Smithers MINNEAPOLIS

2012 UCI Masters World Cyclocross Championships

I came down to Louisville with no expectations and the only goal of making it to the final race. There were qualifying heats for the finals but with a field of less than 80 riders the qualification heats were only used to seed the starting grid for the final race. So the event started with me already making my goal, SUCCESS! Thus I reset to a new goal: SURVIVAL.

My qualification race was on Thursday and with all day rain soaking the venue the day before the event turned into a muddy slog. We were originally supposed to do three laps but the course was so slow that the organizers shorted it to just two laps. Bike handling was important in some sections but for the most part it was a power course in the mud. Slow going in the muck on the flats and considerable time off the bike running the hills and the wooded technical sections, two laps were plenty of time to suck the life force out of nearly everyone on the course. I know that I was thanking Chewbacca while riding to the finish that I was not going to have to put in another lap.

By the end of the day Thursday the course was chewed up, rutted and beat to hell. Then the temperature dropped and everything froze. More qualifying heats took place on Friday and the reports I was reading online during the course of the day sounded grim. No one died (that I read about anyway) and the organizers made what adjustments they could for the championship races on Saturday. However, the ability to ride fast over the slick rutted course was going to be paramount for any success.

There was some sections of the national championship course last weekend in Madison that were challenging, but at least there were sections where you could ride hard and fast and all the downhills were smooth and rideable. Today there was probably less than 100 meters of the total course that could be ridden hard and fast without having to worry about what hell was beneath your tires. The start of the race was fast as usual but it seemed like all but a handful of riders were holding back slightly, as if they knew what disaster was to come as soon as they left the safety of the paved roadway and hit the grass. Just before we came off the pavement I think I heard someone scream “Protect me Tim Tebow!”

Those with the confidence and experience to ride across the slick and deeply rutted course simply rode away, never to be seen again until the power spray washers. I have simply not been racing cyclocross long enough to have dealt with conditions like this in the past so my entire race was spent desperately trying to keep the bike upright, not always successfully, while trying to be patient in waiting for the sections of the course where I could actually ride hard. I would try and ride the cleanest line that I could find, otherwise tacking back and forth across the width of the course trying to ride above and over the ruts instead of in them. But inevitably I would find my front tire dropping into a deep rut that would pitch my bike in a different direction than my forward momentum. Most of the time, following the utterance of profanity, I would be able to force my wheel out of the ride, or put a foot down and correct my line to keep moving forward. But quite often I would find myself simply ejected off the bike. The worse example of this took place at the bottom of the flyover descent when my bike shot to the right while I was leaning left. Once I sailed over the snow fencing someone yelled “Hey, get back on the course!” which was the only heckle so far this year that actually nearly cracked me up. Props to whatever dude made that yelling.

What really made things special was the half inch or so of thawed muck on the surface of the course. As opposed to Thursday where the mud would just kind of splash around on stuff, this stuff was like paste that stuck to anything that touched it. Every single lap my bike got heavier and heavier with mother earth catching a free ride around the park. By the end of the race it was on everything, two inches thick on the downtube, stuck to every spoke, packed and piled up from the bottom bracket shell into the chainrings and over the top of the front derailleur. My bike was probably twice as heavy at the finish of the race as it was at the start.

It would have been nice to see how I could have done against the field on a cleaner day, but cross is cross. As my son would say, you get what you get and you don’t make a fit.

Cyclocross season is over, but I am already starting to think about next year.

Photo courtesy of @velolouisville!