Unlike where I used to live in lower Fairfield County, around here there are some relatively long hills. Although this means that I struggle on some of the roads around here, there is some payback - the descents on the other side.
Now back in FC the fastest I'd go was down a 0.8 mile hill in Weston. On a great day I could sprint at the top, tuck, judiciously use some traffic, and hit and maintain maybe 50 mph.
Not very fast, considering the woman who got clocked going 68 mph while commuting to work.
Yes.
On a bicycle.
So my estimated 64 mph top speed on the road stage of Fitchburg suddenly seems very possible (I've always doubted my math, but then sometimes it's inaccurate in the wrong direction). I had sprinted at the top of the hill, tucked an insanely aggressive tuck (I chose everything on the bike knowing I could trust it on massively fast descents), screamed past the, well, screaming marshals. When I started to slow I started pedaling, promptly hitting 160 rpm in my 54x11. I re-tucked and made it just before that right turn before I had to start pedaling.
And I was still going 30 mph.
I did the math later and I figured out that 160 rpm in a 54x11 was about 64 mph. So I must have been going faster since I thought I'd slowed down 10 or 15 mph when I started pedaling.
Whatever, I can't prove it now and I don't think I have the guts to replicate my experiment.
Anyway, back to crying during descents. There are four reasons you cry during a descent.
1. You are sad.
2. You crash and it hurts a lot.
3. You get dropped and you become very sad (then see #1).
4. Ferocious wind hits your eyeballs and makes them sting.
I wear normal glasses, don't like contacts, and tried the prescription protective eyewear that fit me. I've decided to stay with my normal glasses. Therefore I get quite a bit of wind in my eyes when I descend. And Reason #4 becomes a reality.
My eyes tear up.
Although I can't tuck properly wearing all the winter gear at this time, I regularly hit 45 mph while tucked and hold it for a short while. Short is relative to California descents, where you might descend for 30 hair raising minutes at a time. I'm sure as the weather warms up and I can tuck more aggressively, I'll be hitting much higher speeds.
So what to do about the tears in my eyes?
I realized in the middle of one of many 45 mph descents last week that the tears are there to protect your eyes.
Think about that for a second or three. You need tears. Your blinking actually wipes your eyeball with tears, just not too much. But when you subject your poor eyeballs to dust storm like wind, your eyes go into Defcon 1. Or is it Defcon 5. Whichever. You turn your head (the most protective thing you can do), you close your eyes a.k.a. blink (the second most protective thing), and as a catch all your tear ducts go into emergency overdrive and dump nice protective solution on your eyes to protect them.
Tears are normal.
You therefore have a couple choices (three if you wear protective glasses).
1. Try and prevent tearing by squinting, turning your head, etc. Effectively you're taking your eyes out of the wind. However, since you're doing things like looking away, closing your eyes (fully or mostly), and you have to blink frequently, you compromise your ability to see.
2. Use tears the way nature intends. Cry gloriously while descending, wide eyed, aware of everything out there.
(3) Use protective eyewear and do #1.
On a particularly windy day, on a particularly windy descent, I gave up trying to control my tears (i.e. #1 above) and let them stream down the sides of my face, whisked away off my cheekbones by my now-rapid pace (i.e. #2 above).
Once I accepted that tearing is a good thing, I realized I could descend without blinking. In fact, blinking screwed up my vision more because it takes a moment for my tears to puddle up enough before they exceed surface tension and go streaming on their way. The tears keep your eyes lubricated and washes away contaminants (which is what blinking does) and my glasses keep things like rocks or bigger non-dust things from hitting my eyes.
The only drawback to my revelation is you have a runny nose after each descent. But hey, that's worth it for me.
This is not recommened on the plant Dune since water is very precious there. Anywhere else it should be fine.
Here's to "tearing" down descents.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Story - Mr Belly
One of the problems with racing in the US is that the races are so far away. It's not like a county wide thing where the furthest you drive is a few towns over. It's a regional thing with regional driving distances. As a racer you have to decide how far is too far. In the Northeast I'd say that about 2 hours is most racer's idea of a max drive for a race unless it was a stage race (Killington SR) or a special event (USPro at Philly for example). I know that in California that might be someone's idea of a commute to work, but here, well, it's about as far as I'll go.
Of course if I have legs it's a bit different. When I was flying on the bike, my "acceptable driving radius" extended out to 5 or 6 hours each way.
Think about that.
10 or 12 hours of driving to race about an hour. A whole day shot. Not environmentally friendly, I admit, but back then gas was still in the "cents". As in not "dollar and cents". And "emission control" meant not having a smoke bomb for exhaust, but everything else was okay.
I did some Thanksgiving race in Baltimore (they gave away a lot of turkeys). And one weekend a teammate and I drove out to Bethlehem, PA. I remember it was pretty far, at least 3 hours each way, just for a 20 or so mile crit that I'd never done before in my life.
We did the drive in my teammate's Saab 900, listening to Metallica (my teammate's tape) the whole way. That's not a bad thing necessarily - after a few hours of repetitious Metallica I decided I started liking them. I suppose the alternative was to go stark raving mad so I decided I'd like the music. I think it didn't help that the music only came out of one speaker... or was that the other car that I drove in for hours and hours? Whatever.
Other than that the drive was pretty uneventful. Well, as a car enthusiast it's worth mentioning that the car had no second gear due to a long ago misshift. Every time we got going, he'd have to virtually redline the engine in first so the car wouldn't hiccup when he shifted into third.
And at that time the only thing I knew about Bethlehem was that there were outdated steel mills there. I didn't know what to expect. Four hours is a long way to go to somewhere you don't know.
We got there and the area seemed distinctly, well, un-urban. No sky scrapers, no busy city-like things. More bucolic than, say, New York City.
One of the things that I didn't realize would be the case (until I got there) was that I didn't know anyone from the area. I had no prior races with them. I had no idea who to mark, who was strong, who wasn't. I ran into the same problem in Baltimore, Michigan, and any other far off race courses, as well as some of the collegiate races I'd done earlier in my life.
I did the only thing I could in this situation. I looked at the other racers to see what they looked like. I figured that I could check out what the guys look like, I can get an idea of the general fitness of the racers in the area.
One guy in particular popped out. It was hard to miss him because his belly was so big he had to move his knees to the side to pedal. I figured he'd be a Citizen racer (this was before Cat 5s existed, and back then, a non-licensed racer could race the "Citizen" race). No one else particularly stood out, they looked like normal racers. My teammate and I did a decent warm up as we'd gotten to the venue with plenty of time before our race. I needed this time as I felt pretty tired from the long drive down, and I certainly wasn't looking forward to the drive back.
When I lined up I put my head down to wheel level and looked around. I did this before my first ever win - I saw there were only a few sets of shaved legs in the field that day. I marked them, made sure they didn't get away, and then launched a savage sprint to take the win.
That day in Bethlehem I was a bit disappointed to see mainly shaven legs. I guess even out here in Bethlehem they know about racing. What I didn't realize we were just around the corner from the best track on the East Coast, but then again, back then I didn't know much. It wouldn't be quite so easy to pick out the strong racers.
I did notice Mister Belly had lined up.
Now, although the rest of the 3s looked normal, if Mr Belly was indicative of the pace around here, then I'd be okay. If someone like him could hang, so could I, and if it came down to a sprint, well, I was pretty confident of my sprint.
Trying to get rid of the last cobwebs in my head from the long drive over, I psyched myself up. Metallica's "One" was echoing through my head - it would be the song that popped into my head whenever I raced literally for years to come. With the announcer talking in the background I got into race mode. And with a whistle or a gun (I forget) we were off. Now that I think of it, we might have doffed our helmets for the national anthem. It was that foreign relative to the NY/NJ/CT area.
The course was pretty straight forward. Four corners, right turns, a dip in the longer front and back stretches. The two connecting straights were pretty short so the first two turns were close together, ditto the last two. The longer straights were pretty long - at least 300 meters, maybe more like 400 or more. The main straight started with a slight downhill, then after 100 or 150 meters is started to ease up in angle a bit. No major grade, just a touch more of a difference than the Champs Elysee.
The first lap went well, the guys seemed to know how to race bikes, and the course seemed doable. The long straights hurt me since speeds continually rise in crit straights (so shorter ones are better for me) but I thought the two sets of turns would favor my handling skills. And a slight uphill finish is my forte.
That was before the second lap - at the first turn of the second lap, my bike wiggled a bit weird. Then the front rim hit the ground. I looked down - I'd flatted.
Arg.
No wheel pit so no free lap. My race was over in a couple minutes.
I rolled to the curb, my hand in the air, yelled to my teammate that I'd flatted.
I couldn't believe this. All the driving, all the time, down the tubes. My teammate, an ever loyal leadout guy, was still in the race so I stood by the course and yelled encouragement.
Nothing memorable happened during the race except Mr Belly managed to hang on, his knees splayed out to the sides to clear his torso. I shook my head in amazement. If only I'd still been in the race. My teammate gamely hung on, a bum knee (skiing accidents) limiting his finishing kick. I didn't know what he would do but I was hoping that he could pull a good ride out of his legs.
As the laps wound down I parked myself on the finish stretch, a little bit - 50-75 meters - before the line. I figured if my teammate needed any encouragement, that would be the place for it. If he needed it before that point he was toast anyway.
Bell lap and the field was all together, curb to curb, everyone looking at one another. I'd have killed to be in that field at that moment, it looked like prime hunting ground for a sprinter. I waited anxiously for the field to round the final corner - we all were. Everyone strained to pick out a hint of the racers, to see who'd round the turn, pedals churning, legs a blazin'.
A lone rider came rocketing through the turn, moving visibly faster than the race had been taking the turn on previous laps. He was flying. He looked familiar somehow and I squinted to verify the racer's identity.
It couldn't be.
But it was.
Mr Belly.
Not only did he rocket through the turn, he was probably 20 or 30 meters in front of the field.
WTF?!
He lifted his ungainly mass out of the seat and started sprinting, his belly flopping side to side with his bike. I was waiting for this Cat 3 poser to explode but he somehow kept the power going, held his speed, and actually outdistanced the desperately sprinting field to the line. Gleefully he raised his hands, the improbable winner, a triumph of effort, of will, of something over the honed and fit legs of his rivals.
The announcer was yelling in the PA system.
I did another double take.
"Gibby Hatton wins! Gibby Hatton wins!"
Gibby Hatton?!
I remember reading about him - a pro track racer, a National team member with the likes of Tom Ritchey (yeah, the WCS guy whose bars and stems everyone seems to be using) and Harvey Nitz, bronze in the 1983 Keirin Worlds (albeit helped by a massive crash), a top notch track racer. Gibby Hatton?
I couldn't believe it. He was in Winning Magazine and here he was, in some rinky dink Cat 3 race. And winning it no less.
I learned later that he'd stopped racing for a while and he was just getting back into it. From the looks of the results I found on the internet, he's doing pretty well.
Speed, I realized, doesn't go away.
Amen to that.
(Note: All due respect to Gibby Hatton who based on the results I found can still give out some serious whoop a**. I have never met him and now probably never will but man oh man did he surprise me that day.)
Of course if I have legs it's a bit different. When I was flying on the bike, my "acceptable driving radius" extended out to 5 or 6 hours each way.
Think about that.
10 or 12 hours of driving to race about an hour. A whole day shot. Not environmentally friendly, I admit, but back then gas was still in the "cents". As in not "dollar and cents". And "emission control" meant not having a smoke bomb for exhaust, but everything else was okay.
I did some Thanksgiving race in Baltimore (they gave away a lot of turkeys). And one weekend a teammate and I drove out to Bethlehem, PA. I remember it was pretty far, at least 3 hours each way, just for a 20 or so mile crit that I'd never done before in my life.
We did the drive in my teammate's Saab 900, listening to Metallica (my teammate's tape) the whole way. That's not a bad thing necessarily - after a few hours of repetitious Metallica I decided I started liking them. I suppose the alternative was to go stark raving mad so I decided I'd like the music. I think it didn't help that the music only came out of one speaker... or was that the other car that I drove in for hours and hours? Whatever.
Other than that the drive was pretty uneventful. Well, as a car enthusiast it's worth mentioning that the car had no second gear due to a long ago misshift. Every time we got going, he'd have to virtually redline the engine in first so the car wouldn't hiccup when he shifted into third.
And at that time the only thing I knew about Bethlehem was that there were outdated steel mills there. I didn't know what to expect. Four hours is a long way to go to somewhere you don't know.
We got there and the area seemed distinctly, well, un-urban. No sky scrapers, no busy city-like things. More bucolic than, say, New York City.
One of the things that I didn't realize would be the case (until I got there) was that I didn't know anyone from the area. I had no prior races with them. I had no idea who to mark, who was strong, who wasn't. I ran into the same problem in Baltimore, Michigan, and any other far off race courses, as well as some of the collegiate races I'd done earlier in my life.
I did the only thing I could in this situation. I looked at the other racers to see what they looked like. I figured that I could check out what the guys look like, I can get an idea of the general fitness of the racers in the area.
One guy in particular popped out. It was hard to miss him because his belly was so big he had to move his knees to the side to pedal. I figured he'd be a Citizen racer (this was before Cat 5s existed, and back then, a non-licensed racer could race the "Citizen" race). No one else particularly stood out, they looked like normal racers. My teammate and I did a decent warm up as we'd gotten to the venue with plenty of time before our race. I needed this time as I felt pretty tired from the long drive down, and I certainly wasn't looking forward to the drive back.
