Cyclocross and (Oxy)Morons

Pre-season Jolly Pumpkin Race at Leslie Park

For a few years now, Chris, my friend and neighbor down the street has been telling me about this friend of his. According to Chris, he's this amazing rider who mountain bikes mostly and he goes out to epic week long races like one in Vancouver and wails. I could never talk about biking with Chris without his bringing up this guy. They've been friends since childhood.




Jonathan Page - Who We Pretend to Be

Chris loves to mountain bike, but his job in recent years has him commuting in a car through the thick of Southeast Michigan hell over an hour or two each way, so whenever we talk bikes, which is every time we meet, he says, "my friend Andy..." and seldom talks about his own exploits. After a number of these conversations, Andy took on epic proportions.

Chris had tried to get me in to Local Loop MTB rides a couple of years ago that he did with a group that included this Andy guy. They rode from Chris's house at the bottom of the street on Tuesday evenings when a crew of about ten riders would assemble, ride, and head to the bar, in that order.

45+ at Springfield Oaks, Mark Wolowiec in Front, Duh!

The trouble was that those were the nights when I did the DirtHammer with the club. The DirtHammer has always been one of my dedicated training rides for cyclocross season, so I never did get out with Chris on the Local Loop. In fact, they were usually just heading out, often with lights, when I'd returned from ripping my legs apart with the club. I'd wave as I rode up the street, Chris would wave, they'd go for their ride, and that was that.

We Look So Relaxed and Like Such Pals at the Beginning, Don't We? (Scott Claes, Ken O'Day, somebody's arm, Mike Seaman, Rob)

So, during the first race at Vet's Park this year, I lined up with the pack. Since this is an Ann Arbor race, I noticed Chris in the crowd and thought how great it was he'd shown up to watch. We were our usual nervous, jokey, group, everyone wondering where Mark Wolowiec was, since he usually sets the standard for chase rabbit. Then this guy in a Biciclibre jersey next to me says, "are you Rob?" It's a question I struggle with at times, but realizing this is not a deeply philosophical moment, I answer in the affirmative. He reaches over and shakes my hand. "Andy," he says, "Chris's friend."

A week or two before, when I didn't know he was The Andy, we rode a few laps at the Lower Huron CX race together and Andy was off the front kind of dragging everyone around the course until he, Mark Wolowiec, Joe Brown, and Mike Seaman made it their own little race, leaving the rest of us behind. A couple of laps after that, Andy was walking with his bike over his shoulder in the opposite direction on the back half of the course. He'd broken his chain. At the time I'd wondered, who the heck was this Biciclibre guy? Now, at Vet's it all came together. The infamous Andy. He came in first that day at Vets.

The Pros Over the Barriers

I really love cyclocross. And to put the words love and cyclocross into the same sentence is truly an oxymoron. And the moron part really fits because cyclocross hurts so much that you have to have something deeply wrong inside to feel passion for something so brutal. The oxy- is about air, or the lack thereof (ie., deprivation), perhaps leading to the reason for the second part of the word in our case.

Worse, I don't win many races. The podium is hard to reach. I've had Wolowiec and Brown beat me so often that I feel like it's really an exercise in self flagellation. In previous years Riege was a dominating force, but this year he was less so. It must not have been a priority for him, because he's definitely someone to reckon with when he's on form.

Blood (Seldom the Accompanying Glory)

I wasn't racing CX last year because of my heart attack (see my 2007 blog article DirtHammer 911) at the beginning of the season, so I don't know who the main contenders were beyond stalwarts like Wolowiec and Brown. I know Mark Lovejoy and Ken O'Day are always in there battling it out. But this year we also had the rise of Mike Seaman, Andy Klumb, Mike Belanger, and Mike Green. They made me and my new tubular Zipp 404 carbon wheelset and old faithful Fuji cross bike dig in awfully hard. No matter what my placing, against these guys I knew that I'd been challenged by the best and that I'd done all I could do on a given day.

I remember watching my first CX race, before I decided to expose myself to the stupidity of it all. It was at Hudson Mills near Dexter. Everybody looked like they were going so darned slow. There's something about watching cyclocross bikes moving over the grass that makes you think, "I could do better than that! Why don't they just pedal harder?"

Barriers Won!

The next year I was on that same course for the first time. On the bike it's different. It's like a Kafka nightmare where you work so hard to go forward and the earth drags your wheels down toward hell so your legs just ache. Always. There's always something in a cyclocross race that pulls you down as much as you fight to drive the bike forward.

On a road bike, on pavement, your bike does move forward. It flies sometimes like there is no road, no earth to tie you down. Even mountain bikes can give you that feeling of a soaring raptor as you dip and glide through the trail. But cyclocross is all about earth and gravity and that simultaneous pull of opposing forces. Seldom do you feel that same sense of glide and lift. Even stretches of pavement often work against you. By the time you hit the tarmac all you think of is recovery. And since it's a fall sport there's usually a nice head or cross wind to extinguish any dream of reenergizing on these paved stretches.

Joe Brown

On my last race in late November at Munson in Monroe (out for the rest of the season after that race due to a pinched nerve and a bout of the flu), snow was falling, the course was slick, and the temperature was below freezing with bitter wind chills. Joe Brown, as ever, had designed a challenging, cranky, flowing course to ride. Munson Park has one big hump of a hill and a lot of flat, damp grass. He'd made the one hill into three brilliant, wicked little climbs.

Rob & Joe at Vets

Joe and I battled that race out together from beginning to end. There was one moment when we were topping one of the steepest of those pitches, our legs barely able to turn the cranks over, and he just moaned, "man these hills are hard." In the middle of all that suffering for both of us I thought it was so funny. Here I was with one of my toughest competitors all these years and we were absolutely miserable, having pushed each other to the limit lap after lap, trying to find weakness, trying to pull away, neither of us giving in. I literally had spit and snot all over my face from the cold and the endless exertion. And Joe just wouldn't let up. In all those years, he never has. And I said to him, "you designed this, Joe. You did it to yourself." "I know," he said, "I know." It said everything about cyclocross in that one brutal, honest, comical moment. We do it to ourselves. And then we do it again and again.