The Hurt never felt this good!


After spending too much time writing the previous post (stupid blog), I had to rush to get my butt and gear into the car for the drive out to Hood River. Lucky for me there were no Smokeys on I-84 as I did 80 the whole way. I ended up getting there with plenty of time. Had a chance to get in a pre-ride of the course and get a good warm up. It was the same exact course as the previous year, a mix of open grass, single track, some gravel and pavement. There were 4 barriers (2 singles, a double and a triple). 3 of the four forced either a run-up or one run down. In general I think this is a really good course for me, the single track is fast, and there are not a lot of sharp tight turns. I won the B race last year on it, so I felt comfortable going into the race. One thing I have to remember is to not let myself get psyched out by the other guys on the line. I see these guys that look like they are in great shape and on the most beautiful bikes with top of the line gear, and I just think they are going to whip my butt. Anyhow, I was lined up on the outside, as usual, and in the second row in a field of about 20 or so Master 35+ A riders. They set us off about 1 minute behind the Sr. Men. I got a decent start and after going through the fence gate I was sitting in 5th or 6th wheel. I felt really good on the first barrier/run-up and passed two guys there to move to 3rd. Then on the next straight away I was feeling strong and took the lead. I was thinking it may not have been the smartest move as I was sure Saturday’s race was going to catch up to me eventually, and if I did a lot of the work earlier on, I’d blow-up. At the same time I didn’t want anyone who got a poor start to catch up and wanted to get away as soon as possible. Well by the time we got to the double barrier with the long run-up there were 3 of us off the front. I unfortunately tripped on the second barrier and fell flat on my face, apologizing to the guys behind me for getting in the way. I got up and ran back up to second, and the guy I passed from Dioscovery Cycles was nice enough to tell me my chain dropped, so I was able to shift back up before mounting so the chain just grabbed back on, thanks Dude! I sat in second for the next lap, trying to get a breather as my HR was pinned. Coming in to the double barrier the guy in the lead yelled to his support that he had a flat rear wheel and needed a change in the pits, so I hurried around him and tried to take advantage as the pits were just up the hill. For the next few laps it was me and the nice guy from Discovery Cycles off the front. I think somewhere in the 4th lap I finally got some separation. I did notice when I could see behind that Martin Baker was moving up, which had me worried, as I know he is a good rider, so I tried to keep it moving. I was worried that Martin and the Discovery guy would work together and get back to me like the night before. Luckily that didn’t happen, and I started catching the end of the Sr. Men, so I had some chances to rest. After 25 mins I went through the finish and saw 8 laps to go! I couldn’t believe it, we had only done 7 the night before. I thought there was no way I was going to hang on. Luckily a few laps later it was down to 3 and then the next lap I got the bell for one lap to go. I had opened up about a 20-30 second lead and just focused on keeping it upright for the last lap.

Success and the victory!

Not bad for a double race weekend. It also leaves me undefeated on this HR course, ha ha. (note: I did not win in HR two year’s ago, but it was a different course).

Not to diminish the other guys in the race, but traditionally the HR race does not have the fiercest competition. Bravard, Divini and Butler were racing at Steilacom, and John McCaferty was not there, among others. Anything can happen on any day, yesterday happened to be my day. I know that some of the guys in that race can beat me. I just hope I can continue to be competitive for the rest of the season. But it sure does feel good for now. Except for my sore calves an hip flexors. I am not used to running anymore! I can barely walk today.

It does bring me to one point. Is there a time when someone who is of Masters age (35+) is considered to be sandbagging and should instead race Sr. Mens? If Shanon Skerrit lined up with the Master’s wouldn’t folks think he was sandbagging? I am sure this will be moot once the season is in full gear, but is there a point when a guy should “upgrade” from Masters to Sr Mens? Especially if he is, like me (36), barely a master?

In that theme I am planning to race Sr Mens at Barlow for kicks (in the butt), but will be back in Masters for the Cross Crusade series and USGP.