When I lined up I put my head down to wheel level and looked around. I did this before my first ever win - I saw there were only a few sets of shaved legs in the field that day. I marked them, made sure they didn't get away, and then launched a savage sprint to take the win.
That day in Bethlehem I was a bit disappointed to see mainly shaven legs. I guess even out here in Bethlehem they know about racing. What I didn't realize we were just around the corner from the best track on the East Coast, but then again, back then I didn't know much. It wouldn't be quite so easy to pick out the strong racers.
I did notice Mister Belly had lined up.
Now, although the rest of the 3s looked normal, if Mr Belly was indicative of the pace around here, then I'd be okay. If someone like him could hang, so could I, and if it came down to a sprint, well, I was pretty confident of my sprint.
Trying to get rid of the last cobwebs in my head from the long drive over, I psyched myself up. Metallica's "One" was echoing through my head - it would be the song that popped into my head whenever I raced literally for years to come. With the announcer talking in the background I got into race mode. And with a whistle or a gun (I forget) we were off. Now that I think of it, we might have doffed our helmets for the national anthem. It was that foreign relative to the NY/NJ/CT area.
The course was pretty straight forward. Four corners, right turns, a dip in the longer front and back stretches. The two connecting straights were pretty short so the first two turns were close together, ditto the last two. The longer straights were pretty long - at least 300 meters, maybe more like 400 or more. The main straight started with a slight downhill, then after 100 or 150 meters is started to ease up in angle a bit. No major grade, just a touch more of a difference than the Champs Elysee.
The first lap went well, the guys seemed to know how to race bikes, and the course seemed doable. The long straights hurt me since speeds continually rise in crit straights (so shorter ones are better for me) but I thought the two sets of turns would favor my handling skills. And a slight uphill finish is my forte.
That was before the second lap - at the first turn of the second lap, my bike wiggled a bit weird. Then the front rim hit the ground. I looked down - I'd flatted.
Arg.
No wheel pit so no free lap. My race was over in a couple minutes.
I rolled to the curb, my hand in the air, yelled to my teammate that I'd flatted.
I couldn't believe this. All the driving, all the time, down the tubes. My teammate, an ever loyal leadout guy, was still in the race so I stood by the course and yelled encouragement.
Nothing memorable happened during the race except Mr Belly managed to hang on, his knees splayed out to the sides to clear his torso. I shook my head in amazement. If only I'd still been in the race. My teammate gamely hung on, a bum knee (skiing accidents) limiting his finishing kick. I didn't know what he would do but I was hoping that he could pull a good ride out of his legs.
As the laps wound down I parked myself on the finish stretch, a little bit - 50-75 meters - before the line. I figured if my teammate needed any encouragement, that would be the place for it. If he needed it before that point he was toast anyway.
Bell lap and the field was all together, curb to curb, everyone looking at one another. I'd have killed to be in that field at that moment, it looked like prime hunting ground for a sprinter. I waited anxiously for the field to round the final corner - we all were. Everyone strained to pick out a hint of the racers, to see who'd round the turn, pedals churning, legs a blazin'.
A lone rider came rocketing through the turn, moving visibly faster than the race had been taking the turn on previous laps. He was flying. He looked familiar somehow and I squinted to verify the racer's identity.
It couldn't be.
But it was.
Mr Belly.
Not only did he rocket through the turn, he was probably 20 or 30 meters in front of the field.
WTF?!
He lifted his ungainly mass out of the seat and started sprinting, his belly flopping side to side with his bike. I was waiting for this Cat 3 poser to explode but he somehow kept the power going, held his speed, and actually outdistanced the desperately sprinting field to the line. Gleefully he raised his hands, the improbable winner, a triumph of effort, of will, of something over the honed and fit legs of his rivals.
The announcer was yelling in the PA system.
I did another double take.
"Gibby Hatton wins! Gibby Hatton wins!"
Gibby Hatton?!
I remember reading about him - a pro track racer, a National team member with the likes of Tom Ritchey (yeah, the WCS guy whose bars and stems everyone seems to be using) and Harvey Nitz, bronze in the 1983 Keirin Worlds (albeit helped by a massive crash), a top notch track racer. Gibby Hatton?
I couldn't believe it. He was in Winning Magazine and here he was, in some rinky dink Cat 3 race. And winning it no less.
I learned later that he'd stopped racing for a while and he was just getting back into it. From the looks of the results I found on the internet, he's doing pretty well.
Speed, I realized, doesn't go away.
Amen to that.
(Note: All due respect to Gibby Hatton who based on the results I found can still give out some serious whoop a**. I have never met him and now probably never will but man oh man did he surprise me that day.)
Friday, January 11, 2008
Bethel Spring Series - What Makes It Work?
The Bethel Spring Series, a friendly race oriented set of races going on for almost 15 years, was started by two of my teammates in the early 90s. They started the event because they didn't want to pay, at that time, $18 (a "summer race" price) to race at a race with no prizes offered to racers. They felt that either the entry should be lower or the race should offer prizes. The only way they could make this happen was to hold their own races. The first year they charged, tongue in cheek, $7.95 for entry all inclusive (insurance was $1 at the time). They even brought rolls of nickels for change.
They expected perhaps 20 racers a field and sometimes got as many as 30. Almost all the racers declined the nickel change, thanking them instead for offering a race friendly series of races.
We now charge a bit more for entry (I think it was $12 pre-reg and $17 day of race) but we also give away a lot of prizes, mainly cash, sometimes merchandise. For our 6 week series we give away about $8000, maybe $9000, in cash, all money raised from entry fees. In addition a couple sponsors give some stuff away, and if we have extra money, we buy some prizes to raffle off.
I can't tell you exactly why the Series has been successful but I feel it's a combination of things.
First, we offer a reasonable entry fee. For pre-registered racers it's very reasonable, and if you pre-reg for two races (all but Pros, and male Cat 1s, 2s, and 5s can do this), we discount the second race, even if it's day of race.
Second, we give most of that entry money back to the racers. They see a lot of prizes ($50 primes are not uncommon, $20 are, and $20/10 or $30/20 two place primes are sort of normal). On big field days we've offered $100 primes. We pay out at least $4000 on the last week of racing (overall and daily prizes combined) as well as another $500 in trophies and perhaps $1000 in sponsor-provided prizes. On weather-cooperative years we'd buy Spinergy (when they were around) or Topolino wheels and give them away. The last couple years we've had to cancel a race a year so no wheel giveaways.
Third, we (the promoters) do not take any money for ourselves. I decided to change this for 2007 but I've since decided it would wait till 2008. The only money I make is if I win it. For 2007 the race remains a not for profit thing.
Fourth, we empathize with the racers. If anyone calls us or writes us prior to race day and asks for a refund, we give it to them. If they prepaid for two races and after the first one they decide not to race (it's raining, they're tired, whatever), we refund them their second race entry. If someone flats right before the start, we'll let them get a wheel before the race starts, or have them take their "free lap" right away. In contrast think about the following non-Bethel experience. My co-promoter had a 106 fever before a race. He called the race promoter and asked for either a refund or a chance to give his spot to a teammate. He was denied both. The promoter pocketed my co-promoter's money and sold the spot to the next person on the wait list. Not very sympathetic, and not really a race I'd want to support as a racer. Our race doesn't do this.
In fact, when trying to decide what to do and not do, I tend to be pretty conservative. When I was given the task of running the series (the two founding teammates had respectively moved or retired from racing the year of the first Bethel), we sent out flyers in envelopes. I purchased mailing lists from the USCF for the area (CT, NY, MA, RI I think) and we purposely did not send out flyers to the areas from which we thought the other series drew its racers. I just felt it wasn't the right thing to do. When the other series shut down I felt it was okay to send flyers into that area.
I've made mistakes too, and some of them were quite embarrassing. More than once my final Series points calculations have been off and affected racers only pointed them out late in the day, like either during the prize presentation or a week later. I gave the team prize to one team only to learn that another team had rightfully won it. I talked with both of them and the holder of the trophy nicely agreed to hand it over to the other team. This happened at a later race and they went out on the course and proceeded to shred each others' legs into mush.
Ultimately I try and do what I think I'd want done if I was a racer. I never realized how difficult the "First race at 8 AM, the rest follow in order" was on a racer until I went to such a race. With various other things happening, I was pressed for time and the uncertainty of the race start time really threw me off. I told my then future wife that for 2008 we'd publish start times.
I also sweep the course because, frankly, I hate courses where it's sandy. And in March and April in Connecticut, it's SANDY! I've had some interesting experiences with sweeping and racing, and it seems that part of my relaxation slash stress-reduction therapy is to sweep the road on the day of the race. As an added bonus I can use those "lanes" for my sprint.
As a racer I think that prize money is good, even if I don't have a chance of taking a huge chunk of it home. I feel like the promoter is trying to give something back to the racers, not take all the money for themselves. Granted, it's okay to take some money, but at some level I think promoters need to give back. It's sort of like putting things for sale on eBay or in a classifieds. I got some carbon bars on my bike and I didn't want them. I listed them for $100 on some classifieds but no one took me up on it. I put it on eBay, no reserve, at 99 cents. When no one bid on it for a while I thought, well, I guess I just gave away my bars. But to my surprise a little bidding war erupted. The final selling price? $101. It all works out in the end.
Anyway, for 2008 we're still waiting for permission from the town. Somehow our request didn't make it into the December meeting so we need to wait until January 16 to hear from the town. Until then we just sit tight.
They expected perhaps 20 racers a field and sometimes got as many as 30. Almost all the racers declined the nickel change, thanking them instead for offering a race friendly series of races.
We now charge a bit more for entry (I think it was $12 pre-reg and $17 day of race) but we also give away a lot of prizes, mainly cash, sometimes merchandise. For our 6 week series we give away about $8000, maybe $9000, in cash, all money raised from entry fees. In addition a couple sponsors give some stuff away, and if we have extra money, we buy some prizes to raffle off.
I can't tell you exactly why the Series has been successful but I feel it's a combination of things.
First, we offer a reasonable entry fee. For pre-registered racers it's very reasonable, and if you pre-reg for two races (all but Pros, and male Cat 1s, 2s, and 5s can do this), we discount the second race, even if it's day of race.
Second, we give most of that entry money back to the racers. They see a lot of prizes ($50 primes are not uncommon, $20 are, and $20/10 or $30/20 two place primes are sort of normal). On big field days we've offered $100 primes. We pay out at least $4000 on the last week of racing (overall and daily prizes combined) as well as another $500 in trophies and perhaps $1000 in sponsor-provided prizes. On weather-cooperative years we'd buy Spinergy (when they were around) or Topolino wheels and give them away. The last couple years we've had to cancel a race a year so no wheel giveaways.
Third, we (the promoters) do not take any money for ourselves. I decided to change this for 2007 but I've since decided it would wait till 2008. The only money I make is if I win it. For 2007 the race remains a not for profit thing.
Fourth, we empathize with the racers. If anyone calls us or writes us prior to race day and asks for a refund, we give it to them. If they prepaid for two races and after the first one they decide not to race (it's raining, they're tired, whatever), we refund them their second race entry. If someone flats right before the start, we'll let them get a wheel before the race starts, or have them take their "free lap" right away. In contrast think about the following non-Bethel experience. My co-promoter had a 106 fever before a race. He called the race promoter and asked for either a refund or a chance to give his spot to a teammate. He was denied both. The promoter pocketed my co-promoter's money and sold the spot to the next person on the wait list. Not very sympathetic, and not really a race I'd want to support as a racer. Our race doesn't do this.
In fact, when trying to decide what to do and not do, I tend to be pretty conservative. When I was given the task of running the series (the two founding teammates had respectively moved or retired from racing the year of the first Bethel), we sent out flyers in envelopes. I purchased mailing lists from the USCF for the area (CT, NY, MA, RI I think) and we purposely did not send out flyers to the areas from which we thought the other series drew its racers. I just felt it wasn't the right thing to do. When the other series shut down I felt it was okay to send flyers into that area.
I've made mistakes too, and some of them were quite embarrassing. More than once my final Series points calculations have been off and affected racers only pointed them out late in the day, like either during the prize presentation or a week later. I gave the team prize to one team only to learn that another team had rightfully won it. I talked with both of them and the holder of the trophy nicely agreed to hand it over to the other team. This happened at a later race and they went out on the course and proceeded to shred each others' legs into mush.
Ultimately I try and do what I think I'd want done if I was a racer. I never realized how difficult the "First race at 8 AM, the rest follow in order" was on a racer until I went to such a race. With various other things happening, I was pressed for time and the uncertainty of the race start time really threw me off. I told my then future wife that for 2008 we'd publish start times.
I also sweep the course because, frankly, I hate courses where it's sandy. And in March and April in Connecticut, it's SANDY! I've had some interesting experiences with sweeping and racing, and it seems that part of my relaxation slash stress-reduction therapy is to sweep the road on the day of the race. As an added bonus I can use those "lanes" for my sprint.
As a racer I think that prize money is good, even if I don't have a chance of taking a huge chunk of it home. I feel like the promoter is trying to give something back to the racers, not take all the money for themselves. Granted, it's okay to take some money, but at some level I think promoters need to give back. It's sort of like putting things for sale on eBay or in a classifieds. I got some carbon bars on my bike and I didn't want them. I listed them for $100 on some classifieds but no one took me up on it. I put it on eBay, no reserve, at 99 cents. When no one bid on it for a while I thought, well, I guess I just gave away my bars. But to my surprise a little bidding war erupted. The final selling price? $101. It all works out in the end.
Anyway, for 2008 we're still waiting for permission from the town. Somehow our request didn't make it into the December meeting so we need to wait until January 16 to hear from the town. Until then we just sit tight.
