Seems a few others have come to the same conclusion I did this year concerning Sea Otter, that being "I'm just not feeling it."
The hectic, do-it-all-in-three-days-'cause-to-stay-any-longer-will-bankrupt-you pace of the weekend, the inevitable rain, the drubbing I usually take on race-day, all add up to precious little enthusiasm for Sea Otter this year.
Sure, that stuff is all part of the experience of Sea Otter, and the massive spectacle of bicycle-goodness is something every cyclist should behold, at least once. Still, after 7 consecutive years, I've become jaded in the "Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.1" sense. I'm over it.
For nearly the same coin, I can spend a weekend in Mammoth. So that's what I'm doing.
Maybe if I skip a year, I'll be jonesing to go next year. This year though, I'll be riding snow instead of dirt, and loving every minute of it.
1 I've never actually purchased a Sea Otter t-shirt. Have you seen how much they charge for those things?!
Friday, April 18, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
You lose some, you lose some.
First mountain bike race of the season and my gut-feeling, that my fitness is nowhere near what it should be at this point in the season, has been confirmed.
Raced the Pro/Semi-Pro singlespeed class, in the NMBS Nationals at Fontana last weekend. I didn't feel particularly bad, apart from the usual suffering one goes through in a race. But I was going as hard as I could maintain, and just didn't have the power to keep up.
Ended up 7th out of 7 in the Pro/Semi-Pro field, and got beat by the front-runners in the expert field, who race in the same start wave.
I could come up with a litany of excuses, like maybe I shouldn't have rode hard at crit-practice, on Thursday night. Maybe I shouldn't have overslept, thus cutting my warm-up short, and maybe I shouldn't have put off building up the new frame & fork, until the last possible minute, so that I would have been able to track down the necessary parts and wouldn't have been forced to race on a fully rigid bike, instead of the new one. The plain fact is though; I'm simply not competitive, at my current fitness level, with the caliber of riders that are currently racing singlespeeds.
Gonna have to step it up, if I want to see a podium any time soon...
The race was just the start of my problems on Saturday. My Saturday evening plans of hanging out with my favorite surfer-girl in HB, followed by Sunday-morning surf, went awry, when my just-recently-apparently-not-quite-resurrected KLR 650, broke down in the carpool lane of the 91 Fwy, in Corona, leaving me stranded on the center divider. The center divider is *not* a place you want to be. Not only does it leave you vulnerable to getting smacked by cars whizzing by at 80 MPH, it leaves you indefensible to the extortionist rates of tow-companies. $173 later ($165 plus an $8 "credit card processing fee"), myself and my bike were transported 1 mile away, to the gas station at the nearest exit. Auto Aide towing of Corona should change their name, but they'd probably get a bit less business with "Highway Robbery Towing" printed in the phone directory.
Raced the Pro/Semi-Pro singlespeed class, in the NMBS Nationals at Fontana last weekend. I didn't feel particularly bad, apart from the usual suffering one goes through in a race. But I was going as hard as I could maintain, and just didn't have the power to keep up.
Ended up 7th out of 7 in the Pro/Semi-Pro field, and got beat by the front-runners in the expert field, who race in the same start wave.
I could come up with a litany of excuses, like maybe I shouldn't have rode hard at crit-practice, on Thursday night. Maybe I shouldn't have overslept, thus cutting my warm-up short, and maybe I shouldn't have put off building up the new frame & fork, until the last possible minute, so that I would have been able to track down the necessary parts and wouldn't have been forced to race on a fully rigid bike, instead of the new one. The plain fact is though; I'm simply not competitive, at my current fitness level, with the caliber of riders that are currently racing singlespeeds.
Gonna have to step it up, if I want to see a podium any time soon...
The race was just the start of my problems on Saturday. My Saturday evening plans of hanging out with my favorite surfer-girl in HB, followed by Sunday-morning surf, went awry, when my just-recently-apparently-not-quite-resurrected KLR 650, broke down in the carpool lane of the 91 Fwy, in Corona, leaving me stranded on the center divider. The center divider is *not* a place you want to be. Not only does it leave you vulnerable to getting smacked by cars whizzing by at 80 MPH, it leaves you indefensible to the extortionist rates of tow-companies. $173 later ($165 plus an $8 "credit card processing fee"), myself and my bike were transported 1 mile away, to the gas station at the nearest exit. Auto Aide towing of Corona should change their name, but they'd probably get a bit less business with "Highway Robbery Towing" printed in the phone directory.
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