Root 66 Bikes For BovinesThe Number of The Beast
Michael Phelps cheated.
OK, I don’t really believe that, but I want to piss off as many people as possible with this post. He didn’t cheat, he was genetically engineered in a lab. Again, kidding…or am I? After this race I was sitting, talking to my parents who had surprised me by coming out to Keene, NH for this one. I was being kinda negative about my experience. The guy to my left asks “Hey, but did you like the course?”. “No, not a bit” was my reply. “What about all the singletrack?”. I should have realized that these questions were a little pointed and that I should maybe block my foot rather than guide it as it was rapidly traveling toward my mouth. “Singletrack? That fresh cut stuff? Horrible, there’s got to be some real singletrack out in those woods somewhere”. “Oh, well I’m sorry to hear that, because I cut most of it”. Oops, I’m a big jerk. He got up, kicked me in the nuts, and walked away. Not true.
The Venue looked so promising. Unfortunately the only fun to be had was inside the bouncy castle.
Yes I have read of people trashing races and promoters, and catching hell for it. I know it’s hard work to put on a race, to mark a course, and all the other stuff that goes into that I don’t even know about. I know I’m trashing a charity event – those cows could never afford bikes themselves. Now that’s just a bad joke. When Kevin Costner made Water World, the critics weren’t nice to him. They weren’t nice to Michael Bay about Pearl Harbor either. I’m sure they both worked very hard on those terrible films, it doesn’t mean people have to be nice to them about it.
I’ll try to describe the course as it happened to me. We take off, the entire Expert and Pro fields combined. The guys let me lead it out, spinning my 32 X 19 climbing gear like a…I’ve run out of metaphors for things that spin really fast. They let me take it across the cow pasture to the road where the Experts start mixing it up, obviously excited to throw down with the a class they don’t normally get to ride with. Eventually (this is a long climb) things start to get sorted out. Nathan Ringquist and Ethan Gilmour on the front, me and an Expert kid on their wheels. The climbing was good, I like lot of climbing, this one went from paved, to dirt, to jeep trail, to scrambly, stream bed stuff, and on and on and on, it was awesome. Usually with lots of climbing comes lots of pay off in the form of singletracky traverses or ridgeline trails, that is what this course was lacking, big time.
Linnea made Vegan brownies, she' s a good person to carpool with.
By the top I was dangling off the back a bit, but no one was behind me. I entered the singletrack, it was really just a swath of taped off weirdness, running down the side of hill, like someone ghost rode an ATV down it and marked it’s path. It was flowless and haphazard, the only challenging element were the punji stick saplings jutting out of the pine needles and the sharp, pointy rocks, also obscured by the piles of pine needles. Technical, like riding under a bridge in Medford in the dark and blindly running over shards of broken beer bottles.
Eventually a rock got me, my tire gushing air like Rachel Ray gushes insipid acronyms. I wouldn’t realize until I was dropping off my teammate Linnea (2nd Expert Woman 19-29, yeah!) that I had slashed my sidewall badly, and that a huge bubble of tube was hemorrhaging out. I don’t get a lot of flats “in the field” (give me a stand and a compressor and it’s another matter entirely) so I am not the fastest flat-fixer, far from it, combine that with a mess of Stan’s, frustration, and a bad case of the butterfingers and you got yourself one long flat fix. I saw everyone from every Expert field come by as I fumbled away. My running XDX 1.75’s on more challenging courses experiment may be over. I’ll be running the Jones ACX's in Napa. Better to show up with a Bazooka to the knife fight than to show up to the Bazooka fight with a 2 X 4 with a nail in it.
When I got going again my bad brain had turned on, I wanted to douse this course with gasoline and light it on fire. The “sweet singletrack kept going for just a little while longer, then it was a combination of jeep trail, fire road, logging roads, grass, hike-a-bike, all the stuff that your average mountain biker seeks out of for their weekend ride. The worst was yet to come – a couple miles of dead flat rail trail to the finish. Yes, I’m a single speeder, and yes it’s my own damn fault that I couldn’t hold a four year old’s training wheels on a rail trail, but c’mon! This isn’t a 100 miler or even a forty or fifty miler, it’s a 24 mile course, there is no reason to have racers going down a bleeding bike path! At this point I flipped the trail off with both hands, then made shooting myself in the head motions.
