Ann Arbor's DIRTHAMMER!

Humility Rehabilitation Clinic
The DIRTHAMMER! is not for brittle egos. It will, on any given Tuesday evening, with the right mix of riders, peel away the simpering layers of anyone's pride.

Joe L!!!!!!!! is Partly Right?
Joe--and we all know which Joe I'm talking about, right?--mentioned, in a recent forum, his interpretation of the DIRTHAMMER! origins. It, from his understanding, was begun by Paul Kundrat, Ric Lung, and Ian Lockley, leaving from Northville and emanating forth along local dirt roads. Joe's from Northville. He has pride in his fair village. My guess is that he goes to sleep at night imagining the Tour de France beginning its two thousand plus mile odyssey from Northville someday soon. I'm right, aren't I Joe? Knowing Joe, it could happen.

Well, Joe found snippets of truth in his overexpanding tube of exploding speculations. And half a fact is better than none. And, let's admit it, the DIRTHAMMER! is part legend, part myth, and part delusion anyway.

The DIRTHAMMER! (all caps--as declared by Paul Kundrat) was, in name, Paul's baby. But, and here's where Joe slips down his greasy off-camber hill of truth, this dirt road ride has been going on in Ann Arbor for a while, even before it received the DIRTHAMMER! moniker. And even as the newly rechristened DIRTHAMMER! it originated out of Ann Arbor, beginning from Barton Dam to be specific. So say both Paul and Ric.

Early Origins
According to veteran roadie, Jim Levinsohn, this dirty experience began as an easygoing ride on mountain bikes in the pre-cellphone days. (At first I read it as pre-cellophane and I thought, wow, that is old.) He, Doug Heady, and a guy who is only mentioned in the history books as Dixon wanted a change of pace after a heavy dose of spring and summer road racing. They called this the Dirt Road Ride. Exciting, huh? The regular route of the ride that we now know evolved over time, mostly through the considered attentions and endless wanderings of Jim and Doug.

It has become a route ingrained in the subconscious of anyone who's ridden it repeatedly. In full hammer mode it takes less than an hour and a half to complete, perfect for a Tuesday evening late summer/early fall CX season prep and workout as light fades from the northern hemisphere. The rolling hills are cruelly ever-present and almost perfectly placed to highlight any weakness in the legs of its miscreant participants.

Even in those early "mellow" rides, Jim notes, strange things happened. Dave Koesel fell so hard in a sprint that he was knocked out. He did regain consciousness and finish the ride, but if anyone's come across Dave since (for instance racing a fixie--and doing well--in the Ann Arbor Runway Spring Training Series), this will explain a lot. Paul McMullen, an Olympic 1500 meter runner, rode with his running shoes (truly clipless) and wailed on everyone. Jim and Doug were even chased by a child's remote control car. This is a ride as much known for its imagination as for its exhilaration.

Rebirth
Time passed. Somewhere along the way it lost its sparkle and languished for a while in obscurity. Then, around 2002 or so, a critical degenerate mass reconvened, only this time with cross bikes. According to Paul K, "it picked up momentum with regulars that included myself, Rich Stark, Ric Lung, Brian Rosewarne, Randy Herman, Tom Archer, and others. Inclement weather and darkness were not inhibitors and if you got shelled it meant a solo ride back to A2." Paul, who eventually became president of the Velo Club, considered it the hardest ride the club had to offer.

I picked up on it a year later and I remember regular and irregular luminaries such as Blair Dudley, Ken O'Day, Nick Durrie, Andy Weir, Jason Lummis, Ben & Wendy Caldwell, Jim James, Julie Bellerose, and I'm pretty sure Joe L!!!!!!! among many others, kicking the hurt in as well.

The beginning of the ride has two iterations leaving from Barton Dam, both heading north along Huron River Drive. The first and most common turns right across the Foster Bridge and up the far too soon hellishly steep Country Club Road. The second goes out to the equally unforgiving Tubbs Road climb. Some riders are mercifully dropped this early in the ride and given the freedom to enjoy themselves at their own measured pace. For those who still hang on it's a leg ripping evening of affliction ferociously rolling northwest all the way out to the incessantly undulating Walsh Road, left on Merkel and up a devious little pitch that's dropped many stout riders, and back southeast on Zeeb, Farrell, Jennings, Stein, and Maple, returning to Barton Dam, often shrouded in darkness at this point.

