Bikes and Code

The biking season in Ottawa is pretty much finished for those of us fair weather cyclists. There will be a a final ‘cross race this weekend at Mooney’s Bay and that will be it for me. It’s time to wind down a bit, take some time off the bike and get ready for next year.

I’ve been on the bike about three times since the last race, all inside on the trainer. While riding on the trainer isn’t too terrible, it does get old fast. Still though, it only generally takes me a week or two without riding before I’m feeling that I need to get back in the saddle. I find that planning out the next season during period of low intensity or no intensity is often the best time. Energy is up, I’ve forgotten the pain of training and am only looking forward to the next set of races.

Next season is going to be a different one for me. Hillary and I will be moving to Vancouver in the next couple of months, so I am going to have to find entirely new series of races to keep me busy. My long term goal is to do the BC Bike Race in 2010, so next year is going to be my return to mountain biking to start getting ready for it. It sounds like my season is going to start out with The Salty Dog and, if I can get myself registered (sells out quickly I am told), the Test of Metal. It will be fun to get back into mountain biking more seriously again. My technical skills will be pretty rusty I think, but I’m hoping those will come back as the season progresses.

I’ve already been told that I will have to spend a weekend or two in the Rossland area and ride the Seven Summits as well as several other trails in the area that are best described as epic.

I’m fairly excited about road racing as well. There is a pretty impressive March series of road races put on by Team Escape Velocity that I’m planning on doing my best to attend most of. That and I fully intend on riding several of the major mountain passes that I did in 2007 in the cross Canada trip again. Hope-Princeton is definitely a doable ride and if I can talk some people into it, there are lots of good day trips in and around the Okanagan.

Cyclocross is a sport of bad weather. Cold winds, rain and the threat of snow is taken in stride and often times, the weather plays an important role in a race. The second race at the Kanata Rec center was one of those. The temperature was hovering around the freezing mark with 30km/h+ winds and some light sleet. Or perhaps you could call it heavy snow, it really doesn’t matter.

This was the first race at the Kanata course where we were not sent up the gravel climb up the side of the main hill (according to my GPS, that climb hits about 14% at parts). Instead, the main elevation gain was up the other side of the hill and running. Even more entertaining was the fact that immediately after the run up, a pair of muddy switchbacks were presented. After scoping out the route through the switchbacks, I ended up electing to not remount the bike until I was through the first two. Most people tried to ride, but I found that running would tend to move me up a place. Considering I am an absolutely terrible runner, this was saying something. I also did not fall, which was nice. Some say that in cyclocross, if you don’t fall, you are not trying hard enough. I do not subscribe to that point of view yet. I much prefer to keep the rubber down for the time being, I don’t bounce as well as I used to.

Personally, it wasn’t my greatest race. I slogged through it, but it was far from stellar. I got lapped by the top three guys and that was about it. Second best result this year I suppose, though it was a longer lap, so perhaps not. I evidently just wasn’t with it mentally. I’d hit the long into the wind power sections and just wasn’t able to dial it up as high as I usually can. Ah well, they can’t all be good races.

I most likely will not be attending the Upper Canada Village race next week, which means one more to go this season. Too short it is, but the weather is just getting more and more unpleasant.

A code post is in the works, this week’s topic is going to be a ramble on how I feel about how Java has changed since I started using it in 1998.

In the world of amateur cyclocross, at least in the series I participate in, there is a certain progression you follow, assuming you aren’t a seriously fast dude who just needs to learn to ride on the grass, sand, mud, snow, gravel, stairs and well, you get the picture. I am not a fast dude, so I will not attempt to relate the shock and horror that they feel when they first try out a cyclocross race. If you want that kind of perspective, try this. That’s not me. I’m going to talk about what happens when you start racing ‘cross as a normal human who likes riding bikes.

The first race is a rude awakening. It hurts, in ways that cycling has never hurt before. You get lapped by guys who fly over the bumps in ways that appear to defy physics. You get lapped by the top riders, as does at least half of the field, but if it goes well enough, you come back next week for more.

The being lapped become a regular occurance. In my local series, we have actually had the national champion show up for a couple of races. However, sooner or later, as the skills improve and the speeds go up, eventually something odd happens. The fast guys don’t come around you. This is not always as nice as it sounds. As has often been quoted by famous cyclists, “It doesn’t hurt less, you just get faster”. What this means is, rather than being able to stop a lap early after the eventual winner has finished, you get the honour of doing the same distance as them. You get to suffer longer.

That has only happened to me a couple of times and in general in the races with longer laps where you just don’t get lapped as often. I didn’t get lapped today.

The race, the second one of the year in Almonte was a mud pit. After I had finished, I had mud caked at least 3 inches up each of the spokes, to say nothing of the incredible amount of grass and mud that had made it’s way into every nook and cranny of the bike. I easily carried an extra 2-3lbs of mud around by the end of the race. That made things much more fun, believe me. On the plus side, they did not put the bottom part of the park into the race, so the climbs were not as long or quite as sharp, which was nice. The mud made up for it though. I found that for large parts of the course, I couldn’t actually go at full power without crashing or just spinning my rear tire.

With a major race happening in Toronto this weekend, most of the top guys were not around for our little grassroots race. That said, there were at least a couple of riders who lapped me in Kanata the week before, so it was still going to be quick. It was. With far fewer riders this week, things got lonely fairly quickly. I spent most of the race falling behind the guy in front of me and pulling away from the guys behind, not much in the way of tactics, it was just technical and ride as hard as you can.

The last third or so of each lap was mostly on a series of fields, so you can see around you and who is coming up behind (or ahead). With 2 laps to go, officially anyhow, I could see someone coming up who was definitely not the guy who I’d had behind me all race. “Oh well, here comes the lap.” At the same time, I was also thinking that this was pretty close to the end of the lap, I might actually survive. I was somewhat torn. I could slow the pace and end my suffering, or I could continue to go as hard as I could and hopefully stay ahead.

In the end, I couldn’t slow down. I held the pace and while the eventual winner of the race was closing as if I was standing still, I managed to punch it and cross the finish line before him. For my efforts, I earned the privilege of doing another lap.

All in all, I ended up ahead of a few of the guys who had beaten me in Kanata, I finished on the lead lap on the most technical race of the season thus far and managed to dig deep and stay ahead of the winner. I should note that in no WAY am I saying that it was a close race between him and me. In the final minutes of his race, he probably closed 100m+ on me, it just so happened the the convergence would have happened several meters past the finish line.

Don’t matter though. I’ll take it.