August 15

Wrap-up: State Road Race—Tuesday shmoozeday—Trigonometry for Bikers (or Mass Ave if you prefer)—and Thank God the 7 comes before the 9 now…

So the state-champs road race was possibly the greatest turnout (hang on…Patrick Cox from Taxmasters is on TV right now and I must stop and watch for 30 seconds because he is possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen).

Sorry…anyway the state-champs road race was possibly the greatest turnout the Heroes Foundation team has ever had for a single event! (crap…sorry again but I can’t help but wonder if bed bugs have eaten off the left side of Patrick Cox’s face. Is that why he is always in profile on those commercials?)

So we had a bunch of dudes and my wife up in the Fort for the state champs. It was very hot and very sunny with a not-so-pleasant breeze blowing in from the west. Total elevation gain for the race was two feet per lap. Those two feet are an aggregate of the several inches we gained every time we went over potholes. Other than that…not much going on but lots of maize. (you call it corn, we call it maize…remember that commercial?) So like I said, we brought lots of people to race and many of them had never raced before which means we pretty much had like 10 guys racing 5s. I believe the only reason we did not WIN the 5s is that most of our guys simply did not have any experience with actual race tactics. They are all strong enough to win a road race…just not as tactically astute as the others. For this reason we are considering devoting the rest of the Hammerfests to teaching race tactics to those who want to learn. We decided to do this because anyone who can do Hammerfest and stick it for all six laps is fit enough to compete in their respective categories. And it is at that point where tactics determine how successful you will be as a racer. And THAT is when it gets fun! I will explain: someone who is barely fit enough to stay in the group during a race will expend most of their mental energy worrying about whether or not they can hang on when the pace goes up to 30, and for how long. This is NOT fun. Worrying like that depletes your adrenaline and turns you into a Piggy. BUT…when you are fit enough that you don’t have to worry about hanging on, you can focus on when and where to attack or what break to go with or how far back you want to be when the sprint begins or even when to eat your turkey sandwich, Damian. And when you can focus on those things instead of your fitness, you turn into a Roger…and Roger sharpens a stick at both ends.

So what does all that have to do with the Cat 5 race up in Fort Wayne, Indiana? I’m not completely sure but it was fun to think about. And that’s all that really matters to me. But the POINT! The point is that most of our guys can win races…they just don’t know HOW. Now I can remember when I started racing bikes back in 1993 I did well just by riding as hard as I could for the whole race. That was mountain bike racing. When I started doing road races, I learned really quickly that I might be faster than most of the guys I was racing, but they were all beating me. So I learned how to measure my efforts and make them count when it mattered most. That took about ½ of one race. I quickly learned who was fast, who could win solo, who could initiate a solid break, and who the gnats were. I learned NEVER EVER EVER to follow a gnat attack and never to allow a gnat to be in a break with me because their pulls are weak and their confidence is like soft butter. And speaking of confidence…it is muy importante. It is maybe the most important thing after basic race fitness. Someone who has no real confidence will attack and then immediately look back for reinforcements. This is not the guy to go with. The guy to go with is the one who attacks strong and does not care if you come or not. He knows full well that he is capable of starting something and simply HOPES that someone else will come up and help out a little. And if no one does, he does his best to stay away. If he gets caught, no big deal…at least he had the Pelotas to do something.

Right…I am spending too much time on this. The point is to go with that last guy and not the doucher.

So we could have won the 5s but we didn’t. But I believe we will next time if we spend some time teaching our less experienced guys how to race. Good stuff…

So we did well in the other categories on the whole. Jacob K, who has too many consonants in a row in his last name, got 6^th in Cat 3, I got 4^th and Langan got 6^th in Masters 35+, Ryan Tragesser, who races for Matthews but who we have adopted for road events, got 7^th in M35+, and Damian got very upset at the spare tire truck. Oh and Steve Down placed 15^th, Greeney 16^th, Tim Konrad 27^th, Jose Cisneros 29^th, Lee Jackson 30^th, Jeff Hess 31^st, and Ryan Nolting 34^th in Cat 5. I hear they tried to run a train several times but they created such a powerful draft that my Grandma Richter could have kept up on her adult trike. So next time we’ll get a better plan together.