When I came through and got my bottle field from a sidelined with an injury Michael Mooradian, I told him he was lucky not to be doing this one, that if I didn’t want the couple series points I’d get for merely finishing, I’d bag this one. Thanks for the feeds though Mike, definitely appreciate it. Ethan Gilmour had also flatted and he caught up to me as we started back up the climb. I felt a push from behind, it was Sara Bresnick-Zocchi. “What’re you guys having a tea party up here?” she says. Sara would go on to win the women’s pro race as she does more often than not. Ethan and I sort of started to get serious again, me getting the gap first, him closing it down on a flat section between tiers of the climb. We started to catch some Experts, but I’m afraid we had lost much of our impetus. Just as I caught sight of Single-Speeder Rob Stine I pretty much resigned myself to just getting this one done and over with. I was on the fence about racing this one with all the riding and racing coming up this week with SSWC and all, so I opted to salvage what I could of my legs. Not like you can really take it easy on a single speed, ever. I’d ride with a couple Expert guys, chatting for a while, I’d roll away up the hills, just because I had to turn the gear over, then they would gap back up. I took it easy, not wanting to have to bother with another flat fix.
As I entered the SWEET RAIL TRAIL SECTION I saw one of the Expert guys (Kevin Sweeney, wearing a nice Bare Knuckle Brigade jersey) coming up from behind. I sat up, literally, and waited for my free ride home. He came by hammering, still in contention for a podium finish in his race, I hopped on his wheel and spun 150+ for as long as I could possibly stand it then dropped off to roll in for a fifth place by default. Man, that sounds lame, I am a dick.
I apologize to the people I have hurt and the parades I have peed on.
Yes, but which product is being "placed".
After the race I went to Dunkin' Donuts to get a coffee and a snack. I left my ice coffee on the roof after, for some reason, I took a picture of it, and drove away. I went back in to get another and said "Alright, let's try this one again, only this time I'm not going to leave my coffee on the roof". They told me they'd hook me up with a new one free of charge. "I'm not a kid who just dropped their ice cream cone, I'm an adult idiot who left their ice coffee on the roof of their car". They didn't charge me, the trip to Keene was not a total wash.
Linnea on the podium AGAIN.
OK, I don’t really believe that, but I want to piss off as many people as possible with this post. He didn’t cheat, he was genetically engineered in a lab. Again, kidding…or am I? After this race I was sitting, talking to my parents who had surprised me by coming out to Keene, NH for this one. I was being kinda negative about my experience. The guy to my left asks “Hey, but did you like the course?”. “No, not a bit” was my reply. “What about all the singletrack?”. I should have realized that these questions were a little pointed and that I should maybe block my foot rather than guide it as it was rapidly traveling toward my mouth. “Singletrack? That fresh cut stuff? Horrible, there’s got to be some real singletrack out in those woods somewhere”. “Oh, well I’m sorry to hear that, because I cut most of it”. Oops, I’m a big jerk. He got up, kicked me in the nuts, and walked away. Not true.
The Venue looked so promising. Unfortunately the only fun to be had was inside the bouncy castle.I’ll try to describe the course as it happened to me. We take off, the entire Expert and Pro fields combined. The guys let me lead it out, spinning my 32 X 19 climbing gear like a…I’ve run out of metaphors for things that spin really fast. They let me take it across the cow pasture to the road where the Experts start mixing it up, obviously excited to throw down with the a class they don’t normally get to ride with. Eventually (this is a long climb) things start to get sorted out. Nathan Ringquist and Ethan Gilmour on the front, me and an Expert kid on their wheels. The climbing was good, I like lot of climbing, this one went from paved, to dirt, to jeep trail, to scrambly, stream bed stuff, and on and on and on, it was awesome. Usually with lots of climbing comes lots of pay off in the form of singletracky traverses or ridgeline trails, that is what this course was lacking, big time.
