Judging Self-Worth Through Insignifigant Cycling Achievements

I did the unthinkable and participated in an unsanctioned road race on Saturday! It was part of the grasshopper series, which is about 5 or so races that happen every year in Sonoma or here in Marin. They always draw the best competition available locally and have a good grassroots feel. Now when I say the best competition available locally I’m not talking about a couple of cat 2 racers and some pro mountain bikers, feast your eyes on this;

Yeah, that’s Levi holding one of the “lammies” with the course directions on it. Yes, he did win, easily I might say. His front group ended at three hours flat and the chase group that I was in was 10 minutes back. Now I am aware that if he wanted to he could have turned it on and shaved some serious time off of that but let me have my fun and say that I finished a road race 10 minutes behind Levi while he was in his peak. Even if it holds no water at all!

So anyways, this race was about 70 miles or so with about 6,000 feet of climbing, some of which was pretty steep. I treated it as a training ride and did A LOT of pulling and chasing down breakaways/ instigating breakaways and what not. What was kinda funny is that the “chase group” that I was in (which started with about 12 and ended with 5) was a bunch of pro/semi-pro mountain bikers and maybe one or two roadies. You should have seen us trying to do that weird “echelon” thing in the wind, it was priceless!

Another thing that had me working a little harder than I wanted to was a weird noise coming from the rear of my bike. I kept hearing it over bumps and was imagining that my rear wheel was moving around a bit. It was terriable on the way down the hills and I kept getting dropped and having to chase back on because I was pussy-footing the decents. When I got home later I checked the Orbea out and found a CRACK in the drive side chainstay just behind the bottom bracket!! Maybe I wasn’t imagining the rear wheel moving around after all!

Once it was all said and done I finished 13th (awesome number) which I was very happy with. Did I mention that Saturday was my 27th birthday? Can’t imagine a better way to spend a b-day that a free bike race followed with burritos and beers! Once again these races are awesome and free, so if you’re local I urge you to come out and battle! No matter what your skill level is there will be someone for you to race with and everyone is super friendly, hope to see you at the next one! Here’s the link;
www.grasshopperadventureseries.blogspot.com

And a picture of me on a road bike for those who just can’t picture it

By about 36 seconds it turns out. The race up in Cool California was last Sunday and the conditions couldn’t have been better! This race is known for having awful weather (snow two years ago) and usually being a sufferfest. This year there were the two creek crossings, one mud bog, and a bunch of dry and rocky fire roads that were even a little marbley in spots.

The race started at 10:30 so I was out of the house by sunrise to make it up there with time to warm up. While I was driving along highway 37 I was privlage to this sunrise;

which I thought was kinda awesome. In any case I got up there, rode about a third of a lap, decided that I felt pretty good and went to scope out the competition. Aren Timmel was there and so was Jason Moeschler, I figured that if I could keep ethier of those two in sight it would be a good day.

This race is kina weird in the fact that it groups the pro/semi-pro/expert fields together so it almost ends up being a mass start. Well, when Sean Allen said go I had a little trouble getting my right foot clipped in and I missed the bus when the pro’s took off. I sorta had to play catch up with everybody until the first climb came. I had just caught up with a group of 5 pro’s (minus Timmel who had gotten a flat as soon as he possibly could) and decided that it was now or never so I put out a good effort in an attempt to drop or at least split the field. It worked sorta, I dropped everyone except Moeschler who let me pull him around the first lap and totally blow myself out. It looked something like this;

After the first lap was done Jason showed me why he’s a pro and I’m a “semi”-pro and put a gap on me on the first decent. That looked something like this;

And that’s about how it went for the next lap and a half. He ended up winning with a time that was 7 full minutes faster than last years winning time. I ended 36 seconds behind him and about 2 minutes ahead of the third and fourth place guys. All in all it was a good race for me and it even had a pay out! I think the payout even covered my fuel to drive up there and back (diesel is over $4 a gallon in California right now) and a decent lunch.

I’m really enjoying all the stuff that I’ve been learning by racing with people who have YEARS of experience on me. This is a lot different than just going out on the single speed and hitting the hills as hard as I could and I think that it’ll help me be a faster rider by the end of this year. Maybe within the next year or two I’ll be able to keep up with or even beat some of these guys!!