The Cross Curmudgeon

Star Crossed Cyclocross


Or should we say, Star Crossed grass criterium. This year they changed the course significantly from years past, and added in a lot of long flat straight paved sections, making for a super fast paced course, without too much technicality. Just one set of barriers and the traditional log step run-up. Never the less it was a great time. The crowds are always good the atmosphere is awesome to start the year.

I was definitely nervous before my race. I was going up against Dale Knapp and some other dude wearing a stars and stripes jersey of a Masters national champion in cyclocross. I was lined up in about the middle of the filed, about 40-50 guys strong. Right next to me was John Bravaard, a Portland rider, real nice guy, who always does real well in the local races, as well as his team mate David Divinney and Tim Butler from River City Cycles. These are all guys I was hoping to keep up with as they are top finishers in the local race series. The start had some good jostling and throwing of elbows down the front straight, including some guy just leaning into me. By the second turn I was at the end of a big lead group; close to half the field, with no one too close behind. I spent the next 2-3 laps working my way through people. I was feeling good, but didn't really know how good until Margi told me I was 10th, sitting in the middle of a small group. So I dug in and broke free from that group, which included David Divinney and Tim Butler, trying to chase down Bravaard. I made it to 7th, and realized I was 2 slots behind Dale Knapp! The guy's a legend in US cross. I think I was so surprised with how I was doing I became a little too complacent to hold on to 7th, and I slipped from Bravaard some. Meanwhile Divinney, Butler and a couple guys organized a chase and working together they were making their way back to me. With a lap to go I had a 10 second lead on them and they were gaining while I was just trying to hold on. At the final turn one of the guys was right on my back wheel, and it lead to a sprint finish for 7th......he got me at the line.....oooommmpppphh. But still, I finished 8th in a strong field of really experienced and talented riders. I'm really happy with the results. I'm also really glad there were a bunch of people cheering for me. I don't even know who some of them were, but it helped to cruise past the beer garden and have people cheering me on!



The night ended with two awesome races in the women's and men's pro races. In the women's, a pack of 6 women formed a lead group that included Wendy Simms (Canadian Nat Champ) Josie Jaques Maynes, Wendy Williams and Sue Butler (River City) and two other women. They battled for the entire race, with the annoying announcers talking only about Simms the whole race, and how she was going to pull off the win. On the last lap the hammer was dropped and the two unknown ladies dropped off, leaving for a group sprint, with Wendy Williams taking it at the line!!! Way to go Portland.

In the men's race, right off the bat Ryan Trebon (Kona, National Champ) Teammate Barry Wicks and the Swiss National Champ Christian Hueler (sp?) broke free. By the end of the first lap it was a three person race. The Swiss just sat in and let the Twin Towers do all the work. You could just see it coming. No matter hard they tried, the Kona boys could not drop the swiss, which explains why he is 5th in the world right now. At one point Barry made a move and then stacked it coming off the track and fell behind by 10 seconds. Amazingly, a half lap later he was leading again. They are so fast and strong. But on the last lap Trebon poured it on, dropping Wicks, but everytime he got a small gap Hueler would get back on, resulting in a sprint finish with Hueler taking it in a near photo finish!!! A pretty exciting first night of 'cross.



Well time to get ready to drive out to Hood River for another race. My legs are toast, this is gonna hurt....Thanks to Miss Adventure for the photos and race support! Also a shout out to Matt Wills, who did the ballsy move of upgrading from B's to A's, buying a UCI license to race against some super strong men, got taken out by another rider in the first lap and had to drop out of the race. You're a bigger man than me, I would have taken the heckling and raced B's.

Merry CrossMass Eve!!!!

