Cross is here!

Every year I tell myself I don't like cyclocross. I intentionally avoid registration pages and all the hype and tell myself I won't do any races. But then the road season just...ends, and I'm usually coming into peak fitness with absolutely no desire to train indoors or race on Zwift with the weather still nice. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, there's a local 3-week series that picks up exactly where the crit season leaves off, and I rediscover all the ways this race format is custom-tailored to my tastes...with 2 glaring issues.

Road racing is where my heart is. I'm strong enough to be around at the end of a local elite race, but while I have a decent sprint I'm not good enough to find myself in position to use it. I can usually settle for right around 10th, though I get braver and bolder as the season wears on.

I'm a halfway decent time-trialist and can usually land on the local CAT3 podium, but the experience is not pleasant and I don't really enjoy training for the discipline. Not to mention the TT bike requires CONSTANT care & feeding and the speedsuit only lasts a few rides before starting to degrade. Hill-climbs are just misery.

I want desperately to enjoy gravel, but cannot understand the obsession with races that take 4+ hours. I know my fitness and I know where it fails, and it does not exist beyond the 3-hour mark.

Mountain bike racing is just next-level stupid for my risk tolerance, though I do quite enjoy taking the cyclocross/gravel bike out on XC single-track.

'Cross races, though painful, offer the best mix of all these things, plus the crashes don't tend to remove quite as much flesh, though I have broken a rib on icy grass.

Cyclocross has been described to me as "steeplechase on bikes", but I don't think that quite does it justice. From a visual perspective it's certainly adequate, but from an experiential perspective it's more like a 40-minute sustained heart attack. From a strategic perspective, though, it's more like go-kart racing.

Everyone lines up at the start with one goal: the hole shot. That's the first significant turn or barrier on the course, and it's the one that will make or break your race, making 'cross the only discipline I've ever done where you literally can lose the race in the first turn by not being aggressive enough. Once through the hole shot it's repeats of grass/gravel/sand laps with varying levels of complexity. Usually there will also be some sort of physical barrier requiring a dismount. [GLARING ISSUE #1: Ok I f*ing hate dismounts. I didn't buy a bike to carry it. I won't practice them, so I always ALWAYS suck at them in races, and I almost always hurt myself remounting. I can't jump them, either, because the last time I tried to jump something I ended up in the hospital with a broken face.]

At the start everyone is buzzing high with energy, but as the laps wear on small mistakes add up and riders fall away from the lead group. Usually a passed rider will remain passed until you start making mistakes, too.

But in those lap repeats you're presented with an opportunity to refine your lines in an effort to conserve your ever-diminishing energy for that all-important final push to the finish line. Each lap becomes less a race against other riders and more a race against your own prior laps. Every turn presents an opportunity to do better than last time, and just like go-kart racing, many of the turns will chain together such that doing the first one wrong will cost you time through the entire sector.

So it's both a game of energy and of refinement and also trying to bank on having enough energy to do it all again for an unknown number of laps, because if you're doing well guess what: you get MORE laps of suffering! Riders on the lead lap get a lap board, but riders who've been lapped are pulled after the leader begins his/her final lap. Confusing? Yep, and damn near impossible to bank on in a race!

But that strategic effort of identifying what you can exert and for how long and using that data to clean up lines and experiment with gear-choices through repeated laps while also dealing with a bike that's degrading in-place as the brakes & drivetrain & pedals pack full of dirt & sand while also going just hard enough to not get passed and trying desperately to figure out where you can make the next critical pass while your whole body is screaming STOP? OHMYGODTHAT'SRIGHTUPMYALLEY.

I'm not "good" at it. I do not have enough confidence to corner hard, and so I don't fight for the hole shot. I can't manage a dismount to save my life. And I cannot stand being cold [glaring issue #2], so I'm usually only here for the first few weeks of the season, but if I'm being honest I think I actually LOVE it.

Stupid 'cross.

Infosec is a high-stakes game of entropy

Every once in a while I get a little despondent about life in the security field. The shiny will rub off and I'll see the stark reality that my industry is built around the idea that people are awful. Billions and billions of dollars spent annually in hardware, software, and human assets to stop theft, and the worst of it is that if my whole job is to protect Person A's ideas, and your whole job is to try to steal them, assuming I do well at my job our net lifetime contribution to the world is zero.

