Newbie Once More

Tired of pavement after a long season on the road (kicked things off with a crit on the first weekend of March this year) I bought a cyclocross bike a few weeks ago. I attended a few practices at my local bike shop, got used to carrying my bike on my shoulder, and entered two races over the past weekend: a beginner race and an open race, both on the same day. I walked up to the registration table and handed my USCF card to the slim guy behind it.

“I’m doing the beginner race and the A/B race,” I said.

“O.K. You’re insane,” the guy said, handing me my two numbers and my card. “Good luck.”

Here’s the thing about starting over: you never know what you’re getting into. I found myself, driving to the races Sunday morning, thinking back through a series of firsts: marathon, 10K, 1/2 marathon, triathlon, 1/2 iron, criterium, road race, time trial, professional triathlon. And now cyclocross. What mistakes would I make this time? Each time I signed up for a new event, I rolled my bike, walked, or swam to the start quietly, listening to the confident chatter of the guys nearby. I’ve put my number on the wrong side of my jersey in criteriums, not been able to figure out where to put that number on my bike or body before triathlons, and wondered why that gaunt guy near the start of the D.C. Marathon was rubbing what looked like vaseline onto his nipples.

As I looked out at the course on Sunday, it looked hopelessly byzantine: hundreds of yards of police tape, cordoning off what would be a huge crime scene.  I figured I would just follow the guy in front of me and it would be fine.  We all lined up and listened to the marshall explain the odd way a cyclocross race is conducted: the marshalls clock the first lap, then divide the race time (half an hour, fifty minutes, etc…) by that first lap.  Our first lap took about seven and a half minutes, so when I came through the arrive/depart line there was a little card: 3.

Cyclocross is punishing.  No one goes fast enough to give any kind of drafting effect, and there are too many corners to follow someone’s wheel even if you were going above fifteen miles an hour.  There are steep hills you must carry your bike up, sand pits that glom on to your wheel, little barriers that try to nip the toes of your foot as you leap over them .  It’s like a time tria, but one in which you’re constantly getting on and off your bike, and trying to power over humps of steep dirt.

I was somewhat ready, but by the middle of the last lap, I was experiencing the kind of sensations that usually kick in ninety minutes deep into an Olympic distance triathlon: a hot heaviness in my thighs, and nausea.  But I realized I was close to the front.  Cyclocross is also confusing.  Since people can’t hang on, the way they would in a crit, dropped racers get lapped all the time.  But I saw this guy with a blue jersey who’d been leading the whole race, not too far ahead.  I caught him on a straightaway, while he was gasping and groaning about a cramp.  He swerved into me as I passed him and, when I asked “Are you trying to put us both out of the race?” he said “Yes.” Some people will try to tell you that cyclocross is less cutthroat than road racing.  Don’t listen to them.

I left him behind and got over the last barrier, through the last sand pit.  A kid–I thought he was a junior, actually, as they were on the course the same time as us–almost caught me, and I was amazed that a fifteen year old posted second.  But there I was: first place in my first cyclocross race.

The open race was, of course, a totally different affair.  It was twice as long, much faster, and I finished in about 30th place.  But, result or no, I’m hooked.  New things are crucial, especially in this endurance sport of ours, where value is placed on long periods of a repeated activity.  We do not have the grace of the diving catch, the last second touchdown, the magic of the game-changing play.  We make those adjustments in training, and our races are simply the displaying of training, plus or minus a few seconds from mental toughness (or weakness) and the desire to catch that guy ten yards down the road.  So get out there and do something new this weekend.  Your happiness will thank you.

The pleasure of simply running

I was not always an endurance athlete. Like most boys raised in the Northeast, I played a variety of sports growing up: baseball, soccer, basketball, hockey for one year, until my parents decreed the sport too violent. I never played football for the same reason. They all fell away one year, the fall of eighth grade, except for soccer. The World Cup was just under two years distant that fall, the fall of 1992, and my friend Tom Calihan and I had just watched the U.S. National Team upset England 2-0 before falling, narrowly, to Germany 4-3. That was the terrifying German side of Rudi Voeller, Jurgen Klinsmann, and the hard, unflappable Lothar Matthaus, who played in the central defense. We were good, the United States. We belonged. I gave up my other sports and focused solely on soccer, on the solitary, pressure-heavy position of goalkeeper. Now, of course, it seems obvious I fell into that position; those who are endurance-obsessed at heart may enjoy the company of teams, but at some point they simply want to be left alone.

