Big Bikes

Root 66 Channel 3

The Idiot

Tracing my trail of stupidity leading up to this race is going to be tough, so much to tell…where to begin. A telltale sign of my declining cognitive abilities was my attempt to google map directions to the race from teammate George’s house. I had clicked on the “avoid highways” button to get alternate directions over to his place in Brookline. I then punched in the race venue location to see if it was closer to his abode than mine. Here’s the email I sent a few seconds later:

“AAAH!
Dude, I was just looking at google maps.
I don;t know who put it in my head that this thing is 2 hours away, it's not,
it's closer to 3. We gotta bump up the departure time for your race.

Crap, we're looking at more like 7:15ish.
Let me know if you get this, I'll try to text you as well.

-t”

I followed that up a few minutes later with a retraction:

“I think instead of Pedialyte I was accidentally drank some
Pediatric Crack replacement juice
because I clicked the "avoid highways" button on google maps
to do something and then looked at the directions to the race
with that function still on.

Crackhead!

Sorry, we'll see just before 9.

-t”

Note my incredibly well structured sentence “I was accidentally drank”.
I sound like an LOL cat. “I can haz pedialyte?”.

That’s about when they should have taken the keys to my bike away and called me a cab to a weekend at the sleep study lab. But no, I went off to race in earnest.

My second act of awesomeness involved getting back late from dinner with my parents, then deciding it was still a good idea to swill an entire bottle of Pedialyte during the hour before going to bed. It was going to be a scorcher and I wanted to be prepared…to wake up at least five times during the night to piss. Sleep was non-existent.

On the way down to the race we were listening to my super-awesome “it’s gonna be really hot out” mix. I’d searched for anything relating to heat, summer, hotness, fever, burning, fire…you get it, in my itunes library. The fact that I thought this was a good idea at all is testament to my reduced mental capacity. We stop for gas and when we get back in the car the Beastie Boys are playing. I look at the ipod, it says Dragonforce “Through the Fire and Flames” is playing. I’m baffled, I think it’s some major malfunction with my ipod, I keep clicking through the tracks and The Beastie Boys keep playing “like Ma Bell I got the ill…” I’m about to lose my god damn mind. Finally Miriam looks at the stereo and points out that the CD player is on, not the auxiliary mode. The jack had come out, Greg Montello’s dance party mix was playing. Tech-mology.

We get to the race, I don’t drive the car into any tunnels which are actually just images painted on the side of a cliff face by The Road Runner and kill us all in a flaming wreck. I ride the course, I’m over-geared, I go back to the car and knock a tooth off in the back. Not literally, I’m not quite that dumb. I head out for another pre-ride with Matt O’Keefe, he’s a super nice guy, and a rider I respect a huge amount, so I was honored just to roll with the guy. He was talking about how he’s still trying to find his legs, and that he’d just keep going hard from the start at these races and wait ‘til they show up. I visualized a man (maybe Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter) playing Russian Roulette with a gigantic revolver…loaded with ICBMs, I mean a really gigantic revolver. Eventually one’s going to find the chamber and we’re all dead. During the pre-ride I must have hit a nail or something on one of the wooden bridges because my front tire began to leak. I topped it off and rode around thinking the sealant had taken care of it and I was good to go.

My next act of awesomeness and brilliance went like this, I’d spent an hour the night before the race (when I should have been trying to sleep and peeing instead) building a bottle stand made out of a camera tripod and an old paint bucket. “What’s that?” Skip Brown asked me. “It’s a bottle stand, I made it last night” I replied. “You MADE it?” he laughed. Skip works for Seven Cycles, he helps make some of the finest frames in the world. When he “makes something” It’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court stuff, not a bucket bolted to a tripod. I felt like a chef on Hell’s Kitchen who’d just brought Gordon Ramsey a piece of Wonder Bread smooshed around a ball of peanut butter with a filthy hand “I made this Chef Ramsey!”. Profanity ensues.

Then I’m riding up to the feed zone with said Buckety Bottle stand thingy, I see Mo Bruno-Roy. I try to make a gesture like “Ya, I’m going to joust my competitors with this thing”…then one of the legs suddenly telescopes out, goes into my spokes, drags the rest of the apparatus in between the wheel and the frame, bucket slams into my legs, I go “Ow!”. Attempt at Will Ferrell style comedy transforms into Peter Sellers material quickly. After a trip back to the car to re-ziptie my brake housing on and check the truth of my wheel I was up at the start line watching air ooze out of my front tire through a huge gash, the sealant wasn’t up to the task. Too late to fix it, oh well, it was go time so we went.

What do I even do with this thing?

Here’s how it unraveled:

Another good start for a bad starter, up in the top five, then top three or four. Came down to the first big log hop, Harry Precourt had come around me with some big ringing action on the descent, he opted for the runaround line, I hopped, maybe the guy behind me didn’t hop so well, next thing I knew we had a gap. It was Carpenter the master of the hole shot, Foley, Ringquist, O’keefe, and a guy from Michigan with me. I was comfortable until we hit the super steep climb, I was off and running it. As I tried to close the gap back down on the off camber descent my tire started to roll off. It was only a matter of time. I took out my CO2 and threaded it on, I located my tube, I wanted to make this quick and get back in it.


I pulled off and went to it. It didn’t take but a few seconds to realize my greatest act of awesomeness was grabbing a 26” tube not a 29” tube. Still I tried to stretch the thing onto the rim like a tubular, the sealant making this as easy as boiling alive an Egyptian Hairless Cat (after you’d marinated it in olive oil). Minutes were going by fast as the riders from other fields rolled past. Eventually I got the tire on, using my left foot like Daniel Day Lewis to hold the ever-slipping bead on as I finished it off. Blasted one CO2 in, I was sloppy, wasting a lot of it. Second CO2 was my last chance, yet it still wasn’t enough to hyper-distend the wee tube into the larger tire cavity. Miriam came along with the offer of a pump, if only to just get my now ten minute behind ass back to the start, no dice, not enough purchase on the valve stem. I was walking. But first I was jumping in the river and hanging out there for a while before the hike home.

Michael Patrick went on to win, followed by Ringquist, and Foley. Michael’s been through some crazy stuff, battling brain cancer this past winter and it’s good to see him back on form. He’s coming back from a place most of us have never been and can’t even imagine. Seemed like a bunch of folks had issues with the heat, maybe my stupidity and negligence saved my ass from the ignominy of dropping out due to heat exhaustion. The upside is that in addition to a nice soak in the river Freye was racing in Canada and Oakes was DNF as well so I maintain my tenuous grasp on the points lead for a while longer.
A big ol’ ‘Nice work” to Linnea, Colin, George, and Miriam who all finished their races. I’m going to go get some sleep.