Yeah, I know that I haven’t blogged for like a month or something like that. So sue me, I’ve had a lot of other stuff going on! First and foremost I met a girl who appreciates and supports (but does not participate in) my bike racing, which has boosted my morale considerably! Secondly, one of my main training partners took a little tumble last weekend and is off the bike and on the mend for at least the next two weeks. This is a tragedy because the poor guy put in all those hours through the winter and now, just as the weather is turning, is stuck riding a trainer to keep his fittness up. Seriously, I can’t begin to imagine how frusturating that must be. Lastly, I’ve actually been doing some cross country racing! On a geared bike! It’s all very exciting, listen up…

So for those of you who don’t live in the area, there is an early season series in the Monterey area called CCCX. I think that at first it was meant to be a Central Coast CycloCross thing but somewhere along the way a  cross country and downhill series got added on. Anyways, I missed the first race of the series at the beginning of February only to find out later that my friend/nemesis Eric Ebberoth (who I battled with on singlespeeds all last year) had gone and got a geared bike and an upgrade to semi-pro. Oh yeah, and he had also won the first race by over two minutes!! Not fair at all! This news had me all up in a huff and ready to go down for the second race swinging for the fences.

Longish story made Shortish; I was able to get my geared race bike together in time for the race (see below)

The couse is a mainly flatish, sandy loop with some really fast and fun burms towards the end of the lap. The pro-expert race was a five lap race and I think that there were 10 or 11 in the pro/semi-pro class. We started off in a group of about 6 or 7 and ended up with only 5 by the 4th lap. I missed a shift (not used to “shifting” yet) on a short steep climb and seperated myself and Jim from Eric and the other two guys. Eric attacked while Jim and I were chasing to get back on and I wasn’t ever able to catch back up with him. I ended up third, 32 seconds behind Eric and 1 second behind pro rider (and friend) Dave Yakiatias (who’s name I am surely misspelling). Come to think of it, Dave probably posted his info on the MotionBased website since that’s who he rides for. Maybe I’ll give that a gander when I’m done with this. I wasn’t really happy with how that race ended because of the missed shift on the climb and all, oh well life goes on and there was going to be an opportunity to make up for that poor showing on March 1st (which was last Saturday). Well, here’s how that one went down…

Jim wasn’t able to make it to this race so it was looking like I was on my own on this one. I ended up getting there just in time to see somebody gettind hauled off in an ambulance with a broken collar bone, bad start for a nice weeked. I was early enough to warm up with an entire lap around the course (which ended up being the same exact course as last time) with Dave. He informed me that Jason Moeschler (winner of the Downieville XC last year and all around bad ass WTB pro rider) was there and off warming up somewhere, this week was shaping up to be a battle!

The pace started a lot slower than I had expected and it seemed like no one wanted to be out front in the wind from the very beginning. After two laps at a very relaxed pace there was still 7 of us riding together and I decided to try and break that up a bit. I went for an attack up a slight hill and didn’t look back for about a minute. When I did look back I was a little dismayed to find that I had NO ONE in my draft. All alone on a fairly flat, windy course is bad news! I slowed down a bit and waited for everybody else to catch back on, then I ended up pulling for the rest of the third lap and just kinda wasting some energy. Eric ended up pulling the entire fourth and about half of the fifth lap, one could say the he was being hung out to dry, which he was.

Half way throught the fifth lap I decided that it was now or never and I went for it up one of the few climbs that the course offered. I ended up getting away from everybody except for Jason (who was glued on my wheel) and Dave (who wasn’t far behind). We ended up getting tangled up with some lapped traffic which had us coming to a dead stop, three wide on a paved road. Then the third of a mile sprint for the single track began. Now, if you know the three of us you know why I ended up about half a bike length behind the other two in a sprint. Jason and Dave are both put together more like sprinters, more on the bulky, muscley side. I, on the other hand, have never been described as “bulky” or “muscley” and don’t imagine that I ever will be. In any case, the three of us hammered out the rest of the course as fast as we could, totally blowing a couple of the corners and generally making a mess of things. In the end Jason won the race with Dave 2 seconds behind him and me about 3 inches behind Dave. This time I was okay with a third place finish because I was the one who made the attacks that determined how the race ended, which was totally fun! Here’s an “action shot” so that you’ll almost feel like you were there.

And one from the first race so’s that you can see Jim, too
That’s Eric on our left in the blue kit and Dave behind us in the white

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last couple of weeks, mostly kinda starting to get into race mode again. There’s a race up in Cool (near Auburn) on sunday, I won singlespeed there last year and I expect to be in the top five overall this year. I’ll letcha’ know how it went sometime next week. Unless, of course, you’re at the race. In which case you won’t have any need to trudge through my spelling and grammitical errors to figure out what happened. Hope to see you guys there