Goodbye Dirty Girl.....

Well, it has been a long enduring fling, and while we have had our ups and downs, I loved every painful minute of it. Our time together is almost done, as she prepares to move to europe for the remainder of winter. She'll be back, I'll be waiting, but will I be ready??

A going away ode from Patrick O'grady:

This isn't much of a rant; it's more of a rave.

I love cyclo-cross.

When I stumbled into this sport back in the 1980s, my first love was road racing. But she was too classically pretty and refined to pay much attention to the likes of me. I followed her around like a retarded puppy, but she hardly knew I was alive, barring one sidelong glance at the state road championships in New Mexico back in 1991. All the jocks were crazy about her, and I was only a scrub.


Mountain biking beckoned, briefly, and like the hippie chicks of my late teens, she was big fun for a while, until she took some bad acid at Rage in the Sage one year and kicked my ass right into the ER.

Track? Get serious. All those arcane rules and nothing but left turns. A Trotskyite dervish with one foot in a bucket and a permanent case of PMS. Wouldn't touch her with a 10-foot frame pump.

But cyclo-cross, now, we're talking match made in heaven. She was kind of plain, quiet, a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of girl with no pretensions. Bit of a tomboy; didn't wear makeup or jewelry. And she wasn't fussy. She'd hang around with anyone who showed any interest, and they all left smiling.

We got along pretty well, because like me she was a little bent. A dirty girl, you know? She was into things that road racing thought were sick and even mountain biking considered weird. Like running through icy creeks, clambering up muddy walls, and refusing to cancel a date no matter how gruesome the weather. It could be colder than the other side of Ann Coulter's bed and snowing sideways, a foot on the ground with freezing rain on the way, and she'd just cock her head at you as if to say, "Well? You coming or what?"

We began to lose track of each other when I moved to the mountains and she stayed in town. We'd see each other now and then, but it wasn't really the same. I wasn't as eager to spend hours behind the wheel for a short romp through Boulder's frozen puddles, and she was starting to get a little more attention from the cool kids.

Last time I tried hunting her down, back in '04, all the jocks had started sniffing around in serious fashion, flexing and posing like a bunch of sand-kickers on the beach in a Charles Atlas ad. I'd acquired some extra pounds and shed a whole lot of hair, and she had taken to wearing makeup, even jewelry; titanium this and carbon fiber that. We barely recognized each other and pretended we didn't.

I haven't seen her much since then, unless you count the magazines. These days she looks like a Victoria's Secret model. Hell, she looks like road racing, especially in those Euro mags.

Still, when I heard she was coming back to Colorado as part of a national tour, I went out for a short splash through the snowy mud, just for old times' sake. Just to see if I still had it, you know? I didn't, but it was fun anyway.

Maybe I'll pop up to Boulder this weekend, wave at her as she flashes by in her finery. The wife won't mind. And anyway, she's out of town.

I don't care who cyclo-cross is hanging around with now, or what she's wearing. I know that deep down, under the glitter, she's still a dirty girl.

Stay tuned for the return of the Snow Curmudgeon......