No, not *that* weekend update.
Went to All Hallows Cross in Hughesville, MD. It's halfway between Waldorf and LaPlata, in case you were wondering. I had a good result there last year despite repeated crashes and was looking forward to it. I wasn't thrilled about the course - last year's course was pedestrian except for a bit of nice singletrack. So it was a big surprise when I saw all the changes that Steve & the guys put in for this year. They took the boredom out of the front by making us go up the hill an extra time, and traverse it back down. They put in *a lot* of sand, which was cool because I've suddenly figured out how to ride sand. They also moved the famed corrugated drain pipe so that it breaks up the back really nicely. The end result was a sweet course that alternated between 30 seconds on the gas and 15 seconds of recovery, a perfect mix. And they thankfully kept the nice singletrack, which was pretty mild stuff by MTB standards but enough to bug pure roadies. The course was nice enough that I'm already committing mentally to doing that race again next year. Not quite a classic course, but a euro sort of course with a lot of flow... plus singletrack. As for the result... I got my derailer sucked into my rear wheel. That ended my day on lap 2.
Today was a bit better mechanically at the inaugural Kinder Kross. It was in Severna Park, just a handful of miles from my home. I would have ridden to the race but spent the morning instead snoozing, until a leisurely 7:45. We should have more local races... local to me. I got registered, got a good warmup, and caught Steve Wahl, who said I'd enjoy the course, it was up my alley - punchy.
He was right, in that the course punched me in the mouth, repeatedly. It was pretty good for a first time effort, but suffered a little disunity of purpose. The front half of the course was basically Hyattsville on a 5-7% grade - incessant, tight, 180 degree turns. Open those things up about 1-2 feet per turn and I think it becomes a flowy, sweet course. The back side featured a couple little sandy climbs, a root section strangely reminiscent of All Hallows, a fast section that you could catch huge air off of (and land in a plush sand pit) and a long, fast meadow path coupled to a long 1 turn finishing straight by a 270 degree turn around a tree.
Everything went okay from the start; I elbowed one of my friends out of the way when he tried to come up the inside right from the start - there was no room there or I'd have let him through, as it was the guy inside me was pushing over in jerky swerves, probably getting pushed himself. Up the long hill we went. A lot of people had problems making the turns. And around we went; only the power sections were a rest for me. I held the thread for may a lap and a half - at that point I was hyperventilating and knew that I was done for if I didn't ease up a hair. Three or four guys passed me in a clump - and then that was it. I was racing with 5 other guys for the rest of the race. Two of them passed me, one passed me then I got him on the last lap going uphill after the barriers, the other two guys faded. Final result: didn't get lapped, not even close to it, haven't a clue what my finish number was (somewhere in DFL's neighborhood, but not at the end of the street).
I sort of had an epiphany today after the race. I'm lucky to be racing at all this season after my back blew up last winter. Going in, I knew I hadn't formally trained much and that this would be a season of testing the back to see if it could hold up. For the most part it has; some days are a little tough - by "little" I mean it feels like a welterweight boxer is punching me in the lower back with a studded, cast iron glove. But mostly it's been just racing. I can't take it for granted.
Going into next year, I'm going to try really hard to focus and make a big leap. Shit, it is hard to be a 265 pound dude, throwing down huge watts, crushing a lot of people... until the road tips up. Get to low bodyfat ratio for me - around 225 - and there's going to be some hurtin' little people around these parts. But there's got to be some growth that occurs between now and then, and my luck has to hold out too. But this is huge upside, on the balance. Things can easily get better, right?
So the realization is this. I'm lucky, I'm sorta slow but have a lot of upside potential, and instead of dreading races, I should go into them with a good attitude. It's not all doom and gloom; some days there are some bright spots. Today's bright spots were pretty evident - I didn't break my bike (big one that I've blown 2 of the last 3 weeks) and I didn't ease up at all, keeping up an effort level that left my hands utterly numb and my face feeling cold until 10 minutes after we stopped racing. I couldn't have gone any harder even if I'd wanted to. That's a level of suffering I haven't achieved in a while, and it's a good sign that my body, and mind, are coming around.
What good things happened to you this weekend?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
November Bike & Musak Friday
I took my first ride on Dave's November Bikes road bike. It's a 56, which is pretty close to perfect size for me, which is funny when you think about Dave being 6'1" and skinny and me being 5'11" and change, and not.
First impressions: it is remarkably nimble but still sure footed, blunts big bumps, but has an amazing amount of road feel for a carbon bike. To broadly generalize, steel has great road feel and absorbs bumps, but tends to be flexy, as does Ti. Aluminum tends to have great road feel, and it's rigid, but it kicks the rider in the back on each bump. Carbon tends to be very stiff, and it absorbs big jolts, but it tends to have a dead road feel. For my money, scandium offers the nicest balance, with the best road feel of the bunch - though it is quite flexy.
The November Bike feels closer to scandium than anything else, but it is nearly as stiff as an aluminum crit bike; yet it maintains a road feel that is close to scandium's. I was pleasantly surprised at Hains to be doing Tabata intervals, mashing it hard on a stiff frame, yet getting constant updates on the quality of the road surface through my fingertips and butt as I pedaled along. I could tell the difference between new tarmac and the older stuff, slippery spots and sticky ones, slightly bumpy and slightly smoother bits.
Just for fun I rode through the potholes. The bike did a good job of eating the square edged bumps - not quite as good as my scandium Redline or as my carbon 1st generation Giant TCR, but nearly as well, and without the deadening of road feel that the TCR suffers from.
It was plenty stiff for Tabata intervals. I could get some front derailer rub going if I worked it hard... but then I can do that on every bike.
The handling was sharp edged, but not nervous. For the most part, the bike felt extremely neutral. Lean in hard and it dove in; carve gentle arcs and it carved with me. It was very responsive to rider input. A race bike for sure.
So the first ride impression is really good - a delectable combination of stiff frame, with better road feel than I thought was possible in carbon, particularly at this price point. Can't wait to bomb some curvy descents on this one. May be time for an Ellicot City ride...
More in a day or two.
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I'm too tired out to write much about music. So I'm just going to give you some of what I'm listening to.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tandem? Tandim? Tandumb? Yep.
I've been cranking on work for the race and, frankly, my brain is misfiring right now. Those little neurons or whatever that are supposed to fire between the nerves are firing straight into the jelly of my brain, turning it into... um... stuff that's more jelly-like or something.
I had something really good I was going to post about. Really, I did. But I can't remember shit right now. Most of the business of a race goes on 5-10 days prior to it. So I'm crushed right now. It eases a little the days before the race, but it doesn't ease all the way off; the easing is relative, and minor.
This is why I don't yell at race promoters no matter how bad things are going on the day. It would be like kicking a lame dog. They've been kicked for 2-3 weeks steady before the race, and intermittently for a couple weeks before that. They don't know nothin' about nothin', you see them on race day.
Yep, I'll bitch about things later, sure enough. But never pick on a promoter on race day. It'd be like punching a bowl of salad dressing. Easy to do, but it wouldn't really accomplish anything to hit a bowl of mush.
Oh yeah, now I remember.
We're going to have a tandem class at Tacchino, lord willin' and the crick don't rise (i.e. assuming USAC approves the permits).
I'm not above stealing good ideas from others, and seeing how well the tandem class came off at DCCX, we're adding one.
Yep, plain old theft.
3:45, November 7th. Maybe with a little luck we'll get Keith & Avy taking on Joe & Jared again. Hey, what's the problem? Both teams have an average age of 21...
I had something really good I was going to post about. Really, I did. But I can't remember shit right now. Most of the business of a race goes on 5-10 days prior to it. So I'm crushed right now. It eases a little the days before the race, but it doesn't ease all the way off; the easing is relative, and minor.
This is why I don't yell at race promoters no matter how bad things are going on the day. It would be like kicking a lame dog. They've been kicked for 2-3 weeks steady before the race, and intermittently for a couple weeks before that. They don't know nothin' about nothin', you see them on race day.
Yep, I'll bitch about things later, sure enough. But never pick on a promoter on race day. It'd be like punching a bowl of salad dressing. Easy to do, but it wouldn't really accomplish anything to hit a bowl of mush.
Oh yeah, now I remember.
We're going to have a tandem class at Tacchino, lord willin' and the crick don't rise (i.e. assuming USAC approves the permits).
I'm not above stealing good ideas from others, and seeing how well the tandem class came off at DCCX, we're adding one.
Yep, plain old theft.
3:45, November 7th. Maybe with a little luck we'll get Keith & Avy taking on Joe & Jared again. Hey, what's the problem? Both teams have an average age of 21...
It's Almost November Time...
First - race bidness. You can get a super sweet Tacchino T-shirt from Jason Kamps at Woof Designs. They'll be delivered to the Tacchino on race day and will be available at the registration tent. $14. If you're out of the area and want one delivered, drop me an email tcrjames at gmail, and we'll see about shipping options. The pre-orders close (if you want race day delivery) on Monday, November 1. So get after it if you want one.
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Second - bidness bidness.
Dave Kirkpatrick, Blogger, Construction Guy, Racer, Humanitarian, and Purveyor of November Bikes, passed me one of his new bikes to test. He also gave me a free pair of gloves worth maybe $7 in case the FTC is reading this and wants to know if I've been bought, and if so, how cheaply I was willing to whore myself out.
Just kidding. Dave knows the deal and you guys know the deal. I'll tell the truth about how the thing rides, go about as hard as I usually go, tell you how it feels and what I think, and how it worked. If it breaks and it sucks, I'll tell you. If it rocks, I'll tell you that too. You are all grown ups and can make up your minds if you are interested in it after that.
For now, a first impression. As you would expect, I like the idea of a good race frame put together and sold by a local racer I'm friends with. The bike is nondescript, with an understated black carbon weave finish and a November Bikes logo on the downtube. Frankly, the internal cable routing entry and exit points are more eye catching than anything else on the bike. It's not generic, just understated and functional to the point of being visually quiet - a super hot librarian gal with un-cool glasses doing a bad job of hiding how hot it is. As Ultimate Slayer Fan says, you look at it and "you know. You just know."
The bike retails for $785, and it pretty much says, "shut up and let's just us go for a ride." I can't wait until the rain lifts to try it out. Tomorrow at lunch perhaps. I'll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, I need to ask: is your life better, or worse with 4-inch Brett Favre in it?
Sunday, October 24, 2010
DCCX
Great race today. As usual, DCMTB put on a great event. The course was sublime - just perfect curves and a balance of handling and effort/recovery stretches. Bumpy as hell - but that's beyond their control and the fault of recent very dry weather. Good fries, great beer from DogFishHead (60 Minute IPA and Raison d'Etre) and good fellowship.
Now a word about scoring cross races. I know the refs are getting battered every time a podium gets screwed up. I know that 125 rider fields don't make it easy on them. But I also know that it is the most disheartening thing in the world to get pulled early on the "80% Rule" or some version of that as it's understood locally. If you've wrapped lap three, have maybe three more to go, are suffering, and get pulled, and you're in back, it's not the end of the world. You can live with that... until you see 20 guys who were way behind you ride on by, and it takes the leader 5 minutes to come through, and he's way ahead of the first chase, and you calculate you would have gotten in one or two laps more, easy, before you got lapped.
At that point you think, "Fuck it. I'll just send a check for $20, and they will have gotten what they want from me." Then, as you're having a little pity party, you suddenly see a couple guys in points contention getting pulled for no apparent reason whatsoever. Then, when you think it can't get worse, another buddy who was near DFL rides past the Start/Finish, killing himself to keep with a bunch of top 10 guys, trying to avoid getting pulled - which he does successfully. At that point, you feel at a complete loss for words.
I sucked today and was probably running in 90th when I got yanked - I was about half a lower back twinge away from stepping off the bike at that point. But a lot of slower people weren't yanked, while several much faster people (including 3 or 4 in points contention) were. I have serious angst over this.
The guys in the big fields early in the day - the M 4, 3/4 and 3/4 35+ are the guys whose fees pay the bills. They're the reason everybody else has prize money, nice swag, and so on. And they get treated poorly, for some reason. As a promoter, I hate this. The top 5 guys in the race are wonderful, but the bread and butter guys, the Joe Lunchboxes, finish 10th - 125th. I'm sick of seeing them take it in the shorts, often at random. Podium guys might sneer but the podium guys aren't immune to the scoring problem either. I saw a guy lose a podium a few weeks ago and get graded to near DFL, while a friend who was actually darned near DFL due to a mechanical was awarded a top 15 finish. Shoot, I was probably in 70th or 80th at Hyattsville, got lapped, rode it in the last 800 yards slow to stay out of the way, and pulled myself on the last lap (because I'm not a total dick). Yet I had to go argue myself out of a 13th place finish. Whooooaaaa!
This is getting to be the norm, and pulling people seemingly arbitarily (particularly whacking people in points contention) to thin out the fields for ease of scoring makes it worse, not better.
So I'm done waiting for the learning curve to go up. I'm officially becoming an advocate for timing chips and video cameras, and no pulling. I know that isn't perfect and it would be at least $5-$7 per race extra per rider per race. But I don't see an alternative. As it is, we're encouraging people to walk away from the sport and go ride somewhere else on the weekends.
