You set off on a ride on a cold, oppressive rainy day wearing only a thin layer of clothes. Your hands are frozen to the handlebars. The pavement is a whirl of spray making it nearly impossible to see the other wheels spinning all around you. Your wheels drop off-road into a disgusting soup of muddy grit. Pedal hard.The rain is falling, the wind's picking up. The mud gets so deep that you can no longer ride through it. Your feet are not only cold and wet, they're now getting sucked into the sodden earth with every trudging step.
There are sections of this hellish route that you can ride, but it takes all of your riding skills and every dram of concentration to keep from sliding out and lying prone in the mire. Within a few minutes you're exhausted. It will be nearly an hour before you reach your destination. Your arms and legs already hurt, your lungs are searing, but thank goodness you're no longer frozen. The effort is warming if nothing else.
Just as you think it can't get worse you come to a hill. It's as muddy as the flats. Spanning across the slope are hefty logs. At first you think that's a good thing. They will at least offer a place to get your footing. But the logs require giant steps to get over and with the bike on your shoulder it takes all your effort and an occasional push on your thigh to lift yourself up.
The slide down the other side is perilous. Somehow you stay upright. The course flattens out, but the mud gets too deep again to ride through. You're running. Mud covers your eyes. Somebody put up stupid boards you can barely see, much less step over. Boards. Why?
Back on the bike, but it's still mud and the legs are on fire. Another murky uphill looms before you, but this one doesn't have logs and it's slightly off camber. You feel like Sisyphus, only instead of pushing a rock, you're carrying a bike.
Every time you hop on that bike it's a challenge to get your feet back in the toe clips. Yes, toe clips. This is the pre-clipless era, the Precliprian Age. The bikes are ferrous and heavy. The thin round top tube cuts into your shoulder.
Eventually, the wheel finds its way back to wet, rain-slicked pavement. After a few hundred feet you feel like you've been here before, but it's not over. Ten minutes have passed and you still have fifty minutes to go before you're allowed to quit. And the thought of quitting is ever-present in your thoughts. As you press forth it's like a duplicating cartoon backdrop, the same crap ridden scene repeating lap after lap. You have been here before. The muck returns.
At this point you're so covered in dense swathes of mud that you're indistinguishable from an ape. Yes, you've regressed. This is evolution in reverse.
This is cyclocross, only it's 1988 in Hagendorf, Germany. You're not going to win. You're barely holding on. You know that the kind of cyclocross you do in your home region is a thin veneer of this kind of racing, this kind of course. You're riding harder than you've ever ridden, in more pain than you've ever imagined, and it feels like you're going backwards. Once you finish--if you finish--you will have taken a step back, in Darwinian terms. Maybe a few steps back. You have a gritty taste of Hominoid hormones salivating across your tongue.
And you're only an amateur. You do this for "fun." You're a subspecies of the Elite class who will race this course after you've chewed it up.
Cyclocross in toeclips. Life at its primitive source.
Watch the 1988 Hagendorf Cyclocross World Championships in 8 YouTube videos back-to-back. The Precliprian Age. Enjoy.
Podium
Karel Camrda - Czech (went on to place 2nd in the Elite Class of the 1992 World Championships in Leeds, UK.)
Roger Honegger - Switzerland
Henrik Djernis - Denmark
No comments:
Post a Comment