Born to spin

Our intrepid local cyclocross reporter asked me to post this here, since he doens't have a blog and, at his advanced age, is unlikely to get one.

BC

The Magic of Cross

By Buck Walters

        Every December, the Portland, Maine Symphony Orchestra gives a series of concerts called "The Magic of Christmas." The seaport city is decked in holiday lights, the air is crisp, and Portland's Merrill Auditorium is an inspiring venue, with it's huge columns, and classic Greek architecture. The music is powerful, mostly traditional Christmas carols performed in high symphonic fashion, with vocals, guided by the steady hypnotic wave of the conductor's baton. The whole experience makes you feel warm and happy inside, like all is right with the world. In other words, it's like a cyclocross race.

       

About 175 mile due south, the 2006 California Giant Berry Farm Cyclocross Nationals are taking place in Providence, Rhode Island.  It's the elite men's race on Saturday afternoon, a sunny and an unseasonably warm day. Spectators pack the area around the double barriers behind the beer tent, five or six deep on both sides of the track. The crowd cheers enthusiastically as eventual winner Ryan Trebon smoothly dismounts, crosses the barriers with his oh-so-long legs, then effortlessly re-mounts and is gone.  Maybe 25 seconds later, the chase group appears, with almost all the big dogs: Wells, Johnson, Powers, Wicks and Page.

The approach is slightly downhill and fast, and the chasers are tightly bunched as they swing their legs over their bikes and dismount at what looks like breakneck speed.  I'm reminded of the adorable observation made by four year old Madeleine "Maddy" Labance at a race earlier in the year as she watched the riders crossing a set of double barriers.

"Mommy, they look like ballerinas," she exclaimed to mom Heather, a Cat 1 roadie with Team Advil-Chapstick, dabbling in cross for the first time in 2006.

But no choreographer could have designed the finely tuned footwork of these five elite racers as they shift their hips, legs, shoulders, bikes and centers-of-gravity in perfect synchrony and zoom over the barriers. With the main chase group gone, the crowd remains tightly pressed against the red poly tape, many craning their necks and looking intently up-track to the point where the course appears from behind the beer tent.

"Here he comes," somebody says, as the bright red Fiordifrutta colors of Matt White hurtle into view. Approaching the barriers, White doesn't swing his leg over the top tube, like the others who had come before. Instead, he levels his pedals at the nine and three o'clock position, rises from the saddle with his knees slightly bent and bunny-hops the barriers, passing over the sixteen inch high wooden planks without ever getting off his bike. The crowd responds with a deafening roar. White touches down a little off-line, and probably a tad too close to the tape, the result, no doubt, of his back wheel grazing the second barrier. The normally pokerfaced rider grins as he rides away. Some girls dressed in strange-looking clothes wave hand-lettered signs bearing Matt's name as they hurry off to their next vantage point.  Even as White speeds away, the noise persists.

It's been a good year for Matt White, with a couple of UCI wins and second place overall in the highly competitive Verge New England Cyclocross Series behind Mark McCormick. On the right day, the podium is well within reach for the talented 23 year old. But today is not that day. More than a minute down, and working alone, it's a gap that White will not cross. He's out of contention, but he's smiling, having fun at the nationals.

As I watch the race, I'm standing next to Mark Salazar, 42 year old first year cross racer from Succasunna, New Jersey. Mark, a carpenter who speaks fluent Spanish, had a few top ten finishes in the local C races, and he came to Providence to try his hand at the nationals. He entered the 40-44 masters, but missed his start. The officials were kind enough to let him ride in the 35-39, where he finished 129th in a field of 135, riding an old FUJI on loan from his club, Skylands Cycling. Too much coffee, not enough food, was Mark's analysis. And a hundred twenty eight guys who were faster than you, I remind him, with a gentle slap on the back.

Standing in Roger Williams Park with hands in pockets as the rest of the field stream by, Mark is all smiles.

"I can't believe how much fun this is," he tells me.

Mark needs some fun in his life. His two-year-old daughter, Lila, is suffering from inoperable brain cancer, and his days have been consumed with doctor visits, hospitals, driving, chemo and worry. He barely has time to work, let alone train. His wife Liz OK'd Mark's trip to the nationals on the grounds that it would help preserve his much needed sanity. Talking to Mark on this sunny fifty degree December day, I'd say the plan is working.

"This might sound stupid," Mark offers, "but I'd kind of like to concentrate on cyclocross."

I tell him he's not alone. One of the Skylands U19s, a strapping varsity swimmer with size fifteen feet, told his father after his first cross race that he wanted to give up swimming and specialize in cyclocross. Cross-is like that. It consumes people, and consumes them quickly.

Ask just about any cross racer, and she'll tell you that cross is the most fun of all the bike racing disciplines. And the fastest growing, and probably the most brutal. So what is it that brings 1900+ people to the nationals, makes kids want  to throw away college scholarships, and makes the troubles of the world disappear, at least for a few hours? Not to mention makes you drive ten hours each weekend from September through December so you can experience maybe an hour and a half of muddy suffering.

