Hope Springs Eternal

True to form, March is coming in like a lion.  The wind has been strong and wily in its ability to present against me in all situations.  Truth be told, I can't remember my last windless ride.  Temperatures and precipitation have not followed the annual script.  Two weeks ago, I was momentarily disoriented by a sugarbush in Weston.  Confused by how I could have missed so many buckets left past the sugaring season, I thought leaves must have obscured the view the last time I passed.  I was on to the next stretch of road when it occurred to me that the freezing nights and warm days had started sap running.

And today!  Today I caught a strong whiff of hyacinths.  It brought to mind the last weeks of August, when the sticky, sweet smell of Concord grapes appear out of nowhere.  Hyacinths seem extraordinarily unlikely, as crocuses have yet to emerge and the earliest daffodils, nestled in the southern pocket of stone walls, are only two or three inches up.  Still, it was a bold visitation of Easter before the oily pall of Fasching has completely cleared the kitchen.

The spring classics may be very fast this year.  Or at the very crowded.

Cross Training for the Road

One of the appealing aspects of cyclocross is that it is completely different from road racing.  The racing is different, the training is different, the brakes & tires are different and the vibe is different.  So I'm surprised to be doing a cyclocross workout to prepare for the road season.

Sandpits are a staple of cyclocross courses.  After being terrorized by one with a dog leg turn, I started brainstorming ways to ride sand better.  I searched for volley ball courts, schemed to get onto golf courses and pondered the damage that salt water would inflict on my bike.  It took me a couple weeks to realize that I had been riding by the answer on a regular basis.  Local ponds (as in a twenty minute warm up ride away) have beautiful, fresh water beaches that are completely open and deserted in the fall.

So off to the beach to mystify dog walkers with my antics.  I figured out how to shift my weight and manage turns while staying upright and moving.  At times it felt like stick racing, apparently better known as bat spin racing.  And it didn't take long to figure out that it's incredibly exhausting.  Even after you are able to relax the death grip, it just sucks the energy out of the lower back and hips.

I'm a big proponent of periodization.  In the early spring, I mostly do low cadence / high torque workouts.  This involves a lot of one-legged pedaling or tension intervals, and it gets kind of boring.  Riding sand works  very similar muscle groups as my spring workouts, only a lot faster and it's a nice change.  I skip the turns and just try to make it all the way across the beach.  Once I start falling, I recover on the trails the lead to the next beach.  Here's what it looks like.  By the way,  the playground segment has nothing to do with periodization or road racing.  I was just having some fun after I couldn't get across the beach anymore.

Glaciers Rock

Nothing reveals topography like a bicycle.  You can walk a stretch of road a hundred times and not notice a grade that is immediately clear after one ride.  And in my neck of the woods, nothing has created topography like the Laurentide ice sheet.  The weight of a full mile of ice smoothed the north-west side of bedrock outcrops leaving deep grooves; the south-east side left jagged.  Ten to twenty thousand times the several car loads of leaves I take to the dump each year could not cover the scarred rock.

The bedrock outcrops make for a good class trip, but all the loose rock worn smooth on the trip down from Vermont and New Hampshire make for a good ride.  It's tempting to imagine the ice sheet over Boston as a blue-white expanse of Arctic snow.  At least part of it was more like what you find piled at the edges of a mall parking lot in spring:  an abrasive mix of ice, rock and dirt.

It's also tempting to imagine the retreating glacier disappearing like a heavy snow in spring.  A mile thick of ice and debris melts in some spots and stays stubbornly frozen in others.  It creates rivers and vast lakes both on its surface and deep below.  The channels sweep enormous boulders clear in some places and fill the river bottom with layers of rounded stones in others.

The channel beds and lake bottoms that remained after the glacier's retreat became the eskers and drumlins that make such good riding and the sand fields that separate them.  An esker is the inverted bed of debris left by a stream or crevasse.  Drumlins are similar, forming mounds instead of elongated hillocks.

When I first moved to the Boston area, I thought the long, tall piles of rock and dirt were somehow a result of the highway on one side or the reservoir on the other.  It seemed impossible that the long ridges of debris with sides too steep to climb at places could be natural formations.  And it seemed equally implausible that they were connected to the great reed flats flanking the Charles River.  After hiking and then riding the trails that climb the ridges and skirt the ponds, it was thrilling to learn that this landscape was all created by a glacier.  It's sort of like finding a fossil in your backyard covered with miles of technical, swoopy trails.

Spring Has Sprung!

Today was the official start of spring training:  Individual Leg Training and six minute threshold intervals.  I cobbled together my old Serotta for the occasion.  I can't stand the thought of a carbon frame in a trainer and hate putting training miles on the race bike.

Here's the crazy thing:  for most of the winter, I can barely average above 16mph for a training ride.  I've thought it might be the resistance of heavy, winter pants, or that cold air is denser than warm air, or that Gatorskin tires just roll slow.  As soon as the spring training starts, I can spin along at twenty.  It was like magic today:  in between efforts, a head wind felt like a tail wind.  Same clothes, same tires and a heavier bike.  Go figure.

Editing camera footage and learning software is still taking up a lot of my disposable me time.  I'll be traveling next week for School Vacation Week, so I'm optimizing the schedule for saddle time this week and looking forward to more substantial writing soon.