The Masters race was really fun and Scott Moon took off from the gun in a throwback breakaway from the 90s that lasted all the way to the finish. I felt very good that day and attacked numerous times and finally got across with Court and a couple others. We stayed away and I cramped very badly but managed to stay in it until the end for fourth. Mikey got 3^rd in the field sprint which gave him 6^th in 35+ and Ryan T was right behind him. Good enough for a beer, brothers…

So the Mass Ave Criterium was a triangle. That’s about all I can say about that. I started the 1 / 2 race and pretty much immediately dropped out. My head was just not into it. This is the time of year when I start to get bored with riding all the time and the ol’ motivation just goes away. That race started at 32 MPH immediately with bumpy pavement and super tight corners and I just suddenly realized that I was not having, nor would I have any fun at all that night. So I pulled out and Hans bought me a beer and I thought that was a much better way to spend the rest of the evening.

Damian and Court did well in the Masters race and little Tommy Cox won the day. I saw him in the parking lot with a bouquet of flowers and a half-empty (or full if you are optimistic) bottle of champagne…which I think would have been the BEST way to spend the rest of the evening…but champagne must be earned, whereas beer can be bought, and I had friends with money but my competitive spirit has waned. So thanks, Hans.

I think I’m pretty much done racing now unless I get a wild hair and decide to do Z-ville, which is right down the street from my house. Yesterday I went out with Beth on cruisers and pedaled around JUST FOR FUN and it was great! We got about 10 miles in and my heart rate never rose above 120. I never felt any lactic acid. When we hit a headwind, I simply geared down and rode more slowly. When we had a tailwind, I tried my best to coast for as long as I could. I wore flip-flops and a t-shirt. I did not take a water bottle. We stopped at a friend’s house and said howdy and I didn’t worry about my legs getting “cold”. If we saw a cool neighborhood, we rode in and checked it out. We smelled barbecue and heard kids playing and birds singing. We talked about stuff without having to take a breath every four words. And best of all, my wife and I enjoyed riding together without me worrying about how much time I got in for the day and generally being a brooding, neurotic mess. I’m looking forward to that type of riding for a while. It’s not so hot these days, although it’s August and I know that can change. Today I have both doors open at the shop and there is a fine fresh breeze whisking itself around in here and telling me to loosen the screws a little…at least until cross season shows up and those weirdos start calling…

--Richterissimo

August 2

When I drove home last night I was cross-eyed. Hammerfest was terrifically brutal. Here is the way my mind remembers it:

Chaos! Lap 1: Gunshot and burning legs, too fast, very hot, Al and Court and Don go too FAST every freakin’ time on the first lap. No time to properly prime the engine. Al has his legs back. SW wind makes 238 very fast. Don’t like taking my pulls but stubbornness prevails. Swollen legs and who the hell is on the front?! Might quit this one after a couple laps and just ride slow by myself. 97 degrees or something close. Measure your ENERGY, MAN! ...and no hero-pulls. One, two laps done in record time and where in burning Hades is everyone?! Drop half the group in three laps. Long pulls down 238 on the false-flat going 27 up the hill and my torso is rocking left to right, right to left already...forearms parallel to the ground, hands hanging over the hoods, head cranked up as far as I can with eyes fixed hard and steady two guys up...don’t look at the wheel in front of you, just sense it and don’t overlap...but definitely stay close...no more than an inch or three. Echelon snakes right to left with tremendous wind and it’s really hard to hold a line. Huge rocky minefield all along the shoulder on this stretch and the noise in my ears is thunderous. Snipers firing from all directions...razor sharp boulders everywhere! Someone has booby-trapped this thing...they are hunting us with wind and heat and terrible, terrible speed. Across the bridge at 32 and hit the hill full-force and why the hell does it always have to be ME that gets stuck with the damned hill?! Stay in the saddle and drop a gear and pedal hard and keep the cadence above 90 and now there’s only like six of us left and it’s SO FREAKIN HOT! Around the corner onto 136th and you finished the hill, stud, so you have to start the 136th run so do your best to get back up to speed before you blow up and can’t get back on because Don and Court are next up and there you go...you made it. Down the hill and across another bridge before the double-tier hill past the rock-garden where Logan fell (Logan’s Run) and son of a B you get the hill again but it’s okay because it’s lap 4 and your systems are coming on-line now and the snipers have all gone home for dinner and a pull from the jug...get this thing in the books before they come back with worse aim but more aggression and blood-lust. Up the hill and through the S-curve and back up to 32 with a cross-tail wind and we are lapping people and some of them get back on and then they get back off and I think there are just four of us left now...Damian and Don and Court and Chris. Now on to Cyntheanne where we have headwind all the way but a little bit of a windbreak on the right side of the road. No matter...still fast and hard and HOT but it’s smoother now because we all know how to rotate well and that means a faster average speed.