On a technical level, cross combines the adventure of off-road riding with the higher speeds of road racing, truly the best of both worlds. It's also the fairest of all cycling disciplines--the strongest rider is almost always most likely to win. Luck is usually not much of a factor. And it's low stress, at least mentally. Unlike road racing, where you spend an hour or more watching like a hawk for what might be the winning move, jostling for position and trying to find the right wheel, the cyclocross pecking order is usually established early on. There's not a lot of thinking: just ride hard and hope the other guys get tired before you do.

But the magic of cross goes a lot deeper than that. To be sure, there's a childlike joy in all of cycling. Almost everybody rode a bike as a kid, and who among us doesn't relish the simplicity of life on a bike--no social classes, no economic classes, no political parties. It's uncomplicated, unlike our lives. It's simple, and it's joyful and it's fun, like being a kid again. And cyclocross is the most child-like form of cycling.

On the day after Christmas, it seems obvious as I look out the window and see kids riding their bikes around my neighborhood, a working class area where every home doesn't have an Xbox 360 and a giant flat panel TV. The kids ride bikes. They don't ride in an organized paceline and they don't disappear into the woods for an hour.  Riding mostly BMX bikes, they cruise along the street for a while, and then head off through someone's backyard, onto the sidewalk, and maybe do some figure eights in a parking lot. They're always changing up, never doing one thing for very long. Cyclocross, like riding in the 'hood, is a sport of transitions, and the child in us loves it.

And you should see the kids on my block dismount. They ride full blast across the yard. As they approach the porch, they swing that leg over the top tube like little tree-farms, hop off and tear up the steps without missing a beat.  It comes naturally.

Last spring, Team Bulldog organized the state scholastic mountain bike championships.  There was an event for little kids, around five and six years old. The finish line was at the top of a short but steep hill, which slowed the riders down and made scoring easier.  The hill was too steep for most of the littlest kids to ride. They had to get off and push their bikes each lap. The uphill dismounts were a little ragged, but the remounts were awesome—five year old girls with pink bikes and streamers executing near perfect cyclocorss remounts. About half the kids did it as well as the average recreational cross racer. And nobody's teaching them. It comes naturally.

Two weeks after the nationals, Skylands Park in Augusta, New Jersey was decorated for New Year's Day, 2007, with about 10,000 feet of yellow caution tape for the first of a series of three January "Wintercross" races. About ten or twelve hardy riders were racing through steady rain in the combined B/C event.  The course looked interesting, going through an extensive double maze in the hard packed gravel parking lot, before heading up some stairs and into the baseball stadium that's home to the Sussex County Skyhawks. In the distance, I could see riders exiting the stadium and struggling up a steep incline to a grassy hilltop where they disappeared from view.

Race organizer Bob Cary stood on a small deck at the door of a white trailer adjacent to the finish line. He waved me in. The trackside trailer was warm and brightly lit, in contrast to the dim gray January afternoon outside. Chief Judge Debbie Schiff sat at a desk in front of a laptop, looking out a window onto the course. As riders passed by, she entered their numbers into the computer. In the next room were another laptop and a small printer on a counter, along with some papers, pens and safety pins.

"Pretty fancy set up for 10 riders, isn't it?" Bob asked. "Like the nationals."

I was standing between Cary and the entrance, so unless he wanted to jump over the counter and leave by the other door, he was trapped. A good time, I thought, to ask him a few questions, since he rarely stands still for more than a few seconds.

"Why would you put on a race on New Year's Day," I asked.

       

"Some of the riders asked for January races. We figured if the weather was good, we'd see maybe thirty to forty entries. With the rain, it'll be half that, probably. But who cares?" He shrugged.

        "Who cares?" I repeated, knowing that race promoters live and die by rider turnout.

        "You have to understand what we do here," he says in an almost fatherly way. "We create this big playground for bicycles, and the kids pay us $20 to play on our playground." It's a low budget operation, he tells me, with only one paid official and no prize money, the distant and opposite end of the spectrum from Rhode Island's nationals.

        Bob squeezes past me and out the sliding door at the end of the trailer, and I follow. The leaders of the combined B/C race are approaching.  They are 16 year old David Devine and 47 year old Dusan "Dan" Strika, both regulars at the local races. Thoroughly wet and mildly muddy, they are smiling and exchanging words which, to us, are inaudible as they pass the finish line.

A handful of spectators huddle under a tent and cheer as the leaders go by. A tall guy wearing a hat with stuffed faux-viking horns writes numbers on a clipboard. He's Bruce Kristiansen, local welder and father of two teenaged cross racers, although neither is racing today. Bruce is also the recent recipient of the Skylands club's Volunteer of the Year Award. You can see why.

        Cary runs down three steps and about ten feet up the course where the laps cards are.

        "Three to go, right?" He says to nobody in particular. Satisfied that the lap cards are correct, he turns and points a finger at me. "One of those guys is going to win his first cyclocross race."

       

Cary, a locally successful racer in the 55+ age group, is sidelined with a rotator cuff tear—like Page, he says—and hasn't raced in four weeks, but he's plainly enjoying himself.

       

"I don't know how to explain it," he says "but cyclocross just makes me happy. I like organizing the races as much as I like racing. It's a huge mood elevator"

       

"Like being a kid again?" I ask.

       

"Totally." And that's the magic of cyclocross.

Copyright Buck Walters, January 5, 2007