Monday, January 07, 2008
How To - Clean Your Bike
Today is the first day of a three or four day heat wave in Connecticut. Relatively speaking of course. Normal temperatures typically hit the mid 30s to the low 40s during the day, and much of the day is spent at or below freezing.
However, today we hit 52 (allegedly). Tomorrow is forecast to hit 60, and then we're supposed to have a 55 degree day and a 48 degree day.
Sounds like Florida to me!
Actually, Gainesville was colder in the morning the second last time we went there - high 20s to low 30s.
Anyway, I started off my mini big session with a ride into Massachusetts. It's a loop I've done before but I suffered like a dog the last time I did it. Today was a bit better. I wasn't out to break records and in fact I never did a sprint. But I managed to make it over the hill on Route 57 in reasonable shape and I never really faltered throughout the ride, a good sign.
Massachusetts has one consistent road feature I don't enjoy - a non existent shoulder on main roads. In some places the white line actually falls away because the pavement under it is gone. And instead of putting dirt or something obviously "not road" next to the road, Massachusetts put gravel. So it's driveable for a car but dangerous for a cyclist. A bit of my riding is done on such roads and it's definitely disconcerting. I end up riding through a lot of sand, through puddles, and get the bike pretty messy, all because I have no road to work with. I feel much more relaxed when I get back into Connecticut.
A disconcerting thing happened on one climb - in my lower gears (39x25 and 23), my chain made grinding noises. Dirt had gotten onto the cogs and were doing their best to prematurely wear out my drivetrain. So I tried to avoid those gears. I thought about rinsing them off with water but I didn't have any stop points and I didn't want to risk running out of water.
Chain grinding aside, I added on a loop of about 16 or 17 miles, my standard "Quarry Road Loop" as I've come to call it. On a fast day it takes me about 52 minutes to complete, an average day is about 55 minutes (all this at a not very intense pace). On my mountain bike it takes 57-60 minutes just for comparison sake. Today, after 2.5 hours of riding through the surprisingly cold hills of Massachusetts, the loop took about 54 minutes. Not a fast loop, but not a slow one. I felt reasonable, no cramps, no agonizingly aching back, and my legs were totally fine except they'd fatigue pretty quickly on short hills.
After I got back from the ride I cleaned my bike. Since there are at some points about two feet of snow on the sides of the road (Massachusetts, when I look past the non existent shoulder) and the temps were way above melting, most of the roads were damp with snow run off. My bike was appropriately plastered with mud, sand, dirt, and bits and pieces of yet-to-be-decomposed leaves and twigs.
Since I was already sort of a mess, I got two buckets of water (one with soapy water), my cleaning kit, and went at it. I read about Moreno Argentin when he came to the US for the World Championships in Colorado. He rode with some journalist types and the thing that got them was that no matter what the weather, he always showed up with a clean bike.
Mind you it rained every day out there, and many of the rides set off with wet stuff falling from the sky. When you ride in rain the chain gets gunky, the brake pads bleed blackness everywhere, and the bike becomes a general mess.
Yet each day Argentin showed up with a bike that could have come off a showroom floor.
The kicker was that he was doing the work, not a team mechanic. It was him cleaning the brake stuff off, him cleaning the chain, him wiping everything down.
When I told this story to the guys at the store, we pledged to treat our bikes the same way. We'd go for a ride, return, and detail our bikes, sometimes for hours. Back then it seemed that bikes were it, but without a nice big shop in which to detail your bike and without a couple friends doing the same thing, it's not as much fun detailing the bike. I have a more efficient way of doing this now.
Detailing Your Bike in 30 Minutes or Less.
A couple caveats. First, the bike has to have been kept somewhat clean prior to this "detail". In other words, you don't let more than a week or two of riding go by without performing this detail work (don't count riding indoors as riding time). Second, if you ever ride in the wet, the bike gets detailed. Third, you have all the gear you need.
Ingredients:
- Bike, a bit dirty but not filthy.
- Two 5 gallon buckets, one filled 2/3 with soapy water (use car wash, not dish detergent), one filled 2/3 with rinsing water (both warm if it's winter, cold if it's summer).
- Gear brush (I have a Park and a Pedros and I use whichever I find first)
- Car wash sponge thing, leave in the soapy water
- Water bottle you don't use for drinking or peeing, leave in the rinse water.
- Simple Green degreaser or some other biodegradeable stuff.
First find a place where you can wash your bike. Usually the street is good, somewhere so the waste water can go somewhere other than the grass or into a big puddle. Don't get too close to a sewer grate since bits and pieces get sucked in there like it's a black hole.
Next, lug your stuff there.
Steps:
1. Spray Simple Green (on "Spray", not "Stream") on the chain, chainrings, and cassette. Let it soak a bit.
2. Get a bottle of rinse/plain water and squirt it at the sand/mud on the stays, brakes, fork. The idea is to get the heavy stuff off, not make it clean.
3. Grab the car sponge thing, make sure it's nice and heavy with soapy water, and run it over your bike, top down. So run it over your top tube (maybe your saddle), down tube, stem and sides of head tube, seat tube, seat stays, forks. Rinse the sponge thing and, with a new load of soapy water, run the sponge around the outside of the wheels/tires (rims, tires, outer ends of spokes). Don't let it touch the chain area for now, we're just trying to get the bike clean enough that mud and dirt don't fall into the chain while your cleaning the chain. At the same time we don't want your sponge thing to get greasy.
4. Put the bike in the big ring, small cog. Re-spray the chain, chainring, and cassette with Simple Green.
5. Use the gear brush and brush across the chain on the chainring. Brush towards the bottom bracket, do a pair of links at a time. The chainring holds the chain in place so you can use a lot of force to brush away grit, grease, etc. Spray Simple Green every now and then and you'll see when it starts getting clean under the black mess you're making. Move to the next pair.
6. When you get to a clean pair, you've done a lap. Only two more laps to go. The next lap you're going to do the middle of the chain. Don't focus on the rollers. Instead focus on the inside of the plates, especially the outer plates. Black gunk builds up there and if you don't get it out, the first pedal stroke or two will make your pristine cassette filthy. A couple more pedal strokes and your chainrings will resemble your cassette. So go through, jam the brushes in the middle, get the stuff out of there.
7. When you get to a clean middle bit of the chain, you've done your lap. Time for a break. Use the water bottle and squirt rinse water on the chain. Looks nice, right? It does but it's not clean yet.
8. We're going to leave the third lap for later. Now the teeth. First the chainrings. Since the chain is on the big ring, do the little one first. Clean the valleys of the teeth, where the rollers hit, because that's dirty. Also do the sides and the little ridge where the teeth become the ring. Don't forget to hit the bit between the big and little ring, and don't forget behind the crankarm.
9. Do the big ring next, hit it where the teeth point to the rear hub since the chain doesn't ride there. Get the valleys of the teeth and the ridge on the outside. Remember to spray more Simple Green every now and then.
10. Now do the cassette. I just hold the bike up with one hand and brush with the other. I brush parallel to the chain, on the top of the cassette. The brush going backwards rotates the cassette, the brush going forwards cleans. Scrub away. When I get tired of that, I also scrub down across all the teeth - this gets the valleys of the cassette cogs clean. While you're doing the cassette hit the derailleur pulleys. The upper one is a pain.
11. Rinse again. Now it'll look really nice. And it's still filthy. Turn the bike around so you're looking at the left (non-drive) side. The chain and rings are filthy. Gross. Do a third lap of the chain, scrubbing it while it sits on the big ring. Clean the insides of the chainrings too. Spray more Simple Green.
12. Now rinse again. Now you're talking. Stand up, stretch your back.
13. Take the front and rear wheels out, lean them against your buckets. Put the bike down very gently, fork tips and brake levers on the ground, lean against something secure.
14. Take the front wheel and go around it with the soapy sponge thing. Wipe down the spokes (easier than polishing them individually), wipe down the rim sides and tires. Jam the sponge inside the spokes and wash the hub center. Rotate and repeat - should take 3 or 4 scrubs to do the hub. The rim should be very clean looking. Rinse with the waterbottle.
15. Take the rear wheel. Spray some Simple Green on the cassette, clean whatever you missed. Use the sponge thing and wash the tire, rim, spokes, hub. Rinse.
16. Get bike, spray derailleur pulleys with Simple Green. They are the dirtiest part of the drivetrain, guaranteed. Scrub with brush, rinse, repeat until they look clean. You may learn something about the pulleys like, "Hey, look! The pulleys have writing on them!" Also get the pulley cages, they are the second dirtiest part of your drivetrain.
17. Reassemble your bike. Pick it up and take it to a clean place with no sand on the floor. Get some WD40 or your favorite lube and put some on the chain (on the bottom chain between the derailleur and the crank, and only put lube on the top, i.e. the contact area). Wipe off the chain by turning crank backwards while holding dirty rag to chain.
Note: "WD" of WD-40 means "Water Displacing" or something along those lines. So if you just washed your bike, WD-40 is a natural choice to "displace" the water that's on your chain. Whatever you do, don't leave it wet. Your chain will start rusting in a couple of hours.
18. Wipe off the rest of your bike, leave it to dry.
This should take you, after the first few times, perhaps 30 minutes or less. On cold wet days I do a rough job and get it done in 10 minutes. On a hot summer day with no bugs outside and cold water in the buckets, I'll dwaddle for an hour making sure the bike is spotless.
There are variations of course. Instead of a rinse bucket you could have a hose. At my former house I ran a hose from our basement sink - hot water makes for cleaning your bike in the cold not as unpleasant as it might be. If your bike is more dusty than anything else, the full blown wash probably isn't necessary, and if it was clean before the ride, it'll take very little time to do since your drivetrain cleaning will be sort of done already.
Anyway, I did this at the end of my ride today so my bike is ready to go tomorrow. My "I only have one" things like booties are washed and about to be dried.
Tomorrow I'll be on a fresh bike, with fresh gear, even if it's only a few hundred yards before I go through a puddle.
However, today we hit 52 (allegedly). Tomorrow is forecast to hit 60, and then we're supposed to have a 55 degree day and a 48 degree day.
Sounds like Florida to me!
Actually, Gainesville was colder in the morning the second last time we went there - high 20s to low 30s.
Anyway, I started off my mini big session with a ride into Massachusetts. It's a loop I've done before but I suffered like a dog the last time I did it. Today was a bit better. I wasn't out to break records and in fact I never did a sprint. But I managed to make it over the hill on Route 57 in reasonable shape and I never really faltered throughout the ride, a good sign.
Massachusetts has one consistent road feature I don't enjoy - a non existent shoulder on main roads. In some places the white line actually falls away because the pavement under it is gone. And instead of putting dirt or something obviously "not road" next to the road, Massachusetts put gravel. So it's driveable for a car but dangerous for a cyclist. A bit of my riding is done on such roads and it's definitely disconcerting. I end up riding through a lot of sand, through puddles, and get the bike pretty messy, all because I have no road to work with. I feel much more relaxed when I get back into Connecticut.
A disconcerting thing happened on one climb - in my lower gears (39x25 and 23), my chain made grinding noises. Dirt had gotten onto the cogs and were doing their best to prematurely wear out my drivetrain. So I tried to avoid those gears. I thought about rinsing them off with water but I didn't have any stop points and I didn't want to risk running out of water.
Chain grinding aside, I added on a loop of about 16 or 17 miles, my standard "Quarry Road Loop" as I've come to call it. On a fast day it takes me about 52 minutes to complete, an average day is about 55 minutes (all this at a not very intense pace). On my mountain bike it takes 57-60 minutes just for comparison sake. Today, after 2.5 hours of riding through the surprisingly cold hills of Massachusetts, the loop took about 54 minutes. Not a fast loop, but not a slow one. I felt reasonable, no cramps, no agonizingly aching back, and my legs were totally fine except they'd fatigue pretty quickly on short hills.
After I got back from the ride I cleaned my bike. Since there are at some points about two feet of snow on the sides of the road (Massachusetts, when I look past the non existent shoulder) and the temps were way above melting, most of the roads were damp with snow run off. My bike was appropriately plastered with mud, sand, dirt, and bits and pieces of yet-to-be-decomposed leaves and twigs.
Since I was already sort of a mess, I got two buckets of water (one with soapy water), my cleaning kit, and went at it. I read about Moreno Argentin when he came to the US for the World Championships in Colorado. He rode with some journalist types and the thing that got them was that no matter what the weather, he always showed up with a clean bike.
Mind you it rained every day out there, and many of the rides set off with wet stuff falling from the sky. When you ride in rain the chain gets gunky, the brake pads bleed blackness everywhere, and the bike becomes a general mess.
Yet each day Argentin showed up with a bike that could have come off a showroom floor.
The kicker was that he was doing the work, not a team mechanic. It was him cleaning the brake stuff off, him cleaning the chain, him wiping everything down.
When I told this story to the guys at the store, we pledged to treat our bikes the same way. We'd go for a ride, return, and detail our bikes, sometimes for hours. Back then it seemed that bikes were it, but without a nice big shop in which to detail your bike and without a couple friends doing the same thing, it's not as much fun detailing the bike. I have a more efficient way of doing this now.
Detailing Your Bike in 30 Minutes or Less.
A couple caveats. First, the bike has to have been kept somewhat clean prior to this "detail". In other words, you don't let more than a week or two of riding go by without performing this detail work (don't count riding indoors as riding time). Second, if you ever ride in the wet, the bike gets detailed. Third, you have all the gear you need.
Ingredients:
- Bike, a bit dirty but not filthy.