We are just annihilation and entropy. We are exothermic and high-cost. We are creative but completely untapped for moving the world forward, and literally the only one whose ideas have a chance at succeeding is Person A, and that's only if they're able to afford the battle.

Imagine the world we could have created by now if all 3 of us were allowed to be creative toward a greater good. Imagine if businesses could innovate without fear of attack, if inventors didn't have to work so hard to secure patents just to stop theft. Maybe this comes across as a rant against fiat currencies, but books and movies show us what the human mind is capable of not just imagining, but also bringing to life. We know there have been scientific advances that were directly inspired by media. There was a US general, who, while watching the first "Predator" movie, jumped up and shouted "I WANT THAT!" when the predator became invisible, prompting decades of R&D into invisibity tech. But even that example was intended to be used toward the enormous industry of loss & loss-prevention, because what is a military if not an applied security institution?

But where would we be if all of us could take our ideas and turn them into reality? What medicines would we have? What access to information? What reaches of space?

But instead you just want to steal, and I just have to block. At scale that would suggest at least 2/3 of the planet is involved in some variation of this stupid dance.

Going back to sci-fi, one of the major themes in that genre seems to be that others got their shit together and figured out how to develop toward a common good. Star Trek IV made a big show of us still using money and how damned inconvenient it was, but it's a fairly common trope: societies rapidly advance after "moving beyond money". That's not to say they've moved beyond greed, because greed often underlies the plots of many sci-fi stories, but it's significant BECAUSE it's uncommon in those imagined worlds.

A society that isn't fettered with using 2/3 of its resources to just prevent malice makes for awe-inspiring visuals and ideas. Imagine if it could be ours, and all we'd have to do is stop trying to steal each others' crap.

But then maybe that lack of secure-by-design philosophy, born of centuries of fighting over resources, is why Jeff Goldblum was able to hack the mothership with a PowerBook 5300.

A whole pile of broken

 Not to be a negative Nellie, but I tend to turn to this outlet when I'm feeling less than delightful. It's my way of processing things more fully than I will just inside my own head, because I often don't pull the threads that tie things together until I commit them to the page.

Anyhoo.

Last time I mentioned Grinder Nationals, and how we're not going. It's an incredible disappointment to manage, but let's frame that discussion.

6 months ago I was racing on a fast new Zwift team. My role was the sprinter, and while I never once finished with the pack, I delivered enough intermediate sprint points to make a difference. I had a job and I did that job. I was seeing record power numbers in spite of poor finishing positions, and those power numbers made community racing fun, or at least as fun as itcan be indoors in the winter on Zwift. Fun enough, I guess.

But then I saw the announcement that Grinder Nationals would be held within my own state, organized by a guy who I met on one of my first ever group rides, and who has spent the past several years building one of the best gravel races on the east coast: Dirty Kitten.

As soon as I heard about it I signed up. I knew it was going to be a tremendous reach, and that it would require a fundamental shift in my training structure, but if a buddy was going to organize something so amazing, I was gonna support it.

I stopped racing Zwift and got outside, because May in Virginia is every season all at once.

Alastair's mountain bike team practices & races have given me opportunities to get in big mountainous training rides, but honestly I was getting worn out, then bored, then frustrated.

Riding wasn't even fun. I tried switching bikes, taking the TT bike out for a hit of fear and adrenaline. It rewarded me with a broken drink system and a bent derailleur hanger that put the mech into the disc wheel. Plus I'd forgotten how much I hate hate hate the Fizik Mistica saddle on that bike.

I put a bigger 11/40 cassette on the gravel bike, but while it has made the bike faster it also ruins the performance at higher speeds and still shifts terribly in the lowest gears. [I still think 11/36 is the right size, but ya know: supply chain]

Then I took Alastair out for a sunset-racing road ride on Monday and managed, within the span of 10 miles, to have the chain get skippy with stretch and have the rear shift cable jam.

The race is this weekend. I know I'm not going. I won't even be able to do the backup event I'd considered on the same date: the annual Cap2Cap century ride. Instead I'll be cheering for my son at a mountain bike race, which is great.

But now, in addition to saying I'm a racer without actually being one, I really don't even have anything to race. 3 bikes in various states of disrepair, and one part is on back-order until the day AFTER the season-opener at the Bryan Park Training Series.

