great uncle pappy's cycling almanac

More than a Girl, Not Yet a Woman

2012-01-31T08:50:00.004-05:00

Well, Tim Brown is off to Los Angelos, what Kerouac called "the loneliest and most brutal of American cities." Just to mitigate that bummer a bit, I'll note that clearly Kerouac had never been to Fargo when he wrote that, because there's a big difference between a city of people who live in air conditioned boxes and people who ice fish half the year. Lucky for Tim, there are beautiful mountains and surf and even trails to ride, and a variety of freeways on which to park for hours.

I've complained about Brown a thousand times: his many annoying victories (Leonardtown, Capital Criterium, his refusal to employ modern training technology beyond a whorish G-Shock watch taped to his handlebars (see below), and his annoying habit of "tossing off" at every streetsign, as if celebrating a Grand Tour win.

What made Brown so annoyingly fast? Well, I recently discovered his secret training regimine, and I have the photographic proof:

Yes, that is a can of beer in his skate.

We've all seen Brown evolve from a skinny Cat 5 on a 25 pound triple-equiped Trek to a cold blooded assassin. Last year at Speed Week racing against the pros he claimed three top 20s, earning himself a national ranking in the top 100 American crit racers. He won the MABRA Crit Championship and came in second in the road race at Page Valley, proving he's more than a sprinter, not yet a time trialist (i.e., more than a girl, not yet a woman).

Ride off into the smoggy sunset, Brown. You're almost a full woman now. If you ever get lost, just follow your flamboyant G-Shock back to Hains.

Tour of Bahamas Preview

2012-01-27T12:31:00.015-05:00

It's once again time for the Tour of Bahamas, which has a storied past and a particularly interesting relationship with iconoclasts and mustaches. More on that later.

The race takes place on Nassau, and the road race course loops around half the circumference of the island. It is a three-stage race:
Time Trial: 3 miles
Circuit Race: 42 miles total (6 mile loop)
Road Race: 76 miles (17-mile loop )

The race was first run in 2003 and has grown in prominence, although it is not by any means on the UCI calendar. Past champions include two fairly big names in cycling, Tyler Farrar and Caleb Fairly. The two fastest TT times are held by David Zabriskie and Floyd Landis, whose post race e-mail stated:
I beat the course record set by Zman [David Zabriskie] two years ago and I was on somebody else's road bike with clinchers and no aero clothes. Take that f@*#ers.

Although Landis won the TT, Caleb Fairly of Garmin's development squad managed to overtake him for the overall (just as Fairly did again at Tour of Battenkill).

The Tour of Bahamas' reigning champ is MABRA's own Chuck Hutcheson, who as an amateur took an impressive win with support from his Battley-Harley XO Communications teammates Brian Sacawa and Jared Nieters.

Unfortunately, Hutcheson is unable to defend his title. He moved to California after last season and was involved in an accident which prevented his return to Bahamas. Nonetheless, Battley-Harley XO and several other MABRA teams have dispatched a group of riders to the Bahamas, hoping to retain the title.

Shots of our athletes in action on the sand have trickled out:

Here one elite MABRA athlete appears to be rolling around in the sand, presumably intoxicated. Another, identified by our forensics experts as Tim Rugg, attempts to cop a feel on a rider identified as DJ Brew, who is deep in some sort of squatting pose. Other MABRA riders stand around in a daze, probably also inebriated or unable to understand the warmth and brightness of the climate.

Jared Nieters snapped a full frontal photo of Tim Rugg in his natural habitat. Most notably, Nieters caught Rugg in full musth.

Our wildlife experts explain that the hair that appears on Rugg's face is an indication that he is in what experts call "musth," a periodic condition in bull elephants, characterized by highly aggressive behavior, accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones--testosterone levels in an elephant must can be as much as 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times. Although musth is, as the experts note, typically an elephant behavior, Rugg is known to be elephantine in certain ways.

While elephants secret a compound called "temporin" from their skulls, Rugg secretes hair from his upper lip.

Human musth-oids are rare, although they are generally more common in cycling and in skinny jeans than the general population. And the Tour of Bahamas, for whatever reason, has typically provoked the musthoid reaction in certain riders. Most notably, one Dave Zabriskie:

The race begins tomorrow.

The Subtle Power of those Tiny Pins

2012-01-24T08:11:00.011-05:00

Legs: Andre Greipel and Podium Girl

The Tour Down Under reached its moderately interesting conclusion this Sunday, and the word that came to me as I watched the last stage was power. Funny, because Americans are obsessed with power in sports. It's why the past decade was the greatest era in American sports. We were at our steroidally proficient peak power then. Not only that, we were simply huge: we not only want our sluggers to knock it out of the park; we want them to look like they've eaten the park.

Americans are obsessed with the appearance of power, which is why we love bodybuilding more than Olympic lifting, and why we love NASCAR more than Formula 1.

It's also why very few of us appreciate pro cycling. Pro cyclists--the Vanilla Gorilla excluded--look like victims of starvation, not powerhouses.

But if you wanted to power a light bulb or a machine for anything longer than 30 seconds, you'll find there's no human being better suited to putting out power than a cyclist.

Take, for instance, Andre Greipel. Here's some of his power data from last year's Tour Down Under. Notice that in stage one he jumped over 1,000 watts four times--in the final 2k.

In the last 300 yards he pegs over 1,350 watts, averaging 1,047 watts for 20 seconds and hitting 38.6 mph

These are impressive values, but not anything astronomical. What's really impressive is that early Andre had averaged 465 watts for 3.4 kilometers, and had averaged over 230w for the entire 135km stage.

In a later stage he averaged 542w for 4 minutes and, after 100 miles at 225w, still managed to hit 1,397 watts in the finishing sprint.

This is just one example of the extraordinary power in pro cyclists. Greipel is one of the few cyclists who actually appears powerful. But even he doesn't look as powerful as he actually is.

That subtlety, that's what makes cycling hard to watch. It can appear nonchalant, as if what happens in a pro race is what happens when kids hop on their Huffys and do laps in the driveway.

All that's needed to dispel the Sunday stroll myth of cycling is to actually try racing. When some scrawny Rugg-like kid jumps off the front and you can't even grab his wheel on level ground, you recognize that power is something concealed in those tiny little pins. At its best, it appears if by magic, and you begin to ask the question that is at the heart of cycling fandom: how does that little dude hoist a truck over his head for two hours straight?

Did Pettachi Pork Greipel?

2012-01-18T07:25:00.003-05:00

"Earl's over in the woods porking Sheena," they said. It was a cold fall day and everyone was waiting for buses or just lingering, looking over toward the woods where Earl, who wore steel toed boots and began chewing tobacco in the sixth grade, was porking a girl. It was said.

It didn't conjure up a specific image for me, but it definitely was a trigger. Porking. Filthier than french kissing, nastier than the dutiful handjob, and definitely not kosher. And there was something completely macho and absolutely sexist about it. Dudes porked chicks. It was an asymmetrical act.

I still don't know what it means exactly other than to say that to be porked is to be slightly less abused than to be screwed.

Which is why I think it's the appropriate word for what Andre Greipel has accused Alessandro Pettachi of doing. "[Pettachi] went from the left to the right. I could manage to stay on my bike, but I think he didn't care what happened behind him. Maybe he didn't see me, but I think it was just not fair."
Basically, Greipel is saying, Pettachi porked me.

Pettachi denies even giving Greipel a basic porking; he suggests that, in fact, it was Greipel who porked him, stating, "I moved over slightly, but I gave him all the space he needed. In fact, he passed me."

The judges, upon reviewing the events, agreed with Pettachi that no one had screwed anyone at this particular junction. As to whether porking occurred, that is another matter.

So You're Saying There's a Chance

2012-01-12T09:08:00.005-05:00

--Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei's Bicycles

I was about to start writing a bit when I discovered that Red Kite Prayer had pre-cogged my thoughts.

The truth about riding is that it never gets easier, the sacks never get sacked up on their own, and you can just as easily lose a pair of swinging ones as gain them. There are no permanent positions of badassery, unless you're Merckxx or Copi. (Note well, Lance Armstrong). Today's badass can easily become tomorrow's goat, pussy, has-been, tragedy, and so forth.

There's a fragility to awesomeness that isn't symmetrical; sucking isn't a fragile position. It's the position almost everyone is in. The position in which we are born, and the position we are in for most of our lives. We are certainly in the position of sucking when we die. Only a handful are in the position of awesomeness, and only for a moment, then.

Look at Cancellara, a rider who has dominated single-day races and time trials for the past half-decade. This year he somehow become a has-been, despite finishing on the podium in the Spring classics and placing second in the TT at worlds. His performances at Roubaix, Flanders, and San Remo were among the most ridiculous displays of cycling power I've ever seen. And yet his year was a failure.

I believe Cancellara's situation--the fragility of his dominance--has something to do with me and maybe you, if you've been racing for a while and you're not as motivated as you once were. I've never been dominant on a bike, but I have managed to keep progressing. That upward progress motivated me. I felt I could keep getting better. Cancellara could certainly find motivation in his own god-like abilities; I wonder what motivates him now?

For me, I lost motivation when I started thinking about the futility of my genes and my age. At some point this past year, I decided I might get 1% better or maybe even 3% better, if the stars aligned themselves, but I would never get 10% better. Unfortunately, I need to get 10% better if I'm going to win at this level.

So I'm seemingly faced with a choice: keep fighting a losing battle or give up.

There is always, I'm hoping, the possibility that I was wrong to limit myself. That maybe I can improve that 10%. Maybe I just need to train smarter, time my moves better, stay devoted to this craft. And I can do it without being a bigger asshole or becoming a doper, or of losing sense of what's truly important in life (e.g., beer).

It's the one-in-a-million chance that exists but is unlikely:

Funnily enough, just the possibility of this (and I think my odds are a little better than one in a million) is enough to sustain me.

It's not only something I hold to motivate me to train; it's also something I think of about humanity. I hope that Steven Pinker is right: humanity is growing less violent, more peaceful, and that we can be optimistic for the future.

We can hope that in devoting ourselves to something, even if it is only riding a bike, that we somehow embody the notion of progress

Olympic Lifting and Cycling Training: My Experience Thus Far

2011-12-30T09:06:00.011-05:00

If I could think of one sport, offhand, which is exactly the opposite of cycling, I'd probably chose archery. Not too far behind would be Olympic lifting. Olympic lifting is a kind of lifting that requires explosive athleticism expressed in a movement that rarely lasts more than five seconds. One cynic called it "gymnastics with a bar."

Olympic lifting is two sexually suggestively named lifts:

(1) the clean and jerk

This women is under 125 pounds, but that's around 250 pounds on the bar. This is a two-part lift: the clean brings the bar up to the shoulders; the jerk brings the bar to full extension above the head. The world record clean and jerk is around 560 pounds.

(2) the snatch

This clip is from an American Open meet for lifters at 187 pounds. Kendrick Farris, the last lifter, snatches 351 pounds even. The World Record in his weight class for the snatch is 412 pounds. The superheavyweight snatch world record, achieved just this year by an Iranian lifter is 471 pounds.

Although the lifts--clean/jerk and snatch--are similar, in that both move the bar from the floor to overhead, the clean and jerk tests the limits of a lifter's power, while the snatch tests a lifters coordination, grace, and balance.

Until the 1960s, America dominated Olympic lifting, but since then we've achieved less than five medals. The Soviets, then the Bulgarians, and now the Chinese have dominated the sport. Most Americans don't even know what Olympic lifting is; even fewer appreciate the skill and power it requires.

Americans, instead, have focused on powerlifting. Powerlifting is a sport of three lifts, all comparatively small ranges of motion: floor to waist (deadlift), chest to arms' length (bench), squat to standing (squat).

The demands of powerlifting and Olympic lifting are different. Powerlifting requires power (without speed, necessarily), and usually punishes, flexibility. It encourages the development of a partial range of motion. It does not require speed, coordination and balance, as Olympic lifting requires.

Powerlifting caters to the American obsession with big pecs and biceps, the bro standard of strength: HOW MUCH CAN YOU BENCH, BRO? Most people who lift in America follow a bodybuilding or a powerlifting routine. This is unfortunate, since our obsession with power may be hampering our athletic development. A recent New York Times article described some of the problems that result from the assumption that simply pressing weights in limited ranges of motion makes an athlete better on the football field.

The numbers powerlifters put up are extraordinary, no doubt. Years ago I edited a book about Ed Coan, whose squat and deadlift were both around thousand pounds.

He lived in his parents' basement, listened to a lot of metal, and took the odd injection every now and then. He's still doing doing amazing things, and is probably pound for pound the world's best mover of heavy things over a very short distance.

Olympic lifters usually have superhuman vertical leaps; powerlifters can lift a car six inches off the ground, but may find it hard to leap over a curb. Oly lifters in the lower classes, as you may notice in the above video, look very much like track cyclists:

All fine and good, you say, but does this have anything whatsoever to do with cycling?

A lot of cyclists lift in the off season. I hear, "I'm lacking strength on climbs."

So we hit the gym, but most of us have no idea what we're doing. We have heard that leg presses, squats, and maybe plyometrics are good. As is core work.

We've also learned about sets, repetitions, and rest between sets.

Some of us think we should do tons of repetitions, reasoning that we need to build our muscular endurance.

Others of us think we should do a small number of repetitions, reasoning that we need to build muscular strength.

We lean toward the training of track cyclists such as 2010 World Champion Robert Forster, here shown doing two (kind of poor) reps with 550 pound:

There's evidence that plyometrics and maximal strength training (as Forster does), in very specific areas, may help. There's evidence that strength training generally helps track cyclists--the Australians and British have been at the fore in this development.

What about Olympic lifting? There's the similarity in build between Oly lifters and cyclists. Cyclists--particularly sprinters--and Oly lifters have huge quads and relatively small torsos. Beyond that, and the theoretical argument that cycling requires speed and power in the same way Oly lifting does, there's no concrete connection between the two. There have been no studies, as far as I'm aware, on Olympic lifting and whether it benefits cyclists.

Despite this, I've now done Olympic lifting for three months. I did this partly because I wanted to try something different. This decision had little to do with cycling; I've just always admired Olympic lifters, and I've wanted to see what I could do if I applied myself to the discipline.

I can say, fairly definitively, that Olympic lifting has a negative short-term effect on cycling performance. My on-the-bike power has declined, since my legs are always recovering from an Oly session. I would certainly be stronger, at the moment, if I had ridden rather than snatched and cleaned (I'm not a fan of jerking). Yeah, yeah.

My program, which I usually do three times a week, consists of front squats, power cleans, snatch, full cleans, stiff-legged deadlift, and core work. I usually vary the emphasis from posterior chain (glutes, hammies) to anterior chain (quads).

I still can't snatch my bodyweight, but my clean is up to about 1.5 x my bodyweight. That is, I can almost clean what the 125 pound girl (shown in the video above) cleans. These are piss poor numbers in the world of Olympic lifting, but not bad for a chicken chested cyclist. My squat isn't much better than when I started, but I now go ass to ankles, and I'm hitting about 100 pounds more than when I started working the full squat.

Unfortunately, I've gained twenty pounds in body weight since I started lifting (and rode the bike less). I'm pretty sure most of it is useless. I did manage to lay down a decent sprint the other day on the bike, but my critical power intervals over 30 seconds are all way down.

Still, Olympic lifting has proven a helluva lot of fun. And if, in five months, I retain some of this strength, it'll have proven a worthwhile diversion. And if not, well, at least I'll have tried something new and interesting.

Isn't that what every new year should be about?

The Skeptical Trainer: On Riding Without Getting Anywhere

2011-12-28T09:19:00.005-05:00

I hereby congratulate myself on yesterday fully committing to something I dread. It is something unnatural, something which, for me, is an extraordinary act of willpower...

...riding the trainer.

Pshaw, you say. What's so tough about riding the trainer? The East Germans used to ride the trainer for 12 hours a day facing a cinder block wall. And they were grateful and developed mental discipline. Maybe that's why you're such a pussy on the bike, Papps.

When I ride a trainer, I experience all the pain of riding without all the rewards: the scenery, the joy of moving fast, the connection between work and results. If riding a bike outside is a reminder of how we can accomplish amazing things with simple tools, riding a trainer is a reminder that sometimes all the sweat in the world doesn't get you anywhere.

Riding the trainer is metaphysically draining.

I've read the tips, I've done the Spinervals and Coach Carmichael's DVDs. I've tried watching movies and listening to good music.

The problem is not just motivation to ride the trainer; it's my worry that riding the trainer in the Winter may have no effect on my performance in April.

There's a ton of evidence that training yields benefits to performance over periods of 4-12 weeks. My concern is about training benefits over longer periods. There's very little research about protocals longer than 12 weeks. What research is out there is inconclusive.

My experience over the past two years has raised doubts of my own about the benefits of long hours in the saddle in Winter. Two years ago I didn't ride in the off season, except for the occasional interval workout. I was in graduate school and had little time to ride. I graduated in May and after about two months of serious racing and interval work, I set new power records.

I continued training throughout the Fall and Winter of 2011. I put in long winter hours on the bike, usually doing the dirty double on Saturdays. I averaged between 10-15 hours on the bike a week.

It was the first time I had been able to put in place the typical cyclist's training plan: base miles, gym work, build work, and lots of time on the trainer.

Despite the hard work and some moderate success in 2011, I never reached the level of fitness I'd attained in 2010.

A lot of things effect performance on the bike, but I can't disregard the possibility that all the winter work is counterproductive. It could be possible that maybe the best training plan for me is a completely sedentary winter followed by 8 weeks of intense interval training.

Physiologically, all those long rides should have increased the stroke volume of my heart and thickened my blood with red blood cells. It should have altered the makeup of my muscle fibers and increased production of mitochondria.

I can't know how I would have raced last season had I not trained as I did; maybe I trained optimally and I simply don't have the genetic makeup for progress. Maybe I'm aging and instead of getting faster, I'm simply minimzing loss.

In the end, I have to trust others. I have to trust the evidence of other riders who swear by the benefits of long training rides and of hours spent on the trainer. Still, these nagging doubts about my own n+1 experiment make it that much more difficult to suffer--is there a point to this? Doing these workouts on the trainer, which by itself is pointless enough, is even more disheartening.

Still, I didn't start racing a bike just to be fast. If I wanted to be fast, I'd just take drugs. No, I loved riding and racing a bike because I often triumphed through doubt, and often failed through faith. That's bike racing, and that's training for bike racing.

USAC Provides New Opprotunities for Masters Racers

2011-12-15T10:01:00.007-05:00

(EXCERPT FROM SPEECH BY UCI BIGDOG, PHAT MCGWAYD)

The scourge of illicit performance enhancing drugs is plagueing not only cycling, but many other American athletic competitions for middle agers. This scourge blights our well-off men, who suffer from a lifetime of privilege, pussy attitudes and a bit of spare cash. From southern Florida to northern Florida, and in a couple other areas in the country, this terrible blight is afflicting these unfortunate, morally bankrupt, perfectly able-bodied and societally advantaged men.

Something must be done.

Something must change.

The old pattern of fighting this blight with poutyness and bitching is not working.
MABRA and USAC need a new strategy. The time for change, for a new paradigm, is at hand.

That's why this year, the UCI has partnered with USAC to announce a new category of races that will finally give wealthy, narcisistic, self-loathing middle aged white men a chance to compete with each other on a level, albeit incredibly expensive and self-destructive playing field. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Master-D Series, powered by the Chinese Human Recycling Program and by Big Hank's (TM)Horse Tranquilizer-in-a-Jug, with no injections and guaranteed no serious brain damage, probably.

The race series begins in Minnesota in February, with the winning riders surely pushing the boundaries of cold-blunting drugs such as brandy, crack, and hallucinagenics. Through the mountains of Colorado, down to Mexico where the supply and cheapness of product encourages cocktails that will surely push the boundaries of drug use in a manner not seen since Marion Barry's Mayorship.

Medical personal will not be present; instead, veterinarians will stand by to "put down" any athlete with a life-threatening trip or with signs of drug-induced heart failure, seizures, Hunter S. Thompson imitation-syndrome, male lactation, or otherwise unseemly event.

The races promise to be exciting, and the races will be televised. Nothing props ratings like multiple heart attacks, old white dudes on amphetimines and disco bisquits and lots of drug ODs.

Concurrently, USAC has inked a deal with MTV to produce a reality TV show about the series. Called "Racing the Wind (With a Belly Fully of JarJar Binks)," the show will follow the fortunes of a loveable crew of saggy, unattractive middle aged men who you simply want to punch in the face for being assholes. This is a continuation of MTV's exploration of American assholes oevre.

Moral Balance in Bridal Shops and in Belgium

2011-12-05T08:11:00.010-05:00

If Thanksgiving is proof that America is a nation with the ability to be generous, the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, is proof that we believe in moral balance. That is, a day of morality must immediately be followed by a day of immorality. If we donate turkeys and work in a soup kitchen on Thursday, we need a Friday of trampling and pepper spraying our fellow citizens, just to get back to normal. Whew! All that gratitidue made me feel nauseatingly humane until I whipped out my Tornado 5 and unleashed a spritz of hell into rival shoppers' eyes and nostrils.

Another ritual of moral equilibrium common in America comes about as a way of balancing holy matrimony. In this case, brides anticipate the moral goodness of the wedding day, and balance that morally sanctified day with a day of dress shopping. Brides typically gather a scurvy band of rogues about them and pep them up with drugs and promises of cupcakes. These bands can be identified by their apparel: garish printed T-shirts which may or may not express bridal information (e.g., SIZE 12, BUDGET: $1,000, SLEEVELESS SKINSUIT,VEILS ARE FOR VIRGINS).

The action heats up even before the doors of the boutique open as brigand bands deploy their stouter members to the scrum, locking elbows and practicing their trampling formations. For many effete teams, their day is already done, lacking the brawn to maintain a defensive perimeter against the more husky bridal parties. Then the doors open, and events unfold as shown below in this stock police footage:

Several things to notice:
(1) A bride-to-be is about to be trampled in the first photo. This is fairly common; the bodies of the weak are tossed aside, or piled high to form defensive walls, as at Thermopoylae.
(2) A bride-to-be in the second photo, grunting and clutching a dress in a display of territorial marking, exhibits a white foam around her mouth.
(3) A bridal team, pepped up on cupcakes and krunk juice shows typical amoral disregard for human decency in their savage attire, having devoured bunny rabbits and now sporting the gory rabbit ears as trophies--a warning to would-be dress rivals.

Such morally repugnant mob events--runnings, as they are called--occur around the world. In Kazakhstan, there is the running of the Jews:

In California, there is the running of the lifeguards:

And in Belgium, there is the running of the road racers participating in Tom Boonen's charity cyclocross race:

Thus do our heroes expunge the glory and goodness of a road season with the perversions of cyclocross. Thus do our gods reveal their tainted chamoises. Thus does the cycling world find its moral equilibrium.

New Team-Issue Bikes an Issue for XO-Battley-Harley-Davidson-Sonoma-Teaism

2011-11-09T22:32:00.005-05:00

BH-XO has in the past suffered from an excess of awesomeness, from sweeping BAR podiums to winning the first six spots of local races. In the spirit of generosity for which it is well known, the team has decided to spread the love around. Literally.

BH-XO will next year be sponsored by DCLoveSpread.org, a local sperm bank that receives high quality sperm from top-notch athletes such as Harley. As part of the sponsorship deal, BH-XO will not only provide a stellar donation pool, they will also ride and race on new working sperm-donation bikes, specially designed in Europe for similar sperm facilities there.

"Personally," stated BH-XO spokesperson Tim Rugg, "the canister looks a little small for me." When informed that the canister was intended to hold the donations of either three hundred men or 50 horses, Rugg expressed surprise. "No kidding?"

It remains to be seen whether the plan will yield results (other than a plethora of children with excess beard syndrome and/or a fondness for Brownie Batter) for BH-XO.

There is evidence at both the international and local level that the plan will not work. "Merging bike racing and medical donations is a somewhat risky proposition," said a skeptical Riccardo Ricco, whose own career has taken a hit as a result of some amateurish attempts to mix the two.

A similar scheme involving liver transplant Big Dummy bikes attempted by another local race team, District Velocity Racing, led to catastrophic results when team members began slow-cooking intended liver donations, unaware or unconcerned that they were indeed cannibalizing human organs. "When team member Justin "Rez" Reznick showed up at George Washington Hospital with a calf's liver," said a team member who spoke on condition of anonymity, "our relationship with Speedy-Livrs, Inc. was done."

In the case of BH-XO's bikes, the temptation to donate rather than ride may prove too much. On the other hand, such an outcome would ensure the long-term viability of the BH-XO organization, as well as strengthen the future of MABRA's gene pool.

A God/Accountant of British Cycling

2011-11-09T09:01:00.005-05:00

Believe it or not, this is the face of greatness.

This is Chris Myhill, British hill climb legend.

In races he wears glasses, the kind you wear around town.

He was tops among age groupers at the British Hill Climb championship this year.

He eschews the tuck, preferring to grab the aerobars on his bike like the horns of a bull.

His bike is from the last decade (notice the Wilier lettering and the BB30 bottom bracket).

Hair and makeup by Paul Mitchell.

Styling by Rutherford Nesbitt-Higgins, pig farmer and herpetologist.

Tanning spray courtesy of the British Dairy Council.

Just try staying with this guy on the climbs or in Excel spreadsheet. You've never seen a guy who can throw down watts, PivotTables, or nested statements like Myhill.

Proof that the heart of British cycling in no way aspires to $300 pink hats and merino wool penis warmers.

La Mafia e Biciclette

2011-11-01T15:50:00.008-04:00

Moocher: [laughs] Since you won that Italian bike, man, you've been acting weird. You're really getting to think you're Italian, aren't you?
Cyril: I wouldn't mind thinking I was someone myself.
--from Breaking Away

I remember the first time I saw a pure road bike, an Italian beauty from back in the days when the best bikes and components were actually made somewhere on the Apennine peninsula. Everything on the bike was made in Italy, from the cow whose leather graced the seat and bar tape to the rubber of the Vittoria tires to the elegant Campagnolo chainrings. An elegant geometry, it coiled from the ceiling, poised, both round and edged, as erotic as a boa draped over the heaving bosoms of some Mediterranean goddess emerging from a warm sea--oozing with olive oil magnetism and elegantly rugged, dangling with seemed Roman aureus hauled from a sunken trirene from the bottom of the Adriatic in a diver's vest by Al Pacini's cousin, a tomatoe red Bianchi of lugged steel, handmade in Italy with mechanics from Campagnolo, shifters on the downtube, and Sella leather as rich in luster as licorice.