- Two 5 gallon buckets, one filled 2/3 with soapy water (use car wash, not dish detergent), one filled 2/3 with rinsing water (both warm if it's winter, cold if it's summer).
- Gear brush (I have a Park and a Pedros and I use whichever I find first)
- Car wash sponge thing, leave in the soapy water
- Water bottle you don't use for drinking or peeing, leave in the rinse water.
- Simple Green degreaser or some other biodegradeable stuff.
First find a place where you can wash your bike. Usually the street is good, somewhere so the waste water can go somewhere other than the grass or into a big puddle. Don't get too close to a sewer grate since bits and pieces get sucked in there like it's a black hole.
Next, lug your stuff there.
Steps:
1. Spray Simple Green (on "Spray", not "Stream") on the chain, chainrings, and cassette. Let it soak a bit.
2. Get a bottle of rinse/plain water and squirt it at the sand/mud on the stays, brakes, fork. The idea is to get the heavy stuff off, not make it clean.
3. Grab the car sponge thing, make sure it's nice and heavy with soapy water, and run it over your bike, top down. So run it over your top tube (maybe your saddle), down tube, stem and sides of head tube, seat tube, seat stays, forks. Rinse the sponge thing and, with a new load of soapy water, run the sponge around the outside of the wheels/tires (rims, tires, outer ends of spokes). Don't let it touch the chain area for now, we're just trying to get the bike clean enough that mud and dirt don't fall into the chain while your cleaning the chain. At the same time we don't want your sponge thing to get greasy.
4. Put the bike in the big ring, small cog. Re-spray the chain, chainring, and cassette with Simple Green.
5. Use the gear brush and brush across the chain on the chainring. Brush towards the bottom bracket, do a pair of links at a time. The chainring holds the chain in place so you can use a lot of force to brush away grit, grease, etc. Spray Simple Green every now and then and you'll see when it starts getting clean under the black mess you're making. Move to the next pair.
6. When you get to a clean pair, you've done a lap. Only two more laps to go. The next lap you're going to do the middle of the chain. Don't focus on the rollers. Instead focus on the inside of the plates, especially the outer plates. Black gunk builds up there and if you don't get it out, the first pedal stroke or two will make your pristine cassette filthy. A couple more pedal strokes and your chainrings will resemble your cassette. So go through, jam the brushes in the middle, get the stuff out of there.
7. When you get to a clean middle bit of the chain, you've done your lap. Time for a break. Use the water bottle and squirt rinse water on the chain. Looks nice, right? It does but it's not clean yet.
8. We're going to leave the third lap for later. Now the teeth. First the chainrings. Since the chain is on the big ring, do the little one first. Clean the valleys of the teeth, where the rollers hit, because that's dirty. Also do the sides and the little ridge where the teeth become the ring. Don't forget to hit the bit between the big and little ring, and don't forget behind the crankarm.
9. Do the big ring next, hit it where the teeth point to the rear hub since the chain doesn't ride there. Get the valleys of the teeth and the ridge on the outside. Remember to spray more Simple Green every now and then.
10. Now do the cassette. I just hold the bike up with one hand and brush with the other. I brush parallel to the chain, on the top of the cassette. The brush going backwards rotates the cassette, the brush going forwards cleans. Scrub away. When I get tired of that, I also scrub down across all the teeth - this gets the valleys of the cassette cogs clean. While you're doing the cassette hit the derailleur pulleys. The upper one is a pain.
11. Rinse again. Now it'll look really nice. And it's still filthy. Turn the bike around so you're looking at the left (non-drive) side. The chain and rings are filthy. Gross. Do a third lap of the chain, scrubbing it while it sits on the big ring. Clean the insides of the chainrings too. Spray more Simple Green.
12. Now rinse again. Now you're talking. Stand up, stretch your back.
13. Take the front and rear wheels out, lean them against your buckets. Put the bike down very gently, fork tips and brake levers on the ground, lean against something secure.
14. Take the front wheel and go around it with the soapy sponge thing. Wipe down the spokes (easier than polishing them individually), wipe down the rim sides and tires. Jam the sponge inside the spokes and wash the hub center. Rotate and repeat - should take 3 or 4 scrubs to do the hub. The rim should be very clean looking. Rinse with the waterbottle.
15. Take the rear wheel. Spray some Simple Green on the cassette, clean whatever you missed. Use the sponge thing and wash the tire, rim, spokes, hub. Rinse.
16. Get bike, spray derailleur pulleys with Simple Green. They are the dirtiest part of the drivetrain, guaranteed. Scrub with brush, rinse, repeat until they look clean. You may learn something about the pulleys like, "Hey, look! The pulleys have writing on them!" Also get the pulley cages, they are the second dirtiest part of your drivetrain.
17. Reassemble your bike. Pick it up and take it to a clean place with no sand on the floor. Get some WD40 or your favorite lube and put some on the chain (on the bottom chain between the derailleur and the crank, and only put lube on the top, i.e. the contact area). Wipe off the chain by turning crank backwards while holding dirty rag to chain.
Note: "WD" of WD-40 means "Water Displacing" or something along those lines. So if you just washed your bike, WD-40 is a natural choice to "displace" the water that's on your chain. Whatever you do, don't leave it wet. Your chain will start rusting in a couple of hours.
18. Wipe off the rest of your bike, leave it to dry.
This should take you, after the first few times, perhaps 30 minutes or less. On cold wet days I do a rough job and get it done in 10 minutes. On a hot summer day with no bugs outside and cold water in the buckets, I'll dwaddle for an hour making sure the bike is spotless.
There are variations of course. Instead of a rinse bucket you could have a hose. At my former house I ran a hose from our basement sink - hot water makes for cleaning your bike in the cold not as unpleasant as it might be. If your bike is more dusty than anything else, the full blown wash probably isn't necessary, and if it was clean before the ride, it'll take very little time to do since your drivetrain cleaning will be sort of done already.
Anyway, I did this at the end of my ride today so my bike is ready to go tomorrow. My "I only have one" things like booties are washed and about to be dried.
Tomorrow I'll be on a fresh bike, with fresh gear, even if it's only a few hundred yards before I go through a puddle.
Life - Wedding Pictures
So some select wedding pictures are up. The slide show is from the 2007 Nutmeg State Games and has a lot of familiar faces in the "racing shots". So take a look and see if you're there. The helmet cam clip is by far the most detailed and longest clip I've put together - I had to get it to fit inside of YouTube's 10 minute limit.
The pictures don't show me sitting in the driver's seat of the (then future-) missus's Honda, my bike on the roof rack, me wearing just the pants, shirt, shoes, and socks, AC on (not that you could tell), waiting for the rest of my family to arrive. They were bringing the jacket, vest, tie, and other things which I forgot at the house. Various friends gathered around and hung out since, well, if the groom wasn't going in, then they weren't either.
Of course a few took the opportunity to point out that only I "would bring his bike to his wedding."
At least we didn't ride away on the tandem.
The pictures don't show me sitting in the driver's seat of the (then future-) missus's Honda, my bike on the roof rack, me wearing just the pants, shirt, shoes, and socks, AC on (not that you could tell), waiting for the rest of my family to arrive. They were bringing the jacket, vest, tie, and other things which I forgot at the house. Various friends gathered around and hung out since, well, if the groom wasn't going in, then they weren't either.
Of course a few took the opportunity to point out that only I "would bring his bike to his wedding."
At least we didn't ride away on the tandem.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Story - JRA putzes
I was reading spinopsys and saw the post on JRA ("Just Riding Along"). JRA is the bane of customer service oriented bike shops. You know those shops that want all their customers to be happy? At some point the customer is flat wrong and doesn't deserve whatever they're asking for from the shop or manufacturer.
I call those JRA people "putzes" or "bozos". They do not understand certain things, whether it's social etiquette, rules, perhaps responsibility. I had a moment of realization when I observed some kids playing - they simply don't understand certain things and so they'll do some things that you'd expect only a kid would do. A putz/bozo acts similarly. Hopefully the kids will develop some of the subtleties of social interaction after a bit of time and learning. So you have to be patient, explain to them how things are, and sometimes you have to be firm with them.
A few stories come to mind.
First, a long time ago a guy came in the shop with a Specialized mountain bike. This is back when they went to thinwall, oversize steel tubes with plug-type dropouts. No suspension forks at the Rockhopper level.
His fork was bent *forward* at an aggressive angle. He claimed it was a JRA incident and asked for a warranty replacement fork. We figured he landed off a jump way too hard and "chopperized" his fork. He wouldn't budge from his story though and we had no proof.
Specialized, to their credit, declined to warranty the fork. (I agree - cracks are warranty issues, bends are not.) We didn't push Specialized (we could have) as we felt the guy broke his own bike. A judgement call on our part I suppose. We didn't believe this guy, he was smirking the whole time he discussed this with us, so we never went to bat for him.
Specialized did offer to sell him a "scratch 'n dent" fork for $30 or something like that. That was a lot less than the $150 or so for a new one so he took it. The fork was in great shape so everyone got what they wanted.
To the customer's credit, he willingly paid for the labor to install it and came to pick up the bike. I talked to him at that time. "Look, you're getting your bike, you got a fork with a little scratch, and your bike works. Tell me what really happened."
He made me confirm that we couldn't charge him if he changed his story. I told him that we couldn't as he already paid and received his bike. In effect he was already gone. He smiled and admitted the truth.
"I was trying to jump down a flight of stairs and messed up."
Second:
Everyone knows that some guy was riding his bike with his QR not done right, the front wheel fell off, the guy lost a lot of teeth, sued the bike company, and won. This led to various iterations of the "Lawyer tabs", the fork dropout raised edges that prevent a wheel from popping off if the skewer is undone (intentionally or not). Most racers file the nibs down so that in a race situation, they can get a wheel change in 10 or so seconds.
Before the lawyer tabs there were some pretty terrible inventions. The worst were the metal tabs found on Schwinns for a while. The clipped into fork-mounted screws and held the wheel prisoner till you firmly unlatched the two latches to release the wheel. It required different axle nuts, a differently brazed fork, and were impossible to remove reasonably quickly.
Most shops (and riders) cursed this unknown guy with the new teeth that caused all these problems. They cursed the fact that this guy turned John Howard into an expert witness who testified that quick release skewers loosen up over time on their own. And they cursed him every time the wheel hung up on whatever safety device was on the bike.
Well, that guy with the new teeth was my boss for 7 months.
Yep. No one liked him - he was pompous, ineffective, and didn't have a real bone in his body. He is what I call a putz or a bozo. He's so clueless he doesn't even know what he doesn't know. I could go on and on so I'll do so in a different post.
After a month or two of his big fake grins (meaning the feeling behind the grin, not the fake teeth themselves), he learned I was a "biker". He came over to my desk and asked if I knew about the things that keep front wheels on. I replied to the affirmative. He then proudly told me that he was responsible for singlehandedly changing the bike industry since his lawsuit forced bike companies to have some kind of wheel retention system on all their quick-release equipped bikes.
He was a football coach for a high school team and rode his bike "all the time". (This was to imply he knew how quick releases work, which he didn't). One day he rode to school, then to practice, and when he left the field house after practice, his front wheel simply fell out. What I suspect happened (my opinion, no proof) is that his not-as-clueless football players played a little trick on him and just loosened his QR. If you ever met this guy, you'd understand. His total lack of substance just screams "play a joke on me". Even I'm saying it and I don't condone jokes like that.
Anyway, he said as he rode off the curb the front wheel came out and he face planted into the pavement. He lost a lot of teeth and sued the shop and the bike company (I think the victim was Raleigh). And he won a lot of money. It bought him some teeth, paid for his house, and got him some other stuff I forget.
Third:
A "tough guy", a former Marine (not to insult Marines in general, this guy probably shouldn't have been one), and a wannabe racer, Mr Unnamed bought a nice, mid-upper-range Bridgestone mountain bike. Great bike, great value, great performance, one of our favorites at the time.
When he picked up the bike he went with the guys on an urban ride - you know the kind, where you cruise down the sidewalks, get air off the little lips for wheelchairs, try and out-wheelie the other guy, things like that. The guys left the shop and rode over a couple-feet-high mound of snow piled up on the corner of the parking lot. Mr Unnamed sprinted at the mound of snow and basically t-boned it. No front wheel lift, no attempt to unweight the front, etc. He bent the fork backwards and bent the top and down tubes. The brand new bike was trashed.
He claimed it was defective, that it should have survived the impact. He pointed to the other bikes that made it. He never realized that he simply didn't know how to ride the bike.
At some point we thought he was a friendly guy, responsible (hey, he's a Marine), respectable, etc., but he got downright nasty about the bike and threatened to sue the shop. Bridgestone broke down and gave him a new frame and fork (probably one of the reasons they went out of business). He could never admit he broke the bike himself.
I saw him now and then afterwards and he was one of those guys who never got a clue on racing, group riding, technique, etc. He always insisted on doing things his own way and it showed. Since he wasn't smart enough to learn everything riders have learned over the last 80 or so years of current bicycling, he was always a few (or more) steps behind. He always had some new "training program" he was following, with specific workouts, a detailed schedule, etc. The problem was that he never bothered learning about riding in general.
I suppose that as long as there are people around there will be fully functional adults who simply "don't get it". The extreme end of the bell curve folks. The putzes, the bozos. And yes, I did mention something about observing kids who were acting in a similar non-societal way.
The difference between those bozos and the aforementioned kids?
The kids were 1 and 3 years old. Mr. Stairjumper was a college student in his 20s, Mr. Teeth was a manager in a prestigious IT firm in his 30s, and Mr. Unnamed (I don't know what he did for a living) was in his 30s in these stories.
