Planes, Pains, and Sebaceous Cysts The Size Of Kuatos

Note to self: Mayonnaise is not a viable substitute for chamois cream, especially in warm climates.

Oh, another note to self: hey idiot, clean your bike Before you put it back in the travel case next time.

Seriously, the only reason I took my bike out of the travel case in-between my last two trips was to clean it. The problem is this: after a one-hundred mile mountain bike race or after the sixth day of a stage race,
I just don't feel like cleaning the damn thing. I mean, I don't even want to look at it. I do feel like dousing it with gasoline, lighting it on fire, and throwing it off a cliff. But that, I can do with my eyes closed. No visual necessary. I
I kind of want to keep my bike locked in that travel case, it's like a dog that I bought because of its fighting pedigree, a dog I trained to fight, taught to lust after the blood of other dogs, but now…now I've lost control of the animal and I worry that it will eat my face the first chance it gets. It's my fault the creature is dangerous and unpredictable, but it doesn't make me any less wary around it. I associate the bike only with pain and suffering, we've been through so much hell together this summer, it's no wonder I want to lock it away like a Pit Bull gone bad.

It's been a crazy couple months, I've gone from The High Cascades 100 out in Bend, Oregon, to the Breck Epic, a six day stage race in Colorado, and now I'm on my way to Brevard, North Carolina for the Pisgah Mountain Stage Race.

These events are called "races" but, for me, they are more like cycling tours. There is no better way to experience the trails a place has to offer than by riding them real, really fast with a big group of knuckleheads.

One problem with all this flying around and racing is the flying part; I hate flying. I am not a plane-talker for one thing. The second I sit down on the plane, I insert my ipod ear buds as a defensive measure. I may not listen to music at any point during the entire flight, but I want my neighbors to think I am. Or, more importantly, I don't want them to talk to me at all. Nothing good ever comes of talking to people on planes. On the way out to Oregon the girl next to me was a non-stop-plane-talker. She tried to engage me, but when I proved unresponsive, she turned to the old man across the aisle. At one point I tuned in just enough to hear that she was telling the poor, old dude about her Coke addiction. (That would be Coca Cola addiction.) The old dude was as wise as he was receptive to the incessant babbling of over-caffeinated girls on planes, he had this sparkling gem of wisdom to offer: "Yup, I used to drink a lot of soda, but now you know what I drink to stay hydrated these days? — water.

A-freakin'-mazing.

Another fun part of plane travel is the trying to get your bike on the plane as cheaply or as freely as possible. I have a list of ploys I attempt every time I hit the ticket counter.

Airline Employee: "Is this a bike?"
Me: "Um, not really, it's bike parts."
AE: "We still have to charge you for a bike."
Me: "Did I say bike? It's more like trade show supplies."
AE: "They're in a bike case."
ME: "Yes, but it's full of golf clubs…a surf board…a tuba…anything but a bike."
AE: "Uh huh, and it's over weight."
ME: "You're overweight."
AE: "What did you just say?"
Me: "I said, 'that's up for debate,' I read online that your weight limit for bike cases is 100 lbs." (waves hand in Jedi-mind-tricking motion).
AE: "What was that crap? Do you want me to call TSA and tell them I've got Osama Bin Kenobi over here?
Me: "No, but what if I told you I was…an organ donor…and astronaut…that I once saved a baby from drowning."
AE: " I would tell you that I am going to charge $150 for your bike case."
Me: "You're not gonna budge on the whole charging me for the bike case thing are ya?"
AE: "You're a quick one aren't ya hon."


And it's usually about ten minutes into the flight when I remember all the stuff I've forgotten to bring, silly, little stuff like a helmet. I forgot my helmet on the Oregon trip. Lucky for me I ran into Single Speed guru Dejay Birtch. At the time Dejay was in the process of growing one of the most magnificently large sebaceous cysts I have ever laid eyes on right on the back of his head. I called it his Kuato, like the little, slimy/hairy, all-knowing thing that came out of that guy's chest in Total Recall. It had grown to such proportions that I believe Dejay had procured a second helmet just in case he needed to put it on his secondary head, or Kuato. Maybe Dejay had the second helmet for some other reason, a reason I can't think of but, whatever the reason, he had a second helmet and I got to use it during the race and it was awesome, even if it had Kuato juice all over it.

