Get At Me, Racing Season!

With the 2012 road racing season just around the tight, technical, hairpin corner, I’m striving to be more well connected to y’all readers this year; to that end, I encourage you to introduce yourself to me on Facebook, Twitter, and especially in person. I absolutely love meeting readers face-to-face, and while I may make fun of you or attempt to steal your cool sunglasses, I encourage you to come introduce yourself nevertheless.

Does it feel awkward to walk up to a random stranger who is wearing tight-fitting clothes covered in fruit? Probably. In order to avoid senseless awkwardness, here are a few suggested topics to keep the conversation flowing as smoothly as Laurent Fignon’s golden ponytail out the back of his helmet.

1. Tell me your favorite beer, why you like it, and why you think I would like it.
2. Produce an authentic sample of said beer. I guarantee I’ll give you a hug, and possibly a kiss should the quality of the beer merit such action.
3. Tell me about your most recent breakaway attempt. Trust me, I love a good breakaway story. That said, I already know most breakaways fail miserably from personal experience, so don’t lie and tell me you won a race solo — that never happens.
4. Just make fun of me. Heckle me, point blank, to my face. It’ll help acclimate you to the desired level of CX-like heckling during the actual races. Let’s make 2012 the best season of heckling Road Racing has ever seen!
5. Describe your favorite crit course. If you can’t recite each corner in exquisite detail, don’t bother with this one.
6. Tell me your least favorite thing about Professional Cyclist Paul Mach’s blog.
7. Tell me some outlandish “this is what the kids are using these days” slang. The more hip, vulgar, or unintelligible, the better. I’ve been using “skrilla” and “balls deep” a lot, but that stuff is already dated. I’m always on the prowl for some street cred with the youngsters, and new slang is at a premium now that I’m supposed to be building a rapport with my U23 teammates.
8. Ask me for a Custom CounterattackingReality.com Clean Bottle.

Seriously. I have Google Analytics, so I know at least a few people read this shit — don’t be shy! Come say hi!

I haven’t been particularly present in the digital world of late, and it’s mostly because I’m still rather embarrassed by my Mt. San Bruno experience on New Year’s Day.

(Photo Credit: Sonia Sofia Milan)

If you recall, the internet predicted a pretty good race for my Cal Giant teammate Chris Stastny and I. As you can see in the graphic below, that USACycling Race Predictor is a load of horse s&*t, and I am not even going to bother making excuses for my poor performance. Staz and I executed a damn-near perfect Mullet Ride that day.

Before I fully erase that disaster of a “bike race” from my memory, I’d like to quickly congratulate Nate English (Kenda p/b 5 Hour Energy) for breaking the course record and commend Chris Phipps (Thirsty Bear) for getting about as close as any mortal could to matching that lungmuscle. I’d also like to congratulate Stastny on finishing with almost exactly the same time as the past three years.

Dude, if you’re gonna keep training so hard in the off season, at least get faster, would you? Now that you’re my teammate, I care about your successes and loathe your failures.

What else is new? Let’s see. I went for a few one-hour rides over the course of the past few weeks, which is a pretty typical “training load” for me. Because it’s been exceedingly warm and exceedingly dry, I chose to frequent the trails behind UCSF’s Parnassus campus, in the highlands of San Francsico near Twin Peaks.

Now, I think that area is technically known as the Mount Sutro Open Space Preserve, but I’m going to relabel it “Yarra Park” after my 2011 ‘cross nemesis Derek Yarra.

This is not a deferential label, nor is it meant to honor or glorify Mr. Yarra in any way. Instead, I’m calling this small swath of trail-marbled greenery “Yarra Park” because it’s where I trained this winter in my quest to defeat my nemesis Derek at his own sport of CX. Having succeeded in doing so, I want to commemorate the occasion. Perhaps I’ll bust open a bottle of champagne on a tree in that park and drink it on the trail as a christening. Who’s in? Derek, care to join me?

Nomenclature aside, after fifteen minutes of ripping around singletrack on my road bike, my face looks like this. It’s weird, my mouth curves upwards and shows my teeth, and my eyes look happy.

Besides a few short, happy rides during the week, not much happened in the way of bicycles until this past weekend, at which point shit got “cray.”

Saturday morning, I headed up to Marin to do a long ride with my friends Roman Kilun (Kenda p/b 5 Hour Energy) and Andy Goessling (Mike’s Bikes). Many of you probably know Roman, technically a lawyer who’s been so busy racing professionally on teams like Health Net, OUCH and Kenda since he graduated with his JD that he hasn’t bothered to practice. Yet. Joining us on this ride was Roman’s Kenda teammate Jim Stemper, who I actually recognized from somewhere else.