This will probably be interpreted as an attack on the refs and promoters. It's not. Somebody has to raise this issue, air it out, and get the issue addressed. Give it another year and the regular B race (M 3/4 will be as packed as the first two, and the M 1/2/3 35+ will be trending that way. It's only going to get worse unless we start working right now to make it better. Chips aren't perfect, but they'll help a lot. Shame we have to go that way because it's more costly at first (big capital costs) but we're going to have to pay more money if we want to hang on to the sport we know. Otherwise it becomes a dirt version of the basic industrial park crit. That would suck.
Now a word about scoring cross races. I know the refs are getting battered every time a podium gets screwed up. I know that 125 rider fields don't make it easy on them. But I also know that it is the most disheartening thing in the world to get pulled early on the "80% Rule" or some version of that as it's understood locally. If you've wrapped lap three, have maybe three more to go, are suffering, and get pulled, and you're in back, it's not the end of the world. You can live with that... until you see 20 guys who were way behind you ride on by, and it takes the leader 5 minutes to come through, and he's way ahead of the first chase, and you calculate you would have gotten in one or two laps more, easy, before you got lapped.
At that point you think, "Fuck it. I'll just send a check for $20, and they will have gotten what they want from me." Then, as you're having a little pity party, you suddenly see a couple guys in points contention getting pulled for no apparent reason whatsoever. Then, when you think it can't get worse, another buddy who was near DFL rides past the Start/Finish, killing himself to keep with a bunch of top 10 guys, trying to avoid getting pulled - which he does successfully. At that point, you feel at a complete loss for words.
I sucked today and was probably running in 90th when I got yanked - I was about half a lower back twinge away from stepping off the bike at that point. But a lot of slower people weren't yanked, while several much faster people (including 3 or 4 in points contention) were. I have serious angst over this.
The guys in the big fields early in the day - the M 4, 3/4 and 3/4 35+ are the guys whose fees pay the bills. They're the reason everybody else has prize money, nice swag, and so on. And they get treated poorly, for some reason. As a promoter, I hate this. The top 5 guys in the race are wonderful, but the bread and butter guys, the Joe Lunchboxes, finish 10th - 125th. I'm sick of seeing them take it in the shorts, often at random. Podium guys might sneer but the podium guys aren't immune to the scoring problem either. I saw a guy lose a podium a few weeks ago and get graded to near DFL, while a friend who was actually darned near DFL due to a mechanical was awarded a top 15 finish. Shoot, I was probably in 70th or 80th at Hyattsville, got lapped, rode it in the last 800 yards slow to stay out of the way, and pulled myself on the last lap (because I'm not a total dick). Yet I had to go argue myself out of a 13th place finish. Whooooaaaa!
This is getting to be the norm, and pulling people seemingly arbitarily (particularly whacking people in points contention) to thin out the fields for ease of scoring makes it worse, not better.
So I'm done waiting for the learning curve to go up. I'm officially becoming an advocate for timing chips and video cameras, and no pulling. I know that isn't perfect and it would be at least $5-$7 per race extra per rider per race. But I don't see an alternative. As it is, we're encouraging people to walk away from the sport and go ride somewhere else on the weekends.
This will probably be interpreted as an attack on the refs and promoters. It's not. Somebody has to raise this issue, air it out, and get the issue addressed. Give it another year and the regular B race (M 3/4 will be as packed as the first two, and the M 1/2/3 35+ will be trending that way. It's only going to get worse unless we start working right now to make it better. Chips aren't perfect, but they'll help a lot. Shame we have to go that way because it's more costly at first (big capital costs) but we're going to have to pay more money if we want to hang on to the sport we know. Otherwise it becomes a dirt version of the basic industrial park crit. That would suck.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
What the hell...
I just did a great post. Unfortunately, Blogger ate it. You guys are just going to have to do without the musak this week.
Oh, what the hell. One song won't hurt.
See you at DCCX.
Oh yeah, one other thing. The best racers I know, including a couple world class level guys, are humble, good dudes. Yet some fairly low Cat racers I know who have accomplished a whole lot less are completely full of themselves. What the hell is up with that? Is the Douchebag Olympics an actual event now, and they're in training for it?
Oh, what the hell. One song won't hurt.
See you at DCCX.
Oh yeah, one other thing. The best racers I know, including a couple world class level guys, are humble, good dudes. Yet some fairly low Cat racers I know who have accomplished a whole lot less are completely full of themselves. What the hell is up with that? Is the Douchebag Olympics an actual event now, and they're in training for it?
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Nanny Statism
We often don't recognize infringements on our freedom because we tend to be looking for guys in brown shirts. It's rarely that dramatic, and often significant infringements look much less dramatic - even appearing sensible at times.
One of the ways our general liberty is getting eaten up is creeping nanny-statism, a general softening of the culture away from traditional, energetic, stereotypically masculine views of risk and rewards.
I got to thinking about this because of the current football controversy. No, not the one involving players raping and sexually harassing women. The other one, about hard tackles and shots to the head.
Shots to the head are a bad thing. Last weekend, several players went down with concussions as a result of bad, helmet-to-helmet hits. As a guy who played rugby for 20 years, and a little bit of football before that, I can tell you that the solution for head shots is pretty simple. You ban tackling above the shoulder level, and you stiffly penalize players who spear, or lead a tackle with the head. It is nothing to get hysterical about. The problem is rules creep in a tough game, allowing players to push the boundaries a bit too far.
Thanks to the Sports Media Industrial Complex, however, we've been treated to a bunch of girly scandals this year. I don't mean that as an insult to women; I mean that ESPN is attempting to apply Oprah standards to the NFL and other sports as part of its effort to expand its marketing. So we're not hearing about which receivers are nearing historical marks, or who you should pick up for your fantasy team. Instead we're getting caretaker dialogue about breast cancer, how terrible head injuries are, and how players are hitting too gosh darned hard.
Sorry NFL and ESPN, but once again this is a corner of life I don't want feminized. I don't want women to girly up their grunting tennis games, I don't want Danica Patrick to get special rules because she's a girl, and I don't want to hear Bob Ryan's prissy handwringing about how it's terrible that football players get hit so damned hard. You don't like tennis, race, or football competition because it's too competitive and harsh, go find something else to do with your time and quit bitching and condescending to the rest of us about our bad manners. Seriously, Bob Ryan. Screw you.
It's a free country. A man wants to make a million taking hits - or a woman wants to make 20 million racing with the boys at 230 MPH and risking death - I'm in favor of it. There's a traditional value in the American spirit that values liberty, and the fact that with great freedom comes the possibility for great success. And great failure. That means a flaming, explosive race car crash, or leaving a pro football game with a crippling back injury. Those are the downside risks inherent in freedom, and daily life offers less spectacular (but still wonderful) payoffs, when we take little risks. A mountain descent, kayaking on a river, or getting a little hammered and smoking a good cigar - these are the things that make life pleasant. All of them involve a little risk.
Society as a whole is getting too risk averse when sports columnists are wetting their pants over football injuries. Seriously - I am not talking about rationally expressed concerns here. The tenor of the conversation is panicky - "oh, the game will just destroy itself. It needs radical change. People won't tolerate this."
Bullshit.
Just because something is hard and comes with potential adverse outcomes, doesn't mean that it's a bad thing, that it needs to be radically softened up, or that people won't tolerate it.
As always, This Is No Time To Overreact!
What football needs, plain and simple, is to bring back the old fashioned spearing penalty that prohibited leading with the head, and maybe consider the wrap tackle (normal in rugby) to slightly reduce the initial shock of the contact. These aren't the radical changes the prissymen are asking for; they're tweaks to a game that is over a century old, which has been just as rough (albeit in different ways) for just as long. We don't need to burn the village to save it.
What does this have to do with you?
You ride a bike, correct?
You know, a lot of people think that's really dangerous, right?
Are you aware of mandatory helmet rules for kids? That seems pretty reasonable.
What about people who think that because bikes and traffic are sometimes a dangerous mix, that bikes oughtta be restricted to the sidewalk, or bike lanes? That's over the top, right?
What about people who think of mountain biking as an extreme, destructive sport, one that should be banned from public lands because it is so reckless and dangerous?
Do you see where I'm going with this?
The same impulse that causes Bob Ryan and Tony Kornheiser to get their panties in a wad about a weekend's worth of hard NFL hits, is the same one that drives people to think there's no good reason to ride these dangerous bikes - or jump from a plane, or go deep sea diving, or anything that could possibly put a person at risk. Tony Kornheiser is a great example; the guy hates bike riding for a million reasons, including the fact that it's a silly way for an adult to put themselves at risk.
The well meaning effort to reduce risk in our lives - for our own good of course - is sometimes called paternalism. Less couth people like me call it nanny statism - the elevation of government rules and social conventions that cause all our institutions, including government, to act like we're infants and they are a strict wet nurse. The paternalist instinct is found on the right and the left; each political party manifests it a little bit differently. But there is a strong and ascendant tendency toward it in today's society.
What the NFL is browbeaten into doing about Brett Favre's tasteless (but not criminal) sexual proclivities, or hard hits or head injuries, may seem remote from cycling. But it is not. The same nanny statist impulse that gets hysterical over a handful of NFL concussions and sexting, making a mountain out of those molehills, will also get hysterical about bikes, and salt in your food, and outdoor smoking, and pretty much any damn fool thing that strikes its fancy.
No man is an island; and no man's hobbies are isolated from all other men's hobbies. The way the NFL is treated, and the hysterical attitude that a lot of our opinion leaders are taking toward it, will not be restricted to the NFL. The presence of this attitude in sports is just a symptom of its presence in all of society - look up the Alar scare, and the current thimerosol hysteria, and past efforts to ban football, and efforts to put airbags and seatbelts on motorcycles. There is no effort to rationally discuss risk and reward, and why we might tolerate or even encourage risk-taking as a society.
All these silly notions are of a piece. They are aimed at saving you from yourself, even where it means protecting you from statistically unlikely happenings (like the 1 in 100,000 chance of a bad reaction to a vaccine). We tend not to think too much about it when the government or some worthy non-profit nibbles away at another person's freedom, or works to change social attitudes about somebody else's hobby and pleasure from adventurous and energetic to fearful and beaten down. But if we wait until our own lifestyles are under the gun, we have waited too long.
It is in this way that mountain bikers are excluded from parks. First the hunters get shut out, a tiny group that uses the park for a few weeks per year, and nobody objects because the hunters' periodic use is a PITA for the rest of us. Then it's the equestrians because they tear up the trail, and we don't miss them because it's tough to ride on a trail chewed up by horses. Then it's the cyclists because they're reckless, and the hikers don't mind that because it's a pain stopping while the bikes pass. Finally the hikers go because their numbers are small, and there's nobody to help raise a stink about it, because all the other park users are long gone.
The assault on our fun, risk-taking hobby, is a quiet one. Many of society's opinion leaders, many of whom don't seem able to take on the big questions but who are happy to lecture us on what we should eat or with whom we should sleep. There's a war on mountain bikers led by people who are out to protect the wilderness by removing the humans - in the interest of protecting the humans they tell us. Our little group is next under the "wilderness classification" moves afoot in national lands. And, in a lot of places, there's about to be a backlash against the spending on bike trails and bike lanes because at the national level we've gotten ourselves tied to a political party that's about to be on the outs. Part of why they are hated by so many people is because that particular party is well known for telling people how they ought to live certain parts of their lives. (Just like the other party is known for claiming authority over other parts...)
As fun-loving, risk taking cyclists, we ought to realize that the real enemy of our lifestyles isn't one political party or another. It's the people who want us to stop doing what we love to do - because it'd be for our own good, as they define what is good for us. After we have a successful societal revolt against these people - what Mencken called the Uplifters - then we can have a debate about a lot of the little political details on the many issues facing us. Until then, I think we should probably focus on kicking the people out of our lives, who think they know better than us how we should live it. Grover Norquist delusionally thought that such people were "Get Off My Back Republicans." But he was wrong. We're just "Get Off My Back People." We vote for whoever we think is less likely to get on our backs and in our faces, and on our neighbor's backs. We're the Leave Me The Fuck Alone Coalition. And we're happy to be members of *that* party.
Yeah, it's possible we may get a concussion or hurt ourselves somehow. But I'd rather face the risk of a concussion, then never know the joy of laying a hard hit in rugby, of bombing down a rocky downhill in the woods, or of sitting in on a 35 MPH paceline.
When somebody dies, we talk about how they "spent" their lives.
Think about that. We "spend" our lives doing things. We pay for our fun with days of our lives.
So what do you want to do with your days - save them all up as if your time could go into a bank account? Or would you rather invest them in life, and spend your days having fun?
One of the ways our general liberty is getting eaten up is creeping nanny-statism, a general softening of the culture away from traditional, energetic, stereotypically masculine views of risk and rewards.
I got to thinking about this because of the current football controversy. No, not the one involving players raping and sexually harassing women. The other one, about hard tackles and shots to the head.
Shots to the head are a bad thing. Last weekend, several players went down with concussions as a result of bad, helmet-to-helmet hits. As a guy who played rugby for 20 years, and a little bit of football before that, I can tell you that the solution for head shots is pretty simple. You ban tackling above the shoulder level, and you stiffly penalize players who spear, or lead a tackle with the head. It is nothing to get hysterical about. The problem is rules creep in a tough game, allowing players to push the boundaries a bit too far.