The point of the DIRTHAMMER! is its relentlessness. It builds momentum, reaching not one crescendo but dozens of them. If the pace slackens, it's immediately reignited by those with the freshest legs going off the front, much to the chagrin of those who feel they've just put in the last their own weary muscles have to offer. Whining and groaning is part of the dialogue. It's one ride that's meant, by definition, to repeatedly grind every last ounce of energy out of the legs and lungs, then require more.

The DIRTHAMMER! by any name is an institution in this area. It's a ride that helps racers prepare and stay in shape for the fall cyclocross season, and many use it to lock in their form for Traverse City's ICEMAN in early November.

Whoa! Wait a minute. Maybe the DIRTHAMMER! started in Traverse City. Hey, I'm originally from Traverse City. Yes, yes, it did start in Traverse City. And soon the Tour de Fra...

If anyone has further truths or fabrications to share about this infamous ride, let us know.

..................................oRo...

Jolly Pumpkin Cyclocross Series - Ann Arbor

Punishment Park Productions
Okay all. Time to step into that parallel void that stretches beyond pain into humiliation and pedal deficit disorder. The CX season is rolling into town.

The second annual Jolly Pumpkin Cyclocross series begins Wednesday, August 19th, 6PM, at Vet's Park in Ann Arbor, corner of north Maple and Dexter Avenue. Early in the season, you say? It's never too early to join the insensate.

There will be two races beginning at 6:15. The first, the A race, will go for 60 minutes. The second, the B race, will go for 45 minutes.

With races planned and courses tortuously designed by people with names like Stark (which expresses the futile bleakness of it all), Weir (whose name only needs the final "DO" to define the mangled warp of the experience), Bowser (whose howling will eat deep into your bones as lap after lap tears at the very foundation your once worthy soul), and the inimitable BMF (figure that out for yourselves, kiddies, but be warned, Rosewarned), you will come to know the furies unleashed for the coming weeks.

The Beginning of Ugly
It may not be the ugly time of year, but this will be ugly none-the-less. I promise. You'll feel the foreboding sense of many more ugly days to come. Each turn of the crank will remind you what it feels like to enter the vacuum of the oxygen depleted universe and into the all too real world of exploding pain ratcheting through your thighs. Euphoria doesn't join the game in August. It's far too early. You'll be lucky if you feel it by late October. If ever. But stupidity? Yes, that you'll have with you from the very start.

Excesstasy
Who does well in cyclocross? Those who gladly deplete their senseless brains of oxygen, leading--with merciless empty mindedness--to euphoria transcending agony. These aren't normal minds by any means. They're beyond stupid. They're bathed in self-inflicted misery masked as elation. Humor them. It's fun to watch.

And how do you join this cretinous clique of starved souls? You pedal hard on wasted earth and suck air day after day, week after week, until you've become one of the depleted, a poor wayward being weekly planning your comeback and the chance to stand podium center with the pantheon of addlepated barrier bangers.

Prizes go to the least sensible. It costs nothing but your pride.

BE THERE!
The Series Continues
Stay tuned for more info:
JP#2 - The Dirty Critty Brunch Race
September 7, 9:30 AM (Labor Day)

JP#3 - CANCELLED - Wines CX (First of the weekly Double Trouble

JP#4 - Dirt Hammer
September 22, 6PM - MEET AT FORSYTHE on Newport Rd.

JP#5 - Leslie Park (The Finale)
September 28, 6PM - CANCELLED

Dave Askins ... Ann Arbor's Workman Biker

Centrifugal Force
Dave Askins rigged up the teeter-totter to a set of pedals, cranks, and gears. You go up and down for a while and everything's normal. It's a normal teeter-totter life. Then he says clip in and the shoes he gave you to wear all of a sudden make sense, but the sensation is no longer teeter-tottering. It's spinning and you're helping to make it happen. That's why everything's fine for a while. You're doing it.

It's not like a passive adventure ride at Cedar Point where someone else pulls the levers and makes it happen and you just get sick to your stomach. You pedal harder. Dave's talking the whole time about ways to bring biking into everyday life where it becomes more normal than putting your foot on a gas pedal. More normal than hiding from the air we breathe within the sealed envelope of metal and glass.