The steaming summer air came in with me as I, only a boy, entered the shop in 1992 and Phil Collins' voice wailed "Sue-Sue-Sue-dio" on the shop's molten warm tube-amped sonic system, each strike of Collins' Korg DK-3 MIDI-enhanced snare kit rippling through my chest as if my heart's beating had been hijacked by a tinny imitation snare.

I reached out to stroke its box-rims with their crisp Campy hubs, 36 spokes, and reached and spun the sprocket with its elegant toe clip pedals. So clearly designed for speed, the slight ticking as I spun its crank backwards, its, to me, obscenely large front crank of 53 teeth, seeing, as I had only seen, Japanese-made mountain bikes with their childish chainrings made for tottering through dirt on cushy tires.

"Boy," it said to me with in pure Italian-accented English, reeking of musk and Campari, "the days when a bike was a toy are gone."

The shop's resident pseudo-pro could not be bothered with me, instead he stared at a betamax recording set to John Tesh's incomparable electro-drama brass and drum orchestras; the pro sat agog, crotch splayed, lounging in black bibshorts, jersey of unspeakable lewd colors as manufactured as the drums now driving the beat competing with Tesh's one-man inspiration factory.

I turned to the Bianchi, examining its seal, seeming chivalric, its aluminum components and light weight only possible in a world of advanced metallurgy and sounds made by computers, not strings or striking wood or hide.

All around, strung up dead and soul-less, there were Japanese bikes with welded functional joints and gun-metal gray frames, churned out in factories by a folk who, it was told us, in examinations on every news show from 60 Minutes to 20/20, were well on their way to making America obsolete thanks to their increased efficiency, tighter welds, cheaper labor costs, unlimited focus and dedication to accuracy, and nimble--god, so nimble--Asian fingers. These were a people without souls content with living in closets, perfectly suited to factory work.

I looked at their bikes dutifully.

Then I looked to the red Italian machine, hand-crafted by artisans who ate spaghetti, who could seduce an American woman with a single "mama mia," our Don Corleonis, our Al Capones, our Jake Lamottas.

Heart racing, I looked to the price tag, red felt pen on paper, a hand-written and, for me, impossible $650.

Momma mia! The music played again, but this time the words were strange, taunting, tearing my heart as I turned to the door, the pseudo-pro almost seeming to glance my way, his eyes never leaving the action, as if, in good taste, to ignore the tragic bit of hope and dashing of hope he had just willfully ignored.

"Kid," he finally said, just as I opened the door to leave, "that one ain't for you." He gave me a knowing eye, finally, and, as the door swung shut behind me, the music of John Tesh receded, and in its place there played an unfamiliar, Romanesque tune.

Don't Listen to Bike Races or Gordon Ramsey

2011-10-25T15:31:00.006-04:00

Nick Sachanda's post over on Nick vs. Gravity got me thinking about goals and focus in training. Nick had a breakout season in 2010, attracting a lot of attention, first, for being huge, and second for being fast--his solo winning move at Reston was jaw-dropping.

Since then, unfortunately, Nick's had a rougher time. He's struggled to avoid being dropped, and when I saw him at DCCX, he seemed downright discouraged. As he states in his blog, "8 weeks of being really excited about cross and yet showing up and getting mercilessly beaten force doubt and introspection." He's clearly re-thinking his approach to training ("I've been doing it wrong. All wrong."), and has decided to switch focus from losing weight to gaining strength. "Maybe," he continues, "I ought to focus on getting better at what I am already good at, rather than at what I am no good at."

I don't know if Nick's changed focus will make him a better racer. I will agree that bike racing is unrelentingly unforgiving. And I don't know if the message he's been getting from getting his ass kicked in 'cross is the right message to be heard.

I imagine bike racing like Gordon Ramsey.

Sometimes it should cause us to rethink our plans, but usually it's just giving us a hard time because it's its nature. We should not take what a single bike race (or Gordon Ramsey at any age) tells us as if it's the word of God.

Nick's experience reminds me of Richie Porte's experience, as profiled in Cyclingnews article. Porte's 2010 was breakout; he won the TT at the Tour of Romandie and wore the pink jersey at the Giro for much of the race. Everyone expected even more of the 26 year old in 2011, including Porte himself. But Porte suffered a poor Spring and Summer, the result, he says, of "trying to re-invent the wheel. All I had to do, really, was maybe improve in a few areas when instead we tried to improve on too much. It just got a little bit too much. I got sick, and through no one else's fault but my own, I kept on training and that led to us chasing our tails a bit."

Porte took the wrong lesson from his 2010 season, and in shooting for unrealistic goals he ruined most of his season. I'm not sure what's realistic for Nick, but I hope he sets goals that work for him and that are not purely the result of the consistent pummeling that CX has been giving him.

Our desire to do too much, or to adjust our goals with every setback, is even more true of those of us with less divine genes and masters racers. Says well-known coach and three-time Olympian John Howard, "It's a staggering fact that most of the masters cyclists that I have coached who have interests outside of cycling are the ones who end up on the three-tiered podium."

Start with clear, achievable goals. I'm glad Nick is circling races on the calendar. That's the place to start.

Next, determine what is needed to do well in these races: top-end speed, breakaway power, or climbing ability.

Determine your training by the requirements of your event.

Lastly, judge your progress by your movement along milestones toward achieving these requirements.

These milestones should be entirely physiological: power, power/weight, average heart rate, average speed up Anglers, average speed/two laps at Hains. Anything measurable that is not interrupted by that crazy, irrational Gordon Ramsey of a sporting event: the bike race.

Good luck, and happy goal-setting.

DCCX: Spectated Bike Races Are Possible in DC

2011-10-24T07:32:00.007-04:00

Oft has this ancient philosophical question been asked: If a bike race goes down in DC and no one is there to hear it, did it actually happen?

That's the normal question we ask ourselves after a race, but that question need not be asked of DCCX. There was a veritable Renn-fest of spectators strolling around and enjoying the race. This was absolutely shocking to me.

First, I didn't know DC cared about bike racing. The biggest races in DC are not in DC--they're in Clarendon and Crystal City. Slightly more than fifty people show up to watch these events. Unfortunately, because they're NRC races, most of MABRA can't participate in these races, so we don't care a whole lot about who wins.

Our races, MABRA races, happen in DC's figurative closet space--in regional industrial parks (e.g., Bowie, Chantilly) and in areas way beyond the suburbs, in coastal Maryland, Page County, and Washington County. We are safely hidden away in places sure to not give a crap about city folk on tights on bikes. If you think spectators come to these races intentionally, for reasons other than to spread tacks on the road, you're delusional. They occassionally show up, sure--to lob tacks on the course.

But wait a minute here, what the hell went down in the woods on DC's north side in that 50 acre area for the rehabilitation of our veterans whose entrance is guarded by a three-headed dog?

Because I swear I heard a bunch of yelling and the smell of beer was strong. And I swear people were eating french fries (this is America; those who use the term frites can take their woolen jerkins and hump back to whatever socialist unmanaged-debt Euro-zone region universal health care non-football playing cafe Slurpee-free zone birthed them).

And I swear, there were people on bikes, in full kits, riding around between ribbons and trying to go as fast as possible.

And this is the really, really crazy part--there were several hundred people cheering. I'm not talking golf clapping. I'm talking the Cleveland Browns doghouse berzerkers, up drinking Wild Turkey since 4:00am fans.

And the best part of it was, I was part of the hooliganism, not the hooligan'ed:
I didn't have to try to hang on Dombrowski's wheel;
I didn't contest the sprint with Kimani;
I didn't, like Kat Klausing, finish in the top ten in two races;
I didn't, like Pete Warner, wonder what the hell kind of trajectory led me from world class triathlete to pack fodder in a pack of bearded fools;
I didn't, like Nick Sachanda, find myself an elephant in a grocery bag forced to daintily navigate tiny obstacles (e.g., trees) rather than obliterating them;
I was able to motivate/shout profanity at a lot of clowns I normally compete against;
I enjoyed a free apple and a free beer in a complimentary cooling cozey, courtesy of MABRA's BAR also-ran, Tim Brown;
I was able to see, and deride the unfortunate four act play, silent, of the 1/2/3 men's winner, who spent the last lap trying to dramatize some kind of Sophocles or something, the meaning of which was lost on me.

In any case, I never get to see what goes on at the finish line because I'm way in the back, having pretended to puncture a tire or something, so maybe four-act silent dramas are the standard celebrations these days. Is that the case?

I guess it's unimportant, really, because we were having fun, and that's what sporting events are all about. And a bike race, believe it or not, is a sporting event, and these things can be held in DC.

Unfortunately, the only one left to us takes place on dirt.

Running in Michigan, Riding in DC

2011-10-17T14:52:00.007-04:00

I grew up on this road.

View Larger Map
To the north is the house I lived in for 18 years, and helped build. Behind it is a barn which I also helped build. We built the barn with wood from my grandfather's barn that had tilted in a heavy wind. My grandparents' place is over on Polk Avenue, about a mile northwest of here.

There is a large septic field the Hulk and I dug out on the near side of the house. That was a less-than-ideal spring break for a high school kid, digging through several years of acquired family excrement. It was cold and wet, and the smell was quite powerful.

In the woods to the west there's also an old chicken coop, the remnants of a railroad where my great grandfather loaded virgin timber on cars headed to Lake Michigan and Chicago. I planted those pine trees in the field to the west; they were only saplings, nearly free from the Michigan DNR. My brother and I used a bladed step-on, wedging it into the ground eight inches, dropping the roots of the seedlings in it, pouring a bit of water in, and then pushing the dirt around the roots with our feet. I'd thought the dry summer that followed had killed them all off, but I see many have lived.

When my great-grandfather was a boy, there were only a few patches beneath the canopy where you could see the sky. The virgin pine trees blotted out the sun. We used their roots, thousands of years old, now dead, as fences along our property.

I rode my first bike on this road, from my house to the school you can see to the southwest. It's about three hundred yards.

It's not big news, but people are leaving Michigan, as I did. The school I attended, like many in the area, is now closed down. I'm told the state of Michigan is grinding up many of its paved roads, the cost of maintaining them now exceeding the state's ability to pay for their upkeep.

A part of me wants this to happen, maybe because as I age, I have come to appreciate the aging of things: cities, wine, cars, people.

I ran yesterday along the C&O Canal in Georgetown. First, I dodged cameramen posing tourists. Then things thinned out and there were only couples out walking, cyclists, and other joggers. Running jars my brain. I couldn't think or breathe, as I do on the bike even when I'm struggling my hardest. There was none of the glorious floating sensation, the effect of connecting to perhaps the most efficient machine ever invented, one which directs energy directly into forward motion.

I wondered if I had taken up cycling as a kid if I'd have fallen in love with it like I fell for it three years ago. Probably not. It's a hard sport, with not a lot of glory, and glory was what lured me then.

My run yesterday returned me to that pre-cycling time, that pre-adulthood time, that time when I dug my own shit trench, when I farmed goats and read adolescent literature, that time before cell phones and before 9/11, that time when communism fell as if God himself had struck it down and our Red Dawn fears evaporated and Muslims had not yet replaced communists as bogeymen; that time when my brothers ran with me and they left me early on and I plodded home, and they were already sitting on the porch drinking jugs of water and leaving puddles of sweat that disgusted our mother and delighted our father ("Animals," he'd say).

That is one advantage of having bodies--the memory of movement is not all in your head. Memory is not only a place or mental picture, a Google Map you can pull up, but also a sensation that comes again to you the moment you break into a run, reach for a shovel to dig the foul earth, or hold your loved one, or take a spin on a damn near perfect Fall day.

Clowns, Men, Sotol and Feeling Fast

2011-10-12T07:42:00.010-04:00

"Are we men or clowns?" Paco the Chihuahuan gave us a reproachful look, the kind gringos deserve when they don't know what they're doing.

"We are not clowns," someone said, ashamedly.

Satisfied, Paco nodded, and ordered a round of Sotol. Sotol, he had explained, is the drink of Chihuahua, made from an agave plant similar to tequila and mezcal, but with a rougher, wilder character. Sotol is still rare in America, since it has a rough, mineral quality which is best dealt with straight, like single malt, rather than in sugary magarita mixes favored by American "clowns," in the words of Francisco. Think of it this way--it's the Svein Tuft of Mexican-made booze

Of course, we could not accept being called clowns. We ordered the Sotol and either shot it or sipped it, with none of our clownish tricks (salt, lime, or hot sauce).

We didn't cheer or whoop like college girls about to strip off our clothes at Senor Frogs. We drank it soberly, academically, like alcoholics doing our duty.

Your spell checker will tell you that "duathlon" is out of bounds--it's not an acceptable word--and so, maybe, will your cycling club. In the code of your average road cyclist, duathletes and multisporters in their sleeveless getups and awful notions of how to ride a bike are somewhere between clowns and suicidal death machines. "Why would you ever break a sweat doing anything off the bike?" is the fairly reasonable question.

There are the occassional multisporters who inspire fear, the pros who show up at stage races with legs wrapped in winter fur coats who proceed to smoke our Cat 4s in the time trials.

Then there are those of us who came to cycling from multisport, emerging from the primordial muck to the light of bike racing. From clowns, we became men.

I discovered something this past weekend at the Cape Henlopen Duathlon: it's sometimes fun being a clown.

Some of it has to do with the spirit of the events. Most multisport competitors are average folks. They don't train more than a couple hours a week. They give you a medal just for completing the race, and there are lots of spectators--usually cheering you and their friends and family members.

Please click on the picture below for a close look at the average multisport participant:

It's easy to forget how cutthroat bike racing is compared to other sports. We are savages, out to gut each other. There's no glory in "trying," in bike racing. You get pulled if you just try. Average folks don't do it to stay healthy. Sometimes folks will intentionally try to maim you in ways that don't heal.

There's even a website devoted to ridiculing those who try to keep going when they're dropped.

I'm not saying it's not funny, but the cruelty behind it defnitely wears on you. Bike racing sometimes goes so far beyond manliness that it becomes clownish. What other word describes our peletons at Hains, our goon rides terrorizing Rock Creek Park, our use of illicit drugs to make us faster? Clowns.

Still, I'm not sure I would've enjoyed doing the Cape Henlopen Duathlon as much had I not come to it from my first season racing against the best of MABRA.

Partly, that's because I was fast on the bike, relative to the participants. Halfway through the bike leg I found myself out front, behind the lead car, and no one within sight. It was incredibly strange to be faster than other people on the bike. Sure, half of them were on hybrids, wearing parachute-like kits and carrying several gallons of gooey red beverages in belts around their waste. But still, I was beating all of them, and that is an unfamiliar feeling to me.

My last time trial I'd been beaten by a guy over 60. I'd been beaten by dozens of folks. It wasn't my best race, but even at my best I'm not a top-20 time trialler. And yet, here I was putting down the best bike time of the day in my running shoes (I'd forgotten my bike shoes).

Thank God for halfhearted training, for poor bike position, for the voluminous jerseys sold by Performance Bike shops, for the notion that we are all on the verge of dying of thirst and glucose deficit the moment we break a sweat. Thank God for jobs and families and work-life-play "balance."

Thank God for multi-sport clowns.

If those people took training half as serious as I take riding a bike, I wouldn't have won my first duathlon and felt, for the first time in a long time, that I'm actually fast.

We are clowns, Paco, but even clowns can come to prefer a taste of Sotol every now and then.

A bicycle for the mind

2011-10-06T07:40:00.011-04:00

When Steve Jobs and Apple set out to design machines for us, what were they thinking of?

In Jobs' own words, Apple sought to make what he called "a bicycle for the mind."

Apple aimed to create machines of extraordinary efficiency: machines that get you where your mind wants to go fast, in the same way that bicycles get you where you want to go fast, and do it without requiring gas, oil, maintenance, parking, insurance, licenses, and a thousand pounds of metal.

It's notable that Jobs, speaking a decade before global warming, holds up efficiency as his ideal. But how does this make sense? Why worry about efficiency in a world of limitless energy?

All racing cyclists, in the end, search for efficiency. We don't just maximize power ouput (watts); we also minimize power requirements (by losing weight). That's why Coggan's key stat is watts/kilograms, not just watts.

Efficiency has been the way of all living things, the shaping force of evolution not only of species, but even our tools. This is of necessity--every expenditure has a price. A penny saved is a penny earned.

These days efficiency is so disregarded that buying up pennies might be the best kind of investment. In fact, a hedge fund manager, Kyle Bass recently did something just like that, although with nickels, not pennies.

This, from Michael Lewis' latest book:

[Kyle Bass] still owned stacks of gold and platinum bars that had roughly doubled in value, but he remained on the lookout for hard stores of wealth as a hedge against what he assumed was the coming debasement of fiat currency. Nickels, for instance.
"The value of the metal in a nickel is worth six point eight cents," he said. "Did you know that?"
I didn't.
"I just bought a million dollars' worth of them," he said, and then, perhaps sensing I couldn't do the math: "twenty million nickels."
"You bought twenty million nickels?"
"Uh-huh."
"How do you buy twenty million nickels?"
"Actually, it's very difficult," he said, and then explained that he had to call his bank and talk them into ordering him twenty million nickels. The bank had finally done it, but the Federal Reserve had its own questions. "The Fed apparently called my guy at the bank," he says. "They asked him, 'Why do you want all these nickels?' So he called me and asked, 'Why do you want all these nickels?' And I said, 'I just like nickels.'"

He pulled up a photograph of his nickels and handed it to me. There they were, piled up on giant wooden pallets in a Brink's vault in downtown Dallas.

Everyone is going on about Jobs and his creativity, his salesmanship, and so on. They can't find the word they're looking for to describe him, maybe because these days, when the metal used for nickels costs more than nickels themselves, the notion of efficiency is almost exotic.

Almost as exotic as this bike made of popsicle sticks:

Bike Fit Comparison

2011-09-28T15:19:00.005-04:00

Click to enlarge

Before being fit, I'd had trouble finding a comfortable position on my TT bike. First, I couldn't generate anything close to the power I could generate on my road bike. Second, my taint felt bad, really bad, after a few minutes of riding.

I'd assumed that, because the UCI prohibits forward seat positions, that there must be some kind of aerodynamic position to a forward position. For that reason, I'd purchased a set-forward seatpost. I also assumed that, the more forward my position, the more weight would be on my arms, the less on my taint, the happier I'd be.

I'd also bought an ISM saddle to deal with the taint issue.

Doing my fit was Scott Epsley, a physio with Georgetown who has worked extensively with Australian professional cyclists. He's known particularly for rehabilitating Australia's five-time national time trial champion.

Scott immediately removed my seatpost and ISM saddle. He threw on my old Sella San Marco and moved it backwards. He also flipped my stem to lift my bars.

In short, in my new position, seen on the right, I sit a good distance further back. And although my arms are slightly higher, my back is actually lower because my arms are more extended.

Results:

Foremost, I'm comfortable. I've done several rides, some over two hours long, and so far my taint has been unperterbed.

Because the position more closely resembles my road position, I put out more power and my pedal stroke feels more natural.

I feel lower and more aerodynamic, and the numbers seem to suggest I've gained a little bit of speed.

The lesson: position is a complex thing, and getting a fit, or at least being open to changing your position, may improve your experience on the bike and maybe even your ability to produce offspring.

Not Even Trying at JB's Gran Fondo

2011-09-27T09:19:00.007-04:00

Over at Raw Talent Ranch, Jay Moglia has crafted a Thoreau-esque essay on the Gran Fondo experience that I'll not try to match.

That not try to match part, that's something I've learned in the three years I've been on a bike. There are some efforts you just don't try to match. You watch them go, you settle in, and you do what you can within the bounds of the red line.

We were 60 miles in and approaching a dirt climb of several thousand feet, the only way to get back into Harrisonburg, and I was sitting on Keck Baker's wheel. Keck has, in fact, been one of my most insistent instructors on the lesson I mentioned, the one about not even trying. So I didn't try to follow Keck when he leaped away at the base of the climb. None of us did, our small group that had come away out of the previous riser with its finishing gradient around 20%.

We rolled the gravel and our chips tripped the clocks on the timing device that would measure how long it took to summit this, the biggest and maybe baddest peak I'd ever done. I settled in behind Curtis Winsor, the main group about two hundred meters back. An elderly woman with feathers in her helmet was up ahead--how she got ahead, I wasn't sure--walking her bike through the mist. I later learned that she finished four hours after we did, an hour before sunset, a total ride time of something like 9 hours.

Into the base of the climb Jeremiah Bishop came sprinting past, hands on the drops, fully out of the saddle in the way you're not supposed to be able to do on gravel. He passed us and continued sprinting up toward Keck. I stayed on Curtis' wheel, wondering how long I should try. I watched Jeremiah catch Keck, and slowly, despite Curtis setting a fierce pace, the two of them vanished beyond. "This is the hardest part," Curtis said as we approached a rutted incline and instantly, I had popped.

Drops of sweat fell from me like condensation from an air conditioner, and I wheezed about as loud as one, but there was nothing cool about me. I advanced and halted with each push of the pedals.

I tried to think of where I was on the mountain, climbing its left shoulder, so small and wrapped in its surface I could not see the edge, the bottom, or the top. But I could hardly think, except to say to myself to keep going.

Now there were the riders stopped, heaving and furious as I passed. To some, I said, "the top's not far, I hope." They did not try to respond. Then the climbers came by, juniors limber and dancing on the pedals despite the loose surface. They passed and I did not try to respond.

Someone had spraypainted humorous vignettes in the dirt: "Kiss and Hurt Ahead" "Jeremiah Sucks" "You thought this would be easy?" It levelled off, and suddenly I could turn over the gear, and I was flying upwards, passing Pascal riding in Sven Nys's Landbouwkrediet jersey--a sign, I had thought, that he was a fred, but as it turned out, was an actual Landbouwkrediet jersey given to Pascal by a team rider.

As much as the uphill had silenced my brain, the descent awoke it. I thought of Nutella on waffles. I thought of my own luck at being alive and healthy, and, more specifically, no longer suffering from the climb. I was grateful this was no race, where I was speeding toward something, but just a descent where I could enjoy the energy I'd given to gravity and the energy it was now returning to me.

TT Positions: Length, Compactness, and Tony Martin's Position

2011-09-22T08:12:00.012-04:00

TT positions these days are more uniform than they have been in the past, partly due to UCI restrictions (e.g., saddle noses cannot extend beyond the bottom bracket, arms must be horizontal on aerobars) and partly due to what's taken as common aerodynamic principles. These include the principle of minimizing frontal area, which has, generally, four elements:
(1) getting low;
(2) getting narrow;
(3) getting long;
(4) lowering the head;

Then there's the other idea, which is simply to be in a position which allows you to ...
(5) maximize power output.

Elements 1-4 are often at odds with 5, but the best time trialers manage to do all 5. The aim is speed, and most riders don't achieve their top speeds at their most aero position; they achieve it by balancing aero benefit with power sacrifice.

We're not talking Uncle Pappy of the arthritic back and sanctimonious taint here; we're talking pros. They can legally arrive at a position which places their navel on the nose of their saddle, but even they can't put out any power when so constrained.

This past weekend I received a fit on my TT bike from Scot Epsley, a physical therapist with Georgetown and a fitter for a number of pro riders in the past. We did it in his garage. I'd put myself in an extremely forward position, mimicking the position of Norman Stadtler. Here's Stadtler's bike, to give you an idea:

Take a look at the seat. Not UCI legal (although legal for you or me).

In this tri/forward position, common to triathletes, you look like this:

Most achieve a forward position with three elements:
(1) Seat extremely forward;
(2) Nose directly above front hub;
(3) Upper arm angled at 90 degrees or thereabouts;
(4) Closed space between elbows and knees: compactness.

This position places load on their quadriceps rather than their hamstrings and glutes--muscles especially taxed in the following run portion of their uncouth sport. Thankfully, you and I need not worry about saving ourselves for a run leg. We can whore our entire musculature out to the purpose of going fast.

In more civilized tones, this is what Scott explained to me as he...
(1) moved my seat backward;
(2) flipped my stem, moving it up slightly;
(3) shortened my aerobars.

I'd been having tenderness in the taint, and I'd moved myself forward thinking to put more weight on my upper body, so I was suspicious about Scott's approach.

Aside from solving my taint issues, the element of the fit that most surprised me was compactness. My lower and upper body are now more slightly folded together, and it feels surprisingly powerful and comfortable.

Compactness seems to be a common element of time trial and triathlete positions. It's apparent in the above video of triathletes. Check out Cancellara's position:

David Millar

Though Cancellara and Millar have slightly different body types and positions, they both have compactness: knees close to elbows.

Cancellara and Millar have vertical upper arms, as do Zabriskie and Evans--who achieves a kind of hyper-compactness where his knees actually come inside of his elbows:

They all also tend to ride on the nose of their saddles, almost as if they'd assume triathlon positions if the UCI allowed their seats to extend forward.

The position of Tony Martin seems to me to be totally different. His elbow angle is greater than 90 degrees. Even though his elbows are pushed out, though, he still manages to achieve compactness. This may be something he's changed over the past year, at least when you look at positions from 2010 and this year.

2010 Tony Martin Position

2011 Tony Martin Position

To be clear, Martin's bike setup could be unchanged: saddle neutral or slightly forward, elbows narrow and bent at more than 90 degrees, head down well below his back. But clearly his body is more compact--in 2011 the space between his elbow and knee is gone. In fact, the two seem to be touching.