Thanks to the Sports Media Industrial Complex, however, we've been treated to a bunch of girly scandals this year. I don't mean that as an insult to women; I mean that ESPN is attempting to apply Oprah standards to the NFL and other sports as part of its effort to expand its marketing. So we're not hearing about which receivers are nearing historical marks, or who you should pick up for your fantasy team. Instead we're getting caretaker dialogue about breast cancer, how terrible head injuries are, and how players are hitting too gosh darned hard.
Sorry NFL and ESPN, but once again this is a corner of life I don't want feminized. I don't want women to girly up their grunting tennis games, I don't want Danica Patrick to get special rules because she's a girl, and I don't want to hear Bob Ryan's prissy handwringing about how it's terrible that football players get hit so damned hard. You don't like tennis, race, or football competition because it's too competitive and harsh, go find something else to do with your time and quit bitching and condescending to the rest of us about our bad manners. Seriously, Bob Ryan. Screw you.
It's a free country. A man wants to make a million taking hits - or a woman wants to make 20 million racing with the boys at 230 MPH and risking death - I'm in favor of it. There's a traditional value in the American spirit that values liberty, and the fact that with great freedom comes the possibility for great success. And great failure. That means a flaming, explosive race car crash, or leaving a pro football game with a crippling back injury. Those are the downside risks inherent in freedom, and daily life offers less spectacular (but still wonderful) payoffs, when we take little risks. A mountain descent, kayaking on a river, or getting a little hammered and smoking a good cigar - these are the things that make life pleasant. All of them involve a little risk.
Society as a whole is getting too risk averse when sports columnists are wetting their pants over football injuries. Seriously - I am not talking about rationally expressed concerns here. The tenor of the conversation is panicky - "oh, the game will just destroy itself. It needs radical change. People won't tolerate this."
Bullshit.
Just because something is hard and comes with potential adverse outcomes, doesn't mean that it's a bad thing, that it needs to be radically softened up, or that people won't tolerate it.
As always, This Is No Time To Overreact!
What football needs, plain and simple, is to bring back the old fashioned spearing penalty that prohibited leading with the head, and maybe consider the wrap tackle (normal in rugby) to slightly reduce the initial shock of the contact. These aren't the radical changes the prissymen are asking for; they're tweaks to a game that is over a century old, which has been just as rough (albeit in different ways) for just as long. We don't need to burn the village to save it.
What does this have to do with you?
You ride a bike, correct?
You know, a lot of people think that's really dangerous, right?
Are you aware of mandatory helmet rules for kids? That seems pretty reasonable.
What about people who think that because bikes and traffic are sometimes a dangerous mix, that bikes oughtta be restricted to the sidewalk, or bike lanes? That's over the top, right?
What about people who think of mountain biking as an extreme, destructive sport, one that should be banned from public lands because it is so reckless and dangerous?
Do you see where I'm going with this?
The same impulse that causes Bob Ryan and Tony Kornheiser to get their panties in a wad about a weekend's worth of hard NFL hits, is the same one that drives people to think there's no good reason to ride these dangerous bikes - or jump from a plane, or go deep sea diving, or anything that could possibly put a person at risk. Tony Kornheiser is a great example; the guy hates bike riding for a million reasons, including the fact that it's a silly way for an adult to put themselves at risk.
The well meaning effort to reduce risk in our lives - for our own good of course - is sometimes called paternalism. Less couth people like me call it nanny statism - the elevation of government rules and social conventions that cause all our institutions, including government, to act like we're infants and they are a strict wet nurse. The paternalist instinct is found on the right and the left; each political party manifests it a little bit differently. But there is a strong and ascendant tendency toward it in today's society.
What the NFL is browbeaten into doing about Brett Favre's tasteless (but not criminal) sexual proclivities, or hard hits or head injuries, may seem remote from cycling. But it is not. The same nanny statist impulse that gets hysterical over a handful of NFL concussions and sexting, making a mountain out of those molehills, will also get hysterical about bikes, and salt in your food, and outdoor smoking, and pretty much any damn fool thing that strikes its fancy.
No man is an island; and no man's hobbies are isolated from all other men's hobbies. The way the NFL is treated, and the hysterical attitude that a lot of our opinion leaders are taking toward it, will not be restricted to the NFL. The presence of this attitude in sports is just a symptom of its presence in all of society - look up the Alar scare, and the current thimerosol hysteria, and past efforts to ban football, and efforts to put airbags and seatbelts on motorcycles. There is no effort to rationally discuss risk and reward, and why we might tolerate or even encourage risk-taking as a society.
All these silly notions are of a piece. They are aimed at saving you from yourself, even where it means protecting you from statistically unlikely happenings (like the 1 in 100,000 chance of a bad reaction to a vaccine). We tend not to think too much about it when the government or some worthy non-profit nibbles away at another person's freedom, or works to change social attitudes about somebody else's hobby and pleasure from adventurous and energetic to fearful and beaten down. But if we wait until our own lifestyles are under the gun, we have waited too long.
It is in this way that mountain bikers are excluded from parks. First the hunters get shut out, a tiny group that uses the park for a few weeks per year, and nobody objects because the hunters' periodic use is a PITA for the rest of us. Then it's the equestrians because they tear up the trail, and we don't miss them because it's tough to ride on a trail chewed up by horses. Then it's the cyclists because they're reckless, and the hikers don't mind that because it's a pain stopping while the bikes pass. Finally the hikers go because their numbers are small, and there's nobody to help raise a stink about it, because all the other park users are long gone.
The assault on our fun, risk-taking hobby, is a quiet one. Many of society's opinion leaders, many of whom don't seem able to take on the big questions but who are happy to lecture us on what we should eat or with whom we should sleep. There's a war on mountain bikers led by people who are out to protect the wilderness by removing the humans - in the interest of protecting the humans they tell us. Our little group is next under the "wilderness classification" moves afoot in national lands. And, in a lot of places, there's about to be a backlash against the spending on bike trails and bike lanes because at the national level we've gotten ourselves tied to a political party that's about to be on the outs. Part of why they are hated by so many people is because that particular party is well known for telling people how they ought to live certain parts of their lives. (Just like the other party is known for claiming authority over other parts...)
As fun-loving, risk taking cyclists, we ought to realize that the real enemy of our lifestyles isn't one political party or another. It's the people who want us to stop doing what we love to do - because it'd be for our own good, as they define what is good for us. After we have a successful societal revolt against these people - what Mencken called the Uplifters - then we can have a debate about a lot of the little political details on the many issues facing us. Until then, I think we should probably focus on kicking the people out of our lives, who think they know better than us how we should live it. Grover Norquist delusionally thought that such people were "Get Off My Back Republicans." But he was wrong. We're just "Get Off My Back People." We vote for whoever we think is less likely to get on our backs and in our faces, and on our neighbor's backs. We're the Leave Me The Fuck Alone Coalition. And we're happy to be members of *that* party.
Yeah, it's possible we may get a concussion or hurt ourselves somehow. But I'd rather face the risk of a concussion, then never know the joy of laying a hard hit in rugby, of bombing down a rocky downhill in the woods, or of sitting in on a 35 MPH paceline.
When somebody dies, we talk about how they "spent" their lives.
Think about that. We "spend" our lives doing things. We pay for our fun with days of our lives.
So what do you want to do with your days - save them all up as if your time could go into a bank account? Or would you rather invest them in life, and spend your days having fun?
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Rent is Too Damn High! But Not At The Tacchino!
Go register for the Tacchino! Now! Because the Entry Fee is not too damn high!
Seriously.
We've collected an absolute shitload of great swag, and the more people we have, the higher (and better distributed) the cash prizes will be. And a singlespeed prizelist, fercrhissakes! It's only $20 to register... this rent is not too damn high! Your babies will have things to eat, your stomach will not be growling, our rent is not too damn high.
Not to mention if you people don't register in great numbers, I'm going to be stuck drinking all that beer by myself. And believe me, you do not want to see me on a drunken bender. That happens, the landlady will raise the rent, and then, the rent will be... well, you get the message.
So git er done!
Seriously.
We've collected an absolute shitload of great swag, and the more people we have, the higher (and better distributed) the cash prizes will be. And a singlespeed prizelist, fercrhissakes! It's only $20 to register... this rent is not too damn high! Your babies will have things to eat, your stomach will not be growling, our rent is not too damn high.
Not to mention if you people don't register in great numbers, I'm going to be stuck drinking all that beer by myself. And believe me, you do not want to see me on a drunken bender. That happens, the landlady will raise the rent, and then, the rent will be... well, you get the message.
So git er done!
Monday, October 18, 2010
Readers Write: Swinging for the Fences
Occasionally my readers, real or imagined, write me letters and ask me questions. Sometimes I respond.
Dear Unholy Poly,
I was thinking about cyclocross. It seems like the latest hip cycling thing to do. I pride myself on keeping up with fashion; I rocked my Lance Motorola jersey in 2005 on my OCLV Trek, and then last summer I bought a fixie to session with my friends and drink PBRs. Cross seems like the hot thing to do now. So... Do you think I should?
/s
Henry H. Ipster
Williamsburg, NY
Dear Henry,
By merely asking that question, you just killed cyclocross. Just like you killed fixies, carbon road bikes, Nirvana and REM before them.
Thanks you asshole.
Unholy Rouleur
Ps. If I catch you listening to the Black Keys I will shoot you, on the spot. You hear me, you sonovabitch?
--------------------------------------------
Dear Unroly Holeur,
I was wondering how I could improve my speed on the cyclocross course? Try as I might, I just don't seem to get faster. Any tips?
/s
Allen Lim-Prist
Dear Allen,
If you've tried the usual methods to get faster (interval training, getting a coach, buying $3200 carbon wheels, buying dope from Chodroff) and none of them work, why don't you try obtaining a false ID with Zdenek Stybar's picture, then hiring Stybar for, say, $250,000 per race, to race under your identity?
Seriously. If you've done everything you could and you're not winning, and this really bugs you, there's no other alternative to cheating. Plus everybody will forgive you when they see Styb..., er, I mean you, doing tail whips over the berms.
/s
Unholy Rouleur
Ps. Winners never cheat, and you'll never win.
--------------------------------------------------
Dear Unholy Derailleur,
I'm concerned about the start positions that I'm getting. Really concerned.
No, let me start over again. I am really, really, really fucking concerned about the start positions I am getting. Our local race series has this screwed up method of callups, where only people with points get callups, then the rest of us get screwed no matter how many times we sat there at 7:45 on Sunday night, hitting "refresh" waiting for registration to open. Yet the best I seem to be able to manage, is registering around 25th, which is like two or three positions past the people with callups.
And lately the promoters seem to be giving *anybody* with points a callup. Last week, I had to deal with this guy "Zoltan" who is the Hungarian national champion getting a callup ahead of me because he supposedly has 25 You See I points, whatever the hell those are. But the dude doesn't even have any MABRA series points! WTF? This is really terrible, because unless I can get a better start, there's no way I'll finish in the top 20. Is there anything you can do to help me?
Sirrichard Burton
Remington, WY
Dear Sirrichard,
Yes. I can help you. By relegating your ass to the last row and 119th position at my race, where I will not be able to hear your whining from my lofty perch in row 9, #73. Of course you could retrieve your ball sack out of the women's portajohn, stop whining, and knock out a set of 10 stomps every two weeks or so starting now. Then, assuming you have the courage to get a good start - a fact not in evidence at this point - you'll be able to ride straight to the front and not only will you be happy, but we'll be happy too because you'll find something else to bitch about but you'll be off the front and we won't have to hear your shit.
Any other questions?
Didn't think so.
/s
Unholy Rouleur
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Rhymes With Yardsale
Granogue only treats me one of two ways when I drive up there for the cross race, or the excellent MASS series endurance race. I either lose moderately badly and have a great time, or the course pile drives my ass into the ground, beats me up physically, leaves me for dead in a DNF, and I have a great time.
There is no middle ground.
We - the highly trained tip of the spear of Joint Task Force Coppi/Family Bike Shop - assaulted up I-95, performed a stealth insertion into the Granogue Estate, and established a beachhead alongside the finishing straight at Granogue early on Saturday. We cleverly located our fortification on the starting straight, and a short stagger from a bunch of worthless drunk cyclocrossers from Philly who coincidentally had several kegs of free beer in the back of their pickup truck and who are now my newest best friends. One of the things I like about Granogue is it draws a lot of foreign pro 'crossers looking for UCI points, so that was pretty sweet. Their words of encouragement are always heartwarming, like this one guy riding by waving his middle finger - a European greeting of friendship I'm told by my Irish friends - and he was shouting "le camp de retrenche de Dien Bien Phu." His good cheer and encouragement were all I needed to keep my spirits high, despite the day's setbacks.
The race - Older Slower (35+ 2/3/4 as opposed to Older Faster 35+ 1/2/3) started as it always does, in a warm embrace of the sort a couple close prison inmates might give each other. Unlike last year, I didn't hear anybody talking at the start of the race about how great it would be to be racing in ankle deep mud. Then we started; the referees used a gun and I didn't see anybody go down so I assume the referees weren't from South Philly. Soon we were heading into the woods, and I was somewhat surprised when a very large chap - a track racer based on the jersey - gave me an extremely enthusiastic pat on the shoulder which sent me careening into some roots and a tree. I like congratulations as much as the next guy, but his enthusiasm was almost too much, and I did not know why he was congratulating me so - I hadn't really done anything at that stage.