Jim absolutely shattered my belief that all Pro cyclists are boring and lame and bothersome by being, well, entirely tolerable. In fact, he was pretty effing funny. Jim is training in the Bay Area for a few months, so if you see him riding on your local roads, I highly recommend latching onto his wheel and sitting there as long as you can. Mutely, if possible. He told me he loves that. If you see Roman, don’t bother trying to ride with him — you’ll see why in a second.

Roman tends to do most of his winter training aboard an ancient Cannondale CAAD3 (yes, three) with downtube shifters, a steel fork, an offensively neon green paint job, and a creepy stuffed koala bear mounted behind the rear brake. This bike is worthy of the title “hooptie,” and I’ve even made fun of it on the blog previously.

Just before we set out on our five-ish hour ride, I poked fun at this haphazard collection of antiquated parts Roman calls a bike. “Dude, what are you talking about?” he responded, “This bike isn’t a hooptie, it’s solid.”

Yep. Super solid. About an hour into the ride, Roman broke his rear downtube shifter boss straight off of his frame.

This failure was probably due to the gusto with which Roman shifts into harder gears while he’s, ahem, “Kilun it” on the climbs.

Was this suddenly unshiftable hooptie a problem? Nah. All it took was one bike shop employee (Andy), two pro cyclists (Roman and Jim), one lawyer (Roman) and one science PhD student (Me) to design an elegant solution: you simply have to MacGyver the shit out of the situation and mount the rear shifting mechanism onto the front (left) shifter boss. Like a boss!

Laughing, joking, and bullshitting, the four of us rode our bicycles out to the Point Reyes lighthouse and back. We even moo’d at dairy cows and what not. It was very pretty.

I was still feeling rather sprightly at the 3.5 hour point, which was pleasantly surprising given my predilection for < 1 hour rides. Then we began climbing Mount Tam, at which point I went all “Cadel Evans” and cracked when it mattered most. My inability to climb is notable, consistent, and disturbing.

Thankfully, my ineptitude was my salvation. I chose to take a slight shortcut over Alpine Dam back to my car for a cool 5 hours of riding, whereas the Pro contingent kept riding over the Mount Tam summit — and in the final hour of their ride, amassed five flat tires between the three of them.

Just another Roman Ride, it seems. Fun, fraught with catastrophe, painful, and ultimately worthwhile.

This is what a flat criterium “specialist*” like me looks like after a long ride with significant climbing at the end.

I guess I should have taken a 5-Hour Energy, eh, guys?

I think a side-by-side comparison obviates the need to describe my life as a cyclist in words. Here’s what amounts to a graphical summary of this post — nay, my career.

And so, while I had originally committed to a ~5 hour ride with some teammates the following day, I did what any self-respecting crit racer ought: I bailed last-minute, went to my laboratory for a while instead, and then “raced” Sunday’s Early Bird Training Crit in Fremont. After the usual breakaway shuffle for the first half of the event, I ended up in a late-race breakaway with Ethan Sopenski (SJBC), Daniel Holloway (Phil Mooney’s replacement at Raleigh Pro Cycling) and Chuck Hutcheson (McGuire Mismatched Kit Squad). I won with a last-lap attack — but I’m pretty sure they let me.

My teammate Eamon Lucas, a huge fan of the Caps Lock key, was quick to describe the experience as eloquently as I’ve ever seen.

Hurrah! I already “won” a “race!” From a small breakaway, no less! Who would have guessed? And my teammate won the field sprint! Total domination of what amounts to a crit scrimmage game!

I’d also like to point out that — for approximately the first time ever — I beat a Cal Giant rider in a crit. That he is my teammate is a minor technicality.

The moral of the story, of course, is that I just straight-up suck at being a real bike racer. I can barely even finish a run-of-the-mill training ride, then I bail on another training ride because I’m afraid of the miles, and then I “win” a race that doesn’t matter to anyone. Not even the other people contesting said “race.”

Sigh.

And thus, my friends, 2012 has begun just like 2011 ended: I can’t climb for shit, my road racing outlook is as depressing as Andy Schleck’s Tour chances, and I win crits that don’t matter to anyone. Just stop reading this blog now.

See you at the next Early Bird Crit!

*A criterium “specialist” is also known as “Fatty” by his team. Already. It’s on the official team roster under the First Name header.