First Cyclocross 060129

What do bicyclists do when it's too wet and muddy to ride offroad? They race in the mud.

My goal for my first cyclocross was not lofty, but it was ambitious. More ambitious than I expected. My goal was to not finish DFL (Dead Last), and I met it, by one position. Cyclocross is harder than it looks, not that it looks easy mind you. I was disavowed of any illusion of being in any sort of decent shape as I got my ass handily kicked.

Getting everything ready the night before, I debated how much preparation to do on the bike. Apart from changing from the wheels with the road tires to the wheels with the knobbies, I decided to take off everything non-essential (except the speedo), that I didn't need a wrench to remove. I, correctly, assumed that I would be so incredibly non-competitive, that removing the rack and kickstand would make no dicernable difference to my finishing time or rank.

The first challenge was getting to the fairgrounds in Watsonville in time to warm up before my 8am race. It probably doesn't surprise many people that I don't consider myself a morning person. Early mornings are nice, but not usually worth staying up for. Since I went to see Lavay Smith last night with some friends, I didn't crawl into bed until about 3AM. The 0630 alarm was not a happy time for me. But, I did manage to make it to the fairgrounds in time to even take a warmup lap of the course before the race.

I wasn't even a quarter of the way through the course when I seriously questioned the intelligence of my riding this race. And I hadn't even gotten to the difficult bits yet. For those who are not familiar with cyclocross, check out http://www.cyclocross.cx , or click for pix of the previous race . They lay out a course, preferably muddy (as a bumper sticker says, mud optional, suffering mandatory ) with several sections specifically designed to require you to get off the bike and carry it, either up steep muddy hills, or over barriers too tall for any normal person to bunny hop. The bikes are what we used to call "10-speeds", though they varied from 1-30. There is a special class for one-speeds. A cyclocross bike is a road bike, not a mountain bike, which has been specially set up for riding in dirt and mud.

My new bike is a cyclocross bike, because I wanted the durability and flexibility, not because I planned on racing cyclocross. But, I owned a vehicle that was nominally a race vehicle, and there was a race for it I could enter. The last one of the season. Do the math.

It was actually a very good thing that I entered this race, without even any expectation, or hopes, of doing well. I learned a lot that will be of tremendous help next season. I found out about things I need to do to the bike, and I learned about techniques that I really need to learn before I can even hope to consider the possibility of not doing abysmally badly. It did not help that I did not find a simple explanation of where and when I was supposed to be. I knew that the race was 1/2 hour, but in auto racing, 1/2 hour means that the checkered flag comes out when the leader crosses the finish line, after 1/2 hour has elapsed. So, if the leader cross the line at 31:10 and the last place driver crosses Start/Finish at 31:05, last place still takes another lap. I found out, during the race, that once the half hour mark is hit, you stop as soon as you cross S/F. I also didn't know such minor details as where to go before the race, whether people carried water as a matter of course, anything about race ettiquette, or even what a cyclocross looked like in action. This race was kind of like on the job training for me. For that matter, I wasn't even sure when I got there which was the beginner group and which was the fast group. I was pretty certain that "C" was the slow group. I did learn, on the warmup, that my cycling shoes are completely useless in the mud. Traction was not an option. Where some people were running up hills, I was barely walking.

I did manage to find out when and where the race started. I had time to "enhance my attention span", and grab my water bottle before the race started. Just before "gridding up", I went to take a drink of water, and broke the top of my water bottle. Not the best omen. I did not, however, get a chance to clean the mud out of my cleats and pedals.

The race started pretty well. I was actually keeping up with the fast pack until we hit the first obstacle, a small dirt berm. I totally screwed up my handling of it, and by the time I got back on the bike and going again, I had already been passed by most of the riders. About halfway through the lap was the first real hill. It was a steep up hill, doing what the autocrosser call a "pin turn" around a tree. I made the mistake of not gearing down before attacking the hill, and halfway up the hill lost speed, and traction, with balance hot on their heels. My right shoe decided that this was the best possible time to get stuck in the pedal, and in the process of getting my foot uncaught, I pulled a muscle in my lower back. So, about what should have been 1/6 of the way through the race, and what turned out to be 1/4, I injured myself. Not seriously, but painfully enough to make things like getting on and off the bike, walking, running, or carrying things up steep slippery hills painful. Cyclocross, however, is not about a relaxed ride on a nice day down a quiet paved bike path. I had figured that much out on my warmup ride. Hell, my warmup ride was one that I would have considered a pretty challenging bit of offroading as recently as, say 8:30 this morning.

I crossed the finish line at about 31:30. I knew that I would be close to making it in time to get in a third lap, but frankly, I was hurting, and I decided that a finish was good enough, that two laps were plenty of fun for today, and I would be happy to wait until next year before my next official lap of a cyclocross course.

I did get some pictures of me, and the bike, after the race. Unfortunately, the camera was set in macro mode, so the pictures of me with the bike did not turn out. I do have some post race pictures of the bike at: http://www.red4est.com/lrc/pix/cyclox06 0129/
which should be entertaining for anyone who has not seen a muddy bicycle before. Click on the thumbs for larger pictures, go to the bigpix subdirectory for the full size versions of the photos.

After a visit at the free chiropractic clinic that was set up by registration, where I found out that I had indeed pulled a muscle, and may have also found a pit crew recruit for my auto racing, I tracked down where the results were posted (another detail that would have been nice to know before I started), and found out that somehow, despite all of my difficulties I had managed to still finish ahead of someone else. Despite the plethora of classes, there unfortunately was not a class for bicycles with luggage racks and kickstands, if there had been, I'm pretty sure I would have won that class.