Other time trialist who manage to achieve compactness despite great elbow bend are Contador and Janez Brajkovic:

Brajkovic

Contador

Both have slight torsos, which allow them to put out power in extremely folded positions. This may be a weakness in the position or physiology of notoriously slight-torsoed Andy Schleck, who, at least in this photo, fails to achieve compactness despite planting his ass on the very rivet of his saddle. Despite having a 90 degree elbow bend, he still doesn't manage compactness:

In the end, I'm not sure why compactness matters--whether it's benefits are aero or powerful. Still, if all the best riders do it, it's probably a good idea to at least try to emulate it.

Larkin and Guthrie Point the Way

2011-09-15T14:59:00.004-04:00

There's a lot of buzz around strength training, and whether it has any effect on your cycling ability. There are questions about how many reps, how many sets, and what kinds of exercises to do. Whether you should work your upper body at all.

I'm here to settle the matter once and for all--not with any science-y studies or such, but with photographic evidence of greatness. St. Thomas asked our resurrected Lord Jesus to touch the wounds in his side, saying, "I'm not gonna believe unless I can touch the wounds." So Jesus said, "go ahead." Basically--and this is not at all theologically sophisticated--St. Thomas, alone among humanity, was given the opportunity to confirm his faith with his fingertips.

And that's the degree of confirmation about the power of lifting weights I'm going to give to you with this video.

In it, you'll see two guys named Larkin and Guthrie tandem deadlift over 1,000 pounds. It's clear from how the crowd reacts that this is real. No need for faith here. When Larkin pumps his little arm in triumph, you know it's real. And when Guthrie sets himself a-quiver in excitement, requiring handlers to strap on his weight belt, you know you're seeing something transcendent.

Does tandem squatting make you a better cyclist?

Tandem squatting clearly makes you a better person. Ergo, since being a better person includes being a better cyclist, clearly tandem squatting of the Larkin and Guthrie variety is a must for those seeking to be better.

Remember:
-Have others cinche on your weight belt before lifts. You are too "in the zone" to do so yourself
-Prepare for lifts by setting yourself a-tremble
-Celebrate achieving a lift by attempting to high five your partner
-Perform your feats of strength in a neighbor's basement. Receive your award shirtless.
-Reward yourself with a homemade trophy of some kind
-Have an MC on hand with a microphone, even if you are in a small space.
-Videotape it for posterity.

Follow in the quivering synchronous footsteps of Larkin and Guthrie, and you'll find yourself swamped in homemade trophies, cheered by people in basements everywhere, living a life as glorious as a masters racer on masteron.

The problem of bank and MABRA mergers, and a practical communist solution

2011-09-09T14:09:00.016-04:00

At the rate we're going with banks and home ownership, it won't be long before there'll be one bank, and it'll own everything. This won't exactly be fascism, but the end result will be the same: most of us will be victims of the bourgeousie and our laws will be subject to the whimsy of fat capitalist bastards.

Even if we are on our way toward peasanthood, as cyclists we can still enjoy the benefits of MABRA, which is thankfully far from the porcine reaches of Lord McQuaid and the UCI. True, the syndicate prevented Joe Dombrowski from racing in Utah and the US Pro Challenge in Colorado and they took Battenkill down a peg or two, but that's about it. In time trials I can still push my seat forward of my bottom bracket. I can wear Primal Wear if I wish.

And this gets to my point--maybe we'd be better off with a few more rules in MABRA.

I'm not quite suggesting we organize a junta to overthrow MABRA and institute a Pacific Northwest OBRA-style anarsynchronous commune thing. I'm suggesting a more gradual revolution. We do this by instituting a couple of proposals loosely based on Marx and Engels' Das Kapital.

Proposal One: Limit team size in races
Laboring against large squads is especially hard on courses with strict yellow line rules. This year at Coppi and Poolesville one large squad controlled proceedings; from the start, we found ourselves behind walls of riders from a particular team, arms linked like goose-stepping fascists, several of their black leather raincoated gestapo brethren already far up the road.

This is not at all to fault the teams that took advantage of their numbers. This is just to shake our worker's sickles and hammers at them passive aggressive-style, and to propose rules that properly handicap them.

I'm talking to you, fascists of Battley-Harley-XO Communications Haymarket Battly Harley Masters Omniteam.

Joking aside, one practical way to eliminate imbalance in numbers is by limiting numbers. We know all riders are not equal, but let's at least make things numerically somewhat equal--let's limit the number of workers a team can field in yellow-line rule races.

Proposal 2: Create a MABRA all-star team to race NRC events

This is a slightly more radical proposal, comrades. I propose we create a collective team that would only convene for NRC or other national-level races. Sort of an all star team of our best comrades.

Workers who perform well in 2011 would get a chance to demonstrate their harvesting skills at NRC-level races in 2012. Also, they wouldn't feel compelled to leave their local villages--NCVC, Coppi, Bike Doctor--for capitalist gain and the chance to race at the NRC level.

Having a composite squad would (1) improve the competitiveness of local elite races by spreading out talent; (2) improve the quality and number of MABRA NRC competitors; (3) increase the support of local clubs for elite racing and racers; (4) allow greater opportunities for sponsors seeking to direct their funds and energy to top-level NRC racing rather than local riders and events; and (5) offer increased MABRA solidarity, since as a club rider you might compete against a rider who'd be your teammate on the MABRA all star squad.

Conclusion: Hammer and Cycle
If we adapt these two proposals, comrades, I promise you a clean sweep of kulaks from the MABRA ranks and the institution of a new egalitarian state. We will take from each according to his ability, and to each we will give according to his needs. Long live free MABRA!

Frank Gonzalez Beats Coondog, Fabian Cancellara and the rest of us at the Donut Derby

2011-09-07T08:18:00.012-04:00

In 2002 traffic was at a standstill in the right lane in Oak Brook, Illinois. This was the pattern every day, a holdup I learned to avoid. It wasn't an accident or an on-ramp. It was a passion for a kind of donut newly introduced to the greater Chicago area, a pillowy yeast effluvia with a gentle sugar shell. And the effect of eating one or two, when hot, was soma-like--calming Midwestern nerves, allowing us to maintain the stoic calm with which we faced a thousand miles of plains and prairie grass.

They were called Krispy Kreme donuts, and if you could find a hot one, you were lucky.

Eventually, our guilt got the better of us and we stopped buying Krispy Kremes, especially as the donuts became ubiquitous. Much of this, I think, had to do with the franchise's whoring the donuts out to gas stations and supermarkets. Krispy Kreme were the Pamela Andersons of the food service industry.

The little golden rings that had once been an expression of precious freedom now became surplus bloat hanging about the waist and dulling the mind. They were things to eat regretfully in church basements or while driving to Peoria--things to shovel in the mouth to quiet the belly, a symbol of wallowing laziness rather than earned reward.

Thus they became part of the competitive eating repertoire.

David "Coondog" O'Karma is one of the three men Jason Fagone profiles in his book on competitive eaters, Horsemen of the Esophagus. Among Coondog's feats are eating 45 hard-boiled eggs in 8 minutes and 10 seconds, making him the WCUE Egg-Sucking Champion. He would have won the 2002 Wing Bowl, having consumed over 100 wings, but unfortunately he vomited. Among his lasting achievements is his feat of eating an astonishing 25 Krispy Kreme glazed donuts in 15 minutes--an act which earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

After what I witnessed this weekend, I'm absolutely astonished that this record stands. I saw a man--and I'm not making this up--one up Coondog in the following manner:
(1) ride a bike at 25 miles per hour for 30 minutes,
(2) eat 15 Krispy Kreme donuts in less than 10 minutes
(3) ride a bike at 23 miles an hour for another 30 minutes
(4) eat 15 more Krispy Kreme donuts in less than 10 minutes
(5) ride a bike at 22 miles per hour for another 30 minutes.

All told, that's 30 Krispy Kremes in 20 minutes.

Can you believe that nonsense?

Let's break it down:
Fat content ingested: 360g (430% of RDA)
Carbs ingested: 660g (290% of RDA)

Put it this way--you'd have to eat 12 pints of Haagen-Dasz ice cream to pack away the same amount of fat Frank Gonzalez ate in 20 minutes at the Donut Derby.

And you'd have to do it and be able to get back on your bike and ride at your FTP without upchucking.

Our strategy, as a team, was to drop Frank on the first section and hope that when he came to the first donut station he'd be feeling uncharacteristically unmotivated to eat. For the past two years he's eaten nearly 30 donuts--subtracting almost a 90 minutes from his ride time, since each donut eaten knocks off 3 minutes of ride time.

The five of us attacked from the gun and set a furious pace. Frank, who also had a support team, responded by chasing down our attacks. We grew more and more desperate trying to shake them. We grew so desperate that we decided out of sheer desperation to take a wrong turn, and despite their many years of doing the event, Frank's team went with us.

Our group of about 15 riders took a detour that added about three miles to the first leg of the race. This meant that our GC guy, Chas, and Frank would both have to eat more donuts.

When we arrived at the first station and watched Frank begin to work, it was clear we were doomed. Chas stacked three donuts and smashed them down, and started working his way through them. Frank stacked five donuts and devoured the lot in less than three minutes. He smashed them with his feet somehow. His teammates stood around as if this was normal. Children were present, which was unfortunate.

Within 10 minutes, Frank had eaten 15 donuts, and his team was on the road and gone. Chas was just beginning his third stack of three.

At that point, we knew the race was over--that what happened on the bike was pretty much irrelevant. Frank could've walked the 35 miles and won.

Consider several hypotheticals:
(1) Fabian Cancellara shows up at the Donut Derby and decides to average 36 miles per hour. He does this ride in 70 minutes.

Frank still beats him.

(2) Let's say Fabian shows up with his whole team, Leopard Trek, and they do the ride in 60 minutes, averaging 38 miles an hour.

Frank beats the entire Leopard Trek team.

(3) Let's say Leopard Trek does the ride at 37 mph and that Fabian manages to eat ten donuts along the way. It takes him 13 minutes to eat the ten donuts.

Frank Gonzalez still beats Fabian Cancellara and the entire Leopard Trek team.

Hopeless.

On the other hand, if you take the time to eat a Krispy Kreme, without having to shovel it in your mouth because your competition is Frank Gonzalez, they're actually pretty good donuts.

An Interview with Donut Derby Rookie Chas Offut

2011-09-01T17:12:00.005-04:00

In my last post, I examined some of the extraordinary stats behind winning efforts of past Donut Derbies. I promised an introduction to a newcomer to the scene, a local boy prepared to do battle in the land of the smorgasbord. Here it is--an interview with DVR's Chas Offut:

(1) Chas, I've known you as a barbeque maestro and local produce afficianado, a Baltimore man, and one of the few non-waifs in MABRA who has managed to score some points in the Cat 4 field. You've never trained a day--until now. What is it about the Donut Derby that's got you actually training rather than just riding?

I’ve always ridden my bike so racing was just a logical next step to push my riding limits. But the Donut Derby, that’s an event that simply defies riding norms. It's true, I’ve been blessed with a naturally rounded mid-section, but I’ve never encountered an event that requires the esophageal fortitude more than the Donut Derby.

(2) This will be your first time tackling the Derby. Describe the Donut Derby and explain what makes it a more complex kind of competition than a mere bike race?

Racing bikes is actually fairly simple: train incessantly, forego relationship needs, avoid good food and put career development on hold. But with the Donut Derby, all of this is put in check with the intake of refined sugar, fried food and beer. Suddenly, friends want to hang out with me, my wife is encouraging me to ride my bike and I finally have time to stay later in the office. Honestly, it’s all very confusing, but that's the innate complexity of tackling the Donut Derby post MABRA race season.

(3) What do you think is necessary to win the Derby in terms of logistics, pacing, gluttony, and team support?

Is this a trick question? I’m bound by sponsor obligations not to divulge any information that may potentially aide my competitors. There’s just too much at stake here. I will, however, say there’s truth in the donut triple stack. I had three stacks this morning. Damn it, I’ve said too much already.

(4) A follow up question--is it necessary to keep the donuts down, or can you, a la the ancient Romans and troubled modern day sorority girls, induce vomiting?

Following the careful review of event rules, our squad’s lawyer concluded that a barf = DNF.

(5) Without giving too much away to your competition, can you give us an idea of what your training for the Derby has entailed? Tabata intervals? Insulin infusions? High altitude training? Periodization? And how are the sensations going into this event?

Let’s just say I’m on a first name basis with the Krispy Kreme counter girl. And, I hit my milestone today before work, which I know Friel would be proud of.

(6) Have you taken a look at competitors from past years and done statistical analysis of their numbers? What kinds of average speeds and numbers of donuts are these guys putting out and eating, respectively?

Yes, it’s quite impressive. The gut buster guys – 40-49 year olds who eat 2x as many donuts as 30-39 year olds – are the ones to watch. Not only do they maintain 17+ mph speeds, they’ve entered some sort of vortex where the cycling and food continuum collide for passage into another world. All eyes are on “Frank the Tank” Gonzales.

(7) What was your best race?

If I must pick just one, I would say the 50 States Tour in which I was awarded the most aggressive rider jersey. And funny thing about it, I wasn't even registered. There’s something about racing on your home turf that takes your game to another level.

(8) What was your most impressive eating accomplishment?

Hmm, what did I cook last night?

(9) Have you any experience in combined competitive eating/cycling? Has your preparation involved "bricks," as the multisport folks call them--that is, the transition from one event of the race to the other?

Nope, never tried that, but my training regimen did include a “boot camp” class. And although the squats left me incapable of walking for 3+ days, I know this class will pay dividends on September 5th. Though not sure how quite yet. And although I have not tested this theory, I have heard that eating cabbage and watermelon will help expand the stomach the night before.

(10) If you win, what kind of celebration will you do as you cross the line?

This is in the works, but let’s just say I’ve been working with a team of dedicated professionals to craft a victory salute that pays respect to all of the men and women who have tenaciously gnawed a tender dough-filled treat - clinging to the freedom it represents - during a sunless conference room meeting.

Gut Doping and Crunching the Numbers of the Donut Derby

2011-08-30T13:53:00.016-04:00

Cycling is a sport of diverse skills--there's sprinting, climbing, motoring, descending, weaseling, moseying, and so on. There's room in bike racing for most of us to find a niche, to specialize. And where niches don't exist in cycling proper, we can create niches--even niches for gluttons.

The annual Donut Derby, brainchild of Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley Wheelmen, is one such creative niche. The Donut Derby is a pseudo-race combining aspects of competitive eating and bike racing. The fast and the fat, aerobic and the absorbic, gut and gam--mastery of two fundamentally warring human characteristics.

In nature, you can be big, or you can be fast, but you can't be both. In the Donut Derby, you've gotta be both to win.

This is one sport where athletes/eaters are pushing the boundaries of what is humanly and humanely possible. The event's online record extends back to 2006. Each year, the winning time has far surpassed the previous year's time. Last year's time, in fact, nearly halved the time from 2006. Such gains haven't been seen since the introduction of EPO to the peleton in the early 1990s. More on that suspicious connection later.

Let's look at more history...the chart below shows the winning times of participants, starting in 2006 when the winning Donut Adjusted Time was 1:26:24. This means that the winning rider, Joe Hamilton, actually rode the 35 miles in 1:46:55, but because he ate 7 donuts, 21 minutes was subtracted from his time.
Joe ate a half dozen donuts and rode at a decent pace. My guess is, it was more of a ride than a race, at the time.

Notice how in the following years, the winning time has fallen precipitously, driven for the most part by increased consumption of donuts. In fact, since Joe's winning ride in 2006, even as Donut Adjusted Time has fallen precipitously, average speeds have declined. This points to the recent supremacy of the gluttons: increased donut consumption is driving down times. In 2008, Joe Skelly stomped the competition by eating 28 Krispy Kremes offsetting his mellow 15.2 average mph pace.

Since Joe's unmatched 28 donuts consumed in 2008, Frank Gonzalez has dominated the race by following Joe's donut-driven methodology. In 2010 Gonzalez achieved an astounding Donut Adjusted Time of 41:29. Joe consumed 27 donuts while average 17.3 mph for the 35 miles.

Frank's abrupt rise to fast/fat greatness is, frankly, suspicious. In 2008, the year of Joe's record 28 (i.e., two baker's dozens and a deuce), Frank finished with a modest time, having consumed a respectable dozen and a half donuts. Joe's consumption was respectable, but it was far from the 27 he was, only two years later, to inhale.

How did Gonzalez make such dramatic improvements in his donut consumption in a single year? Is gut doping out of the question?

Mr. Gonzalez, it turns out, is a member of a suspicious cycling syndicate known as Kapelmuur Independents. Through what might well pass for intrepid reportage Uncle Pappy's has unearthed what might well pass for startling information about Mr. Gonzalez.

Among Frank Gonzalez' support crew, and a fellow member of the Kappelmuur mafia is Bicycling magazine's Bill Strickland. Strickland has written several books about cycling, and has recently come under fire for suggesting that Lance Armstrong may have doped. No word yet if he feels similar suspicions about Mr. Gonzalez's gut doping present.

No one has responded to our inquiries to Mr. Gonzalez. The Kapelmuur consortium and others have remained absolutely silent about Mr. Gonzalez' enigmatic and, frankly, suspicious rise to dominance in the competitive eating/riding category.

Their silence may be partly as a response to lack of questions about Mr. Gonzalez. We have thus far been too afraid to ask: How does one go from 18 to 27 donuts in two years? How does one train for such an event? What kinds of pacing strategies has Mr. Gonzalez adapted? Has Mr. Gonzalez given himself diabetes? How exactly does one gut dope? Until such time as the syndicate spontaneously responds to our unasked questions, we will continue to wonder.

Our answer to the silence of the omerta is the answer of champions: to let our legs/mouths do the talking, although I don't mean the mouth will literally talk. I mean, of course, that it will be talking while shoveling donuts in it. I should also say that we will also answer the silence of the omerta by probably getting our asses kicked, which has also been the traditional response to dopers among the peleton.

As non-gut doping riders, how should we peak for such an event? How to pace ourselves? The chart below shows some possibilities:

While Mr. Gonzalez has achieved dominance as a result of his extraordinary gullet powers, there is room in the Derby for those more inclined toward fast than fat. Mr. Gonzalez's extraordinary time of 41:29 from last year didn't require much speed: he moseyed along at 17 mph. However, it required him to eat more than 25 donuts in under two hours.

So how can you beat the syndicate's man?

Assuming 30 donuts is not feasible, you achieve any of the following combos:

20mph, 22 donuts
21 mph, 20 donuts
22 mph, 19 donuts
24 mph, 17 donuts
25 mph, 15 donuts
26 mph, 13 donuts

The only problem with this formula is that Frank, probably with the aid of various gut doping concoctions procured by the nefarious Kapelmuur Independents, has improved every year, meaning that he is likely to far exceed his previous mark.

Tomorrow, more on the Derby and the rise of a challenger to Frank Gonzalez's heavy-load bearing throne.

Qaddafi, Leezza, and Greenbelt: A Love Story

2011-08-25T12:44:00.004-04:00

Among the odd discoveries in Qaddafi's lair was a trove of Condoleezza Rice photos, done up in precious memories albums--the kind your grandmother keeps of you and your siblings as children. Or, of the kind that stalkers keep of the women they hunt.

To those who paid attention to Qaddafi's ramblings, we were already aware something was afoot. "I support my darling black African woman," he stated in a 2007 interview, "I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders...Leezza, Leezza, Leezza...I love her very much. I admire her and I'm proud of her because she's a black woman of African origin."

Although it's linguistically unclear what Qaddafi meant by saying he was proud of Condi for "leaning back," it's connotatively clear: the good Colonel's heart had been stolen by the ice dancing, football loving, Chopin playing, elliptical machine ravaging former Stanford Provost.

Qaddafi was not alone among world leaders in his creepy admiration for Condoleezza. Ariel Sharon once stated, "I have to confess, it was hard for me to concentrate in the conversation with Condoleezza Rice because she has such nice legs."

I bring up this weird fascination for Condi because it illustrates a broader point about the mystery of attraction: it often makes fools of us.

This is not to say that Qaddafi, had he not collected and probably drooled over photos of Condi, would have otherwise been a distinguished old gentlemen. It is just to say that passion drives us to do some really idiotic stuff.

Bike racing, for example.

Last night at Greenbelt when our favorite referee, the ponytailed badass who begins his spiels with a hearty, "GENTLEMEN...",announced that tonight would be the very rare double points night, due to high attendance in the A race, my heart skipped a beat--just as Qaddafi's heart had done when suddenly, Leezza Leezza leaned back and barked an order at an Arab leader. Suddenly, Qaddafi sat up and gave her the once over--who was this goreous African-American goddess, to bark orders at Arab leaders?

This is not impossible, I thought, I can do this! I can win this thing!

In the same kind of pathetic way that Qaddafi must've thought, This is not impossible--this eerily robatic, allegedly politically neo-conservative black woman is amazing, and must be mine!

You see, I've given my heart to Greenbelt, no matter that it is a training series. I love it's steady left-hand turns, its gentle uphill, its greeny goodness.

And I wanted to win its heart:

No matter that I hadn't won a single edition of it, even editions with less than 20 people.
No matter that the new racers coming up from the B race were sure to ride negatively and not allow any breakaways.
No matter that a Greyhound bus in Nashville discharged four vapor-spewing cannisters of bull semen yesterday , a slippery disaster some (i.e., me) have called "the Deepwater Horizon of bull semen spills." No word if the bull semen was headed for Pete Cannell's laboratory as of yet.

Forget about the so-called "training series" nature of the event, I told myself. Damn the bull semen hazards! This is a storied event, and if I put my heart to it, I can achieve anything I dream.

What did I have going for me?
For once, Harley was not the only team presence: DVR had six, NCVC at least five, Route 1 at least five. I could take advantage of the newbies.
I was an outside shot. The contenders surely alerted their teammates to the threat men: Brown, Abbott, and Lumm. They may have not been aware of my mathematical chance at the win, given the double points situation.
A dream driven by delusional passion.

So delusional was I that the following possibility ccurred to me: I lap the field, then win the field sprint. That would give me both first AND second, which would surely be enough to give me the win.

Believe me, I considered this a very real possibility. In the throes of passion, of which I have limitless quantities when it comes to Greenbelt (and Ho Hos, but we won't go into that at the moment), one doesn't think about probability. One is in LOVE, moaning "Leezza, Leezza, LEEZZA!" And clutching precious moments album to bosom.

Because that's what love is: humiliating and dreamy.

Unfortunately, reality is usually overly eager to dish out humiliation, in both my case and in Qaddafi's.

The race started, and I managed to get away for a few laps, but I was alone and completely lacking the engine to stay away for 12 laps, which is what I would've had to do. Still, while the field was out of sight behind me for a couple of laps, I dreamed I was approaching them from behind. I indulged in a few daydreams of victory, of my torso clad in yellow and the goofy little carwash print on the front of it, and Julie Elliott taking my photo--the drama of a come-from-behind win to take the whole damn thing! Lapping the field and then winning the field sprint for both first and second! Everyone wondering, "Who is this middle aged man who suddenly came alive and crushed the field?" I'd come home after the race and showering my girlfriend in carwash tokens and she laughed and laughed, her wildest dreams come true...

Reality, of course, delights in crushing such idylls. I was shortly caught by the pack. Like Qaddafi, I was driven from my glorious position of lonely leadership, dreams crushed.

Brown took a vicious field sprint, edging out Greg Abbott by the slightest of margins. I rolled in and couldn't even grab fifth.

For most of the season Brigham Lumm wore the jersey, helped by his brother Brandon.

Brigham

Greg Abbott always threatened, and it looked like it was bound to be a two-man race. It wasn't until Tim Brown started winning, at the end of the season, though, that someone else looked like a likely candidate.

Brown was aided by having one of the larger and more powerful squads. And he is, of course, currently listed as the BAR leader until Keck's points from Church Creek are tallied. That is, Brown's not too shabby as a rider.

After the race I did, however, eat my first Chipotle burrito in months, which, as wonderful as it was, I couldn't finish. This was astonishing, because last year I ate two in 45 minutes. While I haven't managed to get much better as a bike racer, all my starving has, in the end, apparently shrunken my stomach.

That's the best I got out of this whole thing, I guess.

Well, time to move on. Qaddafi and Greenbelt are both gone, and Condi is playing her piano somewhere, I suppose.

C'mon, Momo, let's get on with life, nursing our broken hearts and lingering no more on what might have been...fly away, Leezza and Greenbelt...fly away...

Anger in Rebellin and Armstrong

2011-08-18T07:47:00.008-04:00

So Davide Rebellin is back in racing. Rebellin won the other day sporting Miche's mustard yellow and black kit and a helmet bereft of air holes, a la 1992. It is fitting to see Rebellin in such bygone garb, since Rebellin is 40, one of the few cyclists still around who is old enough to have race not only in, but before the BE era; that is, the era Before EPO.

Unfortunately, Rebellin not only lived through the EPO era, he also used it. In 2004 he became the first rider (Gilbert repeated the feat this year) to win all three Ardennes classics--winning Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Fleche-Wallone and the Amstel Gold races back-to-back.

He won silver at the 2008 Olympics, but that's also where he was busted for dope. His silver was stripped when Rebellin's blood showed he'd used CERA--the same drug that brought down Ricco and Piepoli, as well as Rebellin's Gerolsteiner teammates Stefan Schumacher and Bernhard Kohl.

Apparently Rebellin is also one of several Italian cyclists currently under investigation for tax evasion.

As a result of Rebellin's positive test from the Olympic road race (which wasn't announced until almost a year after the event) Fabian Cancellara was granted silver and Alexander Kolobnov--the same Kolobnov thrown out of this year's Tour for using a masking agent--was given bronze.

Miche, Rebellin's current team, functions as a "haven for riders convicted of doping." Its riders have included Stefan Schumacher and Michael "the Chicken" Rasmussen--until Christana Watches made him an offer and customized an extra, extra small wristband just for him.

Rebellin said Monday that when he crossed the finish line in triumph at Tre Valle Varesine, it was in a fit of "anger."

I suppose Rebellin would say the only thing he's "on" is anger these days, just as Lance once famously responded to the rhetorical question "What are you on?" by answer, "My bike. Six hours a day."