I call those JRA people "putzes" or "bozos". They do not understand certain things, whether it's social etiquette, rules, perhaps responsibility. I had a moment of realization when I observed some kids playing - they simply don't understand certain things and so they'll do some things that you'd expect only a kid would do. A putz/bozo acts similarly. Hopefully the kids will develop some of the subtleties of social interaction after a bit of time and learning. So you have to be patient, explain to them how things are, and sometimes you have to be firm with them.
A few stories come to mind.
First, a long time ago a guy came in the shop with a Specialized mountain bike. This is back when they went to thinwall, oversize steel tubes with plug-type dropouts. No suspension forks at the Rockhopper level.
His fork was bent *forward* at an aggressive angle. He claimed it was a JRA incident and asked for a warranty replacement fork. We figured he landed off a jump way too hard and "chopperized" his fork. He wouldn't budge from his story though and we had no proof.
Specialized, to their credit, declined to warranty the fork. (I agree - cracks are warranty issues, bends are not.) We didn't push Specialized (we could have) as we felt the guy broke his own bike. A judgement call on our part I suppose. We didn't believe this guy, he was smirking the whole time he discussed this with us, so we never went to bat for him.
Specialized did offer to sell him a "scratch 'n dent" fork for $30 or something like that. That was a lot less than the $150 or so for a new one so he took it. The fork was in great shape so everyone got what they wanted.
To the customer's credit, he willingly paid for the labor to install it and came to pick up the bike. I talked to him at that time. "Look, you're getting your bike, you got a fork with a little scratch, and your bike works. Tell me what really happened."
He made me confirm that we couldn't charge him if he changed his story. I told him that we couldn't as he already paid and received his bike. In effect he was already gone. He smiled and admitted the truth.
"I was trying to jump down a flight of stairs and messed up."
Second:
Everyone knows that some guy was riding his bike with his QR not done right, the front wheel fell off, the guy lost a lot of teeth, sued the bike company, and won. This led to various iterations of the "Lawyer tabs", the fork dropout raised edges that prevent a wheel from popping off if the skewer is undone (intentionally or not). Most racers file the nibs down so that in a race situation, they can get a wheel change in 10 or so seconds.
Before the lawyer tabs there were some pretty terrible inventions. The worst were the metal tabs found on Schwinns for a while. The clipped into fork-mounted screws and held the wheel prisoner till you firmly unlatched the two latches to release the wheel. It required different axle nuts, a differently brazed fork, and were impossible to remove reasonably quickly.
Most shops (and riders) cursed this unknown guy with the new teeth that caused all these problems. They cursed the fact that this guy turned John Howard into an expert witness who testified that quick release skewers loosen up over time on their own. And they cursed him every time the wheel hung up on whatever safety device was on the bike.
Well, that guy with the new teeth was my boss for 7 months.
Yep. No one liked him - he was pompous, ineffective, and didn't have a real bone in his body. He is what I call a putz or a bozo. He's so clueless he doesn't even know what he doesn't know. I could go on and on so I'll do so in a different post.
After a month or two of his big fake grins (meaning the feeling behind the grin, not the fake teeth themselves), he learned I was a "biker". He came over to my desk and asked if I knew about the things that keep front wheels on. I replied to the affirmative. He then proudly told me that he was responsible for singlehandedly changing the bike industry since his lawsuit forced bike companies to have some kind of wheel retention system on all their quick-release equipped bikes.
He was a football coach for a high school team and rode his bike "all the time". (This was to imply he knew how quick releases work, which he didn't). One day he rode to school, then to practice, and when he left the field house after practice, his front wheel simply fell out. What I suspect happened (my opinion, no proof) is that his not-as-clueless football players played a little trick on him and just loosened his QR. If you ever met this guy, you'd understand. His total lack of substance just screams "play a joke on me". Even I'm saying it and I don't condone jokes like that.
Anyway, he said as he rode off the curb the front wheel came out and he face planted into the pavement. He lost a lot of teeth and sued the shop and the bike company (I think the victim was Raleigh). And he won a lot of money. It bought him some teeth, paid for his house, and got him some other stuff I forget.
Third:
A "tough guy", a former Marine (not to insult Marines in general, this guy probably shouldn't have been one), and a wannabe racer, Mr Unnamed bought a nice, mid-upper-range Bridgestone mountain bike. Great bike, great value, great performance, one of our favorites at the time.
When he picked up the bike he went with the guys on an urban ride - you know the kind, where you cruise down the sidewalks, get air off the little lips for wheelchairs, try and out-wheelie the other guy, things like that. The guys left the shop and rode over a couple-feet-high mound of snow piled up on the corner of the parking lot. Mr Unnamed sprinted at the mound of snow and basically t-boned it. No front wheel lift, no attempt to unweight the front, etc. He bent the fork backwards and bent the top and down tubes. The brand new bike was trashed.
He claimed it was defective, that it should have survived the impact. He pointed to the other bikes that made it. He never realized that he simply didn't know how to ride the bike.
At some point we thought he was a friendly guy, responsible (hey, he's a Marine), respectable, etc., but he got downright nasty about the bike and threatened to sue the shop. Bridgestone broke down and gave him a new frame and fork (probably one of the reasons they went out of business). He could never admit he broke the bike himself.
I saw him now and then afterwards and he was one of those guys who never got a clue on racing, group riding, technique, etc. He always insisted on doing things his own way and it showed. Since he wasn't smart enough to learn everything riders have learned over the last 80 or so years of current bicycling, he was always a few (or more) steps behind. He always had some new "training program" he was following, with specific workouts, a detailed schedule, etc. The problem was that he never bothered learning about riding in general.
I suppose that as long as there are people around there will be fully functional adults who simply "don't get it". The extreme end of the bell curve folks. The putzes, the bozos. And yes, I did mention something about observing kids who were acting in a similar non-societal way.
The difference between those bozos and the aforementioned kids?
The kids were 1 and 3 years old. Mr. Stairjumper was a college student in his 20s, Mr. Teeth was a manager in a prestigious IT firm in his 30s, and Mr. Unnamed (I don't know what he did for a living) was in his 30s in these stories.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Story - "You!"
Karma has a weird way of working.
I try and do things the right way. There are times when I am not technically right - like when I drive a bit faster than the speed limit on the highway, for example. Or the year I drove without car insurance because, well, I didn't have the money to pay for it. The car wasn't registered either, and there were a host of other things I couldn't afford to do that, in reality, ought to have gotten done. But I made some (risky) choices and it worked out.
I figure that if I was using the money that should have been paying for the registration to buy alcohol or drugs then things wouldn't have worked out. But I was trying to survive, pay the bills, eat somewhat regularly, and stay alive.
So the karma thing worked out.
When I sold bikes, I was honest, perhaps too honest. The only way a shop learns about the products it sells is to really, well, sell the product. Then you see what fails, what wears out, and what really ought to be updated. At the shop we'd see things that fail and either stop carrying the particular model or, in some unusual cases, carry the model but make a change to every single bike we sold so that the iffy part was replaced before the customer bought the bike.
For many consumers, a less expensive headset or hubset really doesn't matter. The hub will last for a couple thousand miles with no problems and many bikes never see that mileage.
In fact, a common statistic I saw regarding department store bikes was that they were designed for 25 miles of riding. Most of them were not ridden any more than that. If you're only riding a bike 25 miles before tossing it, then suddenly the bike's design needs change.
Grease? For 25 miles? You've got to be kidding. So the bearings, well, they'll be fine for 25 miles without any lube.
Round bearing races? Again, for 25 miles? C'mon, let's get real. Anything that doesn't bind will be fine for the 3 or 4 hours it'll take to pedal 25 miles, so if the hub isn't rattling around, consider it done.
Of course this goes for other things like handlebars. A tongue in cheek review of an H brand "mountain" bike stated that after 5 minutes, you just flip the straight bar around so you can bend it back down into place.
Department store bikes typically had the sorriest excuse for a dropout ever - the tubing would be squished flat and a slot cut into it. Tighten the axle nuts appropriately and the tubing-dropouts would bend, curling around the ends of the axle.
For 25 miles, that's fine.
On the other hand, if you want to ride more than 25 miles, such a bike is sadly deficient.
This is where a bike shop bike comes into play. They have things like handlebars that don't bend under normal or even somewhat extreme use. So you don't have to flip the bars every five minutes to bend them back into their original shape.
Their bearing races are round... well, at least from Ultegra on up for Shimano, or maybe Veloce on up for Campy. The races are hardened steel with machined races, not the soft steel that is left unfinished so the bearings can "machine" the races for themselves. And the matching cones are also machined high quality steel. Nowadays many of the bearings are precision sealed cartridges, easier to service but not quite as ideal for load bearing purposes.
Dropouts are solid material, steel or aluminum for the normal bikes, carbon fiber for the light ones. Tighten an axle nut (or more likely, the quick release skewer) and the dropouts resist any crushing forces, allowing the axle to be securely fastened.
What about less serious bikes, like maybe a kid's bike?
You ask a parent if they think their kid's bike isn't serious when the kid is zipping down a hill towards a road that might or might not have cars on it. At that point, a kid's bike suddenly becomes a very serious piece of machinery.
Bike shop kid's bike cost as much as four or five times that of a department store bike. So what do you get for it.
Well, let's go over what isn't any different. The paint and the decals. The department store bikes use very high quality paint because, frankly, it looks great. But after that it goes down hill.
Bike shop kid's bikes use size appropriate crankarms. So the 12" wheel bike has cranks for a 3 or 4 year old, the 16" for a 4 to 6 year old, etc. A department store bike saves money by using the same crank for a bunch of different wheel size bikes. So the poor 3 year old will be making huge slo-mo circles with the same size cranks as their 10 year old elder making tiny circles on their 20" wheel bike.
Bike shop kid's bikes also use stronger frames (some, even the little ones, are aluminum!), stronger wheels, and much better quality bars, stem, seat.
Even the training wheels make a difference. Most shops use the very durable Wald training wheels, while department store bikes have whatever cheapest stamped steel training wheel.
Okay, I'll admit the seatposts don't vary too much.
When I sold bikes, I was proud of the bikes I sold, and that went right down to the kid's bikes. In fact, the kid's bikes were always pretty easy to sell. Pointing out differences was pretty straight forward, especially if we had a department store bike on hand. We typically did as people would show up to get their kid's department store bike fixed and then ask us to toss it when we pointed out what we needed to do to fix it.
That bike would become our latest "department store bike sample".
Parents love their kids and when they'd learn the differences between a shop bike and a department store bike, they'd buy the shop bikes. We even told them to buy it from a different shop if we didn't have them in stock because, well, it just seemed wrong to let someone buy such a poor piece of machinery for their kid.
It's the way things ought to be, at least that's how I saw it.
As a shop guy I never really thought of going out in the real world and seeing my customers. I spent virtually my entire existence either working in the shop, riding the bike, or at either my own place or a friend's place.
So when I went out for a special dinner one night, we chose a small Italian place by the water, run by a former colleague of my dad's.
We could see the small place was packed, but we were okay with waiting for a table and so we walked into the doors. We stood by the "Please wait to be seated" sign, looking at all the tables in the restaurant. No booths separated any of them so we could see every patron in the restaurant.
Suddenly, a man in the middle of the restaurant stood up. He looked at me in an indecipherable way. Then he pointed at me.
"YOU!!!" he screamed, his finger trembling.
The restaurant fell quiet, everyone looking at him, at me, and then trying to figure out what I'd done to the guy. They all turned back to look at him since I was standing there with my mouth half open and he seemed more inclined to keep talking.
"You sold me my daughter's bike!"
All faces snapped to my direction.
Oh no, I thought. She died on it. She's paralyzed. Maybe half paralyzed. Maybe I'm lucky and she only broke something like a thigh or arm. Why couldn't I have sold fax paper. No one dies from fax paper. But no, I had to sell bikes, bikes that let kids ride into streets away from irresponsible parents who then blame the guy who sold them the bike for their kid's problems.
Judging from everyone's expectant faces, they were thinking along the same lines.
The man's face broke out into a big smile.
"She LOVES her bike! She can't stop riding it!"
The tension broke. You could feel the collective sigh of breath from the whole restaurant. I almost collapsed but managed a weak smile.
"I'm glad she likes it," I croaked.
The smiling man looked around the restaurant.
"If any of you need a bike, talk to this guy," he announced firmly. Then, in case someone didn't catch it the first time, he added, "He sold me my daughter's bike."
People started eating again. No shoot outs tonight, no fisticuffs. Just a happy dad with his family, and a very relieved bike shop guy.
Karma, like I said, has a weird way of working.
I try and do things the right way. There are times when I am not technically right - like when I drive a bit faster than the speed limit on the highway, for example. Or the year I drove without car insurance because, well, I didn't have the money to pay for it. The car wasn't registered either, and there were a host of other things I couldn't afford to do that, in reality, ought to have gotten done. But I made some (risky) choices and it worked out.
I figure that if I was using the money that should have been paying for the registration to buy alcohol or drugs then things wouldn't have worked out. But I was trying to survive, pay the bills, eat somewhat regularly, and stay alive.
So the karma thing worked out.
When I sold bikes, I was honest, perhaps too honest. The only way a shop learns about the products it sells is to really, well, sell the product. Then you see what fails, what wears out, and what really ought to be updated. At the shop we'd see things that fail and either stop carrying the particular model or, in some unusual cases, carry the model but make a change to every single bike we sold so that the iffy part was replaced before the customer bought the bike.
