I wasn’t able to make it to the first day’s race at the Downeast Cyclocross in New Gloucester, ME, on Saturday, but I did spend the day at work becoming more and more giddy. Why? For two reasons. First, I was going to get to race my bike the next day, and second, it was raining. All. Day. And rain + dirt = mud!
I’ve mentioned before that I like to race my ‘cross bike in the mud. Even though Sunday’s race was forecast to take place under sunny skies, I knew that after a full day of rain and a couple hundred bikes churning up the course, it was still going to be muddy. Hence, my ever increasing level of giddiness. However, I had no idea just how much mud awaited me.
Sunday dawned bright and … oh, wait, that’s right, it was still dark when I very reluctantly crawled out of my exquisitely warm, cozy, and depressingly female free bed, and hopped in Keith’s car for the drive to the race. I can’t wait to get good enough to upgrade to Cat 3, so I can race later in the day, and I won’t have to get up so god damned early anymore.
More importantly, there are very few photographers there for the early races, and we bike racers are an unspeakably vain group of people. So, racing later means more pictures of ME!
Keith had raced on Saturday, and during the drive up he told me, in lengthy and vivid detail, all about how bad the conditions had been. But I didn’t really appreciate just how nasty the course was until I got kitted up and headed out for a warm up lap.
Haha, look at these idiots! What kind of dumbass rides a bike in the mu-- oh, right.
Click on that photo to get the full effect. That’s not an isolated muddy spot. That was what the whole. fucking. course was like. With the exception of one 100 foot paved section where we went through a barn — yes, through a barn — the entire course was covered in a thick, gooey, 4 inch deep layer of slop.
I didn’t even complete one full lap of the course before I decided it was enough. I didn’t need to see the whole thing, it was all the same. Mud. This race was going to be nothing more than a slow grind, and brute force would be just as important as any real skill. I headed over to the hoses, and tried to clean the half pound of muck that was already coating my bike out of my drive train. I was really starting to worry that the bike would stop working before I could finish the race. It wasn’t so much the mud, but the long grass that was mixed with it — which wrapped itself around derailleur pulleys, cables, axles and every other moving part — that threatened to bring the bike to a grinding halt.
The funniest part of that warm-up lap must have been the sight of me daintily putting my feet down and carefully carrying the bike in a moronic and futile effort to stay clean. Can’t be starting a race covered in mud! That wouldn’t be pro!
At this point, my giddiness decided it had had enough of this shit, and wandered over to the barn to pet the cows. I was on my own from here on in.
I didn’t even try to get a good start, because I knew the race was going to be a crash fest, and I’d be passing a lot of those guys as they picked themselves up out of the mud, so why waste the energy right out of the gate. Upon reaching the first right hand turn, I was proven right when three guys decided to strike up a rousing game of “Hey, you lay face down in the mud and we’ll throw our bikes at you and then jump on your back” right in front of me, and I had to dismount, step over the course tape, run around the writhing pile of muddy, lycra clad men, step back over the course tape, and run up the next incline before finally remounting, all while half the field went by me.
The race was literally only 30 seconds old, and I was already on foot with the bike on my shoulder, having just had an image that looked like the opening scene of “Mud Wrestlers 2 — Down on the Farm: Men in Tights” forever seared into my brain. Awesome.
Oh, it's on, now!
A few turns later, the course entered the wooded section. It was a slightly uphill sweeping left turn, followed by a short descent into a hard right and back uphill. The left side of the course through this section was … wait for it … mud, but to the extreme right side, next to the trees, it was still fairly undisturbed. I had spotted this line during my warm-up lap and figured everyone would be riding here, as it was pretty obvious — to me, anyway — that it was the ideal line through this section. However, I was amazed to see almost the entire pack, with my teammates Keith and Tim stuck in the middle of it, squirming their way through the muck to the left while I took my sweet and apparently-not-as-obvious-as-I-thought-it-was line on the right, and in the space of about 75 meters, I passed half of the field!
I used this method through all of the wooded sections. Staying to the extreme right or left and riding as close to the trees as I dared was the best way to find decent traction and avoid the worst of the muck. I certainly wasn’t the only one doing it, but I was surprised at how many riders seemed unwilling to use the whole course, and instead, just tried to power their way up the middle.
Out of the woods, it was a different story. The half of the course that ran through the fields was nothing but muck. There was no quick line, just put your head down, try to keep the bike moving in a straight line, and try to keep the pedals turning. The last hundred meters or so before the finishing straight was so bad that I was shouldering the bike and running with it. On flat ground.
Let me repeat that: I was running and passing guys who were riding their bikes, on flat ground! Keith summed it up best:
“There’s fun mud, and then there’s stupid mud. This was stupid mud!”
And so it continued for two more laps. Yes, we were going so slow that we only managed to complete three laps in the allotted time. As I came through the last few corners, I heard the announcer … uh … announcing that the winner of the 4 Master’s field was just crossing the finish line, so I quickly started looking to see how far from the finish I was, and how many riders were ahead of me. It didn’t look like many to my oxygen starved brain, so I gunned it to catch the one last rider I’d been reeling in for half a lap. I don’t know if he was one of the leaders and had finally imploded, or if I was lapping him, but he didn’t have much left when I mercilessly passed him a few turns from the end.
"I will crush your spirit! Your anguish sustains me!"
I crossed the line convinced that I had just scored a top five. However, I was probably deceived by the fact that the Cat 4 and Cat 4 Masters fields were running at the same time, so quite a few of the riders I passed were not actually guys I was competing against. I wound up 9th in the 4 Masters, which isn’t bad, but considering there were only 27 finishers, it’s not nearly as impressive as it sounds. I’ll take it, though.
We spent the next hour trying to clean ourselves and our bikes, which wasn’t easy. There was so much mud. Everywhere.
Looka mah muddy bike!
As we sat, exhausted, drinking beer — at ten in the morning — and staring blankly at our filthy bikes, Keith suddenly broke the silence and brilliantly summarized the whole experience when he muttered:
“This race was fuckin’ stupid!”
That may have been true, but I still had fun. Sort of. At least I didn’t sit on my balls this time. That in itself was a victory.