Bar Cam or ER Cam?

Among the unexpected joys of cyclocross, I found race videos and compilations of professional footage absolutely fascinating.  It started as a way to recon upcoming races.  Watching the first lap of someone else's race felt a lot like train spotting.  But as I tried to get a feel for the course, I started noticing details and cheering riders on.  Next I was searching for footage of races I had done.  Finally, I was watching highlights and montages of European races.  And re-watching it all over and over.

It was all compelling, but there seemed to be a gap between barely edited bar cams and TV outtakes.  My sense was that mixing a couple different camera mounts with some careful editing might capture the excitement of racing or just riding.  I could see the shots in my head.  I imagined Warren Miller voice overs...

Hence the set up pictured above.  The first thing I found was that a camera encourages some sketchy riding. Documenting a broken collar bone was not what I had in mind.  Second thing was that my PC is not optimized for graphics and the software that came with the camera was less than bare bones.  So I've gone from learning about mounts, dismounts, call ups and gluing tubulars to ins, outs, cuts, trims and codecs.

This is going to take some time.  It took a whole season of hopping off and on the bike to before I realized that I needed to maintain momentum to make the whole thing work.  It took a half season of gluing tubulars and rolling tires before I got a set to stay put.  Keeping that in mind, I should have some half decent videos just in time for jungle cross.

I see everything twice

A favorite truism of mine is that races in April and May are won in January and February.  Most NE winters, that means a fair amount of indoor riding.  This winter has been so dry and mild that I haven't even set up the trainer yet.  But when I do, I find it easier to break the ride into two.  Morning on the trainer & afternoon on rollers for hard days and two roller sessions for easy days.

This week, mid-day responsibilities and good weather had me doing doubles outside.  All well and good, except that getting off an indoor bike is as pleasurable as staying on an outdoor one.  This became apparent yesterday when I lingered on the morning ride, stretched out the afternoon ride, and then had to eat an early dinner and collapsed early into bed.  To be clear, this is an observation and should not be confused with a complaint.  I'll save the complaints for Binder & Binder commercials, The General, and anything mention of mesothelioma, structured settlements or diabetes.

Looks like I'll be doubling up again today.  Wet snow and temps right on the edge of freezing leads to fingers that can't shift, can't remove soaked clothes and then ache and burn for twenty minutes while they warm up.  That's about the only argument I can make in favor of daytime TV.

Hey Gisele - I own your wheels!

Jason Gay defense of Gisele Bundchen in today’s WSJ reminded me of a brush with greatness.

 

A couple years back, I bought a cyclocross bike at the LBS.  The purchase killed several birds with a single credit card swipe:  an opportunity to try CX, a recovery from a late season set of broken ribs and test of the SRAM group.  And being a large, discontinued frameset, it was a great deal.  The negotiations involved a number of visits and ultimately, a wheel upgrade.  The offered wheels had been sitting around the shop, much like the frame, since they were special ordered for a special customer. 

Granted, it took a series of increasingly explicit comments to clue me on to the provenance of said wheels.  I guess I don’t spend enough time at the intersection of Patriots Football and Brazilian Supermodels.  Anyway, Ms. Brady was shopping for a bike and couldn’t decide whether to go comfort or hybrid (which was a top end CX frame).  The guys at the shop built up one of each especially for her.  I really can’t blame them.  Actually I should thank them.  She chose comfort and I got the hybrid wheels.  I think that’s the appropriate level of closeness for me and the Brazilian Supermodel.

The wheels were Brontager X-Lites.  I wore away the braking surface of the rear wheel after a sloppy winter.  But I took the front wheel out for a tour of the MWRA aquaducts today.  Rode from the Wellesley dump all the way to Framingham with minimal blacktop.

Hello

That grainy photo in the header is me and my first racing bike.  By racing bike, I mean that it shared the same stickers as the pro’s bikes and didn’t come from a department store.  By me, I mean the kid whose elbows, hips, shoulders and shins have yet to meet pavement in any meaningful way.

The photo is a good thirty years old.   I hadn’t seen it for a long time, or really looked at it in the decade since I started racing bicycles.  Can it possibly be that my legs were bigger and my arms were skinnier?  Maybe it’s an illusion of the shadows and the cut-offs.  But I can see my back peeking out over the inside shoulder; some things don’t change.

Middle age is when most men notice some changes.  I notice a lot.  Not all changes and certainly not all colored by the hardening lenses of middle age.   Which brings me to blogging:  the lot I notice seems unusual.  Not terribly unusual, but just enough to be interesting.  I hope.

I ride almost every day.  Racing well involves more time in the saddle than I care to admit.  But it’s genuinely enjoyable and satisfying on a number of different levels.  It’s a trip – both literally and figuratively.  In blogging, I hope to figure out whether the trippiness is an endorphine soaked, oxygen debt induced hallucination or something more enduring.

On a more concrete level, I plan to blog about riding and racing.  For me, that’s masters bicycle racing in New England.  This is perhaps a hopelessly thin slice of sub-sub culture.  Everyone should have a slice of sub culture to call their own.  We'll see what I can wring from mine.