Mind starts to wander as I think about this and realize that this is why a good break can gain so much time on a huge field...guys that know how to properly rotate and stay smooth can conserve so much more energy than the gnats that NEED to do stupid hero-accelerations when it’s their turn to pull just so they can demonstrate how strong they are when all they really do is disrupt rhythm and cause the guy in back of them to exert more energy than necessary thereby causing a chain-reaction of bad-craziness that eventually leads to a slower pace. Hero-pulls are for legitimately chasing a dangerous break or for keeping a break alive when it’s about to die. Hero pulls should be a minimum of 30 seconds to a minute...not five seconds of stupidity. Hero-pulls are NOT for just taking your turn in line when you have no intention of doing anything of consequence beside demonstrating your impotent vanity.

And enough with all that...my calves are cramping, probably because of my insistence on shoving my cleats all the way forward on my shoes because I theorize that by creating a longer lever and keeping it rigid with very strong calves, I can increase my torque on the cranks and produce more power. I am actually still convinced that this is partially true but my calves do tend to wear out when I go hard for more than a couple of hours. Jeff Frame says this is patently ridiculous and he’ll prove it to me with a 30-second Wingate test for max power with my cleats all the way back. I may take him up on it but I may not. I’m not sure I want to be proven wrong. And anyway it doesn’t matter now because it’s lap six...

...and it’s now just Don, Court and myself and Court just laid down a vicious run going down 238 to dump Damian and it took Don 30 seconds to get us back on. Thanks Don but you better grab some cover because the Billies are back and their gin-blossoms are glowing white-hot with the sort of rage that only the truly oppressed can muster. It’s all self-directed in truth but don’t get in their way...more dangerous than a starving wolverine (which will attempt to kill anything that moves, even a moose). Up 238 hill, around the corner, accelerate smooth, down the hill and across the bridge...up Logan’s Run and around the S-turn and finally on the back-stretch and headed for the last corner. Very sweaty now and I look back and we are already out of sight. I know full-well that I can usually out-jump Court or Don but I am full-on knackered and cross-eyed and I vow to take every last pull until the end because that’s what this ride is for...hard training. Headwind hits hard around the corner and we march down Cytheanne toward the church and the little bridge-hill and the 1K to go line and I JUST CAN’T GO ANY FASTER and the terrible screaming wind sounds like banshees chasing us to our doom. Then the anticipation as we get to 500 to go. I just go to the front to avoid any confusion and do my best to lift the pace to at least 27ish. We all sprint at once and my right sartorius snaps like a rubber-band and ends up somewhere in my chest cavity near my liver and I swear it would have been a photo-finish. I honestly don’t know who “won” and I don’t care. I am in oxygen debt for about five minutes and my tongue is weirdly stuck to itself on the underside because I have no moisture left in my mouth. Court’s eyes look like Schwarzenegger’s in Total Recall when they used that machine to generate an atmosphere and it took a little while and Quaid and that girl fell down the side of the mountain and couldn’t breathe and their heads almost blew up with their eyes the size of bloodshot oranges. Yeah...bloodshot oranges. And we call it a day.

Back home to a protein shake and bed. My awesome wife made dinner but I could not eat it because my stomach digested itself to feed my quads and hammies. She also made triple-chocolate brownies which were just coming out of the oven when I got home. She then took them ALL to work today to give to SOMEONE ELSE! (she promised to save me...two)

-Richterissimo

August is Hot

So I am almost comfortable calling myself a bike racer again. I have been out twice now and feel pretty strong, except for the last two days because lots of riding. Tuesdays are almost a race also and it’s always hard. I am going up to FW Saturday to do the state champs and if I can recover in time, I should do well. Then it’s Mass Ave and whatever straggler races I can think of this fall…maybe even Franky T’s Cyclocross extravaganza.

