pulls into my lane, right next to me, and forces me to the curb. *Lovely*

Eventually all that fun ended and I got to the Cap Crescent. It was heavily fogged over starting right at the Georgetown boathouse. Since my knee was bleeding and it was 65 I didn't want to wear knee warmers, but it was immediately clear that the clouds of fog were 5-10 degrees cooler than the clear areas. And man, was it foggy. There were stretches where visibility was 10 feet, at best. The fog was quite lovely in one way - it was mysterious, and mostly quiet. Sound carries funny in fog. There was huge traffic on nearby River Road, but it was inaudible. Yet sounds of cars from across the Potomac, and conversations occurring in Arlington, several hundred yards away, carried across the river and I could hear them. It was eerie; the cars whose lights I could occasionally see were silent to me, while the cars that were invisible made noises like some ghostly wraiths out there in the fog. The dramatic impact of fog for storytelling was suddenly made very clear to me tonight.

The romance was broken by a sudden snarling and choking noise. I was slightly terrified and burst through the edge of one fog bank seconds after the noise started, only to find a small white dog on the trail, choking with the urge to fight me. He was leashed but the owner had the leash fully extended, seemingly assuming that nobody was using the trial. I swerved and dropped a few well placed war whoops and a Blagojevichian sentence on the dog's owner. Further on, the romance of a fog bank was a bit more debunked when a rider came flying out of the fog and blew past me in the oncoming lane. I rode on wondering if the rider, who I only glimpsed for a second, was one of my friends. There weren't many people on the trail, so each encounter with another rider took on special significance. Who were these intrepid souls? Strangely, the fog didn't clear as I went up the hill and back to the truck.

The ride had been mysterious and peaceful all the way back to the truck, but it had not been clean, especially the segments on the Georgetown Branch gravel track. By the time we arrived at home, the fixie needed some serious maintenance to get all the dirt off it. So I whipped out the garden hose and took care of it. Yay fixie!

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That's just an ordinary day's commute there. I wouldn't write about the commute every day, but it would be possible to do so, especially for a more talented writer than I. Instead I try to appreciate the little things that come with the commute - the wildlife, interesting dogs, odd weather, friends and strangers. There is enough there, most days, to keep the mind engaged in something other than just turning the pedals.

How Can You Do It?

I wrapped up cross season today at Reston. To lay bare my soul to you, I was ready for cross season to be over two weeks ago. I've been dreaming of doing long rides on the road for a couple weeks. Literally, dreaming at night about the long rides you do, cold toes, cold nose, where you just get out and spin for hours on end. The road disappears under you as if you were dreaming - yes, I dream of riding in my dreams and sometimes when riding it feels like a dream instead of a ride - and the miles slip away in a quiet zen state where the stress of day-to-day life goes to die. Eat the bad food, the Clif bars, the breakfast bars from Qwick-E-Mart when you run out of that. Refill the bottles with Gatorade, swill a milk, get some peanuts. Get increasingly sore legs, get yelled at by some guy, wave at a tandom passing in the opposite direction, get ignored by some triathletes out on the bike for a few hours of suffering, oblivious the the bike's enjoyable dimensions...

Yes I missed that. I can't wait to start. But it doesn't mean that cross season was bad or I disliked it. For one, it doesn't feel like a total loss. I didn't do great in the results. Finishing around mid-pack was a good result for me for the first couple months; I managed a top half finish or two, which was nice. Mostly I struggled in the back third, and struggled with declining fitness over the course of the season. The B Masters is a more ruthless field than the C's - most of the competitors know what they are doing and I learned a lot by following other people's lines. The races were more fun this year. I didn't ride as hard, wasn't as out of my skull as in the past, but I rode a lot faster, just by hitting the brakes less and figuring out how to ride it. Following the likes of Fred Witwer and Bobby Lea a few times was really helpful here. Plus there was the cameraderie. The B Masters is different from the C's - the same crew races week in and week out. You get to know folks and develop respect and fondness for them, even the bastards who are consistently sticking it to you. Then there is hanging out with teammates, and a crew of acquaintences you know from week-to-week. There are the venues, many of which seem to get more dialed in and excellent from year-to-year.

Still, my consistently mediocre results reminded me how very far I have to go. There are about 3 things I have to do to make the leap from truly mediocre crosser to good racer, and that ball is in my court. I really need to step it up, and MAC races like today's really bring that point home.

Still, even though the dissatisfaction from potential not-realized burns fairly deeply, I have a lot to be thankful for and I need to name some names, call some people out for all they did for me this year. I grew a lot as a racer this fall, figured quite a few things out. Maybe the payoff wasn't there all the time, but I am starting to be able to see how to get from here, to over there, where I want to be. I need to thank some people for helping me achieve that growth.