Linnea made Vegan brownies, she' s a good person to carpool with.Eventually a rock got me, my tire gushing air like Rachel Ray gushes insipid acronyms. I wouldn’t realize until I was dropping off my teammate Linnea (2nd Expert Woman 19-29, yeah!) that I had slashed my sidewall badly, and that a huge bubble of tube was hemorrhaging out. I don’t get a lot of flats “in the field” (give me a stand and a compressor and it’s another matter entirely) so I am not the fastest flat-fixer, far from it, combine that with a mess of Stan’s, frustration, and a bad case of the butterfingers and you got yourself one long flat fix. I saw everyone from every Expert field come by as I fumbled away. My running XDX 1.75’s on more challenging courses experiment may be over. I’ll be running the Jones ACX's in Napa. Better to show up with a Bazooka to the knife fight than to show up to the Bazooka fight with a 2 X 4 with a nail in it.
When I got going again my bad brain had turned on, I wanted to douse this course with gasoline and light it on fire. The “sweet singletrack kept going for just a little while longer, then it was a combination of jeep trail, fire road, logging roads, grass, hike-a-bike, all the stuff that your average mountain biker seeks out of for their weekend ride. The worst was yet to come – a couple miles of dead flat rail trail to the finish. Yes, I’m a single speeder, and yes it’s my own damn fault that I couldn’t hold a four year old’s training wheels on a rail trail, but c’mon! This isn’t a 100 miler or even a forty or fifty miler, it’s a 24 mile course, there is no reason to have racers going down a bleeding bike path! At this point I flipped the trail off with both hands, then made shooting myself in the head motions.
When I came through and got my bottle field from a sidelined with an injury Michael Mooradian, I told him he was lucky not to be doing this one, that if I didn’t want the couple series points I’d get for merely finishing, I’d bag this one. Thanks for the feeds though Mike, definitely appreciate it. Ethan Gilmour had also flatted and he caught up to me as we started back up the climb. I felt a push from behind, it was Sara Bresnick-Zocchi. “What’re you guys having a tea party up here?” she says. Sara would go on to win the women’s pro race as she does more often than not. Ethan and I sort of started to get serious again, me getting the gap first, him closing it down on a flat section between tiers of the climb. We started to catch some Experts, but I’m afraid we had lost much of our impetus. Just as I caught sight of Single-Speeder Rob Stine I pretty much resigned myself to just getting this one done and over with. I was on the fence about racing this one with all the riding and racing coming up this week with SSWC and all, so I opted to salvage what I could of my legs. Not like you can really take it easy on a single speed, ever. I’d ride with a couple Expert guys, chatting for a while, I’d roll away up the hills, just because I had to turn the gear over, then they would gap back up. I took it easy, not wanting to have to bother with another flat fix.
As I entered the SWEET RAIL TRAIL SECTION I saw one of the Expert guys (Kevin Sweeney, wearing a nice Bare Knuckle Brigade jersey) coming up from behind. I sat up, literally, and waited for my free ride home. He came by hammering, still in contention for a podium finish in his race, I hopped on his wheel and spun 150+ for as long as I could possibly stand it then dropped off to roll in for a fifth place by default. Man, that sounds lame, I am a dick.
I apologize to the people I have hurt and the parades I have peed on.
Yes, but which product is being "placed".
Linnea on the podium AGAIN.
5 comments:
So when are you promoting a race?!?1 Huh?!
Just getting that one out of the way for ya.
Actually I'd help you run an IBC mtb race, except there's already too many races on the calendar as it is.
I've got a great race planned, we're going to leave from my house, ride down the Mystic Valley Parkway against traffic, under a bridge strewn with broken glass, over a couple people's front lawns as they call us faggots and throw beer cans at us, through a couple busy rotaries, up one exit on 93, into the Fells for all of three minutes and only on fire roads, we'll then loop back and leave our bikes locked at the Porter Square T Station while we run into Liquor World, when we come back they will be stripped to the bottom brackets requiring us all to run the final leg back to The Sligo PUb where we will rehydrate with plastic cups full of PBR.
Sound good?
I would have to agree that the single track was a bit "wilderness frontier." There were points that I wasn't even sure that I was on the course at all. What was with all the sharp objects? Was that planned? I had fun though.
I think I do a ride similar to the race you have planned, well, I have the getting called faggot and having beer cans thrown at me down to a regular thing. I think it comes with riding in Mass.
S-
Dude revive the Somerville toxic tour!
sorry for the sufferation, but thanks for the usual great-to-read post!
it ain't easy showing-up (almost) every single wk to race. your blog has been a great, honest account of what it takes - and how freakin' hard it is. 2 to go.
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