Many lessons were learned out at the Breck Epic, lessons that will be applied at The Pisgah Mountain Stage Race. Lessons like: back off for the last couple stages and take it real easy…
so you have enough energy to clean you're bike before you put it back in its crate, uh, I mean case.


This article was originally published in the November 2010 issue of NEMBA Singletracks magazine. Go HERE to get yourself a NEMBA membership.

Thank You Thursday

The word Thursday starts with a "th" and the word thank starts with a "th." Isn't that incredibly clever? I think all my wit oozed out my ear one morning after a bout of acute insomnia.

I'm going to talk about some new additions to my bike, but first I've got to give thanks and praises.

First off there's the Ohio band, Black Owls. You may have noticed that I've been doing some video-work for Cyclingdirt. You also may have noticed the sweet tunes used in my videos. I've basically been using two band's songs for the soundtracks, Black Owls is one of them. In the absence of Guided By Voices, they are keeping the rock-dream alive out in Ohio. I used a Black Owls tune in this video for the Wilderness 101. I met Dave Butler, drummer and vocalist for Black Owls in Aviemore, Scotland in '07, during Single Speed Worlds. Dave is a wicked cool guy and a great graphic designer.


Dave's art work is every bit as striking as Black Owls sound work.



And on that...I'm not going to say "note," I also have to give props to Hallelujah The Hills, the other band I've been using in my videos. Videos like this one. They are a band that is indigenous to the Boston area, the trumpet player, Brian Rutledge, actually competed in The Ice Weasels Cometh 'cross race (that I had something to do with). He is very tall and friendly and talented. They kind of have a Neutral Milk Hotel, Flaming Lips, Built To Spill thing going on, which, in my mind, is a very good thing.

It was all I could do not to segue all over the place back there...
I'm in the airport, so I couldn't verify the quality of the Guided By Voices clip I used back there. It's kind of like the time I linked to a Big Black video while I was blogging from an airport with a slow connection. I wound up linking to the saddest over-done, home-made, video for the song "Kerosene." If Steve Albini ever ran into the guy that filmed that overly-literal, horrible piece of crap, he would probably garrote him to death with a busted guitar string.


And semi-on the subject of Neutral Milk Hotel...
when I was out with some folks the other week, someone threw some...I'm not going to use the acronym "NMH" on the jukebox. We started talking about how there might be a kind of NMH renaissance going on. Sure enough, a few weeks later when I was leaving for Martha's Vineyard, I stopped for a sandwich at Dave's Fresh Pasta...they were playing NMH. Then I got down to Wood's Hole, I grabbed a coffee at some place near the ferry dock, and you guessed it...they were playing NMH. It's not like these guys are the new, hot thing, their last album was released over twelve years ago, and these days they only seem to make news for un-musical activities like trying to save carousels from extinction.


Butanyway...

IBC was awesome enough to hook me up with a front wheel to match the one my buddies at Trek had hooked me up with. Again, the issue was that my rotors are six bolt and the new wheels were center-lock. Cue JRA Cycles logo:

I called up Adam down at the JRA and asked if he had another Mavic center-lock to six bolt adapter lying around, he did. Sweet. The Shimano one I had at the house wasn't going to work due Shimano's overzealous overbuilding. Thanks guys, I owe you Mountain Dews.

I don't think I even mentioned that I forgot my freaking helmet when I went Oregon. I did. Lucky for me, Dejay Birtch has a spare head stashed under the bed in his van, and for that spare head, he keeps a helmet. He leant me that helmet, complete with a V-Hold R mount already installed. Thanks Dejay, you are as magnanimous as your sideburns are unruly.

And A big thanks to International Bicycle Centers for the continued sweet hook ups.

The new Race X Lite carbon bar is a lot lighter than my old aluminum jam and it is 20mm wider, which is just right.

Another sweet new addition is the Evoke RXL Saddle. I did a typically brilliant thing and threw it on right before the High Cascades 100, but it actually worked out. Impressive.

The weight of the bike with the new stuff is really 21.8 lbs, the above photo lies. That was before I installed the new RXL front wheel and the Bontrager 29-3 2.0 Team Issue tire. I would have taken a picture but my camera, along with my 29er Crew knee warmers, arm warmers, wind vest, a bunch of GUs, a tub of chamois cream, and some tubes were all stolen...or something in Oregon. Maybe I should tell that story some time.

I would love to tell more stories, but Jeff Carter or his two-week-old baby are going to wake me up early so we can head up to Summit County to possibly meet up with Doug for a ride. So I will drift off to sleep now, thinking about how Denver is way, way nicer than I previously thought.

