CX Addiction

Ask anyone who knows me, I'm a little bit obsessive compulsive. I'm at the stage of my life where instead of having lots of interests/hobbies I try to excel at a few. I started bike racing in 2003 I quickly found something that I could REALLY get into. I like the training, the nutrition, the feeling you get when you have good fitness, the mental game (especially with the endurance MTB racing), messing with all the neat-o equipment and winning. I really like to win. For me it's never just for fun. My real fun comes when I am winning. The cool thing about racing bikes, to me, is that there is a never ending source of material to research, components to compare and people to race. I don't care if you want to piss on my parade and tell me it's local racing and I take it too seriously, I enjoy it all.

I didn't really discover my identity as a bike racer until this season. In 2003 I figured I was a mountain bike racer (sport class) and would never race road, and by the end of the year I did my first two Gateway Cup Crits. 2004 I found out early that racing expert was hard and raced a lot more on the road then made up for the off-road miles I missed by training for and racing my first 12 hour solo mountain bike race that fall. 2005 was a full season of road racing and then another 12 hour solo race. I was finding that riding lots of miles was taking the snap out of my legs and was having an identity crisis. 2006 was all Power Tap all the time. I basically rode myself into the ground watching the numbers on that thing. Various factors led to my season totally sucking and by mid season I was so burnt out that I was fly fishing more than riding. I was doing ok at Gateway Cup until I crashed on the Hill and finished off my season by getting shelled at U-City. I wasn't having any fun. I went to the Catskills and fly fished for a week and then went back to Boston and fished for another couple weeks on the Cape. When I got back to town I bought a mountain bike and made some plans for the 2007 season.

This year was pretty intense for me. I was training by feel instead of by numbers and my fitness was improving with every race. I figured there would be a breaking point and my recovery started to take a lot longer after my first 12 hour race in August, but the result from the next one in Ohio 3 weeks later showed that I had pulled up on the throttle in time and was even stronger. The Burning race was a dissapointment from a result standpoint, but I was riding really fast and it was coming easy. By the end of Oct I had raced something like 60 hours. I don't normally look at racing based on hours but when races are 3.5-12 hours long you have to. The crazy thing was I was still totally focused on racing/training and really exited about CX.

After just 3 CX races I'm hooked. The energy and intensity is like crit racing but it's not about the dude that can punch it out of a pack with 200 m to go. It hard racing. You have to be a good technical rider, be able to put down some serious power for extended periods of time and endure some suffering. The atmosphere is great since it is so spectator friendly and St Louis has the potential to get ever better. Next year I've already started making plans on ending my endurance race season a little earlier, doing more XC races during the course of the season and taking a nice breather before getting the engines fired up for CX season. I learned pretty quick that a cheap COMPACT cross bike isn't made for racing CX and will have some kickass new equipment in time for the rest of the season which I am really exited about, after all, cool bikes are how I make my living. Most importantly I learned quickly that there is a fine line at this time of the season between staying sharp and getting greedy for fitness. Luckily I think I caught my mistake in time and can still build a little, mostly just from racing.

Right now I'm still thinking in terms of Bubba points instead of UCI points, but it's making me happy.