Training has been consistently good this year. My skin is very brown from the constant exposure and I have been clinically dehydrated for three months straight now. It is at least 90 degrees every day and tonight I am going to Tractor Supply to see about getting a salt-lick. I eat ten thousand calories every day and drink five gallons of water. I am proud of my ribs and linguini arms and I hope to get down to around .5% body fat soon. I believe this will make me faster and hopefully I will be able to ascend the many long climbs around here with gusto…and aplomb.

It is now tomorrow, which is to say that yesterday is today. What I mean by that is that I started this piece today (yesterday) and am now finishing it tomorrow (today). Words and time are fun. So are custom insoles. Jeff Frame, the eminent Fit Guru and physiology genius came by last night to fit my wife and I for custom insoles. I am excited. Every time I talk to Jeff I feel like my IQ goes up by 10%. He is the most natural physio/fitter I have ever met, which means that he has a supernatural understanding of the human body as it relates to cycling and is able to translate that knowledge and passion into the most amazing bike fits/shoe orthotics/workout plans that I know of. Anyone interested in Jeff’s services should contact me and I’ll get you contact info.

So it looks like there are about 20 or 30 guys going up for the state road race this Sunday. Most of them are doing cat 5, which is a good thing. It means that a lot of the guys that are only used to doing the weekend rides and Hammerfest are going to try racing. They should do quite well considering that most of our team rides are faster than most road races I’ve ever done. I firmly believe that if you can hang on at Hammerfest for all six laps, you should be a top-ten finisher in most of your road races. Road races are easier than crits, by the way. Less chance of crashing also…unless you get bored or corn-hypnosis. Northern Indiana road races are way flat and way windy. I tend to get really really bored at these things. I’ll start thinking about the store, or my tomato plants, or weird song lyrics. I may end up singing MacArthur Park over and over in my head for thirty miles. I may begin to notice little idiosyncrasies in the pack to which I would normally be oblivious…like when I saw Damien pull out a full-on turkey sandwich in a Ziploc bag when we hosted the state race in 2009. I remember it was on white bread and he ate it like any fifth-grader in a lunchroom…only we were not in a lunchroom, we were on 113^th street going toward Ringer Road. I thought that was pretty smart. Why restrict yourself to fibrous muck-bars and sugar gel?

I may also think of profound things like Amit Goswami and his theories on consciousness creating our physical universe and not the other way around. Nonlocality…Schrodinger’s cat…What is God…..memories of the panic in the 80’s when Reagan ran the government on what was then a staggering 200 billion-dollar deficit and we now routinely have over one trilltion-dollar deficits with 2011 close to 1.5 trillion. That is nearly 10% of GDP. I think it is wise to loathe politicians. The needs of the nation will never outweigh the need to be re-elected. Everyone wants job security. Very simple. No need for over-analysis. The deficit will continue to grow. We will continue to borrow. Money is cheap with a AAA credit-rating and lenders love interest. Interest is just money that goes away from us and toward a lender. This is money that has no inherent value to back it up. It is a kickback for someone being shrewd enough to recognize someone else who needs money and is willing to provide that money in exchange for a larger sum down the road. We pay for shrewdness. This is ridiculous because you cannot pay interest unless you have enough natural resources to exploit to make up the difference. We probably do but we keep too much of them here in the US where we sell it to ourselves at huge profit margins, thus weakening the lower and middle-classes and reducing our exports which could be used to overcome the interest that we pay on our foreign debt that we use to finance silly government programs like rockets to outer-space and making glow-in-the-dark mice. (I am most-likely grossly inaccurate on everything I just said but that’s okay because I am not trained in economics, just fixing bikes).

Anyway at some point I come back to the race from LaLa Land and maybe there is a break up the road and maybe I’m in it or maybe not. If I am not in the throes of terminal cramp I will position myself up near the front (this is instinctual, and I am very crabby when someone tries to bump me out of the way). Then we sprint and I finish somewhere. Langan has a cooler filled with a hundred cokes and probably some sort of Nabisco snack cake food. I just want beer now and for my wife to drive me home while I fight the Jimmy legs. And that’s a road race.

Good luck and I hope someone brings some SunKing Osiris.