What does anger do for you? Well, according to Dutch psychologist Henk Aarts, a lot. On Armstrong, Aarts states, "There's a picture of this guy near the finish line and you see anger in his face but you can also see this determination. What's interesting is the facial expression of anger almost completely overlaps with the facial expression of determination." And as Leonard Berkowitz of the University of Wisconsin states, anger "can be linked to an hurge to hurt, and at times, even to destroy the target object."

No shit?

In any case, maybe there's something to the old expression about "turning a pedal in anger."

There's actually an entire webpage called "Lance Armstrong in Relationships" devoted to understanding Lance's anger. A sample:

Sometimes Lance feels out of sorts and hostile for no apparent reason, and this is usually due to unexpressed, unresolved anger from the past...Lance Armstrong has a rich, colorful, dreamy imagination and a refined sense of beauty. Involvement in the arts, or with artistic, sensitive, or spiritually inclined people is very satisfying to him.

Another fellow motivated by anger is, believe it or not, gentle Andy Schleck. After the chaingate affair at least year's Tour, where Contador attacked him after he'd thrown his chain (let's be honest--it was pure opportunism), Schleck said the following: "my stomach is full of anger."

It's hard to deny the effectiveness of Lance's anger on the bike and in his dealings with the press and the public it sometimes is persuasive, as it was here:

Lance used his angry "hating me means loving cancer" defense to good use; Schleck went on to stew for another year, a brooding that would only end with Tour victory, except that he didn't win. His anger has only carried him back to where he was, no further.

But maybe that's OK, when you consider where the anger of Armstrong and Rebellin has taken them. It's probable that cyclists cannot blood dope as they did during Lance and Rebellin's prime--for proof, take a look at the slowing average speeds of the peleton and stage winners. But we still face a legacy of doping and of a sport in which our best were our most daring--not only on the bike, but in the intravenous.

A bystander at the Tour de Pont almost two decades ago snapped this picture of Lance in yellow, alone on a climb in Virginia. It could be a James Wilson or Linc Brooks snap of Brown, of DJ, or any of us in any one of our races. It has the same feel--of a young, fit guy riding without a lot of scrutiny.

Who knows if Lance was already doping? If we are to judge him circumstantially, by the winners of his time, we'd be inclined to say he was.

I'm not sure what to make of the difference I see in Rebellin at 40, full of rage--at a system that in his view has done him wrong--and Lance at 22, about to win one million dollars for sweeping three American races, his future unknown: testicular cancer, seven Tour victories, two divorces and a Federal investigation.

There's the kid about to make mistakes in a corrupt and destructive system. Then there's the old guy who's already made his mistakes. The kid is just angry at his dad whose name he abandoned, at his childhood, at God and who knows what? He's full of youthful anger you don't have reason to doubt. The old guy seems to use his anger as a weapon. It's no longer a soul aflame, but a face to put on for the cameras.

And that's the unfortunate effect a lifetime in which anger works. Eventually, you lose your anger itself and you use it as a tool and in so doing, you become a tool.

Words of wisdom, there.

Highway to Heaven: A Fiddler, a few Foul Smells and a Four-Minute Effort

2011-08-13T13:49:00.009-04:00

The Dow could be dropping, American workers losing jobs, the Horn of Africa starving, and my office mate could once again insist on cutting and slowly savoring his boiled eggs first thing in the morning with his shoes off and gouty feet up on his desk. This is a daily fumigation I endure, a test that lingers in the nose and brain long into the morning.

Here's what I've realized--all this bad stuff could happen, but if I take a single sprint at Hains, I'm happy for a few days. Let me win a real race, and I'm good for at least a month.

Anyone else?

It's not like I set out to be this kind of selfish, amoral bastard with hideously skewed values. I only realized it recently; I've been miserable and probably because I haven't won anything in a while.

This year--maybe like your year, maybe not--has been somewhat frustrating. No results. No Coach Troy Spinnervals DVD primes.

I pinned my hopes for a late-season mood-lifting victory on Highway to Heaven, a hill climb lasting between 3-5 minutes. The shortest race I've done since high school track. I needed a result.

My ride up to the race was a guy who's gotten results: Browner, or as he's insisting to be called these days, "Edvald Brown-Hagen." Brown's in a tight, awkwardly contested race with his teammate Keck Baker for the 1-2 BAR. I say awkwardly because Brown is busy getting BAR points while Keck, a builder, is somewhere in the greater Richmond area erecting a subdivision called "Keckston," with streets called "Baker Avenue," "TT Monster Lane," and "I Owe Calvini a Water Bottle Which he Gave me at Washington County Road Race Street." Brown already has the crit championship, a 2nd place in the MABRA road race championship, and a slew of other wins and results.

I've raced with Brownie since he showed up at Greenbelt on a 32 pound blue Trek, straight out V Tech and looking about 16 years old. The first jersey Brownie won was the Cat 3 Hill Climb jersey, two years ago on this very climb. I ride the bike frame he used for that win.

Also in the car was Corey, who, like me, has recently lost a little enthusiasm for racing. He hadn't raced since June, despite showing some decent form. When I asked him how he prepared for Highway to Heaven, he responded, "I bombed Hanoi." He'd spent the night on his computer flying A-7s and F-4s. As a former Army helicopter pilot, I imagine bombing Hanoi may be, for him, a nice way to unwind in the same way I unwind with a glass of chablis, a box of tissue, and an evening of Home Shopping Network.

Corey spent the last month focussing entirely on preparations for Highway to Heaven. Much of that preparation, I'm guessing, involved virtual strafing and bombing runs of various war-torn locales.

The advice I got from them, and from my teammate Brian Sacawa, was to moderate my pace on the initial steep section.

Like Corey, I looked to the race as a way of redeeming myself. In my case, I need redemption for a number of stupid crashes and mental mistakes. For example, falling into a ditch at Page Valley in the most idiotic fashion imaginable, and losing, once again, to Rick Norton.

Rick is the likely winner of the Masters BAR. He's also in third (behind Keck) in the 1-2 BAR. Like Brown, Rick's no stranger to results. Rick won the last two races I entered, Lost River and Page Valley; before that, he'd won Coppi 1/2 in outrageous fashion. I know he's won at least five races this year. In his lifetime--including his pro career--he's probably won more races than I've done this year.

When I saw him wearing an aero helmet, I thought, "I'm doomed." Norton in an aero helmet is like Bruce Lee with nunchuku--a badass.

A four-minute effort is something entirely different from a fifty mile road race. But if you've never done a four-minute hill climb, you don't know if that's good or bad for you.

They start you out with a wooden block behind your rear wheel, and you're looking up the climb, watching the guy in front of you already tossing his bike back and forth in a way that seems impossible to sustain for four minutes.

The juniors come out for this one, floating up the climb, as pliant and light as noodles, shorts flapping in the wind.

It strikes you as you begin, that you have no idea how to modulate your effort, since you've removed your computer (along with your bottle cages and bottles), and you've never seen the road's dips and turns. On top of that, you don't know how your legs will respond.

But you start, and you modulate your effort. It is steep, but not so bad as Brickyard.

You pass a spectator who cheers, then another. Over the steep part, and what's that? A fiddler? Well, he could be either a fiddler or violinist, sawing something, you think, but not enough to figure out whether it's bluegrass, Celtic, or a concerto. You can only hear a note or two and he is out of earshot.

How much time has passed? Should you shift into the big ring?

More people cheering--that's decent of them. There's an orange flag, but you can't read it. Either a construction flag or a Haymarket jersey hanging from a post. Either way, unhelpful.

Not fast enough--your 1-minute man doesn't seem much closer than he was when you first saw him.

There's the finish. Already? Out of the saddle and sprinting, and it's over.

You learn Corey put in a good time of four minutes even--good enough for the win. That's his second MABRA championship in two years.

Hanoi will be carpetbombed again tonight, it is certain.

Brown came within a few seconds of a podium, but, more disappointing to him, was slower than his time from two years ago.

Sacawa, who's battled illness for the last month, put in a special effort to take 2nd in the 1/2.

And I won the old guy race, barely nipping Rick, who'd done the thing twice. "This is the first time I've lost in a while," he said. "This is the first time I've won in a while," I said. Of course, if we'd gone up against the youngsters, neither of us would've been around to contemplate it; we'd have been on our way home, thinking about the next time. As it was, we got a medal, a bit of cash, and a reason to smile through the smell of eggs and gouty feet.

Lost River Race Report, Including Cat Geriatric (First Person), Cat I - IV Races (Third Person)

2011-07-26T22:26:00.004-04:00

I stayed at Lost River Guest House, along with a cohort of November bikes, NCVC visiting professors, and some Gamjams death squads, complete with November "speed weaponry" of matte black, dangerous appearance. There were also a lot of gay men around, and a couple of new parents, since the Guest House is welcoming to all folks. I was glad for it, since the cycling thing gets old--the excuses for getting dropped, the excruciating liturgy of bike maintenance call and response, and the uneasy banter between rival squads and nemesi. Not that you can't be both a gay man or new father and a cyclist; in fact, some of my favorite cycling friends happen to be gay. Point is, and I've probably offended everyone making it, is that the things that were discussed were not cycling.

I also appreciated the company of Mr. November. After the race, as I donned my arm floaties and prepared for an afternoon of full contact post-race Marco / Polo, I spotted Mr. November reclining, shirt off, shades on, fit special lady friend by his side, looking as cool and vicious as his November speed weaponry, with his moderately fruity drink.

Mr. November and I rode the same race, and we had pretty much the same experience--getting our sweaty old asses handed to us, which we nonchalantly accepted and leisurely carried to pooleside, surrounded by really nice, friendly gay guys and new parents and attentive barkeeps who brought us ridiculously fruity drinks.

We were not dominant conquerers in the Ivan the Terrible on a bike manner. So what. Here we were at this awesome place with this view--the magnificent green valley below:

It was damned beautiful, and Mr. N. and I were doing what Cat-Geriatric racers are supposed to do: enjoy beauty and indulge in hedonism.

But this is a race report, so I reluctantly include details of the race. The race unfolded as many Cat-Geriatric races do:
(1) several small breaks form, but they're not potent enough to stay away;
(2) a break finally stays away;
(3) the most ridiculously in-shape dudes in the break attack it on the climbs and win.

In this race, I was lucky enough to be in the break. I wasn't the strongest--that was the winner, Rick Norton. He attacked several times, with his succinctly named teammate, R, and finally he gapped Stephen Robinson and me. R sat in, and I didn't have the anorexia-power (hereafter, ano-power) to win on the last climb.

I rode around for a while after the race, sampled the chicken served up by the Ruritans. Not the best, but they were incredibly nice folks. They kept asking me if I was hurt. No, that's just what wearing cleats makes me look like--that and riding in mountains and 95-degree heat.

Then I went to the feed zone, where I was able to chat with Rick and Pete Warner for a while. Sometimes in a race, the strongest riders don't make the break, and for Pete, that was the frustrating reality of Cat-Geriatric racing.

We watched the 1/2 field explode like buckshot, with ano-power demi-gods Jeremiah Bishop and Keck finally gaining separation. Then the ominous lone chase figure of ano-power grom Joe Dombrowski. Then the three of them, Jeremiah wailing for water, being handed a gallon jug, which he doused himself with like a man on fire. In the end, the sprint--Jesus, it came down to a sprint on that kind of climb?!--led to the bars tangling up and Keck edging out Joe. Joe told me later, at the Guest House, that he was certain they'd go down.

The 4s also exploded. A group of four got away, but were brought back. NCVC lined it up, setting up their man for the win, with DVR's Justin Reznick grabbing second.

The 3s exploded as well. I was certain triathlete cretin Matias P. would take it when I saw him soloing with one to go, but it was not to be. I'm certain his hirsuit gams, which serve him so well on the flats, betrayed him on the climbs, their thick heft weighing him down.

The rest of the weekend was an exploration of child and infant rearing. I've seen Chip Hoover win races after warming up by--and I'm not making this up--changing his daughter's diaper. Some guys can do that.

On Saturday afternoon I watched my friend Tom, an attorney and winner of the Washington Post puzzle challenge, hand out bottles to his teammates. He drove all the way out to Lost River just to do that.

That evening I watched him swaddle his infant son, Reuben. He swaddled the hell out of that kid. And that wasn't all. He had a thousand ways of making the kid stop crying; and Tom's only been a father for three weeks or so. He's only a Cat 5 father, but with an FTP (Fathering Threshold Power) that would shame most Cat 1 fathers.

Here I'd thought Cat-Geriatric racing is all about pleasure and hedonism, but Tom--who's still too young for Cat-G--shamed me into thinking there might be something more to life than all this racing, drinking, pooleside lounging, and view-enjoying. Maybe life isn't just about having awesome ano-power.

Maybe, but watching the display of it this weekend was awesome, and that Tom showed up to watch it was proof enough that, even to those with humanity and filial obligations, there's something extraordinarily tough and beautiful about racing up mountains.

Two Ways of Seeing Bike Racing

2011-07-21T10:47:00.004-04:00

I'm at work, but right now, on the other side of the world, the world's best cyclists are climbing three HC climbs. I don't know what's happening, but I'm dealing with the usual requests from friends, also at work, for live streaming video feeds. My oldest brother, whose vocational future rests on his finishing his dissertation, has spent the morning anxiously combing the web for feeds--future be damned!

The suspense of this year's edition has, in my opinion, made it one of the best Tours in recent memory. In contrast to the Giro, whose tension resolved early in the race, none of the contests in the Tour have yet been decided.

Last night it was almost 100 degrees at the start of Greenbelt. When the whistle blew, I suddenly put in a 1,000 watt sprint to get off the front. I was flying, for about five minutes, then the heat became too much to rid myself of, and I had to stop and adjust my front brake. Catching back on put me over the edge; as the race went on I began to sweat so profusely that my feet were wet. My shoes are still soaked this morning. Five were away, and the meaningless sprint for sixth simply petered out, and we all rolled in, blank-faced. The discord of the race never resolved, for me at least.

It makes me think of Leonard Meyer and his analysis of the fifth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp minor. I'm not a highbrown guy, mostly, but Meyer offers an interesting explanation for why we like music that is applicable to bike racing. Meyer looks at fifty measures of Beethoven's piece. He finds that Beethoven never repeats himself throughout; although he often returns to the same chords and motiffs, they are not exactly the same chords and motiffs. Beethoven establishes a pattern, alters it slightly, alters it again, and so forth. He never returns to the tonic--the chord that anchors the piece--until the very end.

In the same way that narratives remain unfinished until the final sentence, good music, Meyer argues, keeps our attention by suspending resolution until the final note.

Other music theorists say we enjoy music because it is "connotative;" that is, it refers to the real world of images and experiences. The growl of Hubert Sumlin's overdriven slide guitar--run backwards through an old tape deck--on the old Chicago blues track, for example, sounds like the post-war machinery of the factories and engines of industrial American cities. We like Chicago blues because it sounds like our world, but ordered and controlled instead of chaotic.

But Meyers argues we find beauty in music, in the words of Jonah Lehrer, from "the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations)."

How the Tour resolves will determine its worth, and therefore its beauty. Although music is usually planned (musicians read it from pages) and bike races are usually not, the aesthetic effect is the same: unanswered questions compel the action and spur our brains to pay attention. To say, "this is beautiful!"

Applied to a bike race on the screen, viewed in the same way as a painting, this is straightforward, but when you're part of the action, it's a bit more complicated. When is the resolution? There is no end to bike racing. There are little ends, finish lines.

One way to measure the beauty of your own bike racing is to isolate its action to the race. You attack, you get dropped, you hit the finish line, it's over. That has the advantage of resembling the confined action of paintings and music: it happens within a frame, within the 50 measures of the song.

Another way is to see bike like life itself--a pattern which never repeats precisely, full of individual races. The beginning and end are, of course, quite definite: birth and death. To celebrate the beauty of bike racing in this way is to celebrate the many questions and failures, to not see any single finish line as the end. But it's also to race and ride in uncertainty, since the finish line is unknown.

The latter has the advantage of paralleling life, and I guess you could say it might be healthier to think of your bike racing in this way, since it doesn't single out moments in time to glorify/lament. Maybe--and this is hopefully the point of bike racing--it helps you see life better rather than to just escape it. To embrace not only the little resolutions that come, but are not final, but to continue all the way to the line.

Even if it's a line we don't want to cross.

"To life," toasts Stanley Tucci in The Imposters, "and its many deaths." From a bike racer who has died on a bike many times, this rings true.

Weight Loss and Bike Strength

2011-07-19T09:42:00.006-04:00

The hilly part of the season is on us, and like others, my weight is down. I haven't been this light since I had three months of what the village nurse called "the running tummy" in Africa; she also suggested that maybe I'd contracted HIV, since that was the pattern with the other men in the village who had lost the kind of weight I'd lost. Thankfully, I only had pneumonia, dysentary, and some kind of weird infection on my big toe from, I'm guessing, playing barefoot soccer in a cow pasture.

Last week my grandmother, who hadn't seen me in four years, told me I looked "thin as a whip." That's her way of saying, "get yourself checked for tapeworms, boy."

Take a look around you at your next race: cycling is a disease. Tim Rugg used to be eight feet tall and drink things other than his own piss. Here he is with Brown and bottled water, back before cycling took him:

I used to lift weights and prided myself on having a little meat on my bones. Not any more.

Sunday I tried to move a couch, confident I could muscle the thing into our apartment. Unfortunately, I couldn't, and I broke out into a fierce rage--a rage I assumed was about the absurdity of the exchange. That is, the new brown couch is nearly identical to the old brown couch, and I couldn't understand why I had been saddled with the suddenly hellish task of making the Sysiphean exchange. I was too weak to hoist the thing properly, and ended up breaking one of its pitiful wooden legs, and spent the afternoon gingerly throwing myself at it to get it through the door and shouting profanity. Then, there were the two hours spent fixing it, wondering: "why have a become a damned weakling?"

It wasn't about the couches. It was about my inability to toss shit about as a man should do. That night I was so angry I went to the gym and squatted it out (with a childishly small amount of weight), just to make myself feel better.

During the Tour, cyclists may lose over ten pounds--most of it lean body mass including muscle and bone. At the end of it, they look like famine victims.

Surprisingly, that weight loss is, on average, usually the result of only a daily 100-calorie deficit. In a study of energy intake and output from the 1988, researchers found that cyclists took in, on average, 6000 calories per day, while their average expenditure was nearly 6100 calories a day. They ingested 49% of their energy while riding. That's 94 grams of CHO per hour (think, 3/4 of a cup of pasta).

Take a look at Contador--his body is clearly thinnner than last year at this time. The effect of the Giro was not only to make him weary, but to simply eat away at his flesh, so much so that he could not return the lean mass to his ribs in time for the Giro.

Look at Contador's face at the start of the Giro:

Compare it with his face at the start of the Tour:

It seems he's much leaner. But for him this is probably not good; his weight loss could explain his current drop in form. His body has endured too much load and cannibalized too much lean mass. The extraordinary pop he had in the Giro is gone.

A truism I've heard on the powerlifting forums is that you "can't gain strength and lose weight at the same time." That's the problem with losing weight as a cyclist--you lose power, as Contador has done.

It is possible, however, to lose weight and maintain strength. In a 1990 study of high school wrestlers who lost weight over the course of a season, their arm strength did not decline significantly, even as they lost, on average, 4 pounds.

It's unclear how or why this happens: the study, for example, measured arm strength but not leg strength. Maybe wrestlers, as they lost weight, lost strength in their arms? Lance Armstrong used to come into the season 10-15 pounds over his ideal Tour weight. He'd cut the weight in May and June, maintaining the wattage he'd gained through training (and dope?).

Bodybuilders follow a similar pattern: build muscle/gain weight -> maintain muscle/lose weight.

The effect, for cyclist, may simply be to strip the parts of the body of cells not needed for propulsion--that is, everything but the legs and heart. The effect, in this case, is just of mere distribution of muscle. Or it could be an entire-body effect, in which case the weight loss is not localized.

In either case, the hilly season and the couch moving season should be two separate phases. No lifting till September.

New Research on Heat Acclimation

2011-07-12T10:52:00.007-04:00

So, it's really hot out. I was in cooler climates last week, and I noticed my power numbers were significantly higher. This is in accordance with a study done on the Australian national cycling team several years ago, which found that when the temperature rises from 70 degrees to 90 degrees, cyclists' power dropped about 6.5%. (source)

What can you do to improve your performance in the heat?

Research from a study in 2002 had suggested that heat acclimation has little value (source). Nine trained cyclists trained in a self-selected way for seven days at 98.6 degrees, and saw no benefit from their seven days of heat training. Researchers concluded, "moderately intense training in the heat produced only modest variable heat acclimation and only the possibility of a worthwhile enhancement of performance. Highly trained individuals probably need a more marked stimulus to achieve substantial heat adaptation and effects on performance."

Results from that study don't seem to square with findings from a 2007 study conducted at the University of Oregon, done on Cat 1 and 2 cyclists. Researchers found that 9 days of training in the heat not only improved performance (8%)in warm weather, but also in cool weather (6%). The differences between the protocals are slight: the Oregon study subjected cyclists to more rigorous heat training, and two days more of it (9 days, total).

The results led one researcher to suggest the following: "You still have to train fast (in normal weather). But if you can then ad heat acclimation on top of that, you will get a boost. I've heard rumors of pro teams already putting this to use. Train cool, taper hot. For trained cyclists, this just could mean going for an easy spin on hot days."

Anectdotally, this seems true for me. Last year I spent a week in upstate New York, training every day in moderate temperatures. I hit new power highs, and felt terrific. When I returned, the heat in DC felt awful, but after a week or two, I seemed to be in my best form of the season. Although I couldn't match what I'd done in the cool temperatures of New York, I did ride better than I'd been riding before I'd gone to New York.

This year I spent a week in Wisconsin and hit new power highs. I'm hoping my body will acclimate to the heat in time for some target races in early August. I suppose we'll see how that goes.

This suggests that maybe what we need to maximize performance is not merely training in the heat, but periodized heat training, where we incorporate temperature into our program the same way we now plan for different levels and types of intensity.

One more thing--many cyclists prepare for the tour by spending several preceding weeks at altitude. The theory is that the thin air thickens red blood cells. Another explanation is that the cooler temperatures of the Alps also allows cyclists to, when they return, taper in the heat for a grand tour.

If this all seems kind of ambiguous and complex, that's because it is. The takeway, if we are to simplify, and maybe oversimplify it, is that we should vary the temperatures at which we train.

Bike Racing 101: A Saxo-Bank Course in Small Group Tactics

2011-06-30T09:17:00.000-04:00

Dm nyborg, sidste 1,5 time from Streamfactory on Vimeo.

Your taint is fine; it's your internal penis that needs help

2011-06-29T13:42:00.011-04:00

“There’s as much penis inside the body as outside. When you sit on a regular bike saddle, you’re sitting on your penis.”--Dr. Shrader in the New York Times

This has to be one of the more interesting observations ever submitted to the venerable New York Times. By a doctor, no less.

I find it a little obscure, and also completely disrespectful to the cycling world, since it ignores our own nomenclature, our agreed-upon terminology. Look, Dr. Shrader, it's called a taint, and all you need is an axe-shaped, completely hard seat, a chamois well-buttered with DZ's, and you're good to go. If you want us to ride on puffs of air and the much ballyhooed "sit bones" instead of brass and leather saddles and our mythic "internal peni," please speak to us in a language we understand.

Also, I think Dr. Shrader's "50% is inside" claim has a ring of inauthenticity to it. Has he gone around and done the footwork on this one? Gangsta rap surely provided a large natural experimental database which could be useful in providing basic numbers, but I'm going to suggest this is a skewed and possibly exaggerated sample, with measurement error and externalities corrupting the data.

Further evidence of Shrader's quackery: he provides no explanation for how he measures internal penis length. I mean, women don't go around saying they have a 12" anything--and for good, statistically sound reason. You can't measure that.

I'm calling pseudo-science on this so-called doctor.

But I'm thinking like a roadie.

Triathletes and time trial afficianados may feel differently. I imagine they will greet Dr. Shrader's ratio announcement with joy, since these wind-doping enthusiasts obsess about aerodynamics and tidiness and nothing brings them as much pleasure as the thought of tucking things inside so the wind doesn't flap them about.

As in, my cables aren't small, just internally routed, as on Giant's new road bikes.

In the end, it's about reproduction: there are once again concerns about whether sitting on your penis, as normal saddles force one to do, impairs one's ability to reproduce.

My own issues with saddles have been the discomfort I've felt, particularly when I'm trying to TT. The pain was most acute when last year I did two 40k TTs in a row, and my internal penis was absolutely killing me afterwards. I read about Lance Armstrong's switch to the ISM saddle, also a favorite of Chicago policemen, according to the Times article, and put in a few bids on ISM saddles on eBay.

Then last week I saw this contraption parked at the IMF, near my own office:

I wasn't sure whether this was an actual bike seat or simply pads taken from the leg curl machine or Bowflex and miraculously the same diameter as a seatpost.

Instead of a saddle, there are simply two pads running perpendicular to the bike frame. I suppose the rump is supposed to perch atop the pads, but I'm not sure what keeps the rider from sliding fore and aft. Sure you won't fall off the sides of that saddle, but sitting on it has to be a little like solo emo log rolling (which, there is apparently a world championship of...).

I did a little research and found that there are several similarly unorthodox bicycle seat-type contraptions:

The BiSaddle, the Laz-E-Boy of bike seating devices, a device which provides a bike seat for both ass cheeks, and, judging by the picture (taken from BiSaddle's website), appropriate for the super wide loads among us, those of us, ironically, most likely to be uninvited to attempt what the seat enables (i.e., procreation):

Most other models (the Hobson, Spiderflex, the Ergo seat) follow the same principle: provide extraordinary width and no length. None of the saddles have a nose, following the advice of Dr. Irwin Goldstein of Boston U, who states, "...as long as a saddle has a nose--the case with most new designs--it isn't safe."

But let's not stop there. Those who hump all day on office chairs on their internal peni--better not. Demand safe coddling of your internal penis! Do the same for your car manufacturers!

Let's start tracking erection time during sleep, as was done in Dr. Shrader's study. Because who doesn't dream of 4% improvement in erection time while trying to sleep (as was achieved by Chicago policement who switched from cruel, penis-punishing saddles to wonderful buttocks-craddling saddles)?