With the giddiness of a 5-year-old waiting for Christmas, cross season is finally here. Tomorrow I will enter my first race of the year, heading up to Seattle for the Star Crossed event. It is a great event, I think the tag line a couple years ago was "Come for the party, stay for the race". It is complete with a DJ and beer tent in the middle of the race. And the main event, the Men's A race is under the lights. I, alas, am not racing in that one. I'll be doing the Master's A (35yo+). Yup, racing with the old, yet fast, guys. Should be good. I feel like I have trained pretty hard this year, and am feeling like my form is pretty good coming into the race. I hope I don't regret those words. I'll be racing against some really good racers tomorrow.
Check out this preview from last year's:



The exciting thing, is I not only get to race tomorrow, but I am going to drag myself out of bed on Sunday morning, drive out to HR, and race again. Hopefully there'll be a kids race and Lacy (my 4yo niece) will get to race too. And if you liked the clip above so much here's a clip from my men's B race at HR from last year. Yeah, I won it. That's right Wills, you may have been beating later in the year, but I beat you when the glory was on the line, But good for you for not sandbaggin the B's tomorrow. You're a bigger man than me. I'll still cheer you on...
Oh yeah the race clip:


Finally I want to thank the Snow Curmudgeon for letting me hi-jack this blog for the 'cross season. Hopefully he'll keep us posted on the snow as the fall progresses.

Thanks for reading.

The Cross Curmudgeon

Fraud: (n) a person who is not what he or she pretends to be.

Dear readers, I am afraid I must confess that I have been a fraud. I have been living the life of an imposter, deceiver liar and all around fake. No, I am not really a knuckledraggin’ snowboarder, please! It is almost as bad. Here it is December 13th, there is over 5’ of snow at the resorts and I have not even touched the snow! As a matter of fact, the only snow I have seen was on the ground in Gresham. Gresham of all places! Oh the shame. After years of mocking our fellow comrades for straying home to work around the house or do errands on a powder day, the time has come where for the past three weeks I have forgone the graceful bliss of the original art form that is Telemarking to work on my new home. My head hangs low.

But fear not kind and gentle readers, true to my nature, when presented with the time to go skiing this past Sunday, I, the original Snow Curmudgeon, raised my nose in the air and deemed the snow unworthy of my presence and rode my bike instead. So rest assured my friends, while I may not be shredding the gnar gnar in person, I am there in spirit, mocking all the lesser mortals.

The forecast:
After a record setting November, followed by a typical dry spell, we are finally getting some more needed precipitation. Currently the snow levels are lower than expected, but the winds are brutal, averaging 35+ with gusts towards 60. So fear not Lifsey, you chose well and can be comforted by the warmth of your current location. The folks in their little windowless rooms staring at computer models figuring out what it is doing outside say that while we are having a momentary break today the next wave will hit us tonight and keep strong through Friday, transitioning to cooler showers for the weekend. So far things look potentially good for the weekend, with main exception being these pesky high winds.

In summary, I hope you got your holiday shopping done this past weekend when the snow sucked (I didn’t) as it may be good this weekend with snow levels approaching the valley floor for Saturday and Sunday, just keep an eye out for those winds….it could really screw it all up.

Black Friday

I, as so many others have, spent the day giving thanks. You know, it's what we're supposed to do on Thanksgiving. What did the Snow Curmudgeon have to give thanks for? Good question, lets take a look.

Well it is nuking on the mountain right now, the snow base is building fast, and the snow levels are low. Unfortunately can't get to most of it since the damn road is still closed. Not much to be thankful for there.

Tomorrow marks the first official day of the Holiday Shopping Season, a time, as you may guess, quite annoying to me. I get to look forward to 31 days of Musac Christmas Carols everywhere I go. Feel the pressure of having to spend money I dont' have on family and friends for things they don't really want or need, so they can spend money they don't have on me for things I don't want or need, all in the mane of some self proclaimed son of God being born 2006 years ago. Sounds perfectly logical, I'm thankful for it.

I have been drinking since 11:30 this morning and now I have a raging headache. And somehow I am hungry after stuffing my face all day. What the hell.....

So yup, pretty par for the course here at curmudgeon central. I guess I'm thnakful for all the BS I have to be unthankful for, or something......