It's a whole pile of frustrate, so I spent money on retail therapy. Gotta recable the race bike anyway: might as well freshen up that bar tape.

And oh my it's gonna be a garish delight for the senses. Because by some random happenstance my absolute favorite hideous color combination manages to be available for most of my accessories, and I'm leaning in hard. I may finish poorly this year, but you won't miss me. I cannot wait to bring the bling.

And this is the first step of how I get my groove back. Prepare your eyes.

A crossroads of anxiety where bikes sit squarely in the middle

 I say I race bikes. I find that I say it less frequently than I used to. Partly that's down to the pandemic, but partly it's down to refocusing on other things that matter a whole lot more than carbon and lycra. But I still say it, just the same.

I used to be pretty excited about it. Even as recently as February I was restructuring my year to set my sights on racing gravel and changing my training blocs from Zwift 1-hour max-efforts to multi-hour mixed-bag efforts.

Last Fall I did a season of Zwift Racing League that, while fun, kinda ruined my perspective on my own fitness and abilities. My 4.5W/kg and estimated VO2 Max of 62, which under almost any other circumstances would have been considered damned good, were insufficient to finish even a single race in the pack, and a 45-second 800W sprint was only good enough for 2nd place in an intermediate sprint, followed by immediately being dropped from the pack. Add an utter inability to read the race strategy and I didn't feel like I was holding up my end of the bargain for the team.

Since my power was already "good enough", I shifted away from ZRL to start thinking about Monstercross, which is always a hard race, but a great early-season test. And yes I met all my goals, but with a result that was much worse than in years prior, and it became instantly evident that Zwift was actually representative of the changing face of cycling: people are truly stronger and fitter than they were in 2019.

No worries: I'd have 3 months to build fitness for Grinder Nationals (100 miles, 6200', 80% gravel) in May, and I signed up for a 3-race series of progressively longer & steeper gravel races to gauge my progress.

It hasn't gone to plan.

The first race saw much the same issues I'd seen at Monstercross: I can start strong, but I run out of give-a-shit much faster than I used to. Within 30 minutes of the start I was off the pace, and by 35 miles I just wanted to quit.

The 2nd race...I skipped. Kids had been sick, work, yadda yadda. Plus it snowed on race-day, and just f* that nonsense. Lots of excuses.

Then the kids got super crazy sick and we went on vacation and I missed the whole week of training before the 3rd event, and it produced not only the worst race result I've ever had for actually finishing a race, but the highest relative effort I've ever seen for anything on a bike. My fitness wasn't improving: it was getting worse, and I had to walk the bike significant portions of the steep hills and still ended up with some of the worst cramping I've ever experienced.

One of the challenges I face at this time of year is an absolute hatred of Zwift. If it's even remotely tolerable to be outside, I won't get on Zwift. But my schedule doesn't really permit me to do many group rides, so it's solo or nothing. Alastair isn't even doing road with me because he's having a fantastic season of mountain bike racing, which is great, and gives me an opportunity to get a dedicated 2-hour block 3 times a week. But it's all solo, and it's so much easier to just ride "hard enough" when you're alone.

So I got permission to do a couple of group rides at non-standard times just to see how my fitness stacked up, and hoo boy not good. In the first, a ride I can usually do all summer long, I was nearly dropped in the first 3 miles. I rallied and stayed with it, but it was a surprise, and my average power was nowhere near what it had been last year.

In the 2nd, I was dropped HARD in about 5 miles. It was embarrassingly bad. So bad that I decided to pivot back to that skipped gravel race and just ride its course over the following weekend...which was the 2nd worst gravel ride I've ever done, and left me wondering just what, exactly, it is I think I enjoy about this sport.

If it's the racing, I'm not in the shape for that. If it's the adventuring, I sure as shit didn't enjoy that this weekend. If it's the people, I barely get to see them, and the people I like riding with hate gravel. It could be the time I get to myself, but even that gets old after a while.

So yeah I guess I race bikes? But maybe not because Alastair's having such a good time racing mountain bikes that we're canceling our participation in Grinder Nationals so he can focus on his points-standing in his current series. He hates gravel anyway so it's no big loss for him, and there's no way on God's green Earth that I could manage 100 miles on gravel right now.

I did just throw some money at the gravel bike to FINALLY embrace a mullet setup for the steeper stuff, but every time I get the TIME to test it the weather turns to shit. So...Zwift.