My life would be completely transformed! I'd be a lot more tired and irritable!

But does America need more erect penises? Who's to say that we would benefit more from flaccidity. I think of a guy like Anthony Weiner, who now has resorted to therapy to cut down his erection time. There's a simple solution, Mr. Weiner: it's called a Brooks saddle, and you should just sit right on your internal penis and ride. Leave your phone at home, please.

Only in America is a four % decrease in nighttime erection seen as a crisis calling for regulation. There are problems with internal peni in America far beyond those caused by noses on bike seats. We just need to get out on our bikes, on or off of our penises, and see them.

Rezston, Snorkels, BBQ, Research

2011-06-28T12:47:00.005-04:00

Last year, if you remember, big Nick Sachanda soloed off the front to win at Reston. This year, DVR's Justin Reznick won in similar fashion.

I didn't go to Reston because I went instead to the DC BBQ contest down on Pennsylvania. I paid twelve dollars, all of which went to fund the slaughtering, killing, butchering, firing, and embuing with smoke of former living beings. An animal rights group set up neatly outside the entrance offered to pay attendees $1 to watch a 4-minute video showing, I presume, scenes of farm animals being treated atrociously. I ran right on by, and was promptly greated by a free sample of chipped beef smothered in Stubb's BBQ sauce; I stood there in a puddle of congealed animal fat, inhaling the roast flesh of a thousand incarcerated beasts, and watched the swearing-in of the judges. I ate brisket, ribs, chicken wings, turkey, hot dogs, pork (a free sample from the pork industry), beef (courtesy of Safeway Select), and two deep-fried Oreas (they'd run out of Twinkies).

The BBQ was nice, but it wasn't the only reason I skipped out on Reston; frankly, I'm sick of crits. I've been in two accidents this year, both in the last month, and both in crits. Nothing too serious, but enough to make me want to take up a more stately, age-appropriate sport. Say, time trialing.

It's a shame time trialing is about as miserable a thing to do as shopping for window dressing, with its taping over holes, its conversations about 21mm vs. 23 mm tires, its plethora of carbon do-dads aplenty, enough to fill the truck you have to rent and drive, by yourself, to a race you'll do, by yourself. Where's the fun in that?

In my quest to avoid the TT alternative, I happened upon an innovative format now emerging in the Pacific Northwest's Tour of the Unattended. As the site states, it is a "5-day SOLO cycling challenge taking place on familiar routes in greater-Seattle where riders complete five unique stages, exclusively solo, report their data, and receive a ranking." Organizers go on to warn that there will absolutely be no drafting (what they call "Group Doping") allowed. Also disallowed: aero bars or disk wheels ("Aero doping"), although optimizing weather conditions ("Weather doping") is allowable.

I assume weather doping involves rain dances, holding the planet Earth on its axis through black magic, or installing various massive fans of the kind found on the back of boats in the bayou. Or maybe it involves just looking outside your window and waiting till the rain stops.

In any case, it sounds like a hoot, doesn't it? Five straight days of riding by yourself or being thrust along by perfectly legal weather doping in the form of a swamp boat fan being driven behind you. Lonely participants comfort themselves with the thought that other lonely individuals are out there, also by themselves, striving to put down a faster time.

And what a name, too: Tour of the Unattended. Sounds like it's a tour for children left alone in parking lots.

In other news, there's a lot of great research going on, and I thought it might be helpful to give to you, my competitors, because you don't already kick my ass enough.

(1) Creatine does not improve sprinting at the end of a two-hour race, but beta alanine seems to lead to some improvement (source), and fish oil seems to lower heart rate (source).
(2) In a 5-minute TT, those who sprinted all-out (rather than started reasonbly fast) from the gun recorded faster times (source)
(3) Training with a snorkel yields no positive results, although it turns the ladies heads, no doubt (source).
(4) Altering clocks alters performance in athletes. Slow-running clocks, displayed next to athletes, led them to achieve higher wattage, while fast running clocks led them to perform more poorly (source). Not sure how to use this information, but it is helpful to hear that sometimes, it's our brains, not our legs, that hold us back.
(5) All-day attendance at BBQs tend to cause one to gain weight and lose fitness.

There you have it. Get out there on your snorkels and hit up some BBQs.

Thoughts on father's day

2011-06-23T09:52:00.006-04:00

The Bible says (somewhere) that the sins of fathers are visited on their sons, but traditional genetic theory says otherwise. Since Watson and Crick first modeled DNA and the Human Genome Project finally mapped a complete human genome, we've come to believe that our genes are sacred--that we pass on what we are, not what we do.

For cyclists, this is a sometimes depressing, sometimes comforting thought, since it reminds us that we are on a leash, the length of which is set by some kind of unalterable math.

It's how I explain getting dropped--I blame it on my father's genes, not on his diet or exercise habits.

New research is suggesting that genes are not the only factor to blame. Genes don't change (except in the case of viruses), but their expression does. The study of differences in gene expression is called epigenetics.

An example. A famine in some parts of Sweden during WW II is linked with higher likelihood of obesity, diabetes, and other illnesses in the paternal (but not maternal) granddaughters of women who experienced famine while in the womb.

In other words, what grandparents ate (or didn't eat) alters how their grandchildrens' genes express themselves: epigenetics.

Since this is such a new field of research, we don't really know how much difference there is in gene expression, and how much it matters. It could be as big as genetics, with one researcher proclaiming that "epigenetics may ultimately turn out to have a greater role in disease than genetics."

Fine and well. What does this have to do with cycling?

Well, what is cycling but epigenetics--a struggle to redefine ourselves at a fundamental level, to alter how our genes express themsleves, to become a new man/woman?

I started cycling three years ago. My legs don't look like my legs any more. My torso is shrunken. I feel like a different person.

I'm not sure this is what I wanted, from the beginning. I wanted to ride, but I didn't want to change myself necessarily. I'm not sure I wanted to do anything so severe that it might alter disease risk factors for my paternal granddaughters.

But it is a severe sport, and I fell into it severely. I wanted nothing more than to transform myself epigenetically.

I am, undoubtedly, not the only cyclist longing for this epigenetic transformation.

Is it any wonder cyclists dope? Driven, as we are, by the desire to push a machine at speeds beyond human limits, any speed given being a limit, never fast enough. To transform how the self expresses itself.

If not the self.

The drug repoxygen acts in a way completely different from other forms of doping--instead of altering gene expression, it alters genes themselves. It is a virus, a type of gene therapy that induces controlled release of EPO. Those who take repoxygen and reproduce will transmit that gene to their children.

Doping has been a structure hung upon the framework of genes; it leaves them unaltered. Now, it is becoming a way to alter the gene structure itself.

I'm not sure what all this--epigenetics and gene doping--means. Broadly interpreted, I suppose it just expands the ability of children to refuse inheritence, what one takes from one's father.

My dad gave me a lot of great gifts, including the ability to ride a bike tolerably, if not divinely. The challenge of racing a bike and not winning, and maybe of living life in an imperfect world, is to figure out how much of it can be changed, and how much of it you must accept. And the part you accept, you accept that you will pass it on, for good or ill.

Green Rugg: Shaggy, Turns Red

2011-06-20T14:28:00.001-04:00

Tour of Washington County: Race Report

2011-06-20T09:53:00.009-04:00

Washington County was about as perfect as possible. The weather was beautiful, the organization was superb, and I don't recall any ugly incidents: crashes, fights, tacks on the road. Nothing.

The ugliest thing I saw was Justin Reznick's red heaving hirsuit chest (shown above) as he crossed the finish line shouting the king of all exuberantly foul words, for the benefit of all children present. Of course, it was also the most beautiful thing I saw, because Rez doesn't win a lot of races because he's not your typical Type-A chamois-up-his-ass bike racer. He leads bike tour in Mallorca and keeps his red mutton chops trimmed, on the ready for the next Pirates of Penzance casting call.

Teamwork, which set up Rez's win, is always a beautiful thing. DVR's Grant "Man-Dagger" claimed second, and Tom "The Shack" claimed fourth, but the rest of the team straggled in or didn't finish the race; they'd ridden balls to the wall off the front for half the race to whittle the field to about 15, from over 40.

Part of the joy of watching the race was in seeing something I'd never seen before; i.e., a Cat IV race with non-stop attacks. I have never seen that, and it was a thing of beauty.

Grant nabs second and Tom fourth

Grant's daughter tells her dad what to do on the podium

I also enjoyed the women's race, although I felt pity for poor, isolated Monika Sattler. The field attacked her until a small break stuck. As much as I hate to see abuse, the teamwork was beautiful.

In contrast, my race, the 1/2/3 crit, was essentially an extended Cat IV race, a large and fast group ride.

And, like a Cat IV, I crashed out, my rear wheel sliding out with three laps to go. I almost saved it, then fell and slid into the curb. Thankfully, my Cat IV skills didn't bring anyone else down, but I did impair some lines. Sorry.

None of my own teammates stood a chance at the GC on Sunday. Steven Black and Zac Felpel had placed second and fourth in the road race, but none of us can TT that well. Our best hope, Brian Sacawa, has been on antibiotics for a month. I can't believe he even showed up (and put in a better prologue time than me).

Zac, Brian, and Garrett

Because of an error in recording my road race finish, I went off last in the Sunday TT, behind Keck Baker, Nate Wilson, and Kevin Gottlieb. Bike racing can convince you that you're as good as the next guy in the peleton; TTing is a sure way to un-convince you of that assumed equality.

Nate Wilson hasn't won any of the big races he's done this year (I don't think), but it must be nice to come back here and be the strongest rider in the race. To realize that while in the pro peleton he's still developing, around here he's something special. That he's stronger than he was last year.

I have to tell myself that that's what I'm looking for, too: simple proof that I'm stronger than I was last year. Last year at this time I was recovering from two broken vertebrae. So the proof of that question, because I can walk upright, is undoubtedly there.

Next year, I may set the bar a little higher.

Cat 1/2/3 Podium: Russ Langley, Keck Baker, Nate Wilson

UCI Statement: Tour of Washington County a Dangerous Race: Stay Home, Safe From Germans

2011-06-17T08:24:00.010-04:00

This weekend Washington County looms in front of us, intimidating and full of Joe Jeffersonisms. How should you prepare?

Loom--that's my halfling teamate's word, by the way. By halfling, I don't mean he's short, half-witted, or that he has hair on the top of his feet and hails from the Shire. I mean he's half my age. Despite being a mere youth, the Halfling has already fit more suffering in his 18 years than can be imagined; more suffering, indeed, than the nationwide outpouring of grief following the release of Rebecca Black's "Friday" dirge.

Most of the Halfling's suffering happened in a single weekend as a result of competing in a criterium whose streets, I'm guessing, had been lined with including, but not limited to the following:

-Sharpened punji stakes, as faced by the U.S. Army's "tunnel rats" in 'nam,
-Piranha,
-Singaporean officials with bamboo canes used for thrashing those who spray graffiti
-A cheese grater delivery truck spill; and
-Crazy bitches--baby mamas willing to pay no heed to they new manicure who turn they rings around, because Maury just told them they man who has not paid child support (although he denies fathering the child, with some validity) be passing by in a bike race

So, when the Halfling, after all he's been through, says something "looms," you better pay attention. And he's saying this about the Tour of Washington County.

This is especially true for talented, fast riders like the Halfling.

That's why I'm urging you to stay home, Nate Wilson. Stay home, TT monsters Josh Frick, Russ Langley, Pete Warner, and you countless other fast bastards. Stay home, rouleurs like Chuck and Ryan McKinney. Stay home, sprinters like Brown and DJ.

I'm concerned about your safety.

If you must race, follow these safety tips:

Race slowly and with extreme caution.
Ride at a safe distance behind the peleton.
Be courteous and let others, especially me, move forward at will.
Wear protective pads, like these:

Use a faring that blocks projectiles, and, attach a basket where you can keep a first aid kit or possibly a weapon, if you happen to be (or if a forceful woman is accusing you of being) a deadbeat dad:

And need I say anything about the dangerous folks in the greater Hagerstown area, a folk known as Hags, Haggers, Haggites, Hagglers?? The UCI has issued a statement today calling on all fans to show "the utmost sense of responsibility." Ostensibly, the statement was directed toward their treatment of Contador, but it could well have been the intention of the UCI to encourage the folks of the greater Hag-town region, long known for the cycling-mad legions, to not throw beer on or offer pre-race ice cream cones, or to let horses run onto the course accidentally.

Need I remind you that the Boonsboro Time Trial runs along Antietam National Battlefield? There may well be a Civil War reenactment group about! Have you seen those guys? Many are Germans who fly to this country for the purpose of being Confederate soldiers? Germans! Confederates!

Imagine going up against a few thousand Der Panzerwagons (i.e., Tony Martins).

Stay home, fast men. Stay home and safe.

Positive Fantasies, Marriage, and Cycling in the Brain

2011-06-15T09:46:00.010-04:00

Overconfidence. Some starting points:

A recent study shows that imagining success leads to failure, at least in certain tasks. Those who engage in "positive fantasies about the future" in their imaginations are more likely to put forth "poor achievement" in the real world. (The "positive fantasy" in the study is something like "looking hot in high heels," but the study itself is fairly sound in terms of setup).

American schoolchildren rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in math and science, but ourkids are "first in confidence" in their math and science abilities.(source)

American marriages are more likely to dissolve in divorce than marriages in other developed countries (4.5 per 1,000 people); yet, our belief in the sanctity of the marriage institution is higher than in other developed countries (source).

So now we ask our version of the WWJD question: What does this--this call to pessimism--mean for bike racers?

I'm convinced that very little separates pro cyclists from each other. It has to be fractions of percentage points, in terms of power and strength (despite Sean Yates' recent statement that Contador is "15% stronger" than the other contenders). That's because bike races are incredibly long affairs, and given enough time a 1% advantage is enormous--in a race 4 hours long, it becomes an almost one-minute advantage, and in a stage race, it becomes an one and a half hour advantage.

I think this is not as true for local cyclists, but I think it's true for most of us. Our power profiles are different in shape, but--and this is especially true in the elites--its our choices on the bike rather than that extra 5 watts that shows up in the BAR.

Bike riding--that's a test of endurance, but bike racing is, like chess, also about moves and choices.

DJ consistently places in the top five of local races because he's very good at positioning himself, and, of course, because he has a tremendous sprint. But mostly because he's confident and smart about his positioning.

But wait, doesn't confidence mean you engage in "positive fantasy"? I mean, what is confidence but believing in your ability?

Guys who win races always believe they deserve to win. Some (Cavendish, for example) even believe they deserve to win every race they enter. Lance Armstrong was nothing if not confident, obnoxiously so.

Guys who win races are committed to the notion of winning bike races, it seems. Often, this is delusional. Look at Hushovd, who finally won his first race of the season yesterday. He had been unhappy with Garmin, especially with Paris-Roubaix, even though his teammate won. He'd felt confident he could've beaten Cancellara--a result as likely as me beating Rugg in a mustache-growing contest.

Winning requires a kind of confidence, but it also requires clear-eyed realism. At Paris-Rouboux Vaughters, Hushovd's DS, clearly recognized Cancellara's superiority; it was realism that led him to order Hushovd to sit back. It was realism that led him to play the odds with Van Summeran. Because of realism, Garmin got the win at the world's biggest one-day race, albeit from a gangly beanpole with teeth made to chew cabbage, frighten children, and possibly suck chiggers from his girlfriend's cheek.

Most of us don't have DSs keeping us grounded in reality. We jump into breaks or out of them based on "positive fantasies" or because we've been engaged in "positive fantasies" before the race, and have no motivation to actualize our dreams.

I'm not trying to go all Marvin Zauderer on you. I'm just thinking about all the riders I know who are depressed because they're convinced they should be winning races. They've got the power data to win, but for some reason they're not.

Maybe they're not the strongest, and maybe they're making the right moves, but for others, I'm convinced, what's holding them back is a divorce from reality.

I'm not the strongest rider in terms of power, so I can't complain too much about my results, but I'm guilty of the same thing. This is my third year racing, and I don't have any results this year; it's hard in the elites. Still, I've had chances, and I've made mental mistakes.

The hard part about bike racing is accepting limitations. It's something runners don't have to do because there isn't drafting. You weren't first across the line because you were slower, not because you were daydreaming and missed the break. In cycling, with its sometimes magnificent complexity, we ride after a holy grail, a mysterious choice we make purely on instinct. It can be passive or active, violent or calm. It's always different, elusive, and beautiful. It's all the stuff of a positive fantasy--one we are, if we are to ever win, not entertain.

Clarendon Cup Staging: 1/2/3

2011-06-13T21:38:00.010-04:00

The most intense and hotly contested part of Clarendon Cup is the race to the race. Everyone recognizes the importance of staging. Older team members exhort younger team members to stage early, well, as if camping out overnight for Black Sabbath tickets.

I swear about 150 riders were putzing around the start, but by the time we'd lined up, teeth kicked in, hair pulled, blown hammies, we looked like we'd been through hell. And that was just for staging. I followed DJ, who, maybe because he's an officer of the law, always seems to find the sneakiest way around the law. We were supposed to stage from one side; DJ and a select cadre of us staged from the pit area. We paid no heed to the blue-shirted marshall looking at us disapprovingly. FU. Staging is the race.

The Masters race finished, we kicked it in our 53x11s and the 20 yard sprint to the line began. I can't say I placed well, but I did defeat some pretty fast finishers. I was in the third row behind Ryan McKinney.

After the hired help had dragged the carcasses of the less fortunate from the start area, it looked as though they'd let us go early. It was 8:45, and those of who'd survived were anxious to start the race before there were any more casualties.

Instead, we were forced to wait ten minutes. Meanwhile, the unwanted frontal penetrators arrived.

By this, I mean the folks who ride up nonchalantly to the starting line from the front. They pretend to be just trying to find their way through all the chaos. They inch through the front, feign helpless, then turn around, squarely ahead of the rest of us, through sheer assholery avoiding the suffering of the Battle of Staging.

Unwanted frontal penetrators, there is no honor in staging thus. Shame on you. Unwanted frontal penetration is the doping of staging.

I'll say no more on that.

Meanwhile onstage Nima went on about how much weight he's lost, and how mighty his team is, and we sat and waited.

Last year I'd taken a riskier approach to staging. I'd avoided it by letting a gap open even before the starting gun. I staged about 20 yards behind the peleton. I watched the clock, clipped in about 5 seconds before the gun sounded, and by the time I reached the rear end of the group was at about 35 mph and bellowing like a bull gored by John Goodman. I passed about 100 people in five seconds, but I was lucky, and totally a douche.

This year I staged the conventional way, and when the gun sounded and I hit the first corner, I was in in good position in the top twenty. In the picture below, which is of the first turn (post-staging) I'm the traffic cone in the center with smug look on my face.

Basically, this is the order of the finish. Josh Frick, seen here in second position won, but everyone else is basically in the order of their finish.

It was a tough race to get to the start line, but I'm proud of what my team accomplished, and next year I hope to stage even better.

Chuck Drops Me, MABRA, World

2011-06-09T14:29:00.008-04:00

Last night I had one last chance to hang in a break with Chuck Hutcheson. It was only Greenbelt, and there were only 27 of us, but those kinds of details have never mattered to Chuck, who attacks noon rides like Jens at le Tour. And they don't matter to me. A win is a win, and a not-droppage by Chuck is a not-droppage by Chuck. No Spinnervals DVDs were on the line, but it's still important.

I hadn't seen him in a while when, two weeks ago, he showed up at a Tuesday goon. Within five minutes, I was in a break with him, killing it. He broke away from us by riding the wrong way, directly into traffic, up the narrowest, most serpentine part of Beach Drive. Of course, only a lone delusional idiot tried to follow him; the rest of us understand the concept of oncoming traffic.

When we caught him, only three of us hung, and then I was dropped. The group caught Chuck, but then he attacked again and dropped us again.

And this was OK, because it has taken me a while just to get to the point where I can be dropped by Chuck.

To be dropped, you first have to hang, and three year ago when I first started riding a bike, I couldn't hang. Chuck would simply leave, and I would be there in my sleeveless tri-jersey.

For instance, the first time I raced against him, two years ago at Fort Ritchie, he lapped my field. I pulled over before that happened; I wasn't even dropped.

Last Fall, I could finally hang on his wheel for brief spells. This Winter, there were dozens of Saturday 7am and 10am rides where I hung with him until Brickyard, and then he inevitably dropped me.

I hung for 10 miles with Chuck and Rugg before they dropped me at the first Battle of Bull Run.

Chuck dropped me seven times in a row on a ride at Haymarket's camp. I'd catch him, he'd look back, then jump, I'd grind it out and catch, and he'd wait for me, then jump again. I think he was trying to make me stronger, but I suppose he has a little ticker in his head that dispenses dopamine every time he drops someone. Or maybe the refrain from It's a Wonderful Lifeexplains it: every time Chuck drops someone, an angel gets its wings.

I never found it anything but inspiring. I can't think of a reason, other than jealousy, maybe, to dislike Chuck.

There are a lot of great riders in MABRA, strong guys with ridiculous power, but Chuck's the best bike racer we've had for the past few years. Winning the BAR for the last few years is just evidence of that.

That doesn't mean getting dropped by him doesn't get old; I want nothing more than to at least refuse his droppage, if not drop his old ass.

Last night was my last chance, since Chuck's done with his stint in the Army and is leaving DC.

A break of six went in the early laps. I didn't think much of it, since Chuck wasn't in it. But then he went, so after maneuvering to the front, I bridged up.

The break whittled down to four. Then just Chuck and me.

"I won't attack you," he said. "Just sit in."

I hung on for a few laps and tried to take a few pulls. Every time we hit the incline, though, he stood, and I was at my limit. And there were still ten laps to go.

We came up on the back of the B race, just Chuck and me, and I knew it was over for me when he stood. There was no one behind us as far as I could see, and I knew I had a certain second place if I could just hold his wheel on that damn climb.

But I lost the wheel, and Chuck looked back as he passed the Bs, as if to say, "What would you have done with yourself if you'd ever managed to hang on my wheel?"

In the end, you dropped us all. Yeah, it pissed us off, but it also made us stronger, and we wish you many more years of it. Thanks for being a part of MABRA, and, even more, for serving our country.

Bon voyage.

Kids: Get out there and race like drunken, rabid wildcats!

2011-06-01T19:44:00.010-04:00

This here fellow is not auditioning for the next Mel Gibson film about Jesus.

He's not any of the following:
-a flagellate of Iztapalapa, Mexico, who every year mortifies his flesh in imitation of and devotion to Christ,
-a victim of necklacing,
-a hula hooper who mistook razor wire for his hoop,
-a sufferer of the explosive and incredibly painful pustules (known as "bubos") indicative of the bubonic plauge,
-a sufferer of sever eczema (i.e., a guy with diseased or any other kind of epidemic problems with his skin); on the contrary, his skin is marvelously smooth and tough as cowhide, so to speak.

No, he's an 18-year old kid named Darion Fleming, and he's suffering from an incredibly unhealthy affliction called bike racing.

Unfortunately, Darion is gifted and has a natural ability to ride a bike, which makes it fun for him, because, if he stays upright, he tends to win races, or to help his teammates win. This leads him to joyfully enter races by the handful. And this tendency to enter races, thinking he will win, is offset by another tendency--not only of his, but of bike racing generally. That is, the tendency to fall, and have his face, body, ass, legs, arms, ass again, back of the head, loins, shins, ankles, kankles, and loins again smeared and possibly pummeled on the pavement in a totally, utterly painful and completely disrespectful way.

This sucks, because Darion is a great guy; he listens, he's smart, and he's cocky in exactly the right way. And he's totally suffering right now from listening to all the advice us cycling assholes have been giving him!

This is proof not only that those of us who encouraged him are idiots, but that there's a malicious divinity out there.

Darion couldn't have been good at a nice, safe sport like, say, bocce ball.

No, the Lord made him to excel at an incredibly dangerous and haphazardly vicious sport, racing his bike. His purpose in existence is to ride alongside a bunch of middle aged no-talent ass monkeys with nothing else to live for, homicidal maniacs whose jobs, families, health and futures are willingly hazarded for the sake of a 20$ Spinnervals DVD. To us, Darion is nothing but a large speedbump to be ridden down on the path to Spinnervals DVD glory. We will use whatever means--yes, even drugs--necessary to beat this whippersnapper with the vicious sprint.

By the way, there's sort of a vicious circle with those DVDs. Coach Troy is incredibly motivational, and following his instructions leads to incredible fitness, which leads one to be strong enough to get more Spinnervals DVDs as primes, which makes one stronger, which leads one to collect more...

Collecting the whole set? Well, I'd say doing it would let me die a happy man, but I will probably die in a bike race, ridden down by some other Coach Troy disciple, long before the apotheosis of that dream.

Still, as Socrates might well have said, what's life without direction?

I had planned a different kind of essay this week for Ol' Pap's, one about Rock Creek Velo. I had asked them some questions, and they responded with amazingly intelligent answers, without any kind of spelling errors that would let me gloat about how young kids these days are way dumber than we were, which is one of Ol' Pap's favorite topics to bitch about. So I was somewhat disappointed.

Seeing Darion in rough shape, it's hard to encourage these kids to progress in our sport. What do I say to them? Yeah, keep at it. Get your friends to do it. I could do this, buy stock in Tegaderm, and make a killing, but that's hardly...

Actually, not a bad idea.

Get out there kids! Darion, you are gifted and you will never, ever fall again! Ride your bikes! You're all going to be pros. Dive those corners! Rubbing is racing! You have a bright future ahead of you, if not in cycling, in the world of skin graft research.

C'mon, 3M (parent company of Tegaderm).

Bros before, including, but not limited to the following...

2011-05-20T08:18:00.004-04:00

"I saw (EPO) in his refrigerator...I saw him inject it more than one time. Like I did, many, many times."--Tyler Hamilton on Lance Armstrong

"Congratulations to (at)eki-ekimov on his 3rd Olympic Gold Medal!!"--Lance's response, on Twitter

The brotherhood of doping, what Landis termed cycling's mafia, has crumbled. The rules that bound it, the secrets, the values, the doctors, and the fans (the ones with any sense, that is), are now in the open. The head bro, the don, remains defiant, gathering his loyal bros around him, but nearly all the bros have capitulated or been snared: Landis, Gusev, Heras, Chechu, Andreu, Ferrari, and so on.