As for the forecast....well it is going to rain a lot here, and snow a lot on the mountain, and since I won't be enjoying it, you can go find your damn forecast from someone who gives a crap.

Happy Holidays......


SC

Nature Hates Meadows!

Before you all think I'm getting a little extreme even for me, let me lay out my case:

Winter 05/06: Tree falls and takes out Shooting Star

Summer ’06: A near miss lightning strike starts the Bluegrass Ridge Fire complex, just north of meadows (I guess lightning is hard to aim, God may want to look into electronic guiding systems)

Fall ’06: Simultaneous attack by White River and Clark Creek to cut-off meadows from the rest of the world.

I want to know what the government is going to do about it? Where is Homeland Security now? We need to be opening a new front on the war on terror, and start to fight nature where nature is, or we will be fighting nature where it isn’t….huh?....Anyway, there is a new Axis of Evil: Trees, Lighning and Rain. They are working together to strike fear into heart of all Freedom loving glissaders.

Thanks to Nature, meadows remains closed. And not likely to open until sometime in December. In the meantime, staff at meadows are grooming the ski area to “compact the snow and prevent loss from wind transport”. My ass they are, those bastards are up there grooming a few runouts and skiing the hell out of the place, all to themselves….Now I wish I was a Groomer more than ever….

And now, thanks to the closure, all the Timberline pass holders almost look smart, except that Meadows being closed doesn’t make the terrain there any less flat, so while they may be skiing, they’re still skiing crappy terrain. Come January they’ll be suckers again…..

OK the forecast: Since we don’t need to be too concerned with the specifics I’ll just go with a general short-to-medium range forecast:

The Westerly flow seems to be poised and ready to pump more moderate to heavy rainfall into the region. As such, we could see some very interesting weather in November and December, and even into January. I will stay the course and keep us wet, Blustery and rather mild. However, heavy Mtn snows likely under this regime as well!

I can see some very interesting weather issues during this period but it will depend on the offshore ridge and the deep low over the Gulf and North Pac. It still appears to me that the ridge will flatten and allow some active weather to move over the top of the ridge, then drop down along the coast, then inland over the West and PacNW. If this holds true, then we could see some very interesting weather ahead. The longer term means show a much flatter weather mode as well as a flatter offshore ridge. If this is the case, then we would be in position to see some very active weather due to the Active Jet over the West. I will play the forecasts in that direction. Of note, the pattern is very flat but does support some surges of colder air dropping SE from the Gulf next week and beyond. This seems to be a variable mode right now which means that we will see colder air next week, then moderating the following week, but then returning to a colder mode as we enter into December. Heights aloft seem to hold between 534 to 558 over the PacNW, which is a very wet mode for us, and can be cool too. The above heights correspond to snow levels ranging from around 1,500 to 5,500 ft., but this is certainly low enough to build a decent snowpack for so early in the season. Of course, this can be variable but I think we will see ample snow into December, and beyond!

I really look at how amplified or how flat the global pattern is in the Fall season. That tells me a lot about the coming season. Right now, the overall global pattern is rather flat, and the means maintain this flatness as well. This indicates that we are likely to see some active frontal passages and heavy rainfall over the orographically enhanced mtn ranges. This certainly favors some heavy Mtn rains and snows over the Cascades, and Bull run. If all goes well, this will once again be a great water year! Obviously, we are off to a great start already!!

In years of El Nino, the pattern has been fragmented and broken offshore. I am not seeing this now, nor do I expect this to happen later in the season. This is all tied to the global weather pattern which is influenced more by activity to the North than to the South, as such, I will look mostly at the North Pac weather pattern, than the tropical Pac mode.
All in all, I think November and December will be very wet for us, and will stay the course with those feelings. Also, I like the overall weather pattern ahead with respects to snowfall. The pattern does favor a heavy snowfall mode as snow levels lower and moisture taps keep coming. As such, we will stay very wet indeed and snowy

(by Phil Volker, posted without permission)

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......