For many consumers, a less expensive headset or hubset really doesn't matter. The hub will last for a couple thousand miles with no problems and many bikes never see that mileage.
In fact, a common statistic I saw regarding department store bikes was that they were designed for 25 miles of riding. Most of them were not ridden any more than that. If you're only riding a bike 25 miles before tossing it, then suddenly the bike's design needs change.
Grease? For 25 miles? You've got to be kidding. So the bearings, well, they'll be fine for 25 miles without any lube.
Round bearing races? Again, for 25 miles? C'mon, let's get real. Anything that doesn't bind will be fine for the 3 or 4 hours it'll take to pedal 25 miles, so if the hub isn't rattling around, consider it done.
Of course this goes for other things like handlebars. A tongue in cheek review of an H brand "mountain" bike stated that after 5 minutes, you just flip the straight bar around so you can bend it back down into place.
Department store bikes typically had the sorriest excuse for a dropout ever - the tubing would be squished flat and a slot cut into it. Tighten the axle nuts appropriately and the tubing-dropouts would bend, curling around the ends of the axle.
For 25 miles, that's fine.
On the other hand, if you want to ride more than 25 miles, such a bike is sadly deficient.
This is where a bike shop bike comes into play. They have things like handlebars that don't bend under normal or even somewhat extreme use. So you don't have to flip the bars every five minutes to bend them back into their original shape.
Their bearing races are round... well, at least from Ultegra on up for Shimano, or maybe Veloce on up for Campy. The races are hardened steel with machined races, not the soft steel that is left unfinished so the bearings can "machine" the races for themselves. And the matching cones are also machined high quality steel. Nowadays many of the bearings are precision sealed cartridges, easier to service but not quite as ideal for load bearing purposes.
Dropouts are solid material, steel or aluminum for the normal bikes, carbon fiber for the light ones. Tighten an axle nut (or more likely, the quick release skewer) and the dropouts resist any crushing forces, allowing the axle to be securely fastened.
What about less serious bikes, like maybe a kid's bike?
You ask a parent if they think their kid's bike isn't serious when the kid is zipping down a hill towards a road that might or might not have cars on it. At that point, a kid's bike suddenly becomes a very serious piece of machinery.
Bike shop kid's bike cost as much as four or five times that of a department store bike. So what do you get for it.
Well, let's go over what isn't any different. The paint and the decals. The department store bikes use very high quality paint because, frankly, it looks great. But after that it goes down hill.
Bike shop kid's bikes use size appropriate crankarms. So the 12" wheel bike has cranks for a 3 or 4 year old, the 16" for a 4 to 6 year old, etc. A department store bike saves money by using the same crank for a bunch of different wheel size bikes. So the poor 3 year old will be making huge slo-mo circles with the same size cranks as their 10 year old elder making tiny circles on their 20" wheel bike.
Bike shop kid's bikes also use stronger frames (some, even the little ones, are aluminum!), stronger wheels, and much better quality bars, stem, seat.
Even the training wheels make a difference. Most shops use the very durable Wald training wheels, while department store bikes have whatever cheapest stamped steel training wheel.
Okay, I'll admit the seatposts don't vary too much.
When I sold bikes, I was proud of the bikes I sold, and that went right down to the kid's bikes. In fact, the kid's bikes were always pretty easy to sell. Pointing out differences was pretty straight forward, especially if we had a department store bike on hand. We typically did as people would show up to get their kid's department store bike fixed and then ask us to toss it when we pointed out what we needed to do to fix it.
That bike would become our latest "department store bike sample".
Parents love their kids and when they'd learn the differences between a shop bike and a department store bike, they'd buy the shop bikes. We even told them to buy it from a different shop if we didn't have them in stock because, well, it just seemed wrong to let someone buy such a poor piece of machinery for their kid.
It's the way things ought to be, at least that's how I saw it.
As a shop guy I never really thought of going out in the real world and seeing my customers. I spent virtually my entire existence either working in the shop, riding the bike, or at either my own place or a friend's place.
So when I went out for a special dinner one night, we chose a small Italian place by the water, run by a former colleague of my dad's.
We could see the small place was packed, but we were okay with waiting for a table and so we walked into the doors. We stood by the "Please wait to be seated" sign, looking at all the tables in the restaurant. No booths separated any of them so we could see every patron in the restaurant.
Suddenly, a man in the middle of the restaurant stood up. He looked at me in an indecipherable way. Then he pointed at me.
"YOU!!!" he screamed, his finger trembling.
The restaurant fell quiet, everyone looking at him, at me, and then trying to figure out what I'd done to the guy. They all turned back to look at him since I was standing there with my mouth half open and he seemed more inclined to keep talking.
"You sold me my daughter's bike!"
All faces snapped to my direction.
Oh no, I thought. She died on it. She's paralyzed. Maybe half paralyzed. Maybe I'm lucky and she only broke something like a thigh or arm. Why couldn't I have sold fax paper. No one dies from fax paper. But no, I had to sell bikes, bikes that let kids ride into streets away from irresponsible parents who then blame the guy who sold them the bike for their kid's problems.
Judging from everyone's expectant faces, they were thinking along the same lines.
The man's face broke out into a big smile.
"She LOVES her bike! She can't stop riding it!"
The tension broke. You could feel the collective sigh of breath from the whole restaurant. I almost collapsed but managed a weak smile.
"I'm glad she likes it," I croaked.
The smiling man looked around the restaurant.
"If any of you need a bike, talk to this guy," he announced firmly. Then, in case someone didn't catch it the first time, he added, "He sold me my daughter's bike."
People started eating again. No shoot outs tonight, no fisticuffs. Just a happy dad with his family, and a very relieved bike shop guy.
Karma, like I said, has a weird way of working.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Race Promotion - Use the Porta Potties and Other Obstacles
I took the second step towards holding the Bethel Spring Series in 2008, the first step of the year (the first step was to write the town of Bethel, and the first and a half step was to call Bethel Cycle who confirmed they'll be on board for some prizes). Really pretty straight forward - I simply put up a dead end entry page with the tentative dates. Technically, until we have our permits, we cannot advertise races, including receiving entry monies, sending out flyers, etc. We do get a lot of inquiries on exactly when the races will start so this is the first step to address the minor flood of incoming mail. The USA Cycling (USCF is legally dead) permit process is decent (people wise) but not rapid (form availaiblity, process, etc) so we typically have our permits in February. Until then, no bikereg, no prereg, etc.
Like all projects, each Series presents its own unique challenges. As you drill down in the various steps necessary to launch such a Series, some things get done easily while others end up taking up an inordinate amount of time. The hope is that we figure out the time consuming stuff and alot it sufficient energy before it surprises us and leaves us dead in the water.
For 2008 there are a couple new obstacles and one or two changes.
1. The deserted lot, used for playing catch with dogs, walking around kids in strollers, and where we always dumped all the sand, is now a completed lot with a building, parking lot, and little trees sprouting here and there. Our typical finish line set up was in the entry to this lot - it may be difficult to do the same thing for 2008. Have to figure something out.
2. It's snowed a lot here. Lots of sand to sweep.
3. I live about 1.5 hours away, not 35 minutes away. We also get a lot of snow up here. 11" here instead of 4" or 5" in the second last storm. And yesterday, we started in sleet halfway up the state and quickly drove into a moderate snow storm as we got further north. And the van doesn't enjoy snow or ice at all. We have to plan accordingly.
Related to this is the fact that we'll be picking up two of our full time helpers from UCONN each week and driving them to the area the day before each race. We valued them enough that we asked if they could help in 2008 even though they wouldn't be in the immediate area. They said yes so we'll be picking them up.
4. I decided to go to a "start time" format, one where start times are published. I expect some initial problems with the times being off but I hope in 2009 we'll have those handled. And for those of you traveling any sort of distance, the published start times are the earliest the race can start. They can be late, but they cannot be earlier.
Some of the standard obstacles:
1. There is a property owner/tenant who doesn't like us. Specifically he hates the idiots that pee on his building every single year. Thanks to those morons - idiots - selfish mofos - good for nothing bikers who pee anywhere they feel like - etc etc etc he's been opposed to the race series from the get go. Unfortunately we'd like to use his driveway to hold the start/finish thing. It would help with the finish line camera (sun behind the camera instead of in front of it), it's a U shaped drive with two outlets (not like the new building's driveway which has only one), and it's at the same spot as our "normal" finish line.
But since he thinks all cyclists go to Bethel to pee on his building, it'll be a tough sell.
Yeah, cyclists peeing in random public/private places really annoys me since I get to reap the benefits of having to deal with random public/private people over this. You do it at Bethel and you're out, no refund, no nice guy, no nothing. You deserve nothing, and I mean nothing, from a race promoter. Get out and stay out! Sell that frickin bike, shred your racing license, and do the rest of us a favor.
I wish I could set fines for such stupid acts - like the doping thing, racers would have to give up a year of salary if they pee in public. Okay, since a lot of bike racers are dirt poor, they have to give their bike stuff, their car, and whatever else they need to make up about $40k, about the average income in the area.
Phew. Now that I've made that clear. If I catch you peeing anywhere and I get livid you'll know why.
2. We want a Bethel police officer every day to marshal the first turn (the busy one). Maybe fine the public urinators if he gets a chance.
3. I always have ideas on how to improve the Sweep Day experience with better and more powerful tools, but I'm at a loss. It'll cost a few thousand dollars to make the next step. But, if anyone has a power broom (I'm talking 36" wide, horsepower measured in the teens or higher) and some way of vacuuming up sand/dirt, I'm all ears.
4. I also have ideas on improving the setup and breakdown of the race facilities - registration tent, generator, and finishline. I addressed one thing - no power if generator is shut off - by buying two small UPS units. Our printer and laptop will be okay for a few minutes if this happens.
5. Trophies. I have to decide what to give the Cat 5s since we can't give money weekly.
6. Portapotties. For those who use bathrooms to pee. Maybe an extra one for all the public urinators who now use the portapotties.
7. Official stuff - officials, permits, get set up on bikereg, etc.
8. Marshals - get some idea of who'll be working the races each week.
So this is the initial list.
I did forget one thing - actually racing the races. I think if the race took place on a hilly 10 mile loop with thousands of feet of elevation per lap that I'd have bowed out of promoting the thing a long time ago. But I love this race, I love this course because it offers everything to the racers. It's tactical but still allows strong racers to break away. It has a hill so climbers can really put the hurt on the rest of them, but it's short enough that a sprinter can get up it. It has wind so a TT guy can use his superior strength, but it also has wide, long stretches of road so a team can pull back such a TT guy. Some races end in field sprints, but often a break will win.
Because of this yin-yang thing, the race is always a possibility for me, it's always possible to dream of a good race. I hope I'm strong enough to get to the finish, and if I do, I hope I'm strong enough to be able to sprint. In 2007 I was the former but not the latter. This year I hope I'll be strong enough to sprint. So in this respect I am training with the goal of having a slight jump start in form. I rarely gain significant form after Bethel so it's a season focus for me, along with a few races mid summer to hold my training attention.
As far as the promotion bit, the stress starts to build in the late fall when the Series starts looming over my shoulders. I can usually chip away at all this stress a little at a time so that by the end of the Series I'm just a blob of happy Jello, relaxed and happy. That's my goal for this year.
And there's one way everyone can help out.
Please don't pee on anyone's property or buildings at Bethel.
It just stresses me out.
Like all projects, each Series presents its own unique challenges. As you drill down in the various steps necessary to launch such a Series, some things get done easily while others end up taking up an inordinate amount of time. The hope is that we figure out the time consuming stuff and alot it sufficient energy before it surprises us and leaves us dead in the water.
For 2008 there are a couple new obstacles and one or two changes.
1. The deserted lot, used for playing catch with dogs, walking around kids in strollers, and where we always dumped all the sand, is now a completed lot with a building, parking lot, and little trees sprouting here and there. Our typical finish line set up was in the entry to this lot - it may be difficult to do the same thing for 2008. Have to figure something out.
2. It's snowed a lot here. Lots of sand to sweep.
3. I live about 1.5 hours away, not 35 minutes away. We also get a lot of snow up here. 11" here instead of 4" or 5" in the second last storm. And yesterday, we started in sleet halfway up the state and quickly drove into a moderate snow storm as we got further north. And the van doesn't enjoy snow or ice at all. We have to plan accordingly.
Related to this is the fact that we'll be picking up two of our full time helpers from UCONN each week and driving them to the area the day before each race. We valued them enough that we asked if they could help in 2008 even though they wouldn't be in the immediate area. They said yes so we'll be picking them up.
4. I decided to go to a "start time" format, one where start times are published. I expect some initial problems with the times being off but I hope in 2009 we'll have those handled. And for those of you traveling any sort of distance, the published start times are the earliest the race can start. They can be late, but they cannot be earlier.
Some of the standard obstacles:
1. There is a property owner/tenant who doesn't like us. Specifically he hates the idiots that pee on his building every single year. Thanks to those morons - idiots - selfish mofos - good for nothing bikers who pee anywhere they feel like - etc etc etc he's been opposed to the race series from the get go. Unfortunately we'd like to use his driveway to hold the start/finish thing. It would help with the finish line camera (sun behind the camera instead of in front of it), it's a U shaped drive with two outlets (not like the new building's driveway which has only one), and it's at the same spot as our "normal" finish line.
But since he thinks all cyclists go to Bethel to pee on his building, it'll be a tough sell.
Yeah, cyclists peeing in random public/private places really annoys me since I get to reap the benefits of having to deal with random public/private people over this. You do it at Bethel and you're out, no refund, no nice guy, no nothing. You deserve nothing, and I mean nothing, from a race promoter. Get out and stay out! Sell that frickin bike, shred your racing license, and do the rest of us a favor.