And the ride gets faster. You're in the middle of the street and cars go around you as you spin with wild teetering arcs, up and down and sideways. But the cars don't mind and you don't mind and eventually you're one focused centrifuge separating out cars from people walking by, kids selling lemonade, kids running around, cyclists waving as they pass, solo banjo players on the street, life in the city where all these various worlds coexist, and then there's Dave separated out as well.

He's riding up the street on his bike with his Bikes at Work bike trailer, hauling books for Books by Chance or teas for Arbor Teas. When he's not teetering or working on the Ann Arbor Chronicle, he's hauling a load.

If you're around downtown during the day, especially in the Old West Side area, you've seen Dave. He's a distinct character on the street, not just because he has a beard that reaches toward his chest, though that is a distinct feature. And not just because he's friendly and talkative. Neighborhood kids run up to him and he likes to tease them a bit or chat for a few minutes. There are a lot of "hi Dave's" as he makes his rounds. "I'm not even sure who each person is who waves," he says. "They're out of context on the street. I know I've met them somewhere, but I'm not always sure where." But Dave's ubiquitous presence breeds familiarity. "I like being out on the bike. It's closer to the community in a physical sense."

Mostly, you can't miss him because of that bike and trailer combination loaded down with whatever he's hauling at that moment. It looks daunting. You feel his pain, but you're glad that it's not your pain. For some, just getting their legs over the saddle of a bike is challenge enough, much less hauling a couple hundred pounds of books up and down the hills of this town. Every move has to be calculated in advance. It's a Fruehauf of a bike load.

Then there are the days he hauls his teeter-totter down the road. With teeter in tow, lights change to red before the tail end has a chance to clear the intersection. It's like watching a fire truck pass with the ladder fully extended out the back.

Hauling Stuff
The trailer, made by Bikes At Work, is an aluminum marvel of functional engineering. It has holes and knobs for all kinds of tie down options. It has a pivoting swingarm that attaches firmly to a strong part of the bike frame. It has cute aluminum fenders. It looks like it was engineered by an engineer. It's not to be messed with. It is big and robust compared to those kid hauling bike trailers wandering the byways.

Crossing a street is a physics problem. Add it up: a few hundred pounds, plus an overall length of close to twelve feet, then take into account the percent of road slope up or down, and finally the speed at which a car approaches on the cross street. Get any of those wrong and there could be a lot of books strewn all over the street and one not very happy guy with a long beard.

3000 lbs vs. 23 lbs
Dave's been hit by cars before as a solo rider without having any trailer to deal with. It's the dread of any commuter. In the first incident he was crossing the I-94 overpass on State Street. "The rear end of the bike lifted right up," Dave said. "I had no idea what was going on." (Hmmm. Teeter totters do that. Seed of an idea perhaps?) The front end of a car met the rear end of his bike and he lost the match. His bike was trash, but he came out okay, if a bit stunned.

The second time he was zipping along Maple near the M-14 interchange. He had the right-of-way and made eye contact with the driver of the car sitting at the stop sign. Apparently eye contact wasn't enough. She pulled out and he T-boned her. Hint for Dave: stay away from freeway interchanges.

Communication
These experiences have led to a sage wariness about what a couple thousand pounds of moving metal can do to a gangly twenty pounds of bike and the trauma imposed on its rider. He's confident out there with his heavily laden trailer, but he doesn't take any foolish chances. It's all about clear signals to those around him and gauging where he is at any given moment. It's not as much about strict rules of the road as it is about safety, courtesy and communication. He doesn't always come to a complete stop at stop signs, but that doesn't mean he blows through them either. And he never tries to beat a car. But he also knows that if it came down to it and a police officer gave him a ticket for not stopping, he'd accept the consequences and pay the ticket.

Seizing Diem
He rides a beautiful titanium Airborne Carpe Diem that seizes the moment with extra G forces. The wheels were locally built up to withstand the heavy load and year round abuse that his routes dish out.

What caught him by surprise recently was his front fork. He left his house one afternoon, trailer in tow. At the end of the street the front of the bike felt a bit spongy. As he applied the brakes, the sponge snapped. Both sides of the fork sheared right off. All those loads, day after day, week after week, year round had created metal fatigue on the aluminum fork and it finally had enough. Fortunately, that surprise happened at a very slow speed just as he was leaving for a job. He doesn't like to think about the possibilities if he'd been traveling faster.