Unfortunately, the mechanisms that empowered the brotherhood of doping--the UCI, team directors such as Bruyneel and Riis, and national organzations like that of Spain--remain in place.

Did you watch Contador launch in the big ring on Etna? Was it possible to watch that without dismissing it as laboratory assisted?

Right now, the majority seems to be on the side of Lance--that is, they believe, in the way Mormons believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America, or that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people, or that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, MO (for further details, see vid):

Humans react in predictable ways given situations: for example, they usually choose to break rules for personal gain if the rules cannot be enforced. It's easy to form alliances with others who also break rules for personal gain; those alliances crumble when the chance for personal gain crumbles.

That's life, that's human nature, that's what I believe happened with U.S. Postal.

For me, it's much easier to believe that than to believe Lance never used drugs to boost his performance, especially given the vast testimony of witnesses, his association with Dr. Ferrari, and, not least, his unearthly performance in bike races. Possibly, that's because if you're powerless, you're more likely to believe conspiracy theories.

But I could be wrong, just as I could be wrong about Mormonism. I don't mean to pick on it, as a belief system, by the way. I only mention it because there are things in Mormonism many of us find hard to believe, just as there are things in my own beliefs that others may find equally implausible.

Power, not only political power, but the kind your powermeter measures, corrupts us. It corrupts Supreme Court Justices, and it corrupts alliances.

At some point, the bros before EPO code breaks down, and that's what's going on.

Rugg Wins Cycling's American Idol, Trip to Nature Valley

2011-05-17T14:19:00.004-04:00

Last year, Nature Valley Pro Ride was one of the few televised American bike races. I remember watching it and thinking, "How the hell did this race get on TV?" The camera work and announcing were charmingly amateurish. I don't recall helicopter shots, for example. After watching a stage or two, I got into it. The finishing climb, which took place in some Minnesota town, was especially dramatic--Rory Sutherland attacked on the last stage on the finishing climb to take the GC from Kelly Benefits' Scott Zwizanski.

This year, our very own Jefferson Cup was a qualifier for a competition which allows amateurs to race in the Nature Valley Stage Race. The website for the event describes it as "cycling's version of American Idol."

I'm not sure how it happened, but our own Tim Rugg won the competition, despite not winning Jefferson Cup. He won "Cycling's American Idol," and will be racing with others from across the country on a squad of amateurs.

You can visit the website and see a pedostached Tim Rugg and read his bio on his very own page, which runs like this:

In 2008, Tim moved to Washington, DC and got an old downtube shifting steel bike to commute to work. It was raining on his first day and he ended up crashing, destroying his bike, getting a concussion, and had to have my lip stitched up.

He didn't let that stop him though and a week later he bought a carbon fiber bike and ran into some bike racers at a coffee shop who invited him to a training ride.

He did his first bike race a month after that in swim trunks, gym socks, and a v-neck t-shirt and has been racing since.

I love the bio, because it's about the Tim we know--the goofy guy who doesn't care about anything except being really, really fast. He may not be suave, he may not be timid, but he sure as hell will tear some limbs off to get across the line first.

I'm hoping Nature Valley makes some kind of documentary about Tim and his fellow amateurs, because having spent a fair amount of time in the presence of Rugg, some seriously good stuff will occurr, I guarantee.

Good luck, Ruggman. You done made us proud.

Brown Takes Leonardtown

2011-05-15T18:46:00.009-04:00

"You should head down there and see it," the Wizard was saying, "it's a beautiful view."

The MABRA Crit championship Men's 1/2/3 race was down to its final three laps, and Chris Schmidt and I were sitting under a tree. I noticed that a bird had shat on my leg.

The Wizard, as we'd come to know Chris during his tenure on DVR two years ago, had ridden up with his dog, which he's somehow trained to run ahead of him and provide him with a draft or something. I've never seen a dog look so at ease running next to a bike. The Wiz is undoubtedly a dog whisperer or something; after the stuff I've seen him do on a bike, I wouldn't doubt it.

The bird shit sat there on my thigh and a break of three went: Mayson Haims, Ryan McKinney, and a Kelly rider. It looked promising.

The Wizard went on, "If you just go over the edge [he pointed beyond the sharp first corner] there's a big drop off and the Bay is there; it's pretty impressive."

He's grown a beard, Chris, and it's impressive.

With one to go, the gap was less than fifty yards, and Harley massed on the front, indicating they didn't trust Mayson to win, or maybe they knew they weren't content with first place.

Sure enough, Nima jumped, Brown went with him, and took it at the line. Mayson hung on for third.

With that, the Wizard lifted his leg over his bars, mounted his steed, his dog jumped to attention, and he rode off like a goddamn king.

My day had started watching the 35+ 4/5 race which turned out to be the most exciting race of the day, from my perspective at least.

Yesterday I snapped this shot of Chas moseying to the line at Poolesville, after trying a move with a couple miles to go in the 4s (if you have trouble spotting him, that's my finger pointing to his head).

"No one wanted to do anything except chase down moves," he said, frustrated. "I just wanted to ride, kill it."

Chas is not the kind of rider tempted by power data, periodization, or other such notions associated with training. In fact, he insists on calling time on a bike "riding." Training is for guys who take this bike thing seriously; guys who don't have a smoker and stay up all night roasting a suckling pig and drinking homebrew.

Chas does have a smoker, which he fills with all kinds of livestock whose carcasses he lovingly imbues with flavor.

He is from the Baltimore area, and is quite familiar with a beer from the region known as Natty Bo.

He served in the Peace Corps in Africa, but he's not the kind of guy who stinks of pachuli.

At Leonardtown, Chas decided to go from the gun. He jumped, and by the first turn, this was his gap:

He recognized that the corner would slow the race down; as a mountain biker and excellent bike handler, he approached the corners confidently:

Several laps in, a Bike Doctor rider bridged to him. The two stayed away the entire race. If this doesn't impress you, you know nothing about racing in the lower categories, where 99 riders in 100 wakes up in the morning dreaming of sitting in and finishing in a wild, crash-strewn pack finish.

Chas didn't win, but his 2nd place is his first podium in three years of racing. And he got it in the most amazing manner--staying away the entire race.

Next to the registration tables I noticed the memorial dedicated to fallen soldiers. A fresh plaque dedicated to The Global War on Terrorism was inscribed with three names. A wreath with pictures of young men from Leonardtown, fallen soldiers.

They looked like kids to me, like my teammate Darion, who'd gone down yesterday. They'd probably be about 25 years old, about the age of Tim Brown, who won so magnificently today.

I didn't get out to see the Bay, like the Wizard told me to do. I had to get back home. Leonardtown was a beautiful place, even without seeing all of it, even if the birds do drop bombs on out-of-towners.

Harley Sweeps Field at Poolesville

2011-05-14T22:07:00.007-04:00

Team Kisses and Hugs swept places 1-6 at Poolesville. They probably would have swept 1-7, except Adam Switters was so far ahead of the field that he entered a time warp-spacetime continuum thing that's way, way too complicated for ol' Uncle Paps to explain, much less understand.

The race was decided pretty much immediately. Eight riders launched from the gun. NCVC, after determining that having two riders among the eight was sufficient, joined with Harley in forming a wall of solid defenders holding speeds to a brisk walk.

Eight miles in, the gap was over a minute.

16 miles in, the gap was over two minutes.

Switters and an NCVC rider attacked, and entered the space time continuum thing I mentioned earlier. I saw them later, as I sat beside the road with a flat tire. (Lest anyone doubt whether Haymarket and Harley are separate entities, let the record show that Harley denied me a spare wheel when I flatted).

Chuck Hutcheson attacked the break, then Tim Brown attacked and bridged up. Places 1 and 2 were set. Chuck apparently hasn't won enough piddly MABRA races, and Brown is apparently gracious enough to let Chuck continue to win such races.

Behind, Nieters hung on to the three riders--one from DC Velo, one from Coppi, and one from Kelly, I believe--attempting to catch Brown and Hutcheson. I believe NCVC's Rob Sheffield was in there somewhere.

Evan Fader, who'd flatted, caught back onto the pack, and apparently put in some serious wattage. I didn't see this, mind you, since I was sitting in the back of a truck and chatting with Dave K. of Gamjams, who'd flatted and was riding "solo emo," as the DVR folks say.

What happened to Haymarket? Steven Black went down, Darion Fleming went down (poor kid) and flatted, Greg Witwer flatted, and only Bruno survived to the finish line.

The break, all except Brown and Hutcheson, collapsed and reintegrated.

In the last lap, Rugg and Keck attacked on the dirt and stayed away for third and fourth.

"What was that sprint about?" I asked Rugg, who appeared to be racing his teammate to the finish.

"Just doing intervals," replied Rugg. "We needed to get at least some Zone 4 intensity in today."

I was, to say the least, depressed at my race. I wandered into the church/staging area after stealing some coconut water, and noticed several flyers on the wall.

One announced some kind of outdoorsy Woodstock for Jesus-type event called Creation 2011:

The last thing I wanted to do after flatting out of a race was to go to a party celebration Creation.

I thought about this one, "HOW I SHOULD HAVE MET YOUR MOTHER: A LOVE STORY IN REVERSE," which seemed pretty close in meaning to a class called "WHY I SHOULD'VE LEFT THAT B**** BEFORE YOU WERE BORN." I picture a guy on a folding chair, drinking scotch, smoking a cigar, which he points with disdain in a general direction when he says, "your mother."

But then I saw this one showing a weeping LL Cool J, entitled "What is there to cry about? A look at biblical laments."

God knows where they found a picture of Ladies Love weeping. Whatever, I'm pissed and, a little boo hoo might do me some good. Sign me up for that one.

Jani Brajkovic and Building your Peak

2011-05-11T12:04:00.000-04:00

I've often wonderer what it means to peak. Training in all endurance sports builds over a period of weeks or months to a period where an athlete achieves top fitness.

Is there any real physiological reason we have to train to peak, and the peak can only last for a brief period? Why can't I just be as fit as I possibly can be, and sustain that forever?

Erik Zabel raced all year, competitive for every race from February through September, more or less. His was the routine of every cyclists in the pre-EPO era. You never heard Fignon, Hinault, Coppi, or Merckx talking about "peaking." For them, it was simply a matter of getting in shape from the off-season.

So, is the notion of peaking a result of the doping era, in which athletes adjusted their drug regimines to build and peak? The most notorious sport of dopers, bodybuilding, is also the most cyclical, with building and stripping phases, each phase with its particular drugs, foods, exercises, and rituals.

For those of us who wish to be at our best all the time, unfortunately, we can't peak forever. We're all different, to some extent, but none of us can avoid fatigue--and that's the reason we must peak. It's the reason we have to cycle, to periodize, to just do different stuff, to go harder for one week and go easy the next.

Still, we're all different and often our bodies respond unpredictable. Sometimes, what we think is our peak is actually a steppingstone. Our bodies respond to the stress of our planned peak by...attaining an even higher peak--what exercise physiologists call "supercompensation."

Every bit of conventional knowledge about periodization suggests periods of base training followed by gradual building of speed and intensity, with rest days interspersed. You'd never consider going all out for two weeks straight as a kind of training for a race that follows.

Yet that kind of all-out intensity led Jani Brajkovic to see a massive improvement in his power output, a week after doing the Dauphine last year: his 5-minute power improved by 40 Watts--a 7-10% increase.

And consider this study, cited by Friel in his blog:

In 1992 a group of seven Dutch cyclists increased their training volume from a normal 12.5 hours per week to 17.5 hours for each of two weeks. They also boosted their intense training from 24 to 63 percent of total training time during that period. At the end of two weeks there was a significant decrease in all aspects of their fitness—they were on the edge of overtraining. But after two weeks of recovery, the riders experienced a 6-percent increase in power, their time trials improved by an average of 4 percent, and they produced less acidity at top speed compared with pre-crash levels. Not bad for two weeks of hard training.

If it was just Brajkovic, I'd dismiss the results as the effects of a few bags of blood. But several other studies have confirmed that periods of hard training followed by periods of active recovery lead to serious gains.

For those of us who love to race every weekend, this is a warning. We'll never achieve our peak fitness if our plan follows a typical MABRA (Sunday race, Monday rest, Tuesday hills, Wednesday flats, Thursday intervals, Saturday race) plan.

I'm not sure how supercompensation works, and I'm not sure event the smartests exercise scientists do, so don't necessarily run out and ride hard for seven days straight hoping for a big bump in fitness. There were no control groups who rode hard for seven days and then, for example, rode hard for another seven days--maybe their fitness improvements would have been even greater. There was no control group who just simply rested for two weeks. So it's hard to draw conclusions from a possible drug-taking pro and a few Dutch cyclists.

Still, they're pretty enticing results, and planning a crash into your peak plan might be worth a try.

Fresh Breath for the Afterlife

2011-05-10T15:03:00.006-04:00

Suffer from a desire to appear as if on a bike but would rather avoid pedalling? There's an app for that.

Want to feel alive and revved up in a way that even the most glorious dinner, ride, conversation, bit of music doesn't seem to produce in your soul? There's a hellava app for that.

Long for a beautiful woman to be at your side, sweet and obedient, silent, always cleaning, always listening? There's an app for that, and yes it does come from Japan. You can break wind without fear these days, thanks to such applications.

Eat lots of kimchi--so much so that no one wants to kiss you, but you do want to give up kissing nonetheless? There's an app for that. (No, I mean, literally, there's an apple for that. Literally, Korean kiss-promoting botanists are trying to design a pocket-sized apple that enables kimchi- and lip-craving Korean folks to sanitize their mouths before locking lips.)

No clue about the shape of the Earth, your city, your block, or whatever it is that is beyond eyeshot? There's almighty Google Earth saying, "Capital Bikeshare Station this way" in a voice that never grows impatient with your spatial disability.

Can't add? Do any kind of math in your head? Remember any kind of date whatsoever? Remember the names and faces of college friends, old colleagues, the guy at the gym you one time spotted on the weight bench? There are lots of apps for that kind of stuff.

Do you ever need to remember what ingedients go in any food item ever again? Chocolate milk: (1) pour milk in glass; (2) add chocolate milk powder; (3) stir. OR, just buy chocolate milk.

How should we sort the names of those who died on 9/11 in order to place them on the memorial in a fitting way? No worries, there's an algorithm for that.

Girlfriend leave you? Teammate die instantly in tragic accident? Universe suddenly seem a clockwork of meaninglessness, paying no attention to what matters? Cancer devouring flesh?

Not to say these things can't be addressed or understood or even defeated, but there's no app for them. To those who suffer, we wish safe travel on whatever spaceships traverse these black holes.

Jeff Cup and Capital Bikeshare Race: A Gonzo Report

2011-05-09T13:17:00.006-04:00

First, let me make you aware that All Capital Bikeshare Pseudo Race is postponed to a later date when I feel less tired, you are less tired, and I can get maybe a little more interest. I don't want the pictures to show three sorry looking dudes with tennis balls and cucumbers stuffed in their shammies looking around for a reason to continue living. No, I want throngs of triumphant and vibrant folks celebrating life and a cooperative enterprise.

Now, about Jefferson Cup Road Race, 1/2/2.5/3 race...

I, along with every other person in the world, woke up in the morning with one resolution: mark Joe Dombrowski. No matter if the entire rest of the world wins ahead of us. As long as I am exactly one wheel behind Joe Dombrowski, I can die a happy man.

The race began with a series of attacks by Joe, followed by the entire population of the Earth attempting to grab his wheel.

First, Joe attacked up the climb. All 1.6 billion folks from China attempted to grab his wheel, with the Szichwan province getting dropped, but Hong Kong folks managing to hang on just long enough for the entire South American continent to just manage to stay in contact. Unfortunately, Australia was dropped when Joe countered his own attack, and put the Earth's population (excluding himself) in difficulty once again.

Whereupon the entire population of Harley counter-attacked.

I didn't see what happened up in the break, where apparently Harley riders, bored with their break, attacked each other out of sheer boredom and spite.

My teammate Andrew Troy bridged up to the break and grabbed tenth. That's the best we could do. I'm blaming our shoddy performance, as a team, on our lack of kits. It's the only legitimate reason why we did not perform more awesomely. I've gone through everything:

Bad-ass attitude? Check.
Armadillos in trousers? Check.
Mouth breathing vacant stares of doom? Check.
Pre-race warmup routine involving extended Trikke "seshes." Check
The wearing of skinny jeans that might well mimic the constrictive effects of compression socks? Check
Pre-race rocking out to the Gap Band? Check

We just don't look sexy enough to win, I'm convinced. Then again, I'm no expert on sexy; that's the purview of Sexy Tony, who managed to win a race this weekend after 42 consecutive 2nd places in races. How he manages on the catwalk is another story.

Then again, I may not be a reliable reporter of events, partly because I saw/hallucinated(?) this guy on the side of the road cheering for us:

What the hell? The US Champ shows up to cheer on some shmucky weekend warriors mixing it up in the hills of VA? No way. Must've been an imposter or a spirit vision caused by listening to too much Gap Band.

Then there were two shirtless dudes screaming like it was le Tour. Throw in a bear, a Rugg, a Rugg wrestling a bear, an Evan Fader attempting to throw me to the ground and tell me all about how great giving in to hate and joining the dark side and serving the Emporer is, yackety shmackety, a Jorge Marcanerro trying for the 100th time to bridge to the break, and a neutralized 3/4 race a blur out of the corner of my eye as I latched onto the remnants of the Chilean nation on Joe's wheel. And you've got yourself a May Jeff Cup.

I drove down to Jeff Cup with the Dutchman, who had the pleasure of grabbing 2nd at Turkey Hill, and then repeating at Jeff Cup. We went to Charlottesville's Market Street afterwards for a beer, a burger, and some gelato. Now, compare my sorry self with the triumphant Dutchman, receiving congratulations for the Burghehouse or whatever body of elected officials governs the Dutch, raising his stein of hearty beer, a confidence borne of living below sea level and wearing lots of orange.

"Could you run to the car and fetch my long-sleeved jersey?" He asked me before the podium presentation.

Ja, of course. That's my role these days. Fetcher of podium attire. Toaster of Dutch fortune and fortitude. Shill for Dutchmen and Sexy Tonys.

Enjoy your time the sun, my friends. Soon, you'll be trying to hold Dombrowski's wheel, going up against what Rugg calls "Team Hugs and Kisses," what Walter called the men in black pajamas, and seeing hallucinations of Ben King cheering you on.

Start Having Fun with Trikke/Elliptgo/Extreme Strider/and Get Rid of Your Lame Bike

2011-05-05T09:46:00.004-04:00

I've decided to give up cycling and focus on a new, awesomely exciting vehicle for my outdoorsy efforts: human-powered wheeled extra-cyclic activities!

Let me describe my conversion process:
Tuesday night I was descending from Bethesda on the Crescent Trail, one bike among many. The commuters climbed toward me, each drearily seated on asses exploding with pain, the same posture they'd assumed all day at their desks, turning over the cranks in perfectly round, unnatural strokes, backs hunched unnaturally, eyes unnaturally dull.

Suddenly a bobbing helmet appeared, a man standing, appearing to be running, cycling and struggling to sustain the world's biggest shit-eating grin--all at the same time!

He was riding an Elliptigo! The sight of him led me to do some research and discover a whole world of machinery promising way, way more fun than the bicycle and its 98% efficiency.

What are we, the IRS? We want fun, not to get from point A from point B using as little energy as possible. We're American, and that means wasteful transport!

An Elliptigo, the first awkwardly inefficient piece of equipment I examined, provides an "endorphin rush." It's a "secret weapon" for runners. The Elliptgo can make you climb "like a mountain goat" because it has 8 gears--that's seven more than your legs!

Unfortunately, the Elliptigo doesn't meet all my fitness needs.

For example, what about my arms? I need to develop these guns, but on the Elliptigo the arms don't pump back and forth, and I'm afraid I'll lose the Howitzers I've developed on the elliptical machine at the gym.

Thankfully, there's the Extreme Strider BoXer which has that wonderful-slipping-on-ice motion of the legs seen on Elliptigo, but adds to it the arm-pumping action of the mashed potato dance, for maximum calorie burnage and muscle hypertrophicationalization.

The Street Strider Canada seems to do the same thing, except in Canada:

And the scientist behind its invention:

As far as pointless inefficiency, the treadmill bike takes the cake. It's for those more focuessed on pure inefficiently rather than the fun aspect of it all:

There's also the Trikke, which I saw several years ago on the Crescent, complete with a boombox (playing the Gap Band) strapped to cockpit. The Trikke, it appears, is about fun, and managed to be extremely inefficient at the same time. The problem for me, is that it propels itself entirely with pelvic thrusting.

In any case, as the video makes clear, it beats the bicycle, hands down.

And if you want to explore a new field (and I'm not talking about, say, a substantial field such neuro-science), you might want to consider blowing all your time figuring out new ways to break your ankles on a Trikke.

Consider these radical tricks done by kids.

I like the part where he bites the wheel. You can't do that on a bike!

C'mon everybody, let's move to the next phase of human-powered wheel vehicles, and meet out on the Crescent. It's 3D hump-propulsion time.

Ephrata: Stage Four Smorgasbord Report

2011-05-03T14:03:00.013-04:00

[Road race report here. Describe self in delusional terms. Describe race in annoyingly detailed first-person manner. Provide excuses for why didn't win. Backhanded compliment to rivals. Flex.]

Now, about dinner.

After the road race several of us determined to dine at a smorgasbord, a word which implies, I gather, a sort of buffet of buffets, an almost spiritual place devoted to mass: the massing of dead animals and delectibles, of people who like to eat, and the massing of flesh upon these same folks.

I mean, fat people at the Smorgasbord have, planet-like, smaller fat people rotating around them; such are the laws of gravity and gluttony.

The place, I was told, offers a year-round membership, like a country club for maw-stuffers. You can pay a fee, and go anytime and eat as much as you want. There's also a special discount for those who have endured gastric bypass.

Corey drew our attention to a sign asking/telling "Did you know we sell a million donuts a year" without bothering with a question mark. A million donuts is a helluva accomplishment for which the American Association of Cardia Surgeons, the American Floorboard Reinforcement League, and the American Heavy Duty Elastic Wasteband Junta raises its donut and says "salud."

We entered the sanctuary, which was massive as a sports arena (I'm told it seats 1,200, and it goes without saying that it seats 1,200 large people. By that, I mean smorgasbord-going types. You could probably fit 3,000 of our great-grandparents in there.) We purchased our twenty dollar ticket to arteric constipation. We listened to our matron's detailed elaborations on the 50 bars, grills, dispensaries, and vomitoriums, and swarmed the buffets.

If a cow escaped the butcher in the back, this is what he'd see at the Shady Maple before dinners cut him down and devoured him (artist's recreation):

The video isn't anything amazing; just recognize that it took me 45 seconds of brisk walking just to make it through a small portion of the food.

Thankfully, there was an accordion player there to aid the digestion:

After our serenade, we absconded to the downstairs football-field sized gift shop, in which we discovered what might well be an Amish/Mennonite erotica section, if only we could read Amish. (Opening line, as I imagine it to be: "Ezekiel clutched her hands in his worn, strong hands, hands that could kill a goat--and light her hearts fire--with one touch.")

[TT report. Again, describe mighty effort, fate's once again cruel hand, perhaps hint at one's own mental weakness which prevented utter domination in the race of meh-truth. F those guys who were faster. Cool guy walk.]

Somewhere in the vicinity of Blue Ball and Intercourse (I do not kid) we witnessed a car collision, and I called 911 for the first time in my life. Lancaster police and ambulence crews arrived and were gracious and efficient. While I gave a witness report, my associates (to my left) stood with their arms crossed and were extremely helpful.

The crit was in beautiful Ephrata, a great place. Folks came out in numbers, many on bikes themselves. Among these gentlemen were two Trek Madones and a Giant TCR, all equiped with racks.

Others came out to sell us stuff. One cute young girl shyly asked if I'd like to purchase a pretzel and a glass of lemonade.

That's her grandmother on the right. "Entrepreneurship," she said triumphantly. "Child labor," I nearly responded, big government, anti-family DC a-hole that I am. I nearly called in the black raincoats to shut 'er down, boys.

But then, watching that little girl make pretzels with a shy smile on her face, her grandmother watching proudly, the mellifluous voice of Joe Jefferson in the background, a glimmer of sunshine pierced my cold, cold heart. "I'll take a pretzel and a glass of lemonade," I said, and the grandmother beamed at me almost like I was Bobby Lea.

It was Bobby Lea, Olympian, who won the whole thing, after all. No matter. He didn't have to race with a horse, seven fowl, 1/6th of a desert bar including an entire shoofly pie and a gallon of Turkey Hill Vanilla (softserve), a pretzel and a lemonade in his gullet.

Capital Bikeshare Bikes Tenderly Ridden and Reviewed

2011-04-27T09:56:00.006-04:00

The 20th Century was the century of competition: wars cold and deadly, nuclear and idealistic (its a war on drugs!), and pitting half the world against the other half. It was the century of TINA: there is no alternative. Nature pits all creatures against each other, and, yeah, it sucks, but the best thing to do is to just roll with it--there is no alternative.

I don't believe in this vision of nature and of humanity, but these days it's hard to find examples of cooperation working. Development in Africa has utterly failed. Social welfare doesn't seem to work well, if at all. The world is just too full of wheelsuckers.

That's why when organizations in the real world built upon cooperation thrive, it gives me hope.

I say this after having finally received my Capital Bikeshare key, and having commuted on their sturdy machines for the past week.

I'd read gushing articles in the Post and in the City Paper, but I remained skeptical about the system. After all, its emphasis on cooperation is in its very name: Capital Bikeshare. And sharing, my economics professors proclaimed, is for losers, poor people, and communists. A business concept built on sharing is bound to fail, since we humans are products of struggle, hardwired to screw each other over.

Generally, the bike is sort of tank-like: sturdy, easy to operate, heavy, and slow.

It has three gears on an internal hub. Their ratio allows easy climbing but prevents "drilling it," as we say.