A minute or two later, as we remounted our steeds, my good friend Dave T. gave me a nice hard karate chop to the leg, in what I assume was a good hearted attempt to teach me that ancient and honorable martial art. I felt dreadfully ashamed of myself because I did not immediately pick up on the technique, what with the severe pain in my left quadricep.
Not long after that, my buddy Trevor apparently tried to express solidarity by running into me. I do not remember that but Seibold does, saying he got a picture, and it shows "an enormous blur." I am certain the picture is completely accurate, because all I remember of this part of the race myself, is an enormous blur.
So I struggled along with an enormous Charles Horse. It would usually be a "Charlie Horse" but it felt wrong to use the familiar tense whilst decamped upon the Granogue estate of the DuPonts. Shortly thereafter, on a high speed sweeping downhill, a fellow on my left attempted to cure my Charles Horse by centerpunching me from the left. Sadly, it did not work a cure and he only managed to further aggravate the condition by bouncing hard off my left leg, and then crashing himself.
On I continued, valiantly, past the runup. My left leg sadly did not want to do much work at this point, so I resolved to be a gentleman and leave it alone for a while. Thus I stopped asking it to help me, since it did not seem inclined to do so anyhow.
After the second time up the Runup - the Limping Walkup in my case - I resolved to buckle down and just push through the pain, to try to salvage a decent performance. In the dirt and grass section behind the tower, I stuck to the high line and did a little standing effort to get my speed up, since I'd figured out in practice that I could ride the flowing downhill sweepers in front of the tower much faster than many of my peers.
As I did so, I noticed a little dirt dip in the middle of the high line. Thinking with my mountain bike brain instead of my cyclocross brain, I rode right into the middle of it. As the handlebars wrenched out of my hands and the front wheel turned 90 degrees to my direction of travel, I remembered that I was not on my full suspension 29'er with a custom fork and a 2.3 inch front tire, but a shite-handling cyclcross bike with a two year-old 700x32 Challenge Fango.
I endo'ed really hard, and I want to apologize to the DuPont family for leaving a big dent in the ground. I am sorry, please don't be angry, I did not mean to do it.
A few guys rode by while I lay there trying to breathe, and when I got up a few seconds later I noticed there were a couple awful long snot stringers hanging out of my nose. There were no pinpoints of pain, just an all-over feeling of hurt, akin to getting hit very hard from the blind side in rugby. No broken bones, just a shocky, whiplashy feeling that Members of Parliament pay good money to obtain.
My tubular had also rolled and since it was a good long way from the pit, I packed it in for the day.
The rest of the day was spent boozing, telling lies, cheering for my friends (most of whom got crushed, some of whom like Mike W. and Harshman who got great results) and just enjoying a great day. I also stuck around for the end of the M Elite race, which was interesting because Myerson, Nieters and two other guys were dicing for third. The road curves left. The boys were two abreast, with Myerson on the inside wheel, on the left. The four were clipping the apex 100 meters out from the flag. Myerson tried to come up on the inside. There was no there, there. He crashed really hard on the grass, another fellow who owes the DuPonts an apology for denting the estate. I hope he promises not to dent it in similar fashion next year.
All in all it was a really good day, as it always is. I was just really bummed out that the race chose to kick my ass today instead of letting me have a nice mediocre result.
Epilogue: I was registered to race today, Sunday. I was dubious about it, got up early, took a half minute to ease out of bed and go to the bathroom... went right back to bed. Very stiff today, still have the charlie horse from the repeated assaults on my left leg (what did it do to make God so angry at it?) and my back and neck are stiff from that crash. The tubular is wrecked, but the Velocity Escape rims that I recommend so highly? The rims are still basically true. What a great frickin' rim that is for big dudes. Yep, the bike is okay, but I'm bruised as hell. Going to try a long mileage week this week with 3-4 bike commutes and no intensity, to build a little base, get the legs under me again, and to try to work out all the knots and bruises. It was great seeing Granogue again, can't wait for the mountain bike race next spring. It'll take that long, probably, to work out the charlie horse.
Granogue, when she kisses you, always leaves a hickey.
There is no middle ground.
We - the highly trained tip of the spear of Joint Task Force Coppi/Family Bike Shop - assaulted up I-95, performed a stealth insertion into the Granogue Estate, and established a beachhead alongside the finishing straight at Granogue early on Saturday. We cleverly located our fortification on the starting straight, and a short stagger from a bunch of worthless drunk cyclocrossers from Philly who coincidentally had several kegs of free beer in the back of their pickup truck and who are now my newest best friends. One of the things I like about Granogue is it draws a lot of foreign pro 'crossers looking for UCI points, so that was pretty sweet. Their words of encouragement are always heartwarming, like this one guy riding by waving his middle finger - a European greeting of friendship I'm told by my Irish friends - and he was shouting "le camp de retrenche de Dien Bien Phu." His good cheer and encouragement were all I needed to keep my spirits high, despite the day's setbacks.
The race - Older Slower (35+ 2/3/4 as opposed to Older Faster 35+ 1/2/3) started as it always does, in a warm embrace of the sort a couple close prison inmates might give each other. Unlike last year, I didn't hear anybody talking at the start of the race about how great it would be to be racing in ankle deep mud. Then we started; the referees used a gun and I didn't see anybody go down so I assume the referees weren't from South Philly. Soon we were heading into the woods, and I was somewhat surprised when a very large chap - a track racer based on the jersey - gave me an extremely enthusiastic pat on the shoulder which sent me careening into some roots and a tree. I like congratulations as much as the next guy, but his enthusiasm was almost too much, and I did not know why he was congratulating me so - I hadn't really done anything at that stage.
A minute or two later, as we remounted our steeds, my good friend Dave T. gave me a nice hard karate chop to the leg, in what I assume was a good hearted attempt to teach me that ancient and honorable martial art. I felt dreadfully ashamed of myself because I did not immediately pick up on the technique, what with the severe pain in my left quadricep.
Not long after that, my buddy Trevor apparently tried to express solidarity by running into me. I do not remember that but Seibold does, saying he got a picture, and it shows "an enormous blur." I am certain the picture is completely accurate, because all I remember of this part of the race myself, is an enormous blur.
So I struggled along with an enormous Charles Horse. It would usually be a "Charlie Horse" but it felt wrong to use the familiar tense whilst decamped upon the Granogue estate of the DuPonts. Shortly thereafter, on a high speed sweeping downhill, a fellow on my left attempted to cure my Charles Horse by centerpunching me from the left. Sadly, it did not work a cure and he only managed to further aggravate the condition by bouncing hard off my left leg, and then crashing himself.
On I continued, valiantly, past the runup. My left leg sadly did not want to do much work at this point, so I resolved to be a gentleman and leave it alone for a while. Thus I stopped asking it to help me, since it did not seem inclined to do so anyhow.
After the second time up the Runup - the Limping Walkup in my case - I resolved to buckle down and just push through the pain, to try to salvage a decent performance. In the dirt and grass section behind the tower, I stuck to the high line and did a little standing effort to get my speed up, since I'd figured out in practice that I could ride the flowing downhill sweepers in front of the tower much faster than many of my peers.
As I did so, I noticed a little dirt dip in the middle of the high line. Thinking with my mountain bike brain instead of my cyclocross brain, I rode right into the middle of it. As the handlebars wrenched out of my hands and the front wheel turned 90 degrees to my direction of travel, I remembered that I was not on my full suspension 29'er with a custom fork and a 2.3 inch front tire, but a shite-handling cyclcross bike with a two year-old 700x32 Challenge Fango.
I endo'ed really hard, and I want to apologize to the DuPont family for leaving a big dent in the ground. I am sorry, please don't be angry, I did not mean to do it.
A few guys rode by while I lay there trying to breathe, and when I got up a few seconds later I noticed there were a couple awful long snot stringers hanging out of my nose. There were no pinpoints of pain, just an all-over feeling of hurt, akin to getting hit very hard from the blind side in rugby. No broken bones, just a shocky, whiplashy feeling that Members of Parliament pay good money to obtain.
My tubular had also rolled and since it was a good long way from the pit, I packed it in for the day.
The rest of the day was spent boozing, telling lies, cheering for my friends (most of whom got crushed, some of whom like Mike W. and Harshman who got great results) and just enjoying a great day. I also stuck around for the end of the M Elite race, which was interesting because Myerson, Nieters and two other guys were dicing for third. The road curves left. The boys were two abreast, with Myerson on the inside wheel, on the left. The four were clipping the apex 100 meters out from the flag. Myerson tried to come up on the inside. There was no there, there. He crashed really hard on the grass, another fellow who owes the DuPonts an apology for denting the estate. I hope he promises not to dent it in similar fashion next year.
All in all it was a really good day, as it always is. I was just really bummed out that the race chose to kick my ass today instead of letting me have a nice mediocre result.
Epilogue: I was registered to race today, Sunday. I was dubious about it, got up early, took a half minute to ease out of bed and go to the bathroom... went right back to bed. Very stiff today, still have the charlie horse from the repeated assaults on my left leg (what did it do to make God so angry at it?) and my back and neck are stiff from that crash. The tubular is wrecked, but the Velocity Escape rims that I recommend so highly? The rims are still basically true. What a great frickin' rim that is for big dudes. Yep, the bike is okay, but I'm bruised as hell. Going to try a long mileage week this week with 3-4 bike commutes and no intensity, to build a little base, get the legs under me again, and to try to work out all the knots and bruises. It was great seeing Granogue again, can't wait for the mountain bike race next spring. It'll take that long, probably, to work out the charlie horse.
Granogue, when she kisses you, always leaves a hickey.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Fryday
You know who is awesome? Stevil Kinevil.
You know what he did for you people?
I asked if he'd be interested in sponsoring the Tacchino. I noticed all his marketing gig is west-coast oriented and thought it'd be cool to turn some East beasts onto his sweet stuff - he designs cool bike clothes and knick-knacks, and always seems to have a supply of awesome looking stuff on tap in the All Hail the Black Market Market.
So you know what that bastard did? He sent me a huge box of stuff, some of it his own design, some of it just really cool stuff he had laying around by virtue of being Kit Designer to the Stars. It was something like 35 pounds of coolness in a box. Frankly, I'm not cool enough to be in possession of this stuff.
Holy crap are you people in luck. The coolness factor of the stuff he sent me is off the freakin' hook, and he sent enough stuff that *a lot* of people are going to get great, great prizes - in addition to the great stuff our more local sponsors are kicking in. A lot of undeserving people, based on what I've been seeing on Crossresults.com lately, but a lot of people nonetheless.
I'd ask that you seriously consider patronizing his Market Market if you're in need of a cycling cap or a cool non-team jersey, or a messenger bag, a "black out with your sack out" beer coozie, or cool socks. Hey, team gear is nice, but it's often helpful to go incognito, like on rest days when you don't want to race pathletes.
Seriously. He just hooked you people up in a big way. Check out his site and see if you can return the favor.
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! AH, DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
Seems like some park rangers are really going to try to close down the trails at Loch Raven. To everybody. You may want to follow that link and send a few respectful emails to people who can make a difference, if you care about preserving trail access. I don't know if it's NIMBYs that did it, or maybe some quite enviro-activists who are generally anti-access, or if it was one user group or another that tried to get MTB's included and accidentally made themselves collateral casualties.
Doesn't really matter, in the end. What does matter, is mountain bikers are about to lose a nice local place to ride if they don't move quick.
Of course grim only gets you so far. Sometimes it's worth having a laugh, particularly if you can have it at other people's expense.
Yeah, all that brilliant, unique music you love so much? It's one song. Damn.
But hell, I'm actually laughing, and I found this weird little rant about Pachelbel's Canon in D.
But wait, there's more. Let's go for baroque...
Now that's some funny shit. I'm actually smiling a little bit. Hayseed Dixie would be proud.
As long as I'm going to smile... time for Weezer.
Of course you can't really play anything by Weezer without thinking about maybe the greatest video of all time.
Seriously, I think it's that good. At least for somebody of my age. It mashes up icons of my childhood with music of my, well, early to not exactly early adulthood. Weezer is just one of those bands that, if you like them, you can listen to them a lot, and you have sort of an amicable relationship with their body of work; love some hits and like the rest. They're a bit like Cake in that respect, some great stuff and a lot of solid workmanlike stuff.
And I kind of like these guys but I don't know exactly what they're doing with their music yet. I'm not sure they know either.
And apropos of nothing...
Funny how listening to random songs and following links can make you feel better. Music is wonderful stuff.
Have a good weekend. I hope to see you at Granogue.
You know what he did for you people?
I asked if he'd be interested in sponsoring the Tacchino. I noticed all his marketing gig is west-coast oriented and thought it'd be cool to turn some East beasts onto his sweet stuff - he designs cool bike clothes and knick-knacks, and always seems to have a supply of awesome looking stuff on tap in the All Hail the Black Market Market.
So you know what that bastard did? He sent me a huge box of stuff, some of it his own design, some of it just really cool stuff he had laying around by virtue of being Kit Designer to the Stars. It was something like 35 pounds of coolness in a box. Frankly, I'm not cool enough to be in possession of this stuff.