Dave doesn't own a car. He's a Zip car guy if he needs one, which he usually doesn't. In fact, he has yet to make use of the Zip system. In this case, he needed to fix the bike pronto and the Zip car takes advance notice. The bike is part of his livelihood and he couldn't wait. So he schlepped by foot up to Great Lakes Cycling on Stadium with the bike over his shoulder and the fork pieces in his hands. They found him a nice new steel fork. (Who ever heard of an aluminum fork, anyway?) If it happens again, it's hoped that this new one will bend rather than snap. If you've watched him bounding downhill with trailer fully loaded, you'll realize just what kind of assurance that brings.

Yes, Ann Arbor is Like the Rest of the World
Ann Arbor is not flat. There's always a hill or two or three somewhere between where you are and where you're going. Ride down Liberty headed east. Cross the railroad tracks at First Street. Look up. There's a wicked spike of a hill leading up to Ashley. This short climb hurts when you're riding a bike solo. I recently watched a middle-aged non-athletic couple ride their bikes up this hill. It was painful to watch as they zig-zagged their way crank by crank up the slope.

Imagine hauling that trailer with those few hundred pounds of books. Imagine getting the red light at each intersection. Even as you wait at Ashley alongside the Fleetwood, there's still a bit of hill to finish as the light turns green and you go from a dead stop to cross the street, and even then it's still an uphill slope to Main. Gentle, but uphill.

Or...the other option is to take the books west, up the long, long uphill trek to the post office on Stadium. There's no way out without an up.

Dave does this year round. It's not like he takes the winters off. I've seen him out there hauling away in some of the most gruesome weather possible, even through deep snow. Why? "It's accessible economically and it's energy efficient," says Dave in a simple matter-of-fact way. "It's not that bad once you get out in it. It just looks bad while you're standing inside."

Embedded Energy
In fact, while many of us are still trying to figure out how to get our cars to be more efficient, Dave, without any car, is concerned about his small impact on the world. He thinks about the "embedded energy" in the aluminum and titanium of his bike and trailer system--the energy it takes to make them, use them, then to discard them. That's one reason he ended up using the trailer to haul the books and the tea. He'd originally purchased it to tote groceries and for personal errands. But he wanted to use it for more than that alone. Then one day in the early winter of 2007 he bumped into John Weise of Books by Chance. After a short discussion and a trial run, he was in the delivery business. The next fall he added Arbor Tea. He does UPS and USPS runs for both.

Dave's had other bike lives. From ages ten to sixteen, he used a bike to deliver papers in his hometown of Columbus, Indiana. He once rode from Columbus to St. Louis, Missouri where he went to college. The most memorable trek was a ride from Germany to Portugal in a post-fellowship exploration of Europe. He and a friend traveled light, camped and stayed in hostels. Later he even did a little criterium racing, but realized that it wasn't for him--too much about strategy and not enough about recreation.

But what is Dave's idea of an ideal ride? A very long one. Without having to haul anything, just him and the bike. Head out light and just pedal. Let someone else tote the load.

I don't know. I'm having a hard time seeing Dave without that trailer, but I'm sure anything's possible.

Okay, go ahead and roll your eyes about the excentrifugal teeter-totter. But Dave already dries the family clothes in a spin cycle powered by the spin of his legs. He built it up a while back and when it was done and it worked, he came up to me as excited as a little boy. He'd removed himself from the power grid when it came to drying the outfits that get him through the seasons. Do you really think the centrifugal teeter-totter idea is wacky? Remember, this is Dave. He's already convinced mayors and other supposedly respectable folk to teeter along with him in his "Homeless" alter ego as he asks them about current issues. Do you think the multi-modal teeter is far behind?

Watch for it. Dave's always pondering something.

Hangs Around Street Posts Late at Night

Take the glasses off, slap on a jersey and a helmet and you'll know who this guy is. He hangs around the hospital night and day. Sometimes he shows up at races.

First person who sends me the name of the mystery banner man, along with a Garmin Edge 705 GPS w/Heart Rate/Cadence/Data Card & Street Maps, and a short bio of him/herself gets their own special posting on ThingsBike.

Promise.

(What the heck is he looking at so intently?)