I wish I could set fines for such stupid acts - like the doping thing, racers would have to give up a year of salary if they pee in public. Okay, since a lot of bike racers are dirt poor, they have to give their bike stuff, their car, and whatever else they need to make up about $40k, about the average income in the area.
Phew. Now that I've made that clear. If I catch you peeing anywhere and I get livid you'll know why.
2. We want a Bethel police officer every day to marshal the first turn (the busy one). Maybe fine the public urinators if he gets a chance.
3. I always have ideas on how to improve the Sweep Day experience with better and more powerful tools, but I'm at a loss. It'll cost a few thousand dollars to make the next step. But, if anyone has a power broom (I'm talking 36" wide, horsepower measured in the teens or higher) and some way of vacuuming up sand/dirt, I'm all ears.
4. I also have ideas on improving the setup and breakdown of the race facilities - registration tent, generator, and finishline. I addressed one thing - no power if generator is shut off - by buying two small UPS units. Our printer and laptop will be okay for a few minutes if this happens.
5. Trophies. I have to decide what to give the Cat 5s since we can't give money weekly.
6. Portapotties. For those who use bathrooms to pee. Maybe an extra one for all the public urinators who now use the portapotties.
7. Official stuff - officials, permits, get set up on bikereg, etc.
8. Marshals - get some idea of who'll be working the races each week.
So this is the initial list.
I did forget one thing - actually racing the races. I think if the race took place on a hilly 10 mile loop with thousands of feet of elevation per lap that I'd have bowed out of promoting the thing a long time ago. But I love this race, I love this course because it offers everything to the racers. It's tactical but still allows strong racers to break away. It has a hill so climbers can really put the hurt on the rest of them, but it's short enough that a sprinter can get up it. It has wind so a TT guy can use his superior strength, but it also has wide, long stretches of road so a team can pull back such a TT guy. Some races end in field sprints, but often a break will win.
Because of this yin-yang thing, the race is always a possibility for me, it's always possible to dream of a good race. I hope I'm strong enough to get to the finish, and if I do, I hope I'm strong enough to be able to sprint. In 2007 I was the former but not the latter. This year I hope I'll be strong enough to sprint. So in this respect I am training with the goal of having a slight jump start in form. I rarely gain significant form after Bethel so it's a season focus for me, along with a few races mid summer to hold my training attention.
As far as the promotion bit, the stress starts to build in the late fall when the Series starts looming over my shoulders. I can usually chip away at all this stress a little at a time so that by the end of the Series I'm just a blob of happy Jello, relaxed and happy. That's my goal for this year.
And there's one way everyone can help out.
Please don't pee on anyone's property or buildings at Bethel.
It just stresses me out.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Story - You Call This A Race?
On the forums a guy asked what sort of tactics were acceptable. It's hard trying to figure that out because it differs from one area to the next. In the US it's perfectly acceptable to dive to the inside of another racer if you have room. In Belgium, I got screamed at for doing the same thing, and these guys had a good 2 or 3 feet of clear road to their inside.
To them, I was riding dirty.
When I was contesting races weekly (instead of a couple times a year), I'd try and yell to clear a path. For example, if there was a struggling guy in front of me halfway through a one hour race and an almost-rideable gap to his right, I'd say, "On your right", figuring that the guy would let me through since he's tired and there's plenty of time left in the race.
In NY, saying such things would almost always result in the racer moving to his right - to block the guy saying "On your right." I figured out the sort of hyper jerky type racers would move to block, the smoother guys would let me by. So I adjusted my calls. I'd still say "On your right" when behind a reasonable acting racer, but when behind a hyper jerky type racer, I'd yell, "On your left" and he'd obligingly move to his left.
And I'd blast by his right side.
When I went to Michigan, the races were super tight, hotly contested, and the guys cornered so fast they were simply sliding out. At first I thought maybe these guys were rolling tires or touching brakes but it wasn't that. They'd be smoothly following the insanely fast field through a turn and suddenly they're doing the thing you see in the in-car NASCAR cams - where the guy slowly falls over, starts tumbling, goes from being in front of you to beside you, bike and pieces flying everywhere, until he disappears from view.
Riding too aggressively gets others mad and makes them want to beat you. It's apparently the reason why football coaches and the like always praise the team they just demolished because they don't want to give motivation to that team for the next game. They praise their opponent's running game, comment they got a few lucky breaks, and the opponent was a strong team and they were honored to beat them 49-3. Or something like that.
I ran into a situation like that one year.
One racer, an Olympic alternate to an earlier US Olympic road team, totally annihilated the field in an "open" (i.e. non-licensed) race the first time I ever did it. On the podium interview, he made some disparaging remarks about the other racers. Mind you, this guy was a Cat 1 and won numerous state championships (and beat me by 11 minutes in a 25 mi TT), he was a fixture on the national circuit, and he really has nothing to prove, especially in a dinky unofficial race. Yet he averaged about 27 or 28 mph for the 20 mile hilly route, soloing within a few hundred meters of the start. Strong mofo but socially not 100% so he comes across poorly.
Anyway, he didn't play the game after the race. You know the "game", where you say what you're supposed to say? It's like when you see someone you really don't want to see and yet you still smile and say, "Hi, it's nice to see you."
It keeps things smooth and happy and lubricated, like the aforementioned football coach - "I want to thank the sponsors, including the bagel place for the great bagels they gave everyone after the race, the promoter for putting on such a nice race, and all the racers for making the day challenging for me. I had to work really hard to earn this win."
Instead he cracked jokes on how it was easier than a training ride, "you call this a race?", etc. That pissed me off as well as all of the guys who were chasing like mad the whole time, most of them Cat 3s and 4s. We collectively vowed to teach this guy some manners.
The next year I brought a lot of Cat 3s and 4s teammates and one Cat 2 ringer type guy to the race. We worked together, set up the Cat 2 for the win, and he won in a three up sprint. Mr You Call This A Race got second and a Cat 4 teammate got third. Very satisfying. During the race, Mr You Call This A Race got belligerent, calling us names, telling us doing this event was illegal (it was, since we had USCF licenses, but then again, so did he), etc etc.
Cat 2 winner played the game - "this is a great race, great course, really nice people, and a lot of nice sponsors" etc etc. My strategy was immediately apparent as we had perhaps 15 guys at the race but we raced clean, just used team tactics as best we could. Since the course is very hilly there was some level of individual strength required. We bluffed the guy until he gave up. He made the first 15 minutes living hell for us but after that the race was ok.
The following year, the Cat 2 showed up with his own full time semi-pro friends (there was a lot of money for top 3 and he figured they could win most of it), and they got first, second (barely), fourth, and something else. Mr You Call This A Race pulled off the course 20 or 30 meters short of the line - he officially DNFed. Whatever the reason, he earned a reputation for being a sore loser.
During the race, I didn't have the same type of "shock and awe" team as the prior year. But guys who were still steamed about the way Mr You Call This A Race disparaged their efforts from two years prior came up to me and asked me how they could help me out, even though they were on rival teams. They just wanted to help beat the guy that dissed them.
This is why you never refer to an opponent in a disparagingly manner.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I pull the cheap shots only when I'm dealing with someone who already pulled the cheap shots. I don't want to go around antagonizing everyone I race against because it's a small community and word spreads quickly. If someone does antagonize me, okay, then I need to fight back. But if I race so cleanly and so smoothly that the others don't even know I'm taking them to the cleaners, well, hey now.
The best way to race is to race clean against the cheap shot racers and beat them. It's like beating a doper - they cheated and they still couldn't beat you.
Leave the cheap shots to the cheap shotters, take the high road, and you never have to doubt your results.
To them, I was riding dirty.
When I was contesting races weekly (instead of a couple times a year), I'd try and yell to clear a path. For example, if there was a struggling guy in front of me halfway through a one hour race and an almost-rideable gap to his right, I'd say, "On your right", figuring that the guy would let me through since he's tired and there's plenty of time left in the race.
In NY, saying such things would almost always result in the racer moving to his right - to block the guy saying "On your right." I figured out the sort of hyper jerky type racers would move to block, the smoother guys would let me by. So I adjusted my calls. I'd still say "On your right" when behind a reasonable acting racer, but when behind a hyper jerky type racer, I'd yell, "On your left" and he'd obligingly move to his left.
And I'd blast by his right side.
When I went to Michigan, the races were super tight, hotly contested, and the guys cornered so fast they were simply sliding out. At first I thought maybe these guys were rolling tires or touching brakes but it wasn't that. They'd be smoothly following the insanely fast field through a turn and suddenly they're doing the thing you see in the in-car NASCAR cams - where the guy slowly falls over, starts tumbling, goes from being in front of you to beside you, bike and pieces flying everywhere, until he disappears from view.
Riding too aggressively gets others mad and makes them want to beat you. It's apparently the reason why football coaches and the like always praise the team they just demolished because they don't want to give motivation to that team for the next game. They praise their opponent's running game, comment they got a few lucky breaks, and the opponent was a strong team and they were honored to beat them 49-3. Or something like that.
I ran into a situation like that one year.
One racer, an Olympic alternate to an earlier US Olympic road team, totally annihilated the field in an "open" (i.e. non-licensed) race the first time I ever did it. On the podium interview, he made some disparaging remarks about the other racers. Mind you, this guy was a Cat 1 and won numerous state championships (and beat me by 11 minutes in a 25 mi TT), he was a fixture on the national circuit, and he really has nothing to prove, especially in a dinky unofficial race. Yet he averaged about 27 or 28 mph for the 20 mile hilly route, soloing within a few hundred meters of the start. Strong mofo but socially not 100% so he comes across poorly.
Anyway, he didn't play the game after the race. You know the "game", where you say what you're supposed to say? It's like when you see someone you really don't want to see and yet you still smile and say, "Hi, it's nice to see you."
It keeps things smooth and happy and lubricated, like the aforementioned football coach - "I want to thank the sponsors, including the bagel place for the great bagels they gave everyone after the race, the promoter for putting on such a nice race, and all the racers for making the day challenging for me. I had to work really hard to earn this win."
Instead he cracked jokes on how it was easier than a training ride, "you call this a race?", etc. That pissed me off as well as all of the guys who were chasing like mad the whole time, most of them Cat 3s and 4s. We collectively vowed to teach this guy some manners.
The next year I brought a lot of Cat 3s and 4s teammates and one Cat 2 ringer type guy to the race. We worked together, set up the Cat 2 for the win, and he won in a three up sprint. Mr You Call This A Race got second and a Cat 4 teammate got third. Very satisfying. During the race, Mr You Call This A Race got belligerent, calling us names, telling us doing this event was illegal (it was, since we had USCF licenses, but then again, so did he), etc etc.
Cat 2 winner played the game - "this is a great race, great course, really nice people, and a lot of nice sponsors" etc etc. My strategy was immediately apparent as we had perhaps 15 guys at the race but we raced clean, just used team tactics as best we could. Since the course is very hilly there was some level of individual strength required. We bluffed the guy until he gave up. He made the first 15 minutes living hell for us but after that the race was ok.
The following year, the Cat 2 showed up with his own full time semi-pro friends (there was a lot of money for top 3 and he figured they could win most of it), and they got first, second (barely), fourth, and something else. Mr You Call This A Race pulled off the course 20 or 30 meters short of the line - he officially DNFed. Whatever the reason, he earned a reputation for being a sore loser.
During the race, I didn't have the same type of "shock and awe" team as the prior year. But guys who were still steamed about the way Mr You Call This A Race disparaged their efforts from two years prior came up to me and asked me how they could help me out, even though they were on rival teams. They just wanted to help beat the guy that dissed them.
This is why you never refer to an opponent in a disparagingly manner.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I pull the cheap shots only when I'm dealing with someone who already pulled the cheap shots. I don't want to go around antagonizing everyone I race against because it's a small community and word spreads quickly. If someone does antagonize me, okay, then I need to fight back. But if I race so cleanly and so smoothly that the others don't even know I'm taking them to the cleaners, well, hey now.
The best way to race is to race clean against the cheap shot racers and beat them. It's like beating a doper - they cheated and they still couldn't beat you.
Leave the cheap shots to the cheap shotters, take the high road, and you never have to doubt your results.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Training - Powertec Workbench Multi System
Many years ago, after the second sprint of a hard ridden Gimbles ride, I was scrunched up on the wood bench at the convenience store (the only sit-down spot in the shade), drinking my Gatorade, listening to everyone talking about whatever. I had made some big efforts and for once actually made it to the end of the ride with the group.
One guy, sitting a couple guys over, turned and looked at me. Now, I should point out that this guy was a really good rider, a Cat 1 (I think) that went by "Mikie". Tall, lanky, slim, with the spiky blonde hair in style at the time. I hadn't seen him at Gimbles, but then again, I hadn't been doing Gimbles very long at this time. The only other places I'd seen him were:
1. At virtually all of the SUNY Purchase sprints, but he didn't really get mixed up with them, he just hammered at the front.
2. At Gainesville FL where he and his Kissena team did some absolutely monsterous miles with their newly crowned Junior National Champion Sean Nealy.
3. At various Central Park and Prospect Park races. He won at least one of them.
So, to be there with someone that strong was, well, a bit satisfying.
Of course, with my jersey unzipped, slouching, I probably didn't make a good impression.
He looked at me and confirmed my suspicions when he blurted out, in a post ride "what the heck was I thinking?" way, "Yo, what's with your hollow chest? You need to lift a bit. And you look so white, you need to get to the beach or something."