I threw myself into soccer with a singularity that, once again, could have presaged my current avocation. I played indoor soccer in the winter, club soccer in the spring, summers that I wasn’t away at camp I played on the Bay State team. It was all practice, however, for fall. Fall, of course, is when you played with your team, your high school team. I hated high school just as much as any other confused, awkward, hormonal kid. But I still loved playing for my high school. I felt, for those two hours of the game, that I could do something for my town’s position in the world.

When I went to college (and I was obsessed, and good enough, to make playing in college a priority), I felt the same way, although now I was playing for a name, and a prestigious, august name at that. The fields were lovely, immaculate, kept lush and green by a team of men whose job was simply to keep the fields and athletic facilities in good working order. I felt that our good performance would somehow justify the labor of those guys who, I now know, would have been out there if we never won a coin flip. I played because I loved it, but I also played because I had something to prove.

So it is fall to which I connect truly important sport, even though now my crucial season falls between June and August. The crispness of the autumn air, the light breezes, the temperatures that let your body warm up to something comfortable, rather than something sweat-soaked. The days themselves seem to say get out there and compete; you don’t have much time. And, truly, the fall seems shorter than the other seasons, more desperate, as winter lurks in each fallen leaf and northwest blow. So now, even though I’m in my off-season, transitioning, thinking about races in May and June and how much work I need to do to bring my 10K down to 33:00, my 1500 swim down to 18:00, my body wants competition; it wants a bright cool day in October on which I can win ball after ball from some eternal opposing team. It wants the pleasure of work and play rolled into a couple of hours outdoors.

And I’ve found that solace, this fall, in running. Sure there’s Masters practice next week, and I’ve got cyclocross races through mid-December, but I’m having fun on my feet. Today, after classes and before soccer practice with the girls’ team I coach, I caught a sweet 45 minutes, with only my lungs and thoughts. For fun, I did six 800 meter repeats, enjoying the feel of my legs turning over quickly. I saw my first good orange tree on a run, a few days ago, and it’s still warm enough that I can go in shorts and tank, something, with cycling’s windchill, that’s impossible on a bike. I can smell leaves mulching themselves in the ditch on the side of the road, and that odor of woodsmoke that is the source of fall’s poignancy. I go on runs, now, without heart rate monitor, simply enjoying the time, the air, the light. Although I’ve got no important races, my body wants me to go, and running is the answer.

Late Season Surpise

This past weekend, I ran a 5K. I hadn’t competed in more than three weeks, my last race being the ITU race in Rye, New York, where I flatted about twelve miles into the bike. I’d called it a season, took the aerobars off my road bike, and went back to working out once a day. I ran the 5K course twice in the week prior. I teach at a small private boarding school in Southern Vermont that turns out about one or two elite cross-country skiiers a year. They like to come back for this weekend, our Harvest Festival weekend, and show off. I came in second, last year, to one of those guys, gasping across the line fifty-six seconds behind. He was back this year, and I as we lined up on a beautiful New England fall Sunday, I said to him “Eighteen minutes?” (this is an old-school cross country course, with about four hundred feet of climbing in just over three miles).

“Under, I hope,” he said.

Shit, I thought.

This race begins with a too-precious ceremony of letting a red maple leaf fall to the ground. When it touched, we were off across the soccer fields. I ran even with Kevin, my adversary, and just before turning onto the dirt road, thought Why not? and pulled ahead of him. We turned left off the road, ran across a wide field the school’s neighbor owns, and entered the woods, rising and falling along ski trails. Slowly the sound of hard breathing faded behind me. Halfway through the race, I risked a look back. Kevin was two back, and a tall, spandex clad man was in second, at about twenty yards. I had started to suffer, but figured they were too, and tried to turn it up a notch. Do the work now, I told myself, that will put them under. We went back into the woods and started making the turns that switchbacked us up the hill towards school. That guy was closing in. I could hear breathing again and, more alarming, leaves being brushed aside by his feet. He’s gonna catch me, I thought. We crested the hill and came back out onto that first field, which was being used as a parking lot. I felt the familiar feeling of my breakfast rising out of my stomach. When we came back out onto the road, I still had those twenty yards, and the finish line was in sight. I just had to run away from it first, and then make two turns before running back across the soccer fields we’d left behind, in comfort, minutes ago. A hundred yards from the finish I realized I had him, and I sprinted into the finish shute. I have never won a simple footrace, and the orange marking tape stretched across the finish surprised me. What was I supposed to do? At the last second, I saw the notch cut into its center, and I realized I’m supposed to break it. I did. My chaser rolled into the shute. We both stood, bent over and clasping our knees, spittle and mucous hanging from our mouths. Good work, I said. You too, he replied.

The race director came over. “17:53,” he announced. “New course record.”