Holy crap are you people in luck. The coolness factor of the stuff he sent me is off the freakin' hook, and he sent enough stuff that *a lot* of people are going to get great, great prizes - in addition to the great stuff our more local sponsors are kicking in. A lot of undeserving people, based on what I've been seeing on Crossresults.com lately, but a lot of people nonetheless.
I'd ask that you seriously consider patronizing his Market Market if you're in need of a cycling cap or a cool non-team jersey, or a messenger bag, a "black out with your sack out" beer coozie, or cool socks. Hey, team gear is nice, but it's often helpful to go incognito, like on rest days when you don't want to race pathletes.
Seriously. He just hooked you people up in a big way. Check out his site and see if you can return the favor.
--------------------------------------------------------
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! AH, DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
Seems like some park rangers are really going to try to close down the trails at Loch Raven. To everybody. You may want to follow that link and send a few respectful emails to people who can make a difference, if you care about preserving trail access. I don't know if it's NIMBYs that did it, or maybe some quite enviro-activists who are generally anti-access, or if it was one user group or another that tried to get MTB's included and accidentally made themselves collateral casualties.
Doesn't really matter, in the end. What does matter, is mountain bikers are about to lose a nice local place to ride if they don't move quick.
--------------------------------------------------------
Time for a little music I suppose. I'm feeling a bit down this week. I don't know why - I shouldn't the way the Tacchino sponsors are coming through with great swag, and the way things are kinda good at work and at home. But maybe it's because I've gone all introspective about cross, and I've been wondering if we're not about to screw things all up with huge fields, weekly scoring debacles, lapped rider debates (and unlapped rider screw-overs). I really appreciate what the refs do for us, but damn..
Time for a little music I suppose. I'm feeling a bit down this week. I don't know why - I shouldn't the way the Tacchino sponsors are coming through with great swag, and the way things are kinda good at work and at home. But maybe it's because I've gone all introspective about cross, and I've been wondering if we're not about to screw things all up with huge fields, weekly scoring debacles, lapped rider debates (and unlapped rider screw-overs). I really appreciate what the refs do for us, but damn..
Of course grim only gets you so far. Sometimes it's worth having a laugh, particularly if you can have it at other people's expense.
Yeah, all that brilliant, unique music you love so much? It's one song. Damn.
But hell, I'm actually laughing, and I found this weird little rant about Pachelbel's Canon in D.
But wait, there's more. Let's go for baroque...
Now that's some funny shit. I'm actually smiling a little bit. Hayseed Dixie would be proud.
As long as I'm going to smile... time for Weezer.
Of course you can't really play anything by Weezer without thinking about maybe the greatest video of all time.
Seriously, I think it's that good. At least for somebody of my age. It mashes up icons of my childhood with music of my, well, early to not exactly early adulthood. Weezer is just one of those bands that, if you like them, you can listen to them a lot, and you have sort of an amicable relationship with their body of work; love some hits and like the rest. They're a bit like Cake in that respect, some great stuff and a lot of solid workmanlike stuff.
And I kind of like these guys but I don't know exactly what they're doing with their music yet. I'm not sure they know either.
And apropos of nothing...
Funny how listening to random songs and following links can make you feel better. Music is wonderful stuff.
Have a good weekend. I hope to see you at Granogue.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tough Commute
Today's commute was a bit tougher than usual. For one thing, my legs are pretty dead. Sunday's VO2Fest pretty much killed them, then a little bit of cross riding laying out the course, and a lap of Rosaryville buried the bastards. So riding in was a bit slow, the legs never opened.
Around 1:00, I knocked off to go to the office picnic. Unlike a lot of fundatory events, this one was actually fun, mainly because I really, really like a lot of the people I work with. Naturally, I rode to it from the office. Afterward, I rode back into D.C. and waited for Sean to finish up work, killing an hour by rolling around Hains a few times.
Then we headed back home; at that point I had about 40 miles on my dead legs.
Sure enough, there was no zip. But wait, it gets worse.
Coming down a hill on GoodLuck Road - the most inaptly named stretch of tarmac in all of Prince George's County, Maryland - a woman in the oncoming lane looked right at us, then pulled in front of us, turning left. I can't speak for what Sean did but I locked 'em up and feathered the brakes just a bit so as not to slide into her door. We were going probably 25-28 at the time, and we bumped each other pretty good, but didn't crash. "What the f***??!!! BITCH!" was all I could manage to say, albeit at the top of my lungs, and Sean didn't manage to say anything for a couple minutes. So there was some adrenalin going on.
About a half mile later, we're rolling along and Sean has a little gap on me. This woman in a Green BMW 5 series - Ghetto Fabulous, coming out of some really cheap little houses, nice wheels, tons of dings in the car - is talking on the phone. Sean rolls past, then she starts to ease out on me. Yeah, I'm going 25 here too. Not good. As I pass, I holler, "get off the phone" and she hits the brakes. Once I was past, she peels out up the hill, and as she passes, rolls down the window and goes, "You fat bastard!"
That got me laughing pretty good, because that's what a number of my close friends call me. I thought it was just a little presumptuous of her to use such a friendly familiar name for me.
But anyhow, that was #2 close call on the day.
Then a little later we're coming into Old Town Bowie. There's this bridge, and at the bottom the left turn has right-of-way. Oncoming traffic on the left has to stop. So this next woman sees me and Sean coming, and pulls halfway into the intersection right as I get there. This time I lock them up, and holler, "go on! Just go!"
Oddly enough, my legs opened up right about here as I pounded the pedals and shot up the hill.
Three close calls in about 15-20 minutes, all by ridiculous, stupid acting drivers who looked right through us. I could pretty easily be dead right now.
Oh yeah, and my legs, they're toast. I need to get a lot of rest between right now, and Granogue. That, and to not get run over. That may be the tougher part of the deal.
Artist's Impression:
Jim Drafting on Sean Today
Jim Drafting on Sean Today
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Erratum
I tuned in to watch Monday Night Football last night and got presented with blurred photos of Brett Favre's junk. WTF? What in the wide world of sports is wrong with the NFL, and ESPN, that, presented with the hottest sports scandal of the year they give me pictures of Brett Favre's junk, instead of (or at least alongside) pictures of the woman he sexually harassed? Here's what the Four Letter should have shown you, instead of Brett Favre's junk:
Those are the SFW pictures of a woman who was deeply, deeply insulted that a pro quarterback would email her pictures of his junk because exhibitionism is nasty, and it's creepy to just flaunt your stuff out there. So she sued the league, or has threatened to sue it, or is settling out of court but now reluctant to talk about it, or something like that. Nobody knows really... What matters is BRETT FAVRE'S JUNK!!!!
What's up with that? Why are we getting newsflashes, so to speak, on ESPN showing us pictures of Brett Favre's junk? What, was Roger Cossack not available?
Steve Czaban, from whom I cribbed the Sterger pictures, has it figured out. Unlike many of his other theories, this one isn't crazy. The NFL and its network cronies are doing it to appeal to women. It's about teh Market Share.
It's not like the NFL is going to get any more male fans in the U.S. They got that locked up, and they're so desperate to expand, they're going to go to 18 games and hope to hell that the PEDs and cortisone and vicodins hold up and the players can wheeze across the finish line of an 18 game regular season. SO that's maxed out, and there's no foreign market to speak of (NFL World League failed), so you gotta figure out how to wring more money out of the product here in the U.S. They're already calling the New York teams "Nueva York" on some broadcasts, and they have spanish broadcasts of most games so that market is being exploited... so what market is left untapped still?
The women's market, of course.
And not the good time redneck and blue collar (in outlook) girls who already like football, but the soccer mommy and Sex in the City gals who don't care much for it. How do you get them to love the League? Why, you make your notoriously macho football teams wear all sorts of hot pink flair for a month to show that We Care About Breast Cancer, despite the fact that various forms of ass cancer take out far more men than breast cancer takes out women each year, and ovarian cancer takes out far more women than breast cancer does. But breast cancer is a trendy cause so it's a good women-centric marketing scheme. Being an anti-cancer guy wins you all sorts of free passes in the strangest quarters - ask Lance Armstrong about that.
There is also a new line of women-specific NFL gear, and they're advertising the hell out of it. Great. The problem with that is I'm thinking the ads are going to miss the people they're targeted at, and hit some unintended targets, causing collateral damage - me! Like I need to go to the game and see a 255 pound woman in a HAYNESWORTH 92 halter top and some burgundy and mustard short shorts... It will happen, trust me. But I don't matter in this equation, in fact I'm really not even supposed to notice the marketing effort. I'm sure, however, that both women who listen to SportsTalk 980 in D.C., who happen to hear the constant flow of ads for the new women's NFL gear, are getting the NFL's message loud and clear. Message: "I Care."
Finally, to really win the women's market share - or to win the market share of women who don't much like football as it is - the league needs to go really politically correct and issue a handwringing report about how there are few women executives in the NFL, and no women coaches or players, but by God, we're working on it. Yep, the NFL did just that a few weeks back. And to back that up the league flipped out when a Jets player made note of an exhibitionist Telemundo reporter wandering through the locker room being an exhibitionist, and then they wigged out when a swinish Alpha Jock like Favre acted pretty much the way we expect our swinish Alpha Jocks to act by showing his junk privately to a woman who doesn't mind showing her junk publicly. Double bonus round to win female fans - the NFL then lets ESPN show a bunch of pictures of Brett Favre's junk during prime time.
So this brings me back to my point which is all I want to do is have a corner of my life that isn't femaled all up, taken over by a femmy womens' sensibility. I live in a house with a great woman. She has had the upper hand in decorating all of the rooms but for the Fortress of Solitude, where I managed to hold the line and stick with earth tones, bikes, guns, knives and fishing gear. I work in an office that is probably 70:30 in favor of the distaff. They are wonderful professionals and talented... but I feel freaky and weird talking about fishing or hockey or similar guy topics there, 'cuz it draws a look like "dude... where'd the alien come from?" I've got several female friends who I love chatting with... but I need my space.
[update: after sleeping on it overnight, what bugs me is that this is changing the culture of the game, which is what it is, in a way to make it appeal to non-fan whose culture, frankly, thinks NFL culture is pretty stupid. It is as insulting as when Fox tried to make non-hockey fans into fans by digitally painting a big blue blur over the puck "so you can see it." That was offensive because the real action in hockey is what the players are doing, and if you can see that you know exactly where the puck is. It would be like shortening the TdF because novice fans "find it's a bit too long." In this instance, the NFL is a macho culture place, driven by the nature of the sport itself. Don't take my burly ass macho sport, and try to make it Lifetime: TV For Women-friendly. It ain't, you can't make it be that way, and it's incongruous and irritating to sit her watching the NFL try to do this.]
Ferchrissakes, I'm not asking for the Men's Ice Dancing competition at the Olympics to be made full contact, and I'm not asking for Women's Gymnastics to have a Steel Cage Deathmatch Parallel Bars Round. I would just like to have a little corner of my life that ain't all chicked up to appeal to a female demographic that doesn't like football.
I'm not saying I don't want women watching football; I think it's cool when I meet women who are football fans, it's great they like it. But it's like any other sport - let women come to it naturally, don't try to make the sport's culture more girly in order to draw female fans. Do they really have to dress Ray Ray Lewis in pink shoes and a pink freakin' doo-rag for 4 games to draw in women who aren't naturally drawn to the game? Jeebus. What's next - having a cry and talking it out after an incomplete pass or a missed block? I have a sneaking suspicion that NFL Commish Roger Goodell is about one marketing initiative away from causing zombie Woody Hayes to rise from the grave, stagger over to the NFL headquarters, and punch him square in the mouth.
I could handle it better if I thought the motivation for the big publicity campaign was some weepy initiative inspired by Roger Goodell's visit from Oprah and Doctor Phil, but it isn't even that genuine. The League's goal is just to get more money, and it is counting on being able to dupe a large segment of women, who are utterly indifferent to football and who think it's kind of stupid, into thinking it's as cool as Manolo shoes, to wheedle more money out of them, to tap an untapped market. It's just creepy, like a lot of things Goodell does, and I can picture him getting all sweaty and flushed when he looks at the women's Nielsen ratings breakdown for Olympic gymnastics. "See? Women *do* like sports. You know how much money that represents? Now if we can just get them to watch the NFL. Get Hillary Clinton on the phone and see what it'd take to get her to watch, willya Gene?" It's just stage dressing because you can only dress up a sport so much, when its underlying ethos is war without actual deaths.
I'm sorry to go all retrograde on you people. I really am. And I know that the various felonies committed by NFL players against women are completely wrong, and that there needs to be equal opportunity in the workplace. That much I agree with.
But repeated exposure to Brett Favre's junk along with all the crap that the League office is floating right now, is exactly the kind of stuff that turns ordinary, reasonable guys into Archie Bunker. Are they trying to alienate ordinary male viewers? Must they keep showing us pictures of Brett Favre's junk?
If they keep this crap up, I'm going to get a lot less serious about my football and a little more serious about my hockey.
Sure, I'll miss the Giants a lot, but not if they're wearing pink trim on their red white and blue and if the League continues to make it clear that I ain't particularly welcome to their new hen party. Plus I'm reasonably certain that for all his other flaws, Gary Bettman isn't about to let MASN show me pictures of Alex Ovechkin's junk every time there's a stoppage in play.
UPDATED TO GET THE VISIBLE FLECKS OF SPITTLE OUT OF THE TEXT.