That got a bunch of guys going, some chiding Mikie, some laughing, etc.
The good part was he meant it all in good fun.
The bad part was that he was right.
At some point shortly thereafter I started doing some upper body exercises, mainly push ups and some dumbbell type things. I also worked on my tan, but that's a different topic altogether! My brother said once that we family members (at least me and him) were blessed with distinctly unflattering builds - the aforementioned hollow chest and a stomach better for squirreling away reserves than modeling for an abdominal workout gizmo.
A few years later, when I got a chance, I lifted pretty aggressively. I went from struggling with 90 or 100 pounds on the bench to doing reps of 180, maxing out at 200 pounds. This took place over a three or four month period when I worked unusual hours in an office equipped with a very nice gym. A bunch of the guys and I would go downstairs and lift before or after work. I'd gained 10 pounds rapidly, felt much stronger, but looked basically the same.
No need to up my t-shirt size or anything like that.
I never lost that weight, and in fact, I now know that losing weight is much harder than it is to gain it. I figure that, at this point, my best tactic is to gain strength, train a lot, and try and exchange some of the excess fat for some muscle.
Although riding helps a lot, I found in that earlier life (i.e. in college) that lifting really helped drive home a good sprint. So with this in mind, I kept a nice heavy-duty black weight bench from the house, reassembled it in the basement of the apartment, and tried to lift every now and then.
My workouts are somewhat standard:
Curls, to develop bar pulling biceps and related muscles. I curl with dumbbells oriented like a handlebar to try and make it a bit more bike specific.
Dumbbell military presses, i.e. just pushing the dumbbells up like a muscle guy might do. This is a collarbone protecting lift, trying to build the muscle "girdle" around the collarbone.
Bent over rows, flys, and some other stuff I don't know. Basically to work the lats (bar pulling muscles), lower back (ditto, but more core related), and my arms see some benefit too.
Bench presses, because, well, that's what weight lifting is, isn't it? Plus it works on triceps, the muscles you use to hold your body up when you're riding.
The problem is that I lift on my own and can't spot myself. I feel relatively uncomfortable doing an unspotted bench of over 150 pounds, for example, because if my muscles suddenly failed, I'd be choking on a weight bar. My lifting tapered down and my strength slowly dissipated.
Then, on Thanksgiving Day this year, I spotted an ad in the paper for a yellow weight lifting thing I'd previously seen at Dicks Sporting Goods. When I first saw it I dragged the missus over to it and showed her the next great secret training device I really wanted (after the SRM and carbon clinchers and the SystemSix frame and, well, you get the idea). Anyway, the thing was on sale (it still is, by the way) and came with a few hundred pounds of weights (not part of the current sale). So, I think a day later, I dragged the missus to Dicks, we went over and looked at the thing (again), and this time, I bought it.
Of course, it weighs 475 pounds without weights or boxes, and with the additional 300 pounds of weights, the total weight of the package rapidly approached half a ton.
With only Honda Civics around to haul things (the van is at my dad's), and a potential move coming up, we asked if we could pick it up later. Like in a month. Surprisingly, the store people agreed, letting me put the stuff on layaway. (Before you run out and do the same thing, Dicks ended the layaway program last week).
The move thing didn't work so I decided to make the thing fit in the basement. I spent a couple days clearing out a quarter of the basement, to give the weight thing room. With a 8' x 10' foot print, I needed a lot of room. I decided to clear out two more feet each way so it became a 10' x 12' area.
I got some 3/4" exercise mat things which interlock together. Conveniently they are 2' x 2' so I could make a little sketch in my notebook on how to lay them out and get the area I need for the weight thing. I hope to have an area for the bike (on a trainer) and room to put down a newly purchased yoga mat.
Finally, the basement prepped, I rented a 14' box van to pick up the gear. I figured I'd have to un-box the pieces in the van, carry them into the (hatchway) basement, and assemble them inside.
I didn't even want to think about what I'd have to do when we move.
Anyway, when a Dicks person and I loaded the van, I saw that one box was 130 pounds or so. This confirmed the fact that I'd need to un-box stuff in the van.
After about 6 hours of assembling, disassembling (inevitably because something was installed backwards due to the nut holding the wrench), re-assembling, struggling with big pieces of welded steel, trying to line up precision drilled holes while holding said big pieces of steel, and learning tips and tricks on how to assemble such things, I was finally done.
Voila!
This is a view of the gym (if you didn't know already, click the pic for a huge version of it). It's hard to tell but the floor is actually the mat stuff, covered in "diamond plate" pattern things. You'll see a shelf full of stuff in the back (I want to move it) as well as my favorite bike poster (of a crash).
The bench bit - for bench presses, military presses, and some standing things.
The squat part of the machine.
I hope to use this whole setup to create muscular balance, so that, for example, my back doesn't go neglected. I think lifting really helps create a solid core which allows me to sprint better. My jump definitely improves, and I hope that my top speed does also. I have to incorporate some sort of speed moves too (plyometrics) so I don't become a slow but powerful rider.
In a future post I'll have a more comprehensive review of the Powertec Multi System as well as a host of tips to assemble it quicker and without as many errors as I made myself.
One guy, sitting a couple guys over, turned and looked at me. Now, I should point out that this guy was a really good rider, a Cat 1 (I think) that went by "Mikie". Tall, lanky, slim, with the spiky blonde hair in style at the time. I hadn't seen him at Gimbles, but then again, I hadn't been doing Gimbles very long at this time. The only other places I'd seen him were:
1. At virtually all of the SUNY Purchase sprints, but he didn't really get mixed up with them, he just hammered at the front.
2. At Gainesville FL where he and his Kissena team did some absolutely monsterous miles with their newly crowned Junior National Champion Sean Nealy.
3. At various Central Park and Prospect Park races. He won at least one of them.
So, to be there with someone that strong was, well, a bit satisfying.
Of course, with my jersey unzipped, slouching, I probably didn't make a good impression.
He looked at me and confirmed my suspicions when he blurted out, in a post ride "what the heck was I thinking?" way, "Yo, what's with your hollow chest? You need to lift a bit. And you look so white, you need to get to the beach or something."
That got a bunch of guys going, some chiding Mikie, some laughing, etc.
The good part was he meant it all in good fun.
The bad part was that he was right.
At some point shortly thereafter I started doing some upper body exercises, mainly push ups and some dumbbell type things. I also worked on my tan, but that's a different topic altogether! My brother said once that we family members (at least me and him) were blessed with distinctly unflattering builds - the aforementioned hollow chest and a stomach better for squirreling away reserves than modeling for an abdominal workout gizmo.
A few years later, when I got a chance, I lifted pretty aggressively. I went from struggling with 90 or 100 pounds on the bench to doing reps of 180, maxing out at 200 pounds. This took place over a three or four month period when I worked unusual hours in an office equipped with a very nice gym. A bunch of the guys and I would go downstairs and lift before or after work. I'd gained 10 pounds rapidly, felt much stronger, but looked basically the same.
No need to up my t-shirt size or anything like that.
I never lost that weight, and in fact, I now know that losing weight is much harder than it is to gain it. I figure that, at this point, my best tactic is to gain strength, train a lot, and try and exchange some of the excess fat for some muscle.
Although riding helps a lot, I found in that earlier life (i.e. in college) that lifting really helped drive home a good sprint. So with this in mind, I kept a nice heavy-duty black weight bench from the house, reassembled it in the basement of the apartment, and tried to lift every now and then.
My workouts are somewhat standard:
Curls, to develop bar pulling biceps and related muscles. I curl with dumbbells oriented like a handlebar to try and make it a bit more bike specific.
Dumbbell military presses, i.e. just pushing the dumbbells up like a muscle guy might do. This is a collarbone protecting lift, trying to build the muscle "girdle" around the collarbone.
Bent over rows, flys, and some other stuff I don't know. Basically to work the lats (bar pulling muscles), lower back (ditto, but more core related), and my arms see some benefit too.
Bench presses, because, well, that's what weight lifting is, isn't it? Plus it works on triceps, the muscles you use to hold your body up when you're riding.
The problem is that I lift on my own and can't spot myself. I feel relatively uncomfortable doing an unspotted bench of over 150 pounds, for example, because if my muscles suddenly failed, I'd be choking on a weight bar. My lifting tapered down and my strength slowly dissipated.
Then, on Thanksgiving Day this year, I spotted an ad in the paper for a yellow weight lifting thing I'd previously seen at Dicks Sporting Goods. When I first saw it I dragged the missus over to it and showed her the next great secret training device I really wanted (after the SRM and carbon clinchers and the SystemSix frame and, well, you get the idea). Anyway, the thing was on sale (it still is, by the way) and came with a few hundred pounds of weights (not part of the current sale). So, I think a day later, I dragged the missus to Dicks, we went over and looked at the thing (again), and this time, I bought it.
Of course, it weighs 475 pounds without weights or boxes, and with the additional 300 pounds of weights, the total weight of the package rapidly approached half a ton.
With only Honda Civics around to haul things (the van is at my dad's), and a potential move coming up, we asked if we could pick it up later. Like in a month. Surprisingly, the store people agreed, letting me put the stuff on layaway. (Before you run out and do the same thing, Dicks ended the layaway program last week).
The move thing didn't work so I decided to make the thing fit in the basement. I spent a couple days clearing out a quarter of the basement, to give the weight thing room. With a 8' x 10' foot print, I needed a lot of room. I decided to clear out two more feet each way so it became a 10' x 12' area.
I got some 3/4" exercise mat things which interlock together. Conveniently they are 2' x 2' so I could make a little sketch in my notebook on how to lay them out and get the area I need for the weight thing. I hope to have an area for the bike (on a trainer) and room to put down a newly purchased yoga mat.
Finally, the basement prepped, I rented a 14' box van to pick up the gear. I figured I'd have to un-box the pieces in the van, carry them into the (hatchway) basement, and assemble them inside.
I didn't even want to think about what I'd have to do when we move.
Anyway, when a Dicks person and I loaded the van, I saw that one box was 130 pounds or so. This confirmed the fact that I'd need to un-box stuff in the van.
After about 6 hours of assembling, disassembling (inevitably because something was installed backwards due to the nut holding the wrench), re-assembling, struggling with big pieces of welded steel, trying to line up precision drilled holes while holding said big pieces of steel, and learning tips and tricks on how to assemble such things, I was finally done.
Voila!
This is a view of the gym (if you didn't know already, click the pic for a huge version of it). It's hard to tell but the floor is actually the mat stuff, covered in "diamond plate" pattern things. You'll see a shelf full of stuff in the back (I want to move it) as well as my favorite bike poster (of a crash).
The bench bit - for bench presses, military presses, and some standing things.To "test" things, I put 90 pounds on the bench bit, and benched it. Very nice, smooth movement, and no worries about dropping a bar on my throat. I promptly put another 70 pounds on it, cranked out 12 reps, and decided I better chill out before I strain something. Then I re-thought that last bit, took the 45s off, left the 35s on (70 pounds) and cranked out a bunch of military presses (sitting presses).
All the weights seemed very manageable, and since I normally lift up to these amounts, I was a bit surprised. I think the leverage thing is not quite accurate so the weight amount is a bit optimistic (i.e. I'm not lifting the full 160 pounds, more like a 160 x 0.8 or something). This just means that I'll have to put more weight on :)
Since it's a real pain moving 45 pound plates around, I might get a second set of weights. But that costs money and for now I'll make do with moving weights around. It's called "weight training" for a reason, right?
All the weights seemed very manageable, and since I normally lift up to these amounts, I was a bit surprised. I think the leverage thing is not quite accurate so the weight amount is a bit optimistic (i.e. I'm not lifting the full 160 pounds, more like a 160 x 0.8 or something). This just means that I'll have to put more weight on :)
Since it's a real pain moving 45 pound plates around, I might get a second set of weights. But that costs money and for now I'll make do with moving weights around. It's called "weight training" for a reason, right?
The squat part of the machine.There's also a nice squat station, and this is one of the reasons I got the whole gizmo. It's a bit tight back there, but you can see it just in front of the shelf in the first picture. I can load up with weights and safely squat without blowing out something if I collapse in exhaustion. I tried it unloaded (i.e. just moving the heavy yellow steel around). Whether it was from accumulated fatigue from my suddenly intense riding schedule or something else, my legs started getting that lactic acid burn pretty quickly. I moved the 45 pounds plates there (to "store" them) and left it for now.
The curl/pull down station. I put a light weight to test the "abs crunch" thing and it seems to work.
On the curl/pull down station I didn't test out the bent-over row or the pull down bits just yet. However, both are among my favorite "sprinter lifts" and I'm anxious to build up some strength there.
Finally the weights came with an Olympic weight bar, i.e. a very long bar that weighs a lot. I can't imagine loaded it up with so many weights that it flexes, but some people do that. For me, I'll be using it for dead lifts, another "sprinter lift" I find helpful.
Finally the weights came with an Olympic weight bar, i.e. a very long bar that weighs a lot. I can't imagine loaded it up with so many weights that it flexes, but some people do that. For me, I'll be using it for dead lifts, another "sprinter lift" I find helpful.
I hope to use this whole setup to create muscular balance, so that, for example, my back doesn't go neglected. I think lifting really helps create a solid core which allows me to sprint better. My jump definitely improves, and I hope that my top speed does also. I have to incorporate some sort of speed moves too (plyometrics) so I don't become a slow but powerful rider.
In a future post I'll have a more comprehensive review of the Powertec Multi System as well as a host of tips to assemble it quicker and without as many errors as I made myself.
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