It's 80-degrees outside today, the sun has been shining, and there's about a 90% chance that the only way I ride today is on the hamster wheel.

I hate what I love.

Some other beginning's end: Monstercross X ('22)

Featuring the return of the mass start and the full unabridged 25-mile course!

This was my 5th time tackling the monster and its 10th running, which means I've participated in 50% of these. In those 225 miles I've come to realize that gravel racing just plain hurts. It dashes dreams and expectations. It pushes me to the absolute edge and occasionally hands me a little reward. Gravel racing might be a dom.

But having done several of these with varying success, I'd begun to set my goals higher and target faster finishes. Last year's 8th in the 40+ category would have been a 5th in the Mens Open, so I signed up for that group.

I'd done well in the 40-mile Dirty Kitten race with a 4th step podium finish and thought maybe I could surprise myself with a top 10.

I had also made some significant equipment changes from last year's race: the 38mm Donnelly EMP's that were so vague in corners and slippy on loose gravel were replaced with 40mm WTB Raddlers. The difference was night & day, and I could pick my line at speed. I was racing in my Giro Vanquish instead of a mountain bike helmet, and due to the weather was also wearing its integrated visor for full nerdball effect. And I'd fitted an old pair of clip-on aero bars with a 50mm riser.

And while my training in April of last year was waaaaay ahead of where my training has been so far this year, I'd put in time on the gravel bike, both on the open road practicing the aero position and doing recon laps of the course, including a hot lap just last week on the whole whole shebang where I spent over 80% of the lap on the skis and went a minute faster than I'd ever done at 1:29:01.

That lap, done twice, would net a sub-3h race. That lap, however, could not be done twice by me, and I knew that going into the race. And that lap, having come less than 3 days before the start of the race, may have been my undoing.

Now there's a lot that went wrong today, and a lot of it echoes challenges that I've faced in the past, but let me first acknowledge what went right:

1. Nothing broke, I didn't crash, and I finished the race.
2. Though it was extremely cold (for me), I managed my layers well and affixed hand-warmers to all my main grip-points and avoided any issues to my extremities.
3. My first lap was 2.5 minutes faster than the PR I'd just set 3 days ago.
4. My 2nd lap, though it didn't go to plan, was still evidently my fastest 2nd lap ever.
5. I didn't lose myself to despair during that long solo period that happens in the back half of this race.
6. All of my equipment choices/changes were validated. Aero bars are amazing on gravel.
7. I saw friends and had an overall good time.
8. I hurt less than after previous efforts. I think this, too, is a reflection of the aero bars.

All of that is great, but I missed my target of 3h by 11 minutes, and 4 of those minutes were spent standing still after a cascade of failures.

That first lap was not just fast: it was brutal. Just like last year, splits came early--like in the first 2 miles. And the return of the mass-start meant I had no idea whom I was racing. There's nothing to indicate someone is racing in the open field or 40+ or 50+ or even 60+: they're all just out there jockeying for position.

In an effort to not get stalled out of the gate, I'd managed to grid up right at the absolute front, but even so the front group was already splintering within 0.5 miles of hitting the gravel. Trying to cover gaps was burning matches that I'd need later, so I let myself sit in and watched the money go up the road.

 NBD all I needed was a fast crew to hit my goals! And it seemed I'd found my crew as we rolled the next 12 miles together, gaps opening and closing, dropping onto the skis periodically to keep the speeds high, and neatly getting myself back out of trouble every time it appeared with a quick trip to the skis. Seriously: TT bars on gravel bikes are amazing (and should probably be banned. ssssshhhhh).

But then came the dumb little twisty bridge, and for whatever reason we came to an actual halt on it, and I couldn't get back up to speed to stay with the group. The 10 or so guys ahead got away, and the 3 or 4 of us behind had to make do with each other. We were not as motivated as they.

By the time we'd made it around the top half of the course, we'd picked up a few more, but my fueling strategy had been to stop at the team tent at the beginning of the 2nd lap and swap bottles & pick up my Gatorade flask. It was a mistake that would cost me so so much time.

I hadn't practiced riding with that flask in that jersey with those gloves. The combination was simply incompatible. The 12oz flask fits in almost all jersey pockets, and this one is just a tick smaller. It could fit, but I couldn't do it in the gloves that I needed for today's low temps. Every time I tried to take a drink it would take me almost a minute to coax the flask back into the pocket, and that was time I really couldn't spend focused on the race.