Those are the SFW pictures of a woman who was deeply, deeply insulted that a pro quarterback would email her pictures of his junk because exhibitionism is nasty, and it's creepy to just flaunt your stuff out there. So she sued the league, or has threatened to sue it, or is settling out of court but now reluctant to talk about it, or something like that. Nobody knows really... What matters is BRETT FAVRE'S JUNK!!!! What's up with that? Why are we getting newsflashes, so to speak, on ESPN showing us pictures of Brett Favre's junk? What, was Roger Cossack not available?
Steve Czaban, from whom I cribbed the Sterger pictures, has it figured out. Unlike many of his other theories, this one isn't crazy. The NFL and its network cronies are doing it to appeal to women. It's about teh Market Share.
It's not like the NFL is going to get any more male fans in the U.S. They got that locked up, and they're so desperate to expand, they're going to go to 18 games and hope to hell that the PEDs and cortisone and vicodins hold up and the players can wheeze across the finish line of an 18 game regular season. SO that's maxed out, and there's no foreign market to speak of (NFL World League failed), so you gotta figure out how to wring more money out of the product here in the U.S. They're already calling the New York teams "Nueva York" on some broadcasts, and they have spanish broadcasts of most games so that market is being exploited... so what market is left untapped still?
The women's market, of course.
And not the good time redneck and blue collar (in outlook) girls who already like football, but the soccer mommy and Sex in the City gals who don't care much for it. How do you get them to love the League? Why, you make your notoriously macho football teams wear all sorts of hot pink flair for a month to show that We Care About Breast Cancer, despite the fact that various forms of ass cancer take out far more men than breast cancer takes out women each year, and ovarian cancer takes out far more women than breast cancer does. But breast cancer is a trendy cause so it's a good women-centric marketing scheme. Being an anti-cancer guy wins you all sorts of free passes in the strangest quarters - ask Lance Armstrong about that.
There is also a new line of women-specific NFL gear, and they're advertising the hell out of it. Great. The problem with that is I'm thinking the ads are going to miss the people they're targeted at, and hit some unintended targets, causing collateral damage - me! Like I need to go to the game and see a 255 pound woman in a HAYNESWORTH 92 halter top and some burgundy and mustard short shorts... It will happen, trust me. But I don't matter in this equation, in fact I'm really not even supposed to notice the marketing effort. I'm sure, however, that both women who listen to SportsTalk 980 in D.C., who happen to hear the constant flow of ads for the new women's NFL gear, are getting the NFL's message loud and clear. Message: "I Care."
Finally, to really win the women's market share - or to win the market share of women who don't much like football as it is - the league needs to go really politically correct and issue a handwringing report about how there are few women executives in the NFL, and no women coaches or players, but by God, we're working on it. Yep, the NFL did just that a few weeks back. And to back that up the league flipped out when a Jets player made note of an exhibitionist Telemundo reporter wandering through the locker room being an exhibitionist, and then they wigged out when a swinish Alpha Jock like Favre acted pretty much the way we expect our swinish Alpha Jocks to act by showing his junk privately to a woman who doesn't mind showing her junk publicly. Double bonus round to win female fans - the NFL then lets ESPN show a bunch of pictures of Brett Favre's junk during prime time.
So this brings me back to my point which is all I want to do is have a corner of my life that isn't femaled all up, taken over by a femmy womens' sensibility. I live in a house with a great woman. She has had the upper hand in decorating all of the rooms but for the Fortress of Solitude, where I managed to hold the line and stick with earth tones, bikes, guns, knives and fishing gear. I work in an office that is probably 70:30 in favor of the distaff. They are wonderful professionals and talented... but I feel freaky and weird talking about fishing or hockey or similar guy topics there, 'cuz it draws a look like "dude... where'd the alien come from?" I've got several female friends who I love chatting with... but I need my space.
[update: after sleeping on it overnight, what bugs me is that this is changing the culture of the game, which is what it is, in a way to make it appeal to non-fan whose culture, frankly, thinks NFL culture is pretty stupid. It is as insulting as when Fox tried to make non-hockey fans into fans by digitally painting a big blue blur over the puck "so you can see it." That was offensive because the real action in hockey is what the players are doing, and if you can see that you know exactly where the puck is. It would be like shortening the TdF because novice fans "find it's a bit too long." In this instance, the NFL is a macho culture place, driven by the nature of the sport itself. Don't take my burly ass macho sport, and try to make it Lifetime: TV For Women-friendly. It ain't, you can't make it be that way, and it's incongruous and irritating to sit her watching the NFL try to do this.]
Ferchrissakes, I'm not asking for the Men's Ice Dancing competition at the Olympics to be made full contact, and I'm not asking for Women's Gymnastics to have a Steel Cage Deathmatch Parallel Bars Round. I would just like to have a little corner of my life that ain't all chicked up to appeal to a female demographic that doesn't like football.
I'm not saying I don't want women watching football; I think it's cool when I meet women who are football fans, it's great they like it. But it's like any other sport - let women come to it naturally, don't try to make the sport's culture more girly in order to draw female fans. Do they really have to dress Ray Ray Lewis in pink shoes and a pink freakin' doo-rag for 4 games to draw in women who aren't naturally drawn to the game? Jeebus. What's next - having a cry and talking it out after an incomplete pass or a missed block? I have a sneaking suspicion that NFL Commish Roger Goodell is about one marketing initiative away from causing zombie Woody Hayes to rise from the grave, stagger over to the NFL headquarters, and punch him square in the mouth.
I could handle it better if I thought the motivation for the big publicity campaign was some weepy initiative inspired by Roger Goodell's visit from Oprah and Doctor Phil, but it isn't even that genuine. The League's goal is just to get more money, and it is counting on being able to dupe a large segment of women, who are utterly indifferent to football and who think it's kind of stupid, into thinking it's as cool as Manolo shoes, to wheedle more money out of them, to tap an untapped market. It's just creepy, like a lot of things Goodell does, and I can picture him getting all sweaty and flushed when he looks at the women's Nielsen ratings breakdown for Olympic gymnastics. "See? Women *do* like sports. You know how much money that represents? Now if we can just get them to watch the NFL. Get Hillary Clinton on the phone and see what it'd take to get her to watch, willya Gene?" It's just stage dressing because you can only dress up a sport so much, when its underlying ethos is war without actual deaths.
I'm sorry to go all retrograde on you people. I really am. And I know that the various felonies committed by NFL players against women are completely wrong, and that there needs to be equal opportunity in the workplace. That much I agree with.
But repeated exposure to Brett Favre's junk along with all the crap that the League office is floating right now, is exactly the kind of stuff that turns ordinary, reasonable guys into Archie Bunker. Are they trying to alienate ordinary male viewers? Must they keep showing us pictures of Brett Favre's junk?
If they keep this crap up, I'm going to get a lot less serious about my football and a little more serious about my hockey.
Sure, I'll miss the Giants a lot, but not if they're wearing pink trim on their red white and blue and if the League continues to make it clear that I ain't particularly welcome to their new hen party. Plus I'm reasonably certain that for all his other flaws, Gary Bettman isn't about to let MASN show me pictures of Alex Ovechkin's junk every time there's a stoppage in play.
UPDATED TO GET THE VISIBLE FLECKS OF SPITTLE OUT OF THE TEXT.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Read it and Weep
That's the 2010 Tacchino course, more or less, subject to tech inspection and promoter whim. You may notice the addition of a few sweepers, and maybe a little bit more on the Back 40. What you don't see is a set of steps near the pits. Nor can you see the additional rest periods the changes bring. And what you miss most of all in this picture is what this course is going to make you feel like. It will be just like past Tacchino courses - only moreso. Plus there will be great prizes, sweet Belgian beer, sausages and frites, and a frickin' moonbounce for the kids.
Promoter is not responsible if you feel like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark while riding this course.
Artist's Impression: Racer After Three Laps of Tacchino
Triathletes' MTB Day Out
Just observed:
leave dog in car while you go for a 3 hour ride
talk about 'hammering Seagull yesterday on a 'triathlon bike'
pie plate, reflectors still on your $5k MTB
asking, "is this the bike I rode last time? it doesn't feel like it."
"you can catch big air on this trail." (Rosaryville perimeter loop)
Wow.
Just freakin wow.
leave dog in car while you go for a 3 hour ride
talk about 'hammering Seagull yesterday on a 'triathlon bike'
pie plate, reflectors still on your $5k MTB
asking, "is this the bike I rode last time? it doesn't feel like it."
"you can catch big air on this trail." (Rosaryville perimeter loop)
Wow.
Just freakin wow.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Hyattsville CX Wrap
It was a great event, and happily for my family, at least one of us rode well, with Son of Rouleur doing pretty well in the Li'l Belgians 6&7 year-old class.
Me? Not so much. Very flat courses and I just don't get along that well. It seems I'm a VO2 sort of athlete. A course with little rises and hills like Charm City really hurts me, but it also gives me recovery time. A really rolling course does exactly the same, only moreso. A stone flat course? It's nothing but grinding along for me. I sucked pretty bad today, even as other people like Sol (Nice race!) were kicking ass and moving up.
Rather than get tired, blow up and wuss out, I decided to rock the Powertap today, in the hopes it would keep my effort steady and chastise me for easing up.
What did my race look like? Well... like this:
Avg. Power: 267
Normalized Power: 289 (threshold is 335)
Time: 44:03
IF: .826
I'm not sure that IF is quite right - I figured this ride would be an NP buster and my legs are wicked sore, and my stomach churning with post-race acid. This was an easy ride, according to my Powertap. And maybe it was, maybe I pussed out something fierce. But it doesn't feel that way, perceived exertion was 9/10ths, with the only easing up coming in a few turns I couldn't rail, and on the last lap (for me) when I'd been lapped by a group of 3-4 leaders. Even then I stepped it up when the next little group passed, and was actually a bit dizzy when I crossed the line at [unspecified -1 position] place.
I don't get it. Other than the need to keep pushing, and in fact start pushing harder on my diet. That part I get. But as for work ratio... OMG, was that race hard. Why does the PT show it was no harder than a 3x15 low threshold (steady state) interval workout? My legs sure don't feel like I just had an easy workout...
Enough about me, and enough whining. There was a lot of good stuff going on at the race. Good barbecue, great playground for the kids (and a moonbounce), terrific sponsorship from Franklin's Brewpub and Arrow bikes, and Route 1 Velo did a great job putting it together, and squeezing every bit of remotely interesting terrain into the race course. It's a classy event and if you didn't make it this year, you should mark it down for next year. Some of the Coppis had great days, and it was great seeing dozens of my crossy friends on a nice hot day, with clear skies and lots of hard racing going down. Though the racing is disappointing for most of us, the fun we have with friends and the cool scene keep us coming back.
[Update: And just when I'm feeling a little down, Scott The Surprisingly Competetive Stagiare Elite Master sends along this video of today's SuperPrestige race, with special instructions to check out what Stybar does at around 10:45.
That is sick, sick, sick. Brought a smile to my face. I know maybe two or three guys who are actual good racers, who could also do a tailwhip at that speed on an MTB. I am pretty sure I don't know anybody who could do that on a CX bike, much less while riding away from the field at the top race going down today anywhere in the world.
Thanks for passing along, Scott. It gave me miles of smiles. And now that I think about it JeanBean and everybody else who was cheering and who chatted me up later did too.
------------------------------------------------------
Time to register for the Tacchino Ciclocross if you haven't, folks. Some of the popular fields are starting to get a bit full, and you're looking at being a loooong ways back at the start if you don't get after it soon. Did I mention there will be sausage there? There will be, and the vendor will have some, and you can win some for a mid-pack prime. Funk music, spectator pavilions, sponsorship by Duvel/Ommegang (with Hennepin and Duvel Green at the pavilion) and a moon bounce for the kids. Get after it!
Me? Not so much. Very flat courses and I just don't get along that well. It seems I'm a VO2 sort of athlete. A course with little rises and hills like Charm City really hurts me, but it also gives me recovery time. A really rolling course does exactly the same, only moreso. A stone flat course? It's nothing but grinding along for me. I sucked pretty bad today, even as other people like Sol (Nice race!) were kicking ass and moving up.
Rather than get tired, blow up and wuss out, I decided to rock the Powertap today, in the hopes it would keep my effort steady and chastise me for easing up.
What did my race look like? Well... like this:
Avg. Power: 267
Normalized Power: 289 (threshold is 335)
Time: 44:03
IF: .826
I'm not sure that IF is quite right - I figured this ride would be an NP buster and my legs are wicked sore, and my stomach churning with post-race acid. This was an easy ride, according to my Powertap. And maybe it was, maybe I pussed out something fierce. But it doesn't feel that way, perceived exertion was 9/10ths, with the only easing up coming in a few turns I couldn't rail, and on the last lap (for me) when I'd been lapped by a group of 3-4 leaders. Even then I stepped it up when the next little group passed, and was actually a bit dizzy when I crossed the line at [unspecified -1 position] place.
I don't get it. Other than the need to keep pushing, and in fact start pushing harder on my diet. That part I get. But as for work ratio... OMG, was that race hard. Why does the PT show it was no harder than a 3x15 low threshold (steady state) interval workout? My legs sure don't feel like I just had an easy workout...
