Category: cycling

“Back to School” Cyclocross Race: Whee!

So the big cyclocross race at St. Olaf was about ninety-nine kinds of fun. I’ve never raced bikes before, so there was that fun for starters. There were also the various kinds of fun which all racing entails: passing, being passed, working hard, feeling just a little bit pukey, enjoying the acid-lung feeling after the race. (Personal note: I could have done without the bass-drum thud of my heart rate in my skull, which I caused by forgetting to take out my hearing aids before the race. Lesson learned.) The organizers did a great job with the race, too: the registration was painless, the concessions were ample, and above all the course was well designed and well marked.

And the race had lots of cycling-specific kinds of fun, of course. In (what I recall to have been) race-course order:

  • making the first few corners in traffic,
  • getting the timing right for every time I hit the first dismount and runup (at a barrier that was actually just a big scraggly log!),
  • climbing Thorson hill, the damnably steep “sledding hill” slope of the east side of the Olaf campus,
  • gulping air while riding the short flat at the top of the hill,
  • trying not to soil myself (or crash) on rocky descent to the football fields to the base of the hill,
  • focusing my exertion-fuzzed brain enough to negotiate the various features on the flats: several sharp turns, a combination barrier/water hazard, and the tricky involuted “pinwheel,”
  • managing (with one bloody exception (semi-gruesome photo)) to clip in and out of my pedals well enough that I probably gained four or five spots just by being able to pedal before the other guys were clipped in,
  • enjoying the shouts of “Go, Daddy!” from the girls and the clanging cowbells rung by other spectators around the start/finish area, and
  • looking down the course and seeing the hill just a couple minutes away. Again.

I climbed the hill four times, but only rode it three times after misunderstanding how many laps I had left. (I thought I was on my penultimate go-round, so I planned to run/walk the hill and conserve a bit of energy for the last lap, but it turned out I was on my last lap. The “2” on the board must have meant “two laps” for the front riders, who, I think, caught me early in that lap. Oops.)

I had no idea what to expect as far as results, and I wound up 28th out of 41 riders in my category. Not great, but passable for a first race. A bit more cycling-specific training – especially climbing hills that aren’t long, straight, gravel inclines – will go a long way. In other words, I have a few dates with that hill.

“Athletic” Experiment: Cyclocross

What with my new bike, my riding a fair bit since August, and my complete lack of fitness for running races this summer, I decided to try a bike race this fall – the “Back to School Cross” cyclocross race that’s been held at St. Olaf College for the past few years. This year’s race is going to be held on Sunday – quite a while after school started at Olaf, but at a good time for me.

Cyclocross is a kind of racing in which riders use bikes akin to typical road bikes(drop handlebars, relatively high gearing, skinnier tires, and such) to cover off-road terrain that usually includes various obstacles like mud pits, low hurdles, unrideably steep hills, and staircases – all of which can require a rider to jump off the bike, run through or jump over the barrier (sometimes carrying the bike on one shoulder), and then hop back the bike to resume the race. Dismount and carrying sections are the classic elements of cyclocross courses, which are typically pretty short, twisty loops (a mile or so) which the racers have to do over and over for, say, an hour. The Olaf course is classic in this sense, though the beginners’ race at Olaf tomorrow is shorter, just 31 minutes long plus one 1-mile lap.

I’ve been practicing my dismounting, carrying, and remounting “skills” (the sneer quotes are my own) for the past month of so, but I still expect to make a complete fool of myself on those parts of the course. And riding in a group (at least off the start line) will be interesting. My experience with “packs” pretty much begins and ends with the occasional walker in the Arb. On the other hand, I hope my experience as a runner will help on the (few) “run up” sections, and my riding this summer (both on gravel roads and in the Arb) will hopefully at least keep me from passing out during what promises to be a pretty intense half-hour or so. God only knows, though, what’ll happen when I hit the Olaf course’s notorious “Pinwheel of Death”:

Morning Ride

Okay, okay, I know I’m going overboard with the photos this week, but my brain’s too overworded at work to let me compose any coherent prose at home. And today’s bike ride to work was so fantastically pretty, I have to blog it.

Grass Track
My bike tires’ track through the frosty grass on the field behind Carleton’s Rec Center. The frosted grass crunched like peanut shells as I rode over it.

Lyman Crosshatching
The Lower Lyman Lake, beautifully cross-hatched by the November morning breeze. I could’t capture the reflection of the moon flickering in the ripples, but it was gorgeous – a silvery circle being pulled apart and reassembled as the water moved.

Boliou Moon
The waning gibbous moon hanging in the sky above Carleton’s Boliou Hall. Somehow the moon is smaller in this shot than it was in real life.

More Riding

Last weekend, Ben Witt, the owner of Milltown Cycles, the shop where I bought my bike this summer, sponsored a 50-mile ride on gravel roads around Northfield. I couldn’t take the time away from the kids to do the ride, but this amazing collection of photos by one of the tour riders show it to have been amazing. Many of the shots remind me of sights I’ve enjoyed on my own rides this summer and fall, but then there’s photo 23, which is just spectacular.

I gotta find a way to do this ride in 2010. I have twelve months to get ready!