Top of the list has to be my team, the Squadra Coppi. Some teams are about paying for a jersey and being registered to avoid unattached rider fees at roadraces. Other teams are about supporting the hell out of your teammates, helping out with kit or parts or riding tips or pitting at the races, trying to incentivize practice and thinking about how to improve the local scene. I have to give thanks for my teammates - starting with the Ckiller C's like Jon, Dave, Mike, Occasional Art and Andrew, the surprisingly fast B's like Ryan and VA CX champ George, my compatriots in SlowerGeezer (Master 3-4) like KenBob, Scot and Dan, and Masters A stalwart Judd. We also have the much more attractive and generally more competitive women's crew, with Jean, Lindsey, Siobhan, and a couple other semi-occasional racers. Thanks for the support this fall, material and moral. On the second or third lap of the race when the legs are burning and the lungs are exploding, hearing the cheers from teammates, knowing they are out there supporting, is like catching a comfortable draft in which to shelter. Grazie, mi amici!

I am also thankful for my Family Bike Shop buddies, Jon Seibold and Trevor Miller. We rode together to a lot of races, and Jon is a high quality road dog who prepares well and races well, and keeps an even keel. Trevor is the anchorman, not because he gives the news but because he's a solid presence. My traveling buddies helped set the tone for me most weekends, and to the extent I was able to get my mind right and ride well a few times it was partly due to the influence of these two vastly more experienced racers. They've also been dragging me out mountain biking quite a lot, and I would be willing to testify in court that if you want to get a lot stronger on a bike in fairly short order, riding single speed mountain bike with some guys who race single speeds in the expert class is a way to do it. A lot of things that used to be runups to me, pre-mountain bike, are now fairly easy ride-ups. I've learned about momentum, flow, not braking, and suffering, trying to follow their lines in the woods.

I'm thankful for some really experienced crossers who have been willing to give me advice about lines, tires, kit, and training. When you're really good, it probably seems like no big thing, but little tidbits of information are often incredibly useful. Chris Nystrom's "pedal steadily through the sand" is one of the most profound things about riding on slippery surfaces anybody has ever told me. He tossed that line off to a crowd at CX practice at Rockburn one night but it's a game changer, and I've since figured out it works in mud and on wet grass too. Keep up a light pedaling in slippery stuff and you won't slip, or if you do it will be predictable and ride-able. Remarkable. Mike Birner always says something smart, maybe intentionally, maybe by accident, Mark Gwadz is always worth listening to, Chris Mayhew pretty much drips racing smarts, and a couple of the 55+ fast guys - sorry I don't remember your names offhand guys - have given me some really useful tips this year, maybe most effectively by not trying to hard to drop me when I grab your wheels in races. Thanks one and all.

Then there's everybody else, the community of crossers who are just damned supportive, and who function as a crutch for me on days when I just don't have it. Peter Jensen is the nicest most supportive guy who will absolutely rip your legs off that I've ever met. Graciousness on wheels, basically. Johnny, Mike, Jason Pearlman, Jim Ventosa, Joel Gwadz, the Lea family & Fuji team who I always seem to park near, Kris Auer, Pete Lindeman, Kevin Dillard, the AABC crew, Riskus (who's with AABC but deserves his own mention), and the cast of freakin' hundreds - I feel terrible because I see roughly a hundred of the same people every week, they support me and I watch them supporting others, and I wish I could buy them all a post-race beer every week. Damned if being around a good crew of people doesn't make the whole experience worthwhile, even on the most awful days. The 'cross scene is really exploding in the mid-Atlantic, and it's because the thing is more than the sum of its parts; but if you only added up the individual parts you'd still have a very, very impressive collection of remarkable individuals. Nor can you ignore the officials who have been busting their asses, raising their game, and learning to cope with the crowds and mayhem of our burgeoning scene, and you guys may not notice it but a lot of them will cheer for you when you're racing. Oh, they don't pick sides, that'd be wrong, they seem to root for everybody or a good cross section of everybody - but they are rooting and that is beyond great. Even Joe Jefferson is starting to grow on me though when I'm upside down in mud and sliding under the tape, his humorous commentary is sometimes lost on me. But then I'm crazier than Amy Winehouse, as Joe would say... repeatedly.

Penultimate props have to go to coach Bill Gros. On the days I'm running pretty well, like at DCCX, Bill Gros has something to do with it. You ever wonder how a big fat powerlifting-looking dude can ride a bike decently? Good coaching doesn't hurt. He's got a lot of people with better palmares (and more easily perceived bicycling aptitude) than me but probably not to many people for whom he has done more and who have come further.

Final thanks go to Mandy and Will. I couldn't do it without family support.

Sure, it's two weeks late for me to be making a list of people to whom I owe thanks. But there's nothing wrong with Thanksgiving leftovers. My apologies if this isn't the most tickling entry ever, if it's too local for you or if it seems weird that a mediocre racer would be thanking people as if it were Oscar night. The point of it is that many people have done me a good turn this year, and I'd like to express my gratitude for it. How can you do it? How can you thank the people who made it a great scene this year? That's simple - you can't. No matter what you say, it doesn't sum it up right, doesn't convey adequately how warmly you feel toward our little community. But I'll try to say thanks anyhow.

Thanks for a great racing season, my friends. Charm City is only 287 days away. See y'all next year.