Enough about me, and enough whining. There was a lot of good stuff going on at the race. Good barbecue, great playground for the kids (and a moonbounce), terrific sponsorship from Franklin's Brewpub and Arrow bikes, and Route 1 Velo did a great job putting it together, and squeezing every bit of remotely interesting terrain into the race course. It's a classy event and if you didn't make it this year, you should mark it down for next year. Some of the Coppis had great days, and it was great seeing dozens of my crossy friends on a nice hot day, with clear skies and lots of hard racing going down. Though the racing is disappointing for most of us, the fun we have with friends and the cool scene keep us coming back.
[Update: And just when I'm feeling a little down, Scott The Surprisingly Competetive Stagiare Elite Master sends along this video of today's SuperPrestige race, with special instructions to check out what Stybar does at around 10:45.
That is sick, sick, sick. Brought a smile to my face. I know maybe two or three guys who are actual good racers, who could also do a tailwhip at that speed on an MTB. I am pretty sure I don't know anybody who could do that on a CX bike, much less while riding away from the field at the top race going down today anywhere in the world.
Thanks for passing along, Scott. It gave me miles of smiles. And now that I think about it JeanBean and everybody else who was cheering and who chatted me up later did too.
------------------------------------------------------
Time to register for the Tacchino Ciclocross if you haven't, folks. Some of the popular fields are starting to get a bit full, and you're looking at being a loooong ways back at the start if you don't get after it soon. Did I mention there will be sausage there? There will be, and the vendor will have some, and you can win some for a mid-pack prime. Funk music, spectator pavilions, sponsorship by Duvel/Ommegang (with Hennepin and Duvel Green at the pavilion) and a moon bounce for the kids. Get after it!
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Freitag Musik
Time for the tunes.
I've run this song recently but I have to hit it again. Comments on YouTube or any other highly trafficked site are generally a fount of stupidity, but once in a while you find a gem. I found a good one today, maybe the best YouTube comment ever:
Man. I don't know why but that just moves me. "Got two choices 'yall, pull over or, bounce on the devil, put the pedal to the floor..." Damn. FWIW, he's pretty solid in his interpretation of the 4th Amendment, except for concluding that a consent search would be illegal at a traffic stop. It ain't...
Enough shop talk. Here's a film that looks good:
Yeah, a remake of True Grit. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. Directed by the Coen Brothers. Looks like a great, great film comin' at us, people. I know, as The Dude would say, that's, like, pretty bold talk for a, you know, one eyed fat man. Looks like it will have a good soundtrack too. This song seems appropriate to the Rooster Cogburn character.
Check this out.
You know where he got that from, right? Here:
You know who else those guys seem to have inspired? Depeche Mode's Alan Wilder.
Well... That puts me in the mood for some garage punk blues.
Love me some Black Keys. That's not exactly their own song though... They lifted it from this guy:
Speaking of Junior Kimbrough... check this out.
Makes you want to drink whiskey, doesn't it? That's some great blues bass playing there. But we're just pussyfootin' around the blues, aren't we? Lightnin' Hopkins was the blues.
You listen to that song, you watch the video, and you understand the meaning of the expression, "Times was hard. Real hard." Amazing how an individual's suffering can produce some great art. Time to wrap up, I guess. Let's finish with Lightnin'.
See you all at Hyattsville CX. Better bring your Strong. You're gonna need it.
I've run this song recently but I have to hit it again. Comments on YouTube or any other highly trafficked site are generally a fount of stupidity, but once in a while you find a gem. I found a good one today, maybe the best YouTube comment ever:
How interesting. I'm a 63 year old caucasian. I have a BA in Economics and an MBA in Management. I am a decorated Vietnam Veteran where I served as a Captain in the USAF. For the last 33 years I have been an IT systems professional. I'm a church goer. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. Rap is not my first choice in music, but this is some cool shit. I think however many problems you have, bein' a bitch definitely is one.What song was he commenting on? Why this NSFW one from JayZ.
Man. I don't know why but that just moves me. "Got two choices 'yall, pull over or, bounce on the devil, put the pedal to the floor..." Damn. FWIW, he's pretty solid in his interpretation of the 4th Amendment, except for concluding that a consent search would be illegal at a traffic stop. It ain't...
Enough shop talk. Here's a film that looks good:
Yeah, a remake of True Grit. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. Directed by the Coen Brothers. Looks like a great, great film comin' at us, people. I know, as The Dude would say, that's, like, pretty bold talk for a, you know, one eyed fat man. Looks like it will have a good soundtrack too. This song seems appropriate to the Rooster Cogburn character.
Check this out.
You know where he got that from, right? Here:
You know who else those guys seem to have inspired? Depeche Mode's Alan Wilder.
Well... That puts me in the mood for some garage punk blues.
Love me some Black Keys. That's not exactly their own song though... They lifted it from this guy:
Speaking of Junior Kimbrough... check this out.
Makes you want to drink whiskey, doesn't it? That's some great blues bass playing there. But we're just pussyfootin' around the blues, aren't we? Lightnin' Hopkins was the blues.
You listen to that song, you watch the video, and you understand the meaning of the expression, "Times was hard. Real hard." Amazing how an individual's suffering can produce some great art. Time to wrap up, I guess. Let's finish with Lightnin'.
See you all at Hyattsville CX. Better bring your Strong. You're gonna need it.
A Serious Aside
Didn't ride much this week but I did get some fun in. My legs were destroyed from 3 laps at BCA in the mud on the single. Destroyed! Doesn't mean I didn't think about some stuff this week. So I'm going to hit a serious item here and give you music in another post.
------------------------------------------------------------------
GM is having trouble getting it's Initial Public Offering launched. When GM tanked, bond holders sought bankruptcy / reorganization proceedings, because the defining characteristic of a bond, secured commercial paper, is that if a company goes tits up, the bond holders are *senior* in bankruptcy proceedings. "Seniority" means "first in line to take hold of the assets offered as security for the loan." (My quotes). When GM and Chrysler hit the wall like two crash test dummies, the Car Czar determined that bond holders were no longer senior, and the U.S. (and Canadian) government along with the UAW would take control of the company.
Some people howled about the rule of law, and what about bankruptcy law and the Uniform Commercial Code and all that stuff. For their efforts to seize the machines that made the El Dorados, they were, unlike Pablo Picasso, repeatedly called assholes by various professional and amateur pundits. This left a persistent burning sensation in my mind. It struck me as wrong at the time, and still does.
Flash forward 18 months, and GM is now trying to launch an IPO. They are offering preferred stock, counting on this normally desirable investment to raise around 30% of their capital. The distinguishing characteristic of preferred stock is that the shareholders pay a hell of a stiff premium and in exchange receive small but regular dividends, and in a bankruptcy proceeding, preferred shareholders would have seniority, they'd be the shareholders most likely to recoup some of their investments. Shareholders in common stock would have no seniority; they would be last in line.
Maybe one of you smart guys who does finance can tell me why it would make good sense to purchase preferred stock in GM right now. I see the risk in it as roughly akin to playing a second hand of Three Card Monte. Sure, I could win... but experience tells me it would be a really, really bad bet.
Many of you long time readers know I have a thing for Friedrich Hayek, a total mancrush. One of the things he said that was a key to his anti-totalitarian philosophy was that the rule of law:
means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehandIf that sounds familiar it's because John Locke - the political philosopher, not the character on Lost - bequeathed it to the Framers, who scribbled it down in the Constitution:
No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed.This seems pretty intuitive if you think about it. The legislature shouldn't be able to pass a law today, to outlaw your riding your bike on the road last week. (So if the cops show up to arrest you for that, they're wrong; it's an ex post facto law.) Nor should the executive be able to levy punitive measures through a decision-making process or fiat, where it goes contrary to pre-existing laws and regulations.
Consider whether it makes sense to apply the same principles to the protection / intermediation of property rights. Do you think it makes sense that the rules under which a banker makes a loan - the rules under which your money and your neighbors' money gets loaned out - should be enforced according to a set of pre-existing rules? Should you be able to rely on those rules when you choose how to invest? Should the government be able to change the rules mid-way, without new legislation or at least a rulemaking?
The reason a lot of people hit the wall over the GM bailout was not that GM got bailed out. It is so big that maybe it did need to be saved, for the country's best interests. What rankled was that the bondholders' property interests, commercial rights they had paid a premium to protect in reliance on very clear sections of the bankruptcy code - were disregarded by the executive branch. Maybe there were some good reasons and maybe it was morally or politically justifiable. But it wasn't consistent with the rules for disregarding the damn rules. I wouldn't have a problem with a court deciding that there was some exigent circumstance that required waiving seniority rules in this instance - there would at least be Due Process before the seniority rights were deprived and as long as the opinion wasn't blatantly bad, I could accept it. Nor would I mind an Act of Congress changing the law, even if the bondholders were injured by it when their pre-existing economic expectations were destroyed. That is democracy - and the rule of law in action. I can live with a bad result that occurs within the pre-existing framework. But it was all done by executive decision so I have heartburn.
For my trouble, I've been informed this week that Hayek's notion of the rule of law - a notion cribbed from the Framers, and Locke, among others - is some occult Tea Party fetish, a discredited ancient way of thinking. That's the most charitable thing I've heard about it; other explanations are that it's a racist dog whistle, too high flown for the [insert anti-Tea Party slur here] to understand, or whatever works to disregard a fairly timeless notion dating back at least to the days of the public posting of the Roman laws.
I don't think this way of thinking is outmoded. I hold this belief as a civil liberties / rule of law guy and come to it as a result of my worldly experiences. I have lived in bad places abroad, lawless places, where the only real law was power. The result was to convert me to an obsessive loyalty to the black letter of the laws. It seems to me that along with cultural habits, the written laws and the written decisions of magistrates are the only enduring defense against the state of nature, which is Hobbesian at best. As Beckett's Thomas More character noted, if you cut down the thicket of laws to do good, then you have no protection to rely upon when somebody else comes along to do you evil.
As always, I encourage people to read Hayek's Road to Serfdom because it is a defense of classic liberalism, of individual liberty. It's an easy read and it's not a partisan book; it defends liberty and argues against all the totalitarian leaning -isms. It's like John Stuart Mill for people who are pragmatic. If you can read it and not come out the other end a bigger fan of the ACLU and the NRA, and maybe the Tea Party, and Glenn Beck as well as Glenn Greenwald at the same time - then you probably didn't understand it. This isn't endorsing any of them, in fact I'm anything but a fan of some of those people I just named, just saying if you're a friend of individual liberty your education isn't complete until you've read this book. (And his Constitution of Liberty, but who's counting...)
Just remember - I geeked you on Hayek a couple years before Glenn Beck discovered it, and also before liberal bloggers discovered this week (just 55 years after publication) that this saint of right/libertarianism thought we do need a social safety net. Double extra bonus points: Hayek's early work forms the basis for a number of really sound information theories, including theories about the benefits of distributed information, and a theory about why centralized government and bureaucracies generally do not work very effectively and why they tend to slide to at least petty authoritarianism, if not the full blown type. Give it a read - even if you don't like it, it will give you a better understanding about how to argue with me, or if you prefer, the likes of Glenn Beck.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
I rock the small wheel in front because...
... with my massive power, rides would be one long power wheelie.
The pedal hitting the ground with every stroke is a bit of a bummer, but I get to practice my bunny hopping technique with it. A lot.
Monday, October 04, 2010
Well.. That Convinced Me...
We talk about Freudian slips but Freud was of the belief that there is no such thing as an accident, that stuff we say then retract out of embarrassment or as a result of being shamed is usually a window into what we're really thinking. Please, tell me what you think about Freud's belief in comments, and whether you agree with me, or not. No pressure, of course...
But seriously, I don't fantasize about how nice it would be to kill the folks with whom I disagree, not even people who I think have very dumb arguments. I maybe feel like yelling a bit, but as for fantasizing like this... No, I can't go there, and don't. I have to wonder if the people who made this ad have ever been in a fistfight much less anything more serious. They are pretty casual about the notion of eliminating political 'enemies.'
There are days when I wonder if my cringing at an ad like this doesn't put me in an archaic and outmoded little minority whose time has passed. Probably. Social standards almost never improve, and we're becoming increasingly coarse as a society, so if you made me bet $20 on it, I'd say this little ad is the wave of the future. That's depressing.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Mixed Bag
First I did this by sticking my fingers into the spokes of my moving bike to slow it down:
Not an optimal braking method, I assure you, but on the upside the finger should heal within 6 weeks or so and I should get mobility back in that finger tip real soon.
Then I relearned the hard lesson that I suck ass in cross races involving deep mud, particularly deep mud on uphills. This is not an excuse, it is a reason. I sink to the bottom of the mud, where I sit, immobile, doing a dirty, knobby tired version of a track stand. BCA Cross at Ft. Ritchie was a beautiful venue, a new course that I'd maybe like to get a crack at tuning a little bit, and a bunch of soul sucking uphill mud portions that killed me. I rode three laps with a sticking front brake, which maybe didn't help much, but it comes back to the deep mud. Not my bag, man.
Then I rode mountain bikes with my wife and kid which was sublime because the Rouleur Wife really loves her new 29'er. I watched football, vacuumed the damn house at half time and between games, and cooked some delightful sirloins on the grill.
What did you do with your weekend? (No World Championship spoilers here since some of my loser friends Tivo'ed it and will get angry at me mentioning Spartacus' TT win and big man Thor Hushovd's road championship at any time before next Wednesday).
