bike racing is

As silly game, a good motivator and a way to stay healthy but also it is nothing and everything.

350 miles driven this weekend to race my bike for 47 and 44 minutes. 

That's pretty obscene. But it was also pretty fucking magical.

MTB'n taught me one lesson I never really had to learn when I was drinking as much as I was. Drinking that much meant my liver was constantly supplying fuel, non-stop, all day... so not really fasted even if I pretended i was and was skipping breakfast and doing long rides on just coffee. There was a fuck ton of extra fuel from all that alcohol.

So riding the MTB, esp singlespeed forced me to reconcile this new reality in the sober world. One that most of y'all had probably figured out a million years ago.

Emperical Cycling had a line in the morning stories today:

 "Never ride faster to get faster."

Running late to start something but I put some words up on the IGs after this weekends races that i want to put here as a placeholder until I can write a proper race report.

Saturday: (click this link for photo)

This little guy next to me (📷@thisislesli ) ... That's @paullyb he put on an amazing cyclocross race today.

The @granprixbeverly so good. Tom Stevens designed the most perfect course, Paul's crew executed it and the volunteers made it happen.

Thank you all of you.

It was a shock to the system, there was a pile of traffic going there and home and, yeah 24HOGG solo singlespeed doesn't translate very well into CX. BUT it was encouraging that I was about where I have been, not worse. And the course was really hard.

Tomorrow is Quad CX, singlespeed, a double weekend to open the season!I think you can ride fasted to help a very specific narrow and pretty much useless aspect of cycling. Namely long slow rides with very little to no effort. Kind of the antithesis of CX, and while it sounds like it might work for 24 MTB racing, it doesn't because MTBs even going slow are a pretty high energy demand activity. 

Sunday: (click THIS link for photos)

Some call it the race within a race. I think maybe it is simply, The race.

That rivalry, the battle with a friend or that guy who always seems to beat you but you don't know who they are.

Sometimes it is for the win, but rarely in my case, rarely? Heck a podium is a stretch for me. Been a while since being up there in CX. But I find there's so much joy/reward racing against someone. For that last 36 months Jason and Derek have been punching my ticket, always just a few or more places up, but just out of reach. Today I was on their wheels and the front washed out, tire lost air at some point was 5psi lower than planned/pre-ridden (20 vs25), I pulled into the out to check how flat, mostly and then raced it like that. J &D were gone and @joshcalvi and a bunch of others slipped past while I checked it.

Game on, and the new goal was to try and catch Josh, racing him and the course. Took most of the whole race and then on the long spinny uphill I passed him and then, miraculously, we didn't get lapped. He was riding a bunch of the course MUCH better than I was but in the end we finished 1-2 and then we both collapsed ...

It was awesome. In some incoherent rambling I managed to convey to @thisislesli 📷 and Josh and I held each other up...

Can't wait for the next race.

Till later when I can find the intersection of time, energy and inspiration to fill in the gaps and get the whole story of the races in. 

Amor Fati Motherfuckers

G