The Look Back

Last week I talked a little bit about looking forward; well this time of year is also a time to look back. Sometimes when I sit here going, "what in the hell am I going to write about today?" I forget that I was racing bikes for several years, having all sorts of wacky adventures pre-Big Bikes-blog. Somewhere in the pile of files I grabbed off my old powerbook (just before it booted up for the last time) is a document called, lamely enough, "My Cyclo-Biography." "Cyclo" instead of "auto." Get it? I am very witty. That document is a train-wreck of a story, piecing together my first few years of racing. In the deeper, darker, colder days of winter I will try to finish it and polish it up for yuz.

This is one I've pulled from the archives, my 2006 Sea Otter Classic SS race report.

First a blurb from a post-race email thread:

My favorite exchange of the race occurred during a downhill section of trail which was completely rain rutted and treacherous, the guy in front of me dropped his front wheel into a rut
then made the mistake of trying to get out of it, the result was an amazing vault over the handlebars. He managed to catch back up to me and apologize for crashing in front of me.
I told him "the thing to remember when riding ruts is if you should happen to
drop into one, just ride it out, don't fight it...y'know if you make a bad decision just stick with it, hey it works for our president right?" He replied "ya, I'm a registered republican."
I didn't have a wise-ass response so I just dropped him like a wet baby and never saw him again.



And...The race report. I edited the punctuation, but otherwise left it as it was.

Thom P.'s 2006 Sea Otter Classic

Single Speed Pro/Expert Race Report

4.9.06

When I picked up my buddy Jeff ( I.F. Grassroots newbie) at Oakland airport Friday afternoon, he mentioned something about a pleasant forecast for the weekend of Sea Otter. I stared off into the distance through the car window (while a pronounced tick developed in my left eye) and muttered something like " it rains, it always rains...they lie."

I'm a broken man, I came to Marin County last December to avoid another New England winter and we've had four months of east coast March-weather, complete with snow, floods, and mudslides. Sure enough it poured all the way down to Santa Cruz as we wove our way through prime slide territory to our borrowed beach house abode.

Saturday was a beautiful day, a beautiful day to watch a bunch of severely chagrined pros churn their way through a quagmire of stinking, tepid mud during the short track event. All I could was imagine what much of the cross-country course must look like. Preliminary reports did, in fact call the course a "muddy hell-hole."

Despite some flip-flopping on the subject of tire choice I stuck it out with my Hutchinson Pythons, perhaps not the best dedicated mud tire (cough! understatement) but yet bafflingly good in any conditions and they sure as hell don't pack up.

By the time Sunday's race rolled around the weather was not looking quite so clement the only reminder of the previous day's sunniness was the bright red knit hat line on my forehead and the feeling that I'd rubbed warm up balm on my neck.

It wasn't exactly the perfect storm but it was that kind of "arm warmers or not?" sort of temperature bordering on "should I pack my copy of 'Don't Die on The Mountain" in my camel back?"

Up until this point the only purely Single Speed event I had participated in was SSWC 2005 in State College which began with a Lemans start which figure eighted on itself then headed straight up a hill. At Sea Otter we started on The Laguna Seca RaceWay track, about seventy of us, in a pack, spinning our legs like mad, looking like a flock of hummingbirds in fast forward. Terrifying.

Travis Brown sat at the front of the group, riding at what seemed to me like an oddly reserved pace, then something happened...apparently someone attacked, flipping Travis' "Kill 'Em All switch," and he rode off into the mudset leaving the collateral damage to race for second place. I wasn't even in that race, what I was in was a world of gastrointestinal distress, bouncing down the trail like a miniature Hindenberg, periodically throwing up in my mouth a little bit, my belly distended like a two week old corpse floating in The Congo river.

The course was a grueling mix of slippery climbs, run-ups, and deceptively deep and sticky mud bogs which called out to me "Hey you, ride over me, you can do it tough guy, come on, just lean back and pull up, I promise I won't grab your front wheel and hurl you face first into the rancid muck like last lap, I've been in therapy, that's all behind me baby, give me one more chance..." Wham! Lights out.

Road course my Assos.