-------------------------------------------------------------
The Tacchino is coming! Funk, sausage, three (3!) great beers from Duvel/Ommegang, Frites, prizes for best new riders and top singlespeeds, and we're going to push the prize money down into the Cat 3 races if enough of you turkeys sign up for it.
After you register for Tacchino, you need to think about registering for Hyattsville CX - which is this Sunday. It was a first year race last year and was sort of small, but a top flight event. I think it will be really well attended this year because, damn, the word gets out. Hard racing, great course that wrings every little bit out of the terrain features at its venue, and a party par excellence. The awesome Belgian-style brewhouse Franklins (Brewery & AAAAWWESOME General Store) is sponsoring it too - a brewpub that all of you would be raving about if it was located at 12th & H or in Arlington.
DCCX ought to be on your list too, because (1) much as it pains me to say it as a promoter, they leave the rest of MABRA in the dust as a race day experience; and (2) you owe it to yourself to go there, race, and/or just enjoy the day. It is a great event, and frankly, they raised the bar on the rest of us in MABRA, it's a Granogue-ian crossfest that we should all want to imitate. No, I'm not admitting to envy here; just amazement. Tacchino will never duplicate DCCX; we can't be one. But what we aim to do is what DC MTB has done with DCCX, and that is to give racers and fans an experience that combines a great race with an event that pegs the fun meter. Oh yeah, one other thing - they're having a single speed and tandem race at the end of the day. Consider rockin' it Portland style, racing geared early, and rollin' out your Hipstervagen for the last race of the day, and I don't care if you need to drink six beers to get your nerve up to do it. The demands of the single and its peculiar harshness make it just like a regular cross race - only moreso.
------------------------------------
Product Review: PUSH Industries Suspension Fork Rebuild/Mod
Wise bike guys will tell you - if you're a big guy, you need to be careful about what suspension options you get on a mountain bike. Most stuff can't hold up to your beating. Oh, the stanchions and springs are probably strong enough not to break - maybe - but the valving is wrong, the seals aren't built to take it, and if you get the shock or fork pressurized up to the appropriate level for your weight & riding style, it will have the responsiveness of a hardtail or a rigid bike.
I've been pretty happy with the Fox RP2 and Rock Shox Reba Race on my Salsa Big Mama. The rig is built for comfort, for all day epics and endurance races. The RP2 came stock and I moved the Reba over from my hardtail. Still, the Reba was getting nigh on 3 years old and it was time for a rebuild anyhow, so when it converted itself to a rigid fork on a ride up at Patapsco - a lockout due to blown seals which is common with older seal sets in Rebas - I decided to PUSH the fork.
PUSH Industries, near as I can tell, only does modifications and rebuilds on shocks and forks. Based in Loveland, Colorado, they do rebuilds for about 185, and they do modifications - tailoring the gear to your size & riding style - starting at about $225. Prices vary depending on model. I had heard good things about PUSH and I was tired of running the Reba at maxed out air pressure, so I decided to give them a shot.
Ordering the work was simple. I used their web order form, told them how big I am (very) and about my riding style (floats like an iron butterfly, stings like a wasp in the mouth), and what exactly I wanted - very soft on the top, steeply progressive, resistant to bottoming. They then emailed me mailing labels with pre-paid postage, and I FedExed the fork off to Colorado.
Ten days or so later, the Reba arrived back home. This was in mid-July. I bolted the fork back on, and went riding on it.
Now that I have 7 or 8 hard rides in on it, I feel like I can review its performance.
First of all, getting the work done was no hassle. The exterior of the fork is unchanged, so it's a bolt-off, bolt-on operation that any user with basic skills should be able to do. PUSH sent me back the old damping rod, the part that controls oil and maybe air flow as the fork compresses and rebounds, so the mod obviously involved replacing that; I'm not sure what else they did though they include a list on their web site if you're interested.
Second, it came back exactly as I ordered it. I wanted it plush on top because most of the bumps you hit, and most of the energy-sapping bouncing, occurs on little tiny choppy bumps in the trail. To cancel this annoyance out, you need your suspension set with proper sag - the natural drop in the fork or shock when you sit on it. This way when the wheel catches mini-air of an inch, it drops down into contact of the ground, rather than bouncing up each time it hits a little rock or root. You also want it a little mushy right at the top, to absorb that chop. But then when you catch air, you don't want to hear the internals clacking on the bottom. Nor do you want it going halfway down and hitting a wall - you want the resistance increasing as the fork compresses. This fork does exactly that - soft at the top, and I haven't quite bottomed it out yet despite trying. Some people like their suspension set up differently - I suspect big hit riders don't care about softness on top the way a cross country or all mountain rider would, and PUSH will no doubt set you up the way you like.
Third, I am running slightly lower air pressure in this, but the air pressure doesn't matter as much as with the stock Reba because the fork is damped properly. Air pressure was concern before because that and the rebound damping were the only two adjustments I had, and the fork was very sensitive to both. Neither is that critical now; both produce incremental changes, but the way the damping is set up internally by PUSH is now the dominant factor in how this fork works.
Fourth, it works really well. It revolutionized how this bike rides. It handles much better, and the rear suspension works better (without being modified) than it did before. This changes how I ride. In tight single track requiring fast right/left moves, I can bounce a little bit left to right, snapping the bike and getting a rhythm going. If there is a small log or a root crossing the trail, I have the option of doing the traditional bunny hop, or if I'm moving at speed I just throw my weight downward, then hop straight up and jump the obstacle - pretty cool. The effect is most noticeable, however, in rock fields. Rock fields test handling skills and suspension to the limit, and with this perfectly set up fork, I find rocks challenging, but not the ultimate test that they used to be. Part of this is me learning new skills, but part of it is being on a bike that is optimized for my riding style.
I didn't have a chance to test some things. I don't know how well the modifications will hold up over time. I suspect the life will be equivalent to the stock gear - kind of hard to stay in business selling a product that is worse than OEM, right? I also haven't had a chance to test their warranty or customer service. Their work comes with a one year warranty, which is pretty solid.
So there you go. If you are thinking about getting a rebuild, it may be worth thinking about dropping the extra $50 and getting your fork PUSH'ed.
Not an optimal braking method, I assure you, but on the upside the finger should heal within 6 weeks or so and I should get mobility back in that finger tip real soon.
Then I relearned the hard lesson that I suck ass in cross races involving deep mud, particularly deep mud on uphills. This is not an excuse, it is a reason. I sink to the bottom of the mud, where I sit, immobile, doing a dirty, knobby tired version of a track stand. BCA Cross at Ft. Ritchie was a beautiful venue, a new course that I'd maybe like to get a crack at tuning a little bit, and a bunch of soul sucking uphill mud portions that killed me. I rode three laps with a sticking front brake, which maybe didn't help much, but it comes back to the deep mud. Not my bag, man.
Then I rode mountain bikes with my wife and kid which was sublime because the Rouleur Wife really loves her new 29'er. I watched football, vacuumed the damn house at half time and between games, and cooked some delightful sirloins on the grill.
What did you do with your weekend? (No World Championship spoilers here since some of my loser friends Tivo'ed it and will get angry at me mentioning Spartacus' TT win and big man Thor Hushovd's road championship at any time before next Wednesday).
-------------------------------------------------------------
The Tacchino is coming! Funk, sausage, three (3!) great beers from Duvel/Ommegang, Frites, prizes for best new riders and top singlespeeds, and we're going to push the prize money down into the Cat 3 races if enough of you turkeys sign up for it.
After you register for Tacchino, you need to think about registering for Hyattsville CX - which is this Sunday. It was a first year race last year and was sort of small, but a top flight event. I think it will be really well attended this year because, damn, the word gets out. Hard racing, great course that wrings every little bit out of the terrain features at its venue, and a party par excellence. The awesome Belgian-style brewhouse Franklins (Brewery & AAAAWWESOME General Store) is sponsoring it too - a brewpub that all of you would be raving about if it was located at 12th & H or in Arlington.
DCCX ought to be on your list too, because (1) much as it pains me to say it as a promoter, they leave the rest of MABRA in the dust as a race day experience; and (2) you owe it to yourself to go there, race, and/or just enjoy the day. It is a great event, and frankly, they raised the bar on the rest of us in MABRA, it's a Granogue-ian crossfest that we should all want to imitate. No, I'm not admitting to envy here; just amazement. Tacchino will never duplicate DCCX; we can't be one. But what we aim to do is what DC MTB has done with DCCX, and that is to give racers and fans an experience that combines a great race with an event that pegs the fun meter. Oh yeah, one other thing - they're having a single speed and tandem race at the end of the day. Consider rockin' it Portland style, racing geared early, and rollin' out your Hipstervagen for the last race of the day, and I don't care if you need to drink six beers to get your nerve up to do it. The demands of the single and its peculiar harshness make it just like a regular cross race - only moreso.
------------------------------------
Product Review: PUSH Industries Suspension Fork Rebuild/Mod
Wise bike guys will tell you - if you're a big guy, you need to be careful about what suspension options you get on a mountain bike. Most stuff can't hold up to your beating. Oh, the stanchions and springs are probably strong enough not to break - maybe - but the valving is wrong, the seals aren't built to take it, and if you get the shock or fork pressurized up to the appropriate level for your weight & riding style, it will have the responsiveness of a hardtail or a rigid bike.
I've been pretty happy with the Fox RP2 and Rock Shox Reba Race on my Salsa Big Mama. The rig is built for comfort, for all day epics and endurance races. The RP2 came stock and I moved the Reba over from my hardtail. Still, the Reba was getting nigh on 3 years old and it was time for a rebuild anyhow, so when it converted itself to a rigid fork on a ride up at Patapsco - a lockout due to blown seals which is common with older seal sets in Rebas - I decided to PUSH the fork.
PUSH Industries, near as I can tell, only does modifications and rebuilds on shocks and forks. Based in Loveland, Colorado, they do rebuilds for about 185, and they do modifications - tailoring the gear to your size & riding style - starting at about $225. Prices vary depending on model. I had heard good things about PUSH and I was tired of running the Reba at maxed out air pressure, so I decided to give them a shot.
Ordering the work was simple. I used their web order form, told them how big I am (very) and about my riding style (floats like an iron butterfly, stings like a wasp in the mouth), and what exactly I wanted - very soft on the top, steeply progressive, resistant to bottoming. They then emailed me mailing labels with pre-paid postage, and I FedExed the fork off to Colorado.
Ten days or so later, the Reba arrived back home. This was in mid-July. I bolted the fork back on, and went riding on it.
Now that I have 7 or 8 hard rides in on it, I feel like I can review its performance.
First of all, getting the work done was no hassle. The exterior of the fork is unchanged, so it's a bolt-off, bolt-on operation that any user with basic skills should be able to do. PUSH sent me back the old damping rod, the part that controls oil and maybe air flow as the fork compresses and rebounds, so the mod obviously involved replacing that; I'm not sure what else they did though they include a list on their web site if you're interested.
Second, it came back exactly as I ordered it. I wanted it plush on top because most of the bumps you hit, and most of the energy-sapping bouncing, occurs on little tiny choppy bumps in the trail. To cancel this annoyance out, you need your suspension set with proper sag - the natural drop in the fork or shock when you sit on it. This way when the wheel catches mini-air of an inch, it drops down into contact of the ground, rather than bouncing up each time it hits a little rock or root. You also want it a little mushy right at the top, to absorb that chop. But then when you catch air, you don't want to hear the internals clacking on the bottom. Nor do you want it going halfway down and hitting a wall - you want the resistance increasing as the fork compresses. This fork does exactly that - soft at the top, and I haven't quite bottomed it out yet despite trying. Some people like their suspension set up differently - I suspect big hit riders don't care about softness on top the way a cross country or all mountain rider would, and PUSH will no doubt set you up the way you like.
Third, I am running slightly lower air pressure in this, but the air pressure doesn't matter as much as with the stock Reba because the fork is damped properly. Air pressure was concern before because that and the rebound damping were the only two adjustments I had, and the fork was very sensitive to both. Neither is that critical now; both produce incremental changes, but the way the damping is set up internally by PUSH is now the dominant factor in how this fork works.
Fourth, it works really well. It revolutionized how this bike rides. It handles much better, and the rear suspension works better (without being modified) than it did before. This changes how I ride. In tight single track requiring fast right/left moves, I can bounce a little bit left to right, snapping the bike and getting a rhythm going. If there is a small log or a root crossing the trail, I have the option of doing the traditional bunny hop, or if I'm moving at speed I just throw my weight downward, then hop straight up and jump the obstacle - pretty cool. The effect is most noticeable, however, in rock fields. Rock fields test handling skills and suspension to the limit, and with this perfectly set up fork, I find rocks challenging, but not the ultimate test that they used to be. Part of this is me learning new skills, but part of it is being on a bike that is optimized for my riding style.
I didn't have a chance to test some things. I don't know how well the modifications will hold up over time. I suspect the life will be equivalent to the stock gear - kind of hard to stay in business selling a product that is worse than OEM, right? I also haven't had a chance to test their warranty or customer service. Their work comes with a one year warranty, which is pretty solid.
So there you go. If you are thinking about getting a rebuild, it may be worth thinking about dropping the extra $50 and getting your fork PUSH'ed.
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