It also put me in a slightly awkward position that made my back start screaming at me. I did my best to hold on to a new, smaller group that I'd caught on to, but after 3 or 4 miles just gave up. Like big time completely gave up. Slower than would even justify being on the TT bars. Or maybe not because at that exact same time my speed/cadence sensor got wonky and started reporting 0 - 5mph readings. And again because of those stupid f*ing gloves I couldn't even disable it. Mileage stopped climbing even though I was moving, and everything just got into my head all at once. Basically the entire run along Beach Rd up to the dam climb was wonky data, failed attempts at drinking the Gatorade, and pain.

Other riders were catching and passing me and I couldn't do anything about it.

After the dam climb I pulled over again, drank all the stupid Gatorade at once, ate a bar, watched 3 more groups of riders go by, disabled that stupid Wahoo S/C sensor, and climbed on to tackle the remaining who-knows-how-many miles, figuring I had at least an hour to go and thinking I was almost 40 minutes behind pace.

And just like last year I didn't see another soul for almost 10 miles. But I focused up. I got back onto the skis and just motored. Because just like last year, once I got rolling nobody was passing me, either. I wasn't 'back in the game', but I also wasn't worried about a DNF.

And while my back hurt, I was increasingly aware that my arms did not. Usually by 40 miles into this race I'm acutely aware of my triceps, and they weren't in any pain. Credit to the TT bars! I was also flying through turns that I would usually take very gingerly because of the new tires. 

And by mile 45 I was catching people again. First one, then two, then a couple more. Nothing amazing like catching back onto a paceline, but it was affirming.

And then came that damned walking trail with it's awkward switchbacks and big roots and (nearly) compulsory dismount, and while I made it through only having to do that one dismount, I started to feel my legs seizing like in 2020. I was a mile to the end and couldn't stand off the saddle for the tricky final descent/climb/descent in that trail, so just had to take all the impacts and hope the tires would hold. In that I still managed to pick off one more rider, though I also gave up 2 overall spots there, and rolled up the hill to the finish line in 21st for the Men Open category, 3:11:15 on the day.

The winners were 25 minutes up the road.

Once again I know I have work to do, but it's not the same work as last time. Last time I thought I needed more confidence turning, but it turns out new tires squared that away. I'm also not yet limited by the aero performance of the bike frame, so equipment isn't it, either.

I have to practice using the equipment in the exact configuration it will be used race day. The flask/gloves/jersey combo really disrupted my rhythm, and having the hand-warmers under the hoods changed the shape just enough to make climbing awkward, which made my hands feel tired. It all worked, but none of it worked particularly well.

I also hadn't worn my cold-weather boots for anything approaching 50 miles. They're ok, but bulky enough to rub the cranks and heavy heavy heavy. Nor had I worn the Vanquish's visor in quite some time. It kept bouncing off the bridge of my nose and was driving me nuts, but I can't wear my sunglasses with a brimless cold-weather hat because that bounces off the helmet and the noise drives me nuts. I tried finding a thermal hat with a brim, but the one I got was so thick it made my helmet look like a hat on a hat.

I need to stop relying on bars for fuel and go back to gels. I tend to choke on solid foods and really struggle to open the packages, so that's not working. My pause on lap 2 to just eat a bar was a 3-minute stop. Fine in a group ride with store stops--unacceptable in a race.

I need to get more 3+ hour rides under my belt, but that's really hard with schedules and commitments, so that may have to be solved creatively.

I need to trust that I can be fast on my own without needing a fusillade of draft-partners. It's so tempting to chase on to a group to hide in the draft, but it's a trap. You spend less energy in the group, generally, but spike power chips away at stamina as gaps open. With the TT bars I can just motor and stay out of Z5 and pick off riders one-by-one as they get dropped.

I need to also stop trying to chase the "optimal" category. I raced "open" this year because of last year's results, but both groups were almost 3x their sizes from last year, and I'd have been rewarded with a better result for staying in 40+. Fortunately that die is cast for May 7 gravel nationals.

Right now, though, I need rest: Stokesville Strade 60-mile gravel race is in 2 weeks, and a lot of work to do between now and May.