I sat pleasantly spinning up 16th Street to Columbia Heights at a very, very slow pace. I estimate max speed somewhere around 15 mph; that's about where I spin out. Some of you fixed gear remnants might be able to get it up to 20.

The rack is handy for a bag of groceries or for strapping down a sedated child or drunken compadre of svelte stature, I'd imagine. I've only used it for my pack, and it seems sturdy and secure.

The pedals are flat and I estimate the crank length to be somewhere less than 165mm, which may not provide an optimal pedal stroke for some of you. Thankfully, the chainguard protects you from exposure to filth, so you can ride in your tweeds or business performance aero casual attire without sullying yourself, except in cases of sheer joy or extreme surprise, should you be prone to such undisciplined tendencies.

Then there's the seat, which is fully and easily adjustable, and built for those folks who insist on lots of padding under their asses, even if it means pressing right into the soft matter between their thighs. I have thus far had a hard time finding an appropriate height, having to compromise between losing aerodynamic positioning and losing the ability to have children.

I have not yet ridden the thing in the rain, but you'll notice the extensive fenders, and the rear wheel almost entirely shrouded in plastic, which not only prevents moisture from spraying up on you and exacerbating what has been termed "swamp ass," but also from suffering sticks and bike pumps to be inserted in your spokes.

The thing that really brings the joy is simply walking up to a bike on the street and walking away with it, then, when you're finished, throwing it in a slot and walking away. No locks, no fumbling with your keys, no wondering if you'll be missing a wheel when you get back or if someone has urinated on your seat. With Capital Bikeshare, you can be sure that someone has urinated on your seat at some point, so you don't have to wonder. I can't tell you how full of primness my cup is every time I throw the bike in a slot and walk away; people look at me like, "that dude is efficient and obviously a maven, despite smelling like urine."

Maybe the best part about the bikeshare program isn't the bike, but the app. Download it, and it will provide a map, showing you locations of available bikes, parking spots, and making you feel prim as a flower girl on wedding morn.

In fact, I do feel prim as hell, commuting on the damn thing. I don't know why; it's a dorky outfit, to be sure, and I'm your typical middle-aged white guy bent over the thing in deep aero tuck, sweating in my business performance aero casual attire. I'm not advertising my genetic dominance; I'm not winning any competitions.

I don't know if the venture will make money--my economics professors might be right about enterprises built on cooperation being doomed to fail.

But they can go to hell. When I use the bikes, I feel like I'm more part of DC than I've ever been. And that's a good thing.

PS: check out Fleet Foxes' new song about this very topic.

All-Capital Bikeshare Pseudo-Race: Date, Time, Attire

2011-04-25T13:40:00.006-04:00

Recently this publication announced the All-Capital Bikeshare Pseudo-Race.

Here's what I'm thinking, but I can change it if it doesn't suit your schedule, maybe:

Date:
Monday, May 9. I'm thinking an hour or so on a big red bike is the perfect SAYG (slow as your grandmother) recovery ride. It's the day after Jeff Cup.

Time: Approximately 6:00pm

Location: Hains Point Tennis Court parking lot

Attire: Business performance aero casual (e.g., aero helmet, bib shorts, deep V-neck T, long striped socks, brown loafers)

Let's make this fun. Please invite friends, especially those who are awkward-looking, as it will make the pictures that much more amusing.

Keep in mind also that this isn't an actual race. You won't need your USAC card. There will be free laps, but no wheel pit. There will be no purse, only the admiration of those present.

Greenbelt: Where Wings take Dream, and Boston Terriers Roam Free

2011-04-22T09:07:00.005-04:00

I spent several weeks worrying about Greenbelt this year, wondering if maybe it, like the majority of our Spring races thus far, would be cancelled. Thank goodness, Jeff Travis and the Route 1 Velo guys have once again proven their hearts of gold, balls of brass, veins of ice water, and all-round desirable anatomical molecular composition, figuratively speaking: Greenbelt is on!

I'm not sure what Greenbelt is, technically speaking, and if results from it matter, but by God it's a helluva good time on a bike.

Wait, wait.

Let me stop and do it stystemmatically, and not just gush all over the place with no respect for your intelligence, your desire for order, and your standards for sales pitches, which are probably as high as those of Giovanni Ribisi's character in Boiler Room:

You want to race, but you're not rich. At $183.75 for the entire season of roughly 16 races, you pay $11.48 per race.

You love riding on paths, and there's a nice path from DC to Greenbelt (not the one shown below, the C&O, but still, a nice path).

Gas prices are high, and you are cheap. Also you care about reducing your carbon footbprint, especially when it is convenient for you.

You can get out of work a little early.

There are things worth seeing in DC not in NW.

You won't find a better venue for learning how to attack, how to hang on, and how to handle your bike.

Know your enemy. Week after week, you'll get to know your opponents, possibly grow to like some, hate others.

You also get to ride in the middle of a park. By park, I mean the opposite of an office park.

There are free bagels with Nutella.

Larue's wonderful friend, Alex, her dog Charlie, and several associates, will be there sitting on a blanket and probably drinking wine. They will cheer for you ( although if it comes down to it, they're going to want Larue to win more than you).

You'll get to watch the C race, which always includes amusing characters and the occassional crack fiend.

It is a race, but it isn't. This means if you win, you win a race, but if you don't win, you don't lose, because it isn't really a race. That's what you can tell Alex and Charlie, in any case.

I know a guy whose goal this season is to peak for Greenbelt. That means he plans on peaking every Wednesday. His training regimine looks like this:

Friday-Saturday: base, long miles, weight training
Sunday-Monday: build, increasing intensity
Tuesday: taper
Wednesday: race
Thursday: off season cross training

I'm exaggerating, but only a little.

Party on bike! Right price! Scenic SE! Save Earth! Gassy Boston Terrier! Greenbelt! Come, enjoy.

The Artistic Roots of Deviancy

2011-04-21T10:57:00.001-04:00

On a masters racer, no less.

Deviants and the Limits of Pack-agery on a Bike

2011-04-20T12:52:00.014-04:00

How is it that a bad apple ruins a whole bunch? And why isn't it the case that a good apple un-spoils a bunch of rotten ones?

An answer to this question is not just in the interest of grocers, but also those of us interested in jettisoning asshole friends, and becoming better people.

Friends of Charlie Sheen, take note.

To start with a positive note, I think association doesn't just bring us down, as the apple adage seems to suggest. For example, riding with guys like Brigham Lumm, Brian Butts, Brownie and Sexy Tony (as I did last night) makes me believe that a few good apples can un-spoil a rotten one like me (at least when it comes to my FTP).

Social imitation--here are some examples of its power:

-children's performance in schools is more like the success of their peers than the performance of their parents (source)
-America becoming fatter because the rest of us became fat (source)
-the recent spread of unfortunate facial hair choice through the peleton.

Let's look at this last example as an illustration of how it works.

Steve Cozza introduces the pedo stache to the pro peleton in April of 2010:

Rugg introduces the look to MABRA elites in July 2010:

This year, Masters racers have finally begun sporting the look, albeit in ironic fashion and in posed foppery:

How does the spreading of "memes" such as this work? The effect, as Dawkins noted when he introduced the term, is analogous to infectious disease.

First, a deviant, a person of unusual disposition, introduces the meme. The deviant is weird, but like Austin or Portland--in a way that is not too frightening, and possibly worth cultivating. Others imitate the deviant. Then deviant behavior becomes the norm.

That is, four steps from Rugg to Uncle Pappy, or from Portland to Atlanta.

The following illustrates the effect of deviants upon society:

Stage 1: Introduction
The deviant, seen here in the upper right-hand corner, introduces deviant behavior (pedostachery):

Stage 2: Adaptation.
Others adopt deviant behavior.

Stage 3: Ubiquity
Deviant behavior becomes the norm.

Stage 4: Anti-deviancy
At this point even masters racers adopt a certain behavior, and a new stage of deviancy begins--one where cleanshavedness is the new pedostachery.

Of course, there are some forms of deviancy that go too far. Society either ignores or shuns these super-deviants. For deviant, think Robert Downey. For super-deviant, think Gary Bussey.

MABRA has its own super-deviants. Consider this fellow, snapped and examined by Larue:

Imagine the moral decay that would be MABRA if we followed the example of this deviant:
(1) a tendency to swill what might well be yak milk from a bottle;
(2) absolute fearlessness about assuming balls-to-bar straddle while tossing back a cold one pose;
(3) red white and blue rack, yellow tires with black sidewalls, Powertap combo;
(4) cockpit laptop mount;
(5) ski goggles with balaclava with bright yellow helmet condom;and
(6) to paraphrase Jay-Z, backpack, saddlepack, barpack, everything all-pack;

As strange as this guy seems to us, I wonder if this is how we look to the average American: douches on bikes, not properly fat enough, not properly wasteful enough.

In other words, we're all deviants to them.

Carl Dolan Pics and Vids

2011-04-17T19:12:00.006-04:00

The weekend began at Chantilly, wet, cold and windy, with Nima taking the Masters' race and Evan Fader taking the 1/2/3. Coppi's offensive lineman took the 4s, and the tornado took the 3s.

Not sure what happened in the women's races, since I couldn't see through the downpour, but I offer here what might well be the finish of what might well be women in what might well be Chantilly:

The hardmen of the day? Evolution's volunteers and the motorefs. Thanks, badasses.

On to Dolan.

John of DVR after he took a prime:

3/4 finish:

Awful audio interview with Jose Nunez, 3/4 winner:

Interview with Darion Fleming, 3/4 runner-up:

Rugg making sweet love to a bear in the 1/2/3 race:

The chain would lead me to believe this is Faux-zzato, something like 5th place in the 1/2/3:

1/2/3 finish, Fader victorious:

What are we Thinking? Ramblings on Authenticity in Cycling

2011-04-15T08:46:00.006-04:00

If you ask me what I am thinking right now, I am thinking "What am I thinking right now?"

Because that's what you asked me.

What you were really asking was, "What were you thinking before I asked you what you were thinking?"

Normally when someone asks me "What am I thinking right now?" I don't say all this (what I've just described) because it's too complicated, and I would be being a douche, big time.

I just make something up and say, "[X] is what I'm thinking about..." reasoning that, if I'm saying X, X must be what I'm thinking right now. Right?

The point here is that sometimes, you leap before you look. Actions precede, and sometimes determine, thought.

I think of the words of E.M. Forster: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say it?" And of Joan Dideon's words: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."

Racing a bike is something like writing--you don't know your form until you test yourself in a race. The limits of my own strength or weakness come to me in racing in packs, surrounded by my allies and enemies, rather than alone against the clock. It's like 100 people writing one story.

The hard side of this is that the only place the poetry of the complete race remains is in the memories of those there, those who wrote it. Races are not like words, which last as long as litaracy and bytes. Races vanish as memory fades.

Races also change in the memory. Was your first race of Spring as easy as you remember racing to be? Mine was not; in my head, it was written down as less painful.

In Italy, the police are searching the hotel room of previously busted Michele Scarponi, looking for dope, and searching Katyusha's hotel rooms. Thomas Frei, suspended for EPO micro-dosing in 2010, anticipates his return to the sport, as does twice-busted Ricco.

And, of course, here in MABRA we discover that one of our own, a mentor, has been cheating, using chemicals not his own.

When we ride in groups, when we race, we trust that the story of the race, the words of it, are ours. The knee pain I feel, your attack on lap three, my wheezing trying to hold Rugg's wheel, your pitiful attempt to outsprint D.J. Brew--they're ours. They come from us, and I can be sure of that, from all of us. And I know my words are mine, and I trust your words are yours. Not those of a drug-induced cheat.

I take our words, what we write together when we ride together, to be true. The deflating effect drugs and cheating is that it makes the memory of those races false. It's not the results; it's the memories of the events and the coherence of the present.

That's what I'm thinking right now.

For me, bike racing tells me who I am, to some extent, and this requires authenticity and doesn't have much to do with winning and money.

This is why I say, to those who steal this authenticity from me, in the authentic words of Bob Roll, "feel free to FOAD*."

*fuck off and die

Capital Bike Share Pseudo-Circuit Race: 2011

2011-04-12T14:24:00.005-04:00

As cyclists in the greater DC area, we're lucky. We're members of great teams that put on great races and support the sport in countless ways, we have access to great local bike shops, and we live in a great city that supports bike infrastructure and that recently brought us a bike-sharing system. Every time I sit down with a view of the streets, I start counting the dorks on bike red Capital Bike Share beasts, and I'm happy. This is becoming a city of people, mostly looking dorky, on big, heavy, sturdy, well-maintained and easily accessed bikes.

As a kind of celebration of this program, I thought maybe those of us in the racing community could do something to not only give back a little to the Capital Bike Share folks, but have a little fun on the CBS beasts.

Ladies (are there any out there?) and gentlemen, I give you the 2011 Capital Bike Share Big Red Beast Hains Point Pseudo-Race.

I'm not sure how this will play out, but I can picture it in my head:

50+ cyclists in full skinsuits OR some combination of bibshorts/shirtlessness and/or aero helmet-ness. Casual clothes not allowed! Everyone on Capital Bike Share big red beasts.

At Hains.

Thursday night.

Mass peleton spinning out at 180rpms. Attacks. Sprinting. Maybe a prize or two.

I'm thinking early May.

If successful, maybe a hill stage in Rock Creek.

Thoughts?

Go Green with Pete Cannell!

2011-04-11T09:12:00.007-04:00

As we all now know, Pete Cannell tested positive for steroid use, and has admitted to using PEDs for several years now. He's the latest of quite a few cheating masters racers recently caught and sanctioned by USAC.

Cannell's coaching site is now down, as is his twitter account, but the folks at Greens +are using the ol' "stay calm and carry on" approach, and sticking with Pete as their spokesperson:

Just why is Greens+ sticking with "Master Cyclist" Cannell?

I can think of several reasons.

The folks at Greens+ may, as of yet, be unaware of the scandal. They may be a very small company, incapable of rapid website alteration and design (i.e., removing traces of Cannell from their pages).

Or, and this is my favorite possibility--they may have planned the whole thing!

And by this, I mean the ad wizards at Greens+ may be suggesting that the "+" in "Greens+" is indeed masteron, a derivitive of DHT, a drug that strips fat, hardens muscles, and apparently propels its users to national championships.

Note the quote from Cannell on the Greens+ website: "I coach a number of athletes that depend on having the best nutrition and recovery and Greens Plus products are the foundation for that recovery."

What exactly is the "...and recovery" thing Cannell's talking about?

I think it's pretty clear, now that the news has broken, what it is.

Masteron, baby!

And here I was just adding barley- and wheat-grass powder to my smoothies! I could have been drinking (or injecting?) them + masterol, a drug which would have made me fast (and, as a positive side effect, fought off any latent breast cancer I might be developing). And maybe the 15 hours a week I've devoted to this sport would actually mean something beyond the metaphysical explorations and self-discipline and all that feel-good mumbo jumbo Uncle Pappy's is always preaching, and I'd win some shit! Hell yeah! I'd make old dudes hurt!

I can just imagine it--three or four people would recognize my name as "the middle aged white guy that one time who won the Masters race at Dawg Days with a pretty cool solo effort."

Oh, 'twere true, I could die a happy (and breast cancer-free man)!

Maybe with aid of Greens+ (and going heavy on the +) my brother and I could have hung with Cannell back in 2009 when we he rode us all off his wheel at Clarendon Cup.

Maybe we wouldn't have wasted our time reading Cannell's training advice on 1 x 60 intervals. What a shame, to have wasted all that time not injecting ourselves full of Greens+! I mean, if it worked for Pete, it works for the Guinness World Record holding "Longest Living Quadriplegic " Lani Deauville, it would probably work for a couple of nondescript middle-aged genetically bland cyclists like my brother and I.

Go green! Go increased muscle hardness and national championships! Go Masters Racers who cheat and ruin the sport! Support the fight against breast cancer by giving breast cancer drugs a whirl!

Go middle age 'roid rage! Yaaaaaaa

Anything but cycling

2011-04-08T09:09:00.006-04:00

"Anything but cycling," my girlfriend says as she sits down in front of the TV with me. I'm watching Tour of the Basque Country. "Look," she says, "they're on bikes. Again, on bikes. And again." I hand her the remote and she doesn't change the channel, just so she can keep on saying, "And again. [pause] And again."

At least in NASCAR, things explode when they crash.

On the coffee table is David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King, a book about the virtue of boredom. Its characters work for the IRS, and their task is to sort forms--the ones you and I and our accountants are busy filling out right now.

Imagine if you did taxes all day, every day. Yep. If ever there was a subject not fit for fiction, taxes are it, but Wallace gave it a whirl in The Pale King.

The novel opens with Frank Bidart's line: "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed." The discipline of form-filling, of forcing the mind to plod on amid absolutely tedious tasks, eventually brings freedom.

Wrote Wallace: "Bliss--a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious--lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white in to color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."

Unfortunately, Wallace himself did not escape the wash of boredom and ride it out to achieve bliss of a permanent kind; he hung himself on his porch before he'd finished writing his novel.

I'd like to tell my ladyfriend about all this (leaving out the suicide part, of course), about how watching cycling, if she does enough of it, will eventually lead to a kind "instant bliss in every atom," but I'm afraid I don't believe it myself.

Also floating around in my head is a recent study on kids with Tourette's, in which kids with Tourette's showed better motor and cognitive control than the rest of us. In fact, the more severe the Tourette's, the more motor and cognitive control the kid had developed. The struggle to exert control, it seems, develops control.

Of course, you still have Tourette's. You compensate: if you're blind and you struggle to see, your hearing may improve, but you won't ever be able to see.

For some, riding is a discipline; our bikes are the forms we fill--we "change them and are changed." Riding shapes our bodies and minds into something different--we hope better. And what was once boring, guys on bikes, becomes meaningful again and again and again.

Where Do Americans Get Their Calories? (Infographic)

2011-04-06T08:15:00.002-04:00

Interesting graphic on how our diet has changed in 40 years. The real difference is simply added fats and sugars. I quote from Grist:

"If the food processing industry simply cut added sugars and fats by half in calorie terms—from 1,100 calories to 550—total caloric availability would return to 1970 levels: an era that preceded the recent surge in diet-related maladies like obesity and Type 2 diabetes."

Where Do Americans Get Their Calories? (Infographic)

Bill Bryson in his wonderful book, At Home, describes the beginnings of our sugary affections:

"Sweet tea became a [British] national indulgence. By 1770, per capita consumption of sugar was running at 20 pounds a head, and most of that, it seems, was spooned into tea. (That sounds like quite a lot until you realize that Britons today eat 80 pounds of sugar per person annually, while Americans pack away a decidedly robust 126 pounds of sugar per head.)"

How to deal with this? Well, on the one hand we could simply eat less sugar. Or, on the other hand we could burn off 1,755 calories per every pound of sugar we consume. That is, burn off 221,130 calories per year, just to offset the sugar we consumed.

Since 1970 when we weren't exactly stingy with our sugar intake, we've added an additional 30,660 calories to our diet from added sugars.

Last night I rode 50 miles, probably around 1,300 calories or so.

To offset the increased 30,660 calories, I'd have to ride 1179 miles (or 23 50-mile rides).

Now let's look at how many miles I'll have to ride to offset the additional calories from added fat. Since 1970, we take in an additional 149 calories a day from added fat. This adds up to 54,385 calories a year (more than we took in in 1970).

To burn off these calories, I'd have to do an additional 41 50-mile rides (for a total of 2091 miles).

In sum, just to offset the additional calories and fats we've put into our diets since 1970, I'd have to go on 64 50-mile rides this year.

Of course, if we're pumping Gu or sports drinks in our systems while we're out there, it kind of negates the whole thing. We'd have to do the rides on water alone.

Cheese Pizzas and Beer, Super Dave, and der Panzerwagon

2011-03-31T11:53:00.007-04:00

Two weeks after I bought my first road bike, I went up to Connecticut and rode a century with my brother in probably the most perfect cycling weather I've ever experienced. We finished off the day with a couple of New Haven Modern pizzas (just cheese and tomato sauce, please) and a pitcher or two, a celebration of gluten fare.
Cycling, I discovered, was like Viagra for the appetite--I'd never before looked at living things and thought, "ethics shmethics, I want you in my belly," but that's what cycling did to me, especially after the 80-mile mark. While I rode I thought about things to deep-fry, things to dip in batter, things to cover with cream, things to blend, things to kill, grill, and eat no-frills. To be a cyclist is to keep dry kindling on the fires of metabolism, to ache, to crave.

And maybe the soul is not separate from this ferocity. Riding pulls our minds from the world of glowing communicators and into moving air, moving through real space, us choosing and making the panorama to change, not, as on a screen, the panorama changing while we munch Cheetos and mouth-breathe. This gives us time to think, and maybe to distill our longings to their essences.

To distill our thoughts is to make them less vaporous, more solid. When we ride, we know ourselves, or, at least, we know ourselves more than if we'd spent the same amount of time watching, say, Three and a Half Men.

That first year I rode, I didn't have a TV. I rode the paths of DC and I swam (and hated it). I went to Hains and did the Thursday night pack ride, and I wore a sleeveless jersey, and I remember riding the wheel of a tall, smooth Artemis cyclist of an entirely different category. I was told his name was Dave Osbourne, but I was smart enough to figure out on my own that he was pretty much who the Lord God Above had in mind when he sent us the bicycle.
I watched Dave take a drink from his bottle and pop the top shut on his thigh, smooth as can be, cadence unchanged, and I saw the effect of years of elegant burning on Dave's body and in his ease. It was like that of a bodybuilder, in that his were the kind of sinews only seen at the end of decades of constant conflagration, but unlike a bodybuilder's encased meat flesh, Dave's frame was not the end result, just what you were left with.

When I went to the Tour of California and watched the pros, I saw more of this. Guys with bodies like ashes but still burning. I saw Tony Martin, just a 24-year old kid, already a waif, every vein and rib sticking through his skin. They keep talking about him like he's a tank, the Panzer, but in real life he's a dry leaf. You want to help him to his bike. Of course, no one wants to be frail as ash. It's nice being able to carry your own luggage.

But the fire...that's the shit, isn't it?

Reinheitsgebot, Ego Depletion and Cycling

2011-03-30T08:47:00.005-04:00

Last night after a ride in Rock Creek, I come in, still in my kit, grab a Penn Weizen, a little German brew made according to the standards of Reinheitsgebot from the beer of the month package the Hulk blessed me with and I'm carrying a plate of tacos--tacos with anchos, queso fresco, pico de gallo I'd chopped myself, damnit--all ready to devour, and my thumb slips on the guacamole and spills the tacos all over the floor.

Even worse, Oprah's interview with Octamom is on the TV.

Uncle Pappy can be a grumpy man. But strangely, despite it all, he was not that bothered.

I attribute my unusually chipper mood to having gotten in about 3 hours of serious exercise. That and the fact that I hadn't spilled the beer also.

Why is it that exercise often makes us feel better, helps us endure the little stuff? And what is it that puts us in funks?

There's a theory that says we get in funks because we are subject to "ego depletion." I'll let Jonah Lehrer explain it:

"...the basic idea behind ego depletion is that self-control and willpower are limited cognitive resources. As a result, when we overexert ourselves in one domain – say, when we’re on a strict diet, or focused on a difficult task for hours at work – we have fewer resources left over to exert self-control in other domains. This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we’re more likely to indulge in a pint of ice cream, or eat one too many slices of pizza. A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need."

Does cycling deplete or fill up your mental gas tank?

For me, and I don't think I'm alone in this, riding a bike fills up my tank. But maybe that's because cycling is what I want to do most of the time, but especially in Spring when the weather's nice and the trees are in bloom, and the freds are ripe for the slaying.

Race Report: Walton Harley Park XO Criticommunications

2011-03-28T14:04:00.005-04:00

The setting for Charlottesville Racing Club's Walton Park Criterium was Mineral, VA, an old mining town, or that's how it felt to me, since I felt like I was riding through a tunnel and the black lung was bringing me down.

I was dropped after about 10-15 laps in the 1/2/3, so you'll forgive my inability to not be a whiny tart.

I'd ridden down with Larue, Ringer, Alex, and Alex's Boston terrier, a quiet little wonderdog with a belly full of gas and no qualms about letting 'er rip. Germans in no mans land at least had masks.

A course that had seemed on Google Earth to be flat turned out to have a few significant bumps.

The 5s shattered almost instantly.

The 4 race kicked off, and I watched Darion Fleming kick off the front and stay off the front. The pack behind him thinned. Monika, who'd been second in the women's race, dropped off the pace, so I knew it was hard. Read a good report here

The 1/2/3 started blazing fast. Thankfully, I clipped in well and passed several people. I'd heard Harley discussing strategy before the race, and the phrase "attack from the gun." When I'd told him to take it easy on us, Keck Baker gave me an aw, shucks, "you haven't seen me in crits," response.

Keck and Switters attacked hard, eventually forming a break of three with Kelly's Jacob Tremblay. I'm not sure how this went down. Three laps in, I was about tenth wheel, in good position, but I'm not sure on the details up ahead, since my brain was going "NNNNNNGNGNNGNGNNG!"

I closed a gap, then another, then a Whole Foods rider went down ahead of me. Chuck Hutch let a huge gap open in front of him around the bottom corner, and chasing back put me over the edge. I could see the leading break already hitting the next corner into the uphill climb.

Jeremy Edwards hung on, but the rest of us Haymarket fellows blew out the back more purposefully than a Save the Children "text POOP to 20222" fundraiser to treat children with diarrhea. (Actually, you should text a little POOP their way--it's a serious illness and Save the Children is a good organization). There were about 15 out of 50 starters left in the end.

Once I was nicely spectating, I saw the three circling: Keck, Switters and Tremblay. First Keck attacked. Switters sat on as Tremblay tried to bring him back. Then Switters attacked. Tremblay dropped.

Then Harley's Mayson tried to bridge up to Tremblay. Jesus. Have you no decency, Harley? We know you build the loudest damn motorbikes in the world, but do you have to attack, en masse, like that?

And then here comes Joe D., towing several boys, as always. He puts in some serious pulls, and then I'm gone, off warming up for the 30+.