For the past month I'd been geeking out about the course pretty hard, I'd pre-ridden it once and familiarized myself with it's "metrics" on motionbased.com. After much inner debate I decided to go with my training gear, a 34 X 18 not the "two to one ratio" which is so popular amongst the SS racers. I figured this race was going to be all about the climbing and at two 19 mile laps with 3200 feet of climbing per in muddy conditions it would be a de facto endurance event.

I knew it was all about he second lap yet when we went off the line I tried my darndest to remain in contact with the leaders for as long as possible.

The fact I'd been putting in the long miles and not the hard miles became apparent as I went anaerobic and immediately felt like I was going to blow chunks all over my gorgeous Citron yellow paint job. Obviously staying at the front wasn't working out for me so I opted to bide my time and reel folks in on lap two.

As I completed lap one, I was told I was maybe in 14th place, this was OK by me, all I had hoped for was a top twenty placing, I told myself all I had to do at that point was not completely explode or crash so badly that I couldn't get up...sweet.

Oh that, and beat Ron Bolds my self-appointed nemesis, which shouldn't be too hard considering the fact that he is, (and don't quote me on this, I do suffer from numeric dyslexia) 74 years old, that and he races in sandals. After rounding the raceway for the second time I began firing on all cylinders, picking off guys steadily on the singletrack climbs and mud bog sections, working my way into the top ten by the half way point.

The last section of the course was called "The Long Climb Home" and I don't know how this worked out but by the time I hit it for the second time there were literally hundreds of riders strung out along that thing. I began picking my way through the mob, keeping my eye out for other SS riders, as I passed one geared rider he said "Hey, there's a single speeder just up there."
I replied "I think I'm in the top ten, I'm happy, whatever." He wasn't having it "Be happy when you're done, go get that guy!"

I acquiesced, stood up on the pedals, stomped on them, cramped in both calves, and promptly sat back down. I finally gapped up to the SSer, sort of hid out on his wheel for a bit, catching by breath, then hopped on the wheel of a passing geared rider on the next false flat. I thought that would be it for him but when I looked over my shoulder he was right there, he was on me like a grizzly bear on a man in a meat suit. I hit each climb as hard as I could but he kept closing it down, I made a move before the last section of singletrack, cutting off a geared rider, putting him between us, hoping that he would slow this madman down long enough for me to make my get away. Wrong, he was obviously a superior technical rider because he had come around the other rider and was right on my wheel through the tough stuff. I don't know what happened but I ended up with a small gap as I hit the pavement of the raceway, a few seconds later the dude comes whizzing by me drafting off a hard charging geared rider, I jump on as well and we round that last corner going thirty plus miles per hour at approximately five billion RPMs. The other SSer broke left a bit early, as he hit the wind he slowed way down, I moved onto the geared guy's wheel for a second, SS tried to come back in but clipped his front wheel on my foot, it was hectic as hell, I broke right , head down, blind from the mud in my eyes, legs flailing like mad, I even threw my bike as I hit the line first. When I looked up I saw, to my horror that there was a huge group of people congregated at the line, I grabbed two handfuls of brake, my right lever going straight to the bar, my front brake activating enough to put me into a nose-skid, coming to rest between two spectators, who caught me before I fell over.

The other Single Speeder and I tried to express how awesome we each thought the finish was through a series of unintelligible gasps, grunts, handshakes, and even hugs. He introduced himself as Dejay Birtch. honestly I couldn't have been driven to the brink of a massive coronary by a nicer competitor, a class act all the way.

I ended up 7th which was way better than I'd hoped for and had a killer time doing it, except for the throwing up in my mouth part, that I could have done without.

That's Dejay Birtch right on my wheel. The kid to the right was walking his bike in the middle of the only piece of trail with anything like traction on it. I told him to move...with feeling. I look at his face now and feel bad about it, but hey, as Paul Curley says, "that's bike racing."

If you clicked on the Dejay Birtch links (like the one you just ignored) you may have noticed that his blog "Single Swizzle." Which used to be dedicated to the celebration of single speed culture and endurance racing is now a fashion, shopping, and jewelery blog. He kind of came apart after losing out in that sprint all those years ago, shaving his substantial and unruly sideburns and growing a gel-quaffed faux-hawk. But the world of single speed mountain biking's loss is the fashion world's gain, what would they do without Dejay's "Top Ten Shopping Tips for Teen Girls"? Where he gives invaluable advice like:

"The web is a fabulous way to see the world. Using your computer allows you to get all kinds of information on all kinds of things."

That point was illustrated here today. Thanks Dejay, we'll miss you.