Imagine our joy when five Harley guys line up for this race. The pace was more manageable, however, and nothing got away too early. Then a break did get away, with Sean Barrie of Harley in it. Pete Warner of Bike Doctor, Grayson Church of DVR, and Kimani of Coppi put in some serious attempts to get to it, form a chase group, close the distance, but the only thing that happened was another Harley pocket escaped, this one containing Jared. The guy who owns the shop that sponsors my team.

A Whole Foods guy in gleaming white, a guy who'd been at the back the whole race, goes flying past in the finishing stretch and apparently stole Jarod's spot at the line.

I take my hat off to Harley, but I damn them at the same time. The guys were dominant, and right now we don't have an answer.

Also hats off to CRC, which put on a great race with wonderful atmosphere, and in a great little village that will go down in my memory as a bad, bad place.

Jeff Cup delay: Kraken puts off release for another year

2011-03-25T13:20:00.008-04:00

This just in: the kraken, due to be released this Sunday, will remain un-released until May 8. Thankfully, the Holiday Inn has been incredibly nice about room cancellations schedule around the original kraken release event.

In plainspeak, officials cancelled the race known as Jefferson Cup.

Now what?

Well, upon news of the cancellation, I let out a celebratory little girl squeal, and began immediately making preparations for a Sunday morning in bed with piping heigh-di-heigh-di-ho tea and scrumpets with fresh poppin sauce, watching Davy & Goliath and wearing pink bloomers. That is how Great Uncle Pappy spends a snowy Sunday morn.

Brother Timmy "T-Bone" Rugg's reaction was quite different. He sent forth a missive stating his plan to gather 124 bicycles, to tie them twain 'twixt to his seatmast, and to ride the entire Jefferson Cup race, all 80 miles, dragging the 124 bicycles, as a kind of protest against the effeminate cancellation of what he had thought was a race honoring the third president, Thomas Jefferson (father of Richard Jefferson, NBA Star).

Rugg was taught as a child what all schoolboys learn of Jefferson, that he was the president with the third brassiest balls of any president, and the cancellation of a race ostensibly honoring our third brassiest balled president irks Rugg. In Rugg's view, Jeff Cup's promoters have made their race more fit to honor Chester A. Arthur, the president known for having over 90 pairs of pants, and also believed to be almost entirely lacking balls, and those he had were "as brass-like as melted butter," in the words of James A. Garfield (another pussy president, as a fat cat comic character was named after him).

To Rugg's wild gonadally and metallurgically driven charges race officials responded that in cancelling the race they were instead thinking of William Henry Harrison, the president who insisted on giving his inaugural address without a jacket in freezing rain, and who then caught a cold and died, leaving the presidency to John Tyler.

Thankfully, Rugg was dissuaded from his bicycle-dragging protest.

Instead, he'll be at the 7am and 10am and 1pm and 3pm and 8pm and 12pm tomorrow (aka, the Dirty Sextuple). And if you've never done afternoon rides, that's because those rides are local animal migrations.

I added the Walton Park Crit tomorrow, and I'm hoping I'll honor the third-brassiest balled president with a ballsy ride. Or, at least, one that lets me sleep in on Sunday and, for one last time this year, watch the snow fall.

Thinking fast--how cycling makes you more alert and more savage

2011-03-24T08:28:00.006-04:00

Do athletes think more rapidly than non-athletes?

A recent study (profiled in today's NY Times) tried to argue that athletes do think more rapidly.

Here's how the Times describes the experiment that sets up this conclusion:

"...a manual treadmill was situated amid three 10-foot-square video screens. One screen stood in front of the treadmill, with the others at either side. Donning goggles that gave the video images on the screens depth and verisimilitude, the students were soon immersed in a busy virtual cityscape.

When the immersive video began, the students found themselves plopped into an alley between buildings. From there, they were instructed to walk toward a busy street and, once they’d arrived, gauge oncoming traffic. The virtual cars whizzed by in both directions at daunting speeds, between 40 and 55 miles per hour.

When it felt safe, the students were to cross the road. They were told to walk, not run, but had a limit of 30 seconds from the time they left the alley. In some attempts, they had no distractions. In others, they listened to music through headphones or, emulating a common campus practice, chatted on a cellphone with a friend. Each volunteer attempted 96 crossings."

Results? Varsity athletes from the University of Illinois were much better than other, otherwise healthy undergrads. Athletes didn't walk any faster than their non-varsity peers; they simply looked more carefully and more often, and processed data more quickly than non-varsity students.

In other words, athletes thought faster.

It isn't clear whether playing sports develops mental quickness, or that the mentally quick become athletes. Also unclear is which sports performed best at navigating busy streets; researchers don't say, for example, whether runners are any good--after all, running in circles around a track hardly requires split-second timing and watchfullness.

This made me think about cycling and whether we'd be good at this. There's no question, racing a bike is among the most profoundly demanding sports when it comes to judging speed and distance. In a criterium or even in DC's streets, we have to think incredibly quickly. Our ability to perform this very rapid analysis has massive consequences--when we misjudge an object in our sport, we are run over, whereas a goalie merely allows a goal, or a batter strikes out.

It would be interesting to do a similar study on body language--whether athletes are better than average folks at judging fatigue, aggression, and so forth. Good riders can predict attacks; I've seen Chuck Hutch do this many times. Good riders can also judge when the peleton won't chase if they attack. They develop a kind of insight into the dynamics of mob movement, like the flight of pigeons or a herd of deer. These are guys who might not know anything about Nash equilibrium, but they know when a break should go and when it will stick and when the time is right.

I'm not going to suggest these skills on a bike have any bearing on things useful in life off the bike. I'm merely curious about how some people become (or maybe they're born that way) amazingly good at making very complex calculations.

This kind of instinctual calculation is something those outside the peleton can't comprehend. It's something like the instinct of wolves or lions hunting in packs. It's not something we use anywhere else, I don't think. And yet, we've got it--some of us more than others--deep in our animal brain somewhere, and to feel the dormant part of you kind of wake up in the middle of a race, that's pretty cool.

"I Miss Him in the Bedroom:" Cavendish on Renshaw

2011-03-22T15:28:00.003-04:00

Black Hills Report

2011-03-21T07:50:00.007-04:00

All photos by Jim Wilson.

If the purpose of the first race of the year is to absolutely smack you in the brain with reality, then Black Hills achieved its purpose for me. I think I'm not alone in having received this bit of an ass-whooping. (And yes, my brain and ass are pretty much the same thing sometimes.)

Reality, in this case, being that bike racing isn't easy. I can't just float off the front with a national time trial champion just yet and expect to hold my own. Most of us, unless we are a certain Kenda pro, Joe Dombrowski, or Josh Frick, can't expect to win on strength alone.

Essentially, this is crushing and humiliating. To me, it's especially a bummer after my first off-season of reasonably dedicated training. It's also kind of gratifying, though, isn't it? Because bike racing is supposed to be hard as hell, a sport fit for the few at the edge, assassins born of freak chemical accidents and genetic mutations. We didn't go to Black Hills to don tweed and promenade.

Masters' Race
The hill proved harder than we thought it would be. It proved harder than I thought it would be, even after I'd ridden it backwards.

Anyhow, I decided to attack two laps in. Right on my wheel was some DC Velo guy with a nice 'fro. We really killed it for a lap. I was on the edge. What for me had started as a nonchalant move had become a manic attack. I thought, "nice, get out of sight, then ease up." I'd never ridden with DC Velo before, and I'm trading pulls. The second lap off, I take a pull on the downhill, and when he swings around me on the climb, I realize I may not be able to hold his wheel. I also realize we're only four laps in. He's gone, and I'm drifting back to the peleton.

I tried a few attacks later, but I was toast. DC Velo did a nice job of controlling the rest of the race.

I later learned that the Afroed gentleman was Josh Frick. I will remember that.

Cat 3/4
Minutes after the finish of the 35+ I'm lying on the grass, and I wonder if Jose Nunez missed the start and is trying to catch on, or he's really that far off the front on the first lap.

And is he really climbing that fast?

Unfortunately, the pace of the peleton picked up, and after a while, the gap closed.

I was glad to see my old teammate Sexy Tony bridge to a small group and take second in the end. It was a powerful move, and I was glad to see him rewarded for it.

Also glad to see Jose taking the crit yesterday down in Richmond.

1/2/3

Here there was plenty of intimidation: two pros, several NRC caliber riders (including Mr. Frick, again), and the memory of my struggles in the first race. I decided to sit in and hang.

I did not see the Kenda rider, Phil, go. I didn't see him take Evan Fader with him. I heard that the two built a large gap, then Phil built an even larger gap. Apparently, he almost lapped us. Fantastic.

I did see Joe Dombrowski go with two NCVC riders, Paul Mica and Rob Sheffield. Hats off to Paul and Rob for sticking with a world-class rider.

My teammate, Brian Sacawa, joined a chase group which stayed away. Brian managed sixth, an impressive result.

After the masses of departing riders off the front, teammates settled in at the front, and the pace was tranquilo, actually much more manageable than the Masters' race.

I sat in on one DC Velo move toward the end, Win Elliot, I think. Tom Blonkowski of NCVC was also in the move, along with DJ Brew. I apologize, fellas--I was absolutely worthless.

Sum
I didn't see a single crash, the weather was beautiful, the organization was perfect, and I got to see a lot of old friends--what more could I ask for? Thanks, Bike Doctor, for putting on a great race.

(My thanks in particular to Pete Warner, who spent the whole day road guarding and personally escorted my vehicle to its parking spot. Next time, Pete, ya gotta get some Cat 5 dude to do the job during the race.)

Leadout Men

2011-03-17T10:23:00.003-04:00

On April 27, 1986 the reactor in Chernobyl was in the midst of a meltdown and was about to release a massive steam explosion that would have tossed 20,000 metric tons of radioactive steam into the atmosphere. To prevent this, sluice gates needed to be opened, but they were submerged in lethally radioactive coolant water. Engineers Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov, along with Boris Baranov whose job was to hold a submergable light, entered the water in diving suits and succeeded in opening the sluices and preventing the explosion. The three suffered from severe radiation poisoning and two later died. Their heroism saved thousands of lives.

In Fukushima, Japan, 50 workers are engaged in a similar kind of heroism.

The few sacrifice for the many.

This makes me think about a problem philosophers like to discuss: the trolley problem. Consider two scenarios:

Scenario 1: A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?

Scenario 2: As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

In scenario 1, most people would flip the switch and save five lives, kill one person. In scenario 2, most people would not push the fat man onto the track to save the five people.

This is weird. I mean, the difference between pushing a switch and pushing a fat man over a bridge is just a mechanical difference, not a moral difference. The math is the same: kill 1, save 5.

Yet, most people feel the two scenarios are different, and require different moral choices.

Consider a third scenario, in which YOU ARE the fat man, and you face the choice of jumping onto the tracks and saving the five in the trolley.

No one would hold it against you if you didn't sacrifice your chubby self, but jumping onto the tracks would be a higher moral good--true heroism--than watching the trolley crash and burn.

Life is full of the kinds of moral ambiguities in scenario 1 and 2. It can be frustrating, sorting through these kinds of moral dilemmas.

Occassionally we are presented with the chance to throw ourselves in front of the trolley and save the lives of others, so to speak: staying up with our sick child, serving the homeless and the poor, paying attention to people no one usually hears.

America has had generations of such people--leadout men faced with the choice of self-sacrifice, they gave to each other and the nation. It was a clear moral choice, and they choice heroism. They are mostly dead. Many died young and many in great pain.

But what do we become when the moral choices we face don't require sacrifice--when the questions we face are of the kind presented in Scenario 1 and 2?

Do we manufacture such crises and claim they are about self sacrifice when they are actually simply about greed and fear, or maybe laziness and cowardice?

Do we come to believe fraud, legal or not, is the obligation of every corporation and enshrine the virtue of selfishness?

I'm not sure, but I am sure that these men in Japan are doing something morally better than the rest of us will ever do. This obliges us to acknowledge their sacrifice, to recognize their work for us, to say after the race, "I couldn't have done it without these badass leadout men."

More on panache, with special guest Cadel Evans

2011-03-14T12:19:00.008-04:00

My last post was about panache, and I maybe went a little overboard in saying today's peleton lacks panache.

Tennis had McEnroe.

We have Cadel Evans.

Cyclists cannot talk to spectators; unlike John McEnroe, they can't even complain. But they can make up for this barrier of silence, as all great athletes do, with the most visceral language around: the language of the body.

Who doesn't remember Jordan's exact posture when he hit the shot against Cleveland, his shrug after sinking countless three pointers against Portland, being hugged by Pippen after his miraculous rise-from-the-sickbed perforamnce against Utah? Just try scoring a touchdown and NOT celebrating without thinking of Barry Sanders.

Nobody could not celebrate like Barry could. He do backflips through all 25 defensivement and a few of his own teammates (it was the Lions), and you'd be jumping up and down and high fiving your mom, and you'd be waiting for him to cap it off with a spike, or a dunk over the goalpost, and he'd just stop, flip the ball to the ref, and head to the sidelines. One time he bent down, and you thought he was going to do the end zone prayer, but he was just tying his shoe.

That was Barry, and that was panache.

Thank goodness we in cycling have Cadel Evans, who, in the great tradition of Barry Sanders, chooses to express his particular strain of panache by sort of not celebrating, although he's not as good at not celebrating as Barry was.

We get a kiss kind of half-heartedly blown, one that doesn't require the extension of the kiss blowing hand; sort of a kiss wipe.

Yesterday's stage win in Tirreno-Adriatico gave us what Sam has called a hit off "the bong of victory"; this he accompanied with what looked like an imaginary rhetorical flourish of the kind that a Elizabethan lady may have made with her kerchief, perchance her squire departed unto sea.

To celebrate his astonishing win on the Strade Bianchi in last year's Giro, a hugely impressive bit of riding, Cadel lifted approximately all ten fingers to roughly chest height and gave us an inspiring deep exhalation that left his lips flapping for a moment.

Cadel expressed his exhuberance in an emphatic win over Contador in last year's Fleche Wallone by pointing somewhere about ten feet in the air in front of him and taking an even bigger hit on the bong of victory.

When he won the World Championship with an awe-inspiring one-man attack, Cadel expressed satsifaction with his God-like victory by nearly raising his right hand up to eye level, and pointing a limp thumb towards the heavens. His lips seem to form the words, "yes, thank you, I am good, it's true I like Enya and look forward to rocking out to Orinoco Flow after all the whatnot here."

Panache...it isn't just what you do, it's also what you don't do.

Take Brownie. He doesn't come right out and say, "I pattern my aesthetics after a 14-year old Canadian boy." He's not raising his hands as he crosses the finish line of sartorial and cosmatological Bieber mimological triumph; he knows understatement can be the most profound kind of panache around. Also a little goofy. But it's growing on me.

Panache isn't wearing a Rapha hat

2011-03-08T12:01:00.007-05:00

Over at Cycling Tips, there's a letter from Rapha's president about panache in pro cycling. From on his perch, "inspired by British sartorial heritage," Lord Rapha states:

You know panache when you see it: Marco Pantani throwing down his diamond stud before attacking Indurain on the Monte Campione, Jalabert, the sprinter, attacking in the mountains on an all day escape to become an unlikely winner of the King of the Mountains, Cancellara riding away from peloton in the last few km of a Tour stage in 2007, David Millar attacking into Barcelona in 2009, the screams of thousands of his adopted home crowd ringing in his ears. These are exploits that surprise us with their courage and daring. And the riders with panache are often dashing, charismatic individuals who embrace risk and enjoy probing the edges of what’s possible.

Sure. I like Rapha clothes, but if I ever wear anything by Rapha not won or found in the street, please punch me in the nuts.

Please don't take this to be a condemnation of Rapha, or any other high end apparel hucking shop. I don't begrudge you your pink $400 merino wool hat; fop away. But for me, wearing such an item would tell me that, indeed, I have become everything I feared I would become, i.e., the type of guy who uses words like indeed.

Why do I fear the pink Rapha hat? Well, for me to buy such a thing would mean I'd no longer be the guy who cares about one thing: slaying it. I'd care about stuff. I'd no longer be what I think I am: a Midwesterner obsessed with making my body a weapon, not a mannequin.

To wear Rapha would mean I'd be trying to show a little panache on a bike. A requirement of panache is that you're not trying to show panache; you're just trying, through all means necessary, almost all humiliating, to stomp some faces in.

I've always been a fan of ugly, ugly bike riders, those that Phil and Paul used to single out as being "gangly," "fighting his machine," as ugly on a bike as Charles Barkley was on a golf course, ugly enough that if it went to the beach, cats would try to bury it.

To the point...panache has to mean something more than the guy with the elegant trousers in the English sartorial tradition, or (and this is basically the same thing) the guy with chemically enhanced prowess in the Spanish chemical tradition . This may impress the president of Rapha, and he may call it panache, but it's not panache.

I just read Mike Magnuson's Heft on Wheels, in which he, an alcoholic, smoking, obese man quits his vices and dedicates himself to riding his bike. His inspiration: Lance Armstrong. Magnuson talks about how Lance's cancer treatments stripped excess weight from his body, allowed him to fly up mountains, how Lance's greatness came from his overcoming adversity. This is a well and good, but no one believes it anymore. What was thought be panache, well, it was almost certainly EPO and blood bags.

I'll tell you about panache.

Panache is Jeff Travis of Route 1, every week setting up for Greenbelt, getting dropped most races himself, but getting better, slowly.

Panache is Randy Thrasher, for having a name like Randy Thrasher.

Panache is Tim Rugg dancing on his pedals through the West Virginia mountains in the rain in a brown hoodie.

Panache is Nathan Gazzetta throwing up on his top tube every time he throws in an attack.

Panache is Jose Escobar, gliding up the hills and nothing is ever not worth smiling about.

Panache is Chris Schmidt, at 40 mph, unclipping one leg, reaching down and snagging a dropped glove from the rider ahead of him.

Panache is bizarrely paunchy Rez, eating Spaghettios before the big race:

Panache is Larue.

Panache--with blood doping, panache has become extinct in the pro peleton; I can't think of any real examples from professional cycling. This is what Fignon lamented; for him, it wasn't the introduction of blood boosting that mattered, but the loss of panache.

That's fine. Why would we settle for a remote, unsure kind of beauty, when we can find it in our midsts, among us?

Things Said About Mark Cavendish

2011-03-03T08:07:00.006-05:00

Rolf Aldag

He is hugely emotional. He can be very angry or he can be hugging people tightly and giving them Kisses after the stage. The differences between Cav’s low points and high points are huge. He won’t let his emotions out during the race, he will always just try to win. But after the finish line, he can be a different person.

If the towel he cleans his face with is not the right colour he can explode about it.

Sebastian Weber, HTC trainer

If you saw Mark’s data and Andre Greipel’s data you would see that Andre has more power but when you compare it to body size or the drag they have to overcome then it changes to a completely different picture.

Tony Martin

He’s always making jokes to keep the spirits up. He makes it fun for us. He also takes the responsibility for the team. Whenever he doesn’t come in first place, he’s so disappointed that he’s nearly crying because all of his teammates were working for him and they didn’t have the chance to win the race on their own. That’s why I’m proud to work for him.

Simon Jones, head coach at British Cycling, on Cavendish getting dropped in a training ride in 2006

That'll teach you, eating all those chocolate bars at Christmas [causing Cavendish to burst into tears].

Cavendish on Cavendish

By the end of the year, including racing, I’ll have done about 35,000-45,000km. Some guys will do 50,000km. It sounds a lot, but I worked in a bank for two years and I can tell you a day on a bike is one thing. A day in a bank is something else entirely.

Q: Can you respect someone who comes back from a drug ban?

It depends. A mate of mine took a vitamin that had only just gone onto the banned list. He was careless and should pay the consequences, but I can’t dislike him. But Patrik Sinkewitz? He was on my team and blatantly cheated. He should never be allowed back in the sport. If I ever see him in the same peloton as me I will jump off my bike, straight onto him and kick the shit out of him.

Last year I saw Mark Cavendish twice.

I first saw him on the side of a vicious climb during stage 6, the queen stage of the Tour of California (write up here).
Cavendish was way off the pace, and it was clear even before Big Bear Mountain he'd not make the time cut.

Cavendish had struggled on, even though there were no more sprinting stages left, in the hope that the race officials would cut him some slack. After all, there were only about 75 riders left of the original 125+. There were almost as many riders lounging around in bars as on their bikes (I saw Stuart O'Grady and several others knocking back a few in LA the next night).

Unfortunately, race organizers adhered strictly to the time cut, and Cavendish and his groupetto were out.

That didn't exactly stop Cavendish from continuing his participation in the 2010 Tour of California. On stage 8, the final stage up Bonny Doon, I watched the riders and race officials come and go, and settled in with the tifosi. Then a shout went up, and folks went nuts. Cavendish and Renshaw, in full kits, were climbing Bonny Doon for the hell of it. The pope, a Roman soldier, a giant water bottle, mostly naked folks, children held aloft by proud fathers, drunks--everyone was running and shouting and laughing. Cavendish rode by laughing, red-faced, throwing his arms in the air and playing to the crowd, doing mock victory salutes, looking absolutely elated. Everyone was going nuts.

Street Race: Chile

2011-03-02T09:47:00.000-05:00

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

Just Optimism: Morning Cup of Bliss

2011-03-01T09:33:00.005-05:00

You ever sit up at night running through memories?

That time at Greenbelt when it was a bajillion degrees, and you silently committed to attack the living bejesus out of yourself, Rugg-style. Thing is, you weren't alone in this commitment. Rugg was there, attacking self-style, and suddenly everyone else was in on the madness, and what unwound was a series of 1,000 watt sprints to catch or lose wheels, in between which you poured water down your throat and had no idea that the year was 2010, or that you were as pink as a ham, or that sort of stuff. You had no idea about anything. You just were a raging primate hardly capable of manipulating symbols to express yourself. Somehow a training race with twenty five starters became a slugfest of eight. For once you found the right wheel, Brownie's wheel, and endured the overwhelming smell of his Brut for the sake of what in your mind was training race glory, fifth place or something.

The time you went on a solo break and the field sat up so you were off the front for a while. You settled in, wondering how in God's name you would keep this pace up for ten miles, but then you heard the announcer calling your name, and two people cheering you on, and you looked back and saw nothing behind you. It was only an office park, but you were Cancellara at that moment. You were Bruce Lee taking on the entire island of men in pajamas, kicking them all in the face, one by one.

The time you were in the mountains, peaks you could not see from the valleys. On the climbs you had time to hear the wind in the pines and look across an entire state, and you climbed so high you entered an entirely different weather zone and clouds surrounded you, and then you emerged into a new cold and bare sunlight, and you could not believe how cold it had gotten, and you were climbing still. The road turned to gravel, and no cars dared the ruts and washouts, and you were glad for it. Then you finally came to the top, and there was nothing for you to do but head down, descending for ten minutes straight from cold into warmth, into a small village where you stopped for coffee and croissants and the beautiful woman at the counter smiled at you, because you must have been grinning like a fool, probably with flies plastered to your teeth.

You did things like this hundreds of times, with your own legs and lungs.

And you thought of the poor folks who struggled to get from cars to their door, to their motorized scooters. The kids on their game consoles, and the thousands of indoor hours on stationary trainers. Haiti and Malawi, where no one has the time, spare calories, nor greed to ride up mountains or race. China, where the air is thick with soot and mercenary zeal. The millions of victims, the old, and the afflicted. The dead, even the greats, like Fignon, stuck underground.

We are not among them.

Spring is here and most of us can ride. What more could we want?

Arab World Bombs...Hill in Deep Tuck

2011-02-28T13:26:00.013-05:00

Pro cyclists have completed their now-yearly visit to the Arab world, including the Tour of Qatar and followed by the Tour of Oman (pronounced by Moms as "Oh, man") which finished last Sunday.

At the same time these marginal races happened, massive polular revolts began in almost every Arab state. Libya is now struggling to break Gaddafi's "pimpocracy," and forcing Gaddafi to take to the studio and cut a new track (see below):

Protesters have taken to the streets in Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Palestine, Bahrain, and Wisconsin.

What do these Arab revolts have in common? Just what do these Arab citizens want?

Conservatives are split. Glenn Beck believes, and I'm not making this up, radical Muslims have joined forces with left wingers to found a new caliphate. (On second thought, this may not be so farfetched: here's Noam Chomsky, big-time liberal, talking to PressTV, a propaganda mouthpiece of Iran's Revolutionary Guard).

To Bush followers, the uprisings prove that Bush did bring democracy to the Middle East.

Liberals are split between those who kind of believe in letting things just happen and hoping shit doesn't hit the fan (Obama), and those who kind of know they should be wanting Gaddafi to lose power but admit they don't because ain't no one work a robe or female bodyguards like the Gad-man.

As is often the case, both liberals and conservatives miss the point. Although I have as of yet been unable to talk with an actual Middle Easterner, I have managed to procure several sentiments from the interwebs. Foremost among the demands made by protestors of Mubarak's Egyptian regime was a more cycling friendly envirment. It must be admitted, some protestors were simply fans of professional cycling, and took to the streets at the outside of the Tour of Qatar, at one point taking up the chant for three-time Qatar winner Tom Boonon: "Boonen! Boonen! Coke is not halal but you're still our pal!"

Some protestors could not contain themselves at the thought of the upcoming season, and shouted for their favorite races:

But most protestors are just ordinary Arab cyclists seeking better lives on their bikes. They dream of wider bike lanes, safer signals, a city that caters to cyclists.

Meanwhile in Madison, protestors gathered to voice their displeasure at an anti-cycling regime (Governor Walker). Madison had ranked 7th in Bicycling Magazine's Top Cycling Cities in America, but many are worried that the new regime will gut the city's cycling infrastructure.

Whether Governor Walker will follow Mubarak and Tunisia's Ali family into exhile remains to be seen. Walker, like Gaddafi, has drafted a strategic plan to derail his opposition. The Governor's strategy, surely, requires avoiding the three-feet passing bit of legislation that has recently set the MABRA region in flames. Nothing seems to inflame cyclists as much as three-feet passing legislation.