New Tips for the New Racer

Long time, no write. But now the road season is upon us, and for many has already begun. And for some, it may be that this is the year that you or someone you know will be toeing the line competitively for the first time. Congratulations! Welcome to bike racing, possibly the most fun that you can have with your clothes on (for a generous definition of "clothes," granted). And also possibly one of the most challenging sports around for the beginner to take up, given that roadie culture in particular is rife with myth, mystery, over-analysis, chicanery and, dare we say it, elitism. But never fear! I am here to provide some basic advice to help you get started down the path of bike racing sanity.

Most "beginner advice" posts on the internet fall into one or both of two broad categories. The first concerns basic practical elements, like what to bring with you on race day, what to eat (or not to eat), things like that. I'm not going to cover these topics, as they're well catered-for on the intarwebs already. The second category appears to be actual racing advice on how to do well in your first race(s). To be frank, most of these posts seem to be written by idiots, or other beginners - who I love and embrace but can't be expected to get everything right - or are hopelessly vague, or are thinly-veiled advertisements for coaching services or various go-faster products. I want to give you a different, possibly more pragmatic perspective. Okay, ready? Let's go!

1. Before you race, you really should learn to ride in a group. And the best place to do that is on a slow, easy club ride. The niceties of smooth, safe rotation are best learned at a pace you can easily manage and at which you and other riders can converse effectively. It's hard to learn when you're red-lining it just to stay with the group.

2. Don't take anyone's advice too seriously. Especially mine. Most people know way less about bike racing than they think they do. Don't just listen to the person with the biggest mouth. Ask around and find out who has a reputation for helpful advice and mentoring.

3. Don't talk about professional racing at your races. So gauche. Ha ha! Just kidding! Well, not really. Sort of.

4. Don't piss away money on fancy-pants carbon fiber wheels or go-fast bikes. I mean, sure, if you've got money to burn, go nuts, I guess. But if you don't, you're going to want to prioritize your spending. If your bike is mechanically sound and fits you, you should just race it. Even if it's 30 years old. It'll be fine. Really. Here's my proposed ranking of spending by bang-for-buck:

1. Race entry fees and travel. To get better at racing, race as much as possible. As long as you are fit enough that you aren't getting heinously dropped in a half-hour criterium, this is the best money you can spend.
2. Clothing. Seriously. Ideally, you want enough clothing for a week of training in most weather conditions (tights, leg warmers, arm warmers, gloves, are all re-wearable between washes). There's no need to break the bank, but aim higher than the bottom of the barrel for crucial pieces like your shorts. Incidentals like tights, feel free to buy from Nashbar or something. Most clubs offer group prices on kit for members, by the way.
3. Tires. Almost nothing you can buy will make a bigger difference in performance and safety than a quality pair of tires. Grit your teeth and reach into the $60+ range if you can. You pretty much get what you pay for, here.

5. Ride in the first 15 or so riders in your race, but not on the front. Or ride near the back. Or pull the group around. Okay, seriously, you know what? Everyone is telling everyone to be at the front, but not on the front. It turns out that you can burn a lot of unnecessary energy trying to follow a bit of received wisdom that has very little to do with racing well. You're going to need to experiment. So try different things. 

6. Try not to whine or yell about "sketchy" riders in your category. Chances are pretty good, as a beginner, that you're fairly sketchy yourself. And if you aren't yelling (good!), don't pay too much attention to the people who are. Everyone is learning, so try and be kind. It'll get better with experience, I promise. For everyone.

7. That stuff you may have heard about riding around a grassy field with people practicing bumping into and leaning on one another? It's a good idea. Find a friend or ten and do it.

8. Being skinny doesn't make you a climber. Being big doesn't make you a sprinter. Assume nothing. Just try things out. Enter EVERYTHING. Trying attacking on hills. Try sprinting. Just try things.

9. Most of the training or tactical advice articles you find on the Internet are written by crazy people, for crazy people. So keep that in mind. The great secret of bike racing is this: it's really not that complicated. If you want to go out and buy a book and power meter, cool, if you want to hire a coach, that's not a bad idea either if you can afford it. But if you're not so sure, a few months of Riding A Lot (TM) for a few months prior to your first race should get you fit enough to hang on in the beginner categories. The best part is, A Lot isn't actually that much - I can't make a specific recommendation, but for most beginners 6-8 hours a week is plenty of training to hang in there, maybe enough to do well.

10. Last one. Have fun. Seriously, bike racing is supposed to be fun! If you're not enjoying it, you should probably stop doing it. It's okay, I still love you. Bike racers aren't better people or better bike riders than anyone else, they're just people who really enjoy bike racing. Hopefully. I suppose there are some who don't seem to be enjoying themselves. Those people generally suck, so don't be one of them. If you don't like bike racing, you can just keep riding recreationally, or try riding gran fondos, randonneuring, heck, give triathlon a shot. It's all good.

Just a Ride

Over the years I've gone on quite a lot of bike rides for a wide variety of reasons. And let's be honest, most of the time, it's just a ride. It's fun, more often than not (except when it isn't), but seldom a transcendental experience. My rides are really pretty prosaic a lot of the time - I need to get to work, I want to be fast for racing season and have a workout to do, I have nothing better to do. Et cetera. Which makes the standard form for Writing About Riding seem almost defensive in the way it seems (at times!) to seek to justify our weird little hobby by making every ride special. There are a few forms this can take. There's Riding is Meditative. There's Suffering Teaches Us About Ourselves. There's The Bicycle is a Vehicle of the Soul. Perhaps worst of all, there's Riding As Therapy.

Can we have some real talk? A lot of the time I come home with my thoughts as jumbled as when I left. Quite often, I have suffered and learned nothing but that I am tired. Turning the pedals doesn't actually make my problems go away, though of course there's value in a few minutes or hours of escape. Best not to get me started on the spiritual angle. And riding is therapy in the same way that an SSRI is therapy - that is, it has benefits but isn't a substitute for a comprehensive treatment plan. I have gone on rides that rank among the very best experiences I have ever had, but so was the week-long Outward Bound sailing adventure I went on back in high school, and I don't feel too compelled to do that again. My honest reason for loving cycling is that I enjoy riding my bike, most of the time, I like the sensation of speed and the wind in my face and I've made some really good friends doing this and get to spend a lot of time playing with them.

The way we sometimes romanticize and lyricize the act of putting on some funny pants and going for a bike ride can veer into some goofily egotistical territory. And egotism doesn't do much to sell an activity. What cycling means to me is what cycling means to me. I want to share the happiness that cycling brings me. I only fear that making out as if all of my rides, or even a significant minority of my rides, are journies to some poetic apotheosis, is, well - not only is it untruthful, it seems to carry the smug implication that the fulfillment that I gain from it is inaccessible to other people by other means. Cycling doesn't make us better because of something intrinsic to cycling. The only people it makes better at all are the people who are the sort of people to be made better by cycling.

Forgive me if that seems tautological, but what I mean is this: no doubt rock climbers get the same sense of deep personal fulfillment from their hobby that I do from mine. And I'm interested hearing what it is about scaling a rock face that really grabs someone, that reaches into their heart and turns those knobs and switches that open us up and make us warm and excited and alive. I'm just unlikely to be convinced that the same experience would reach me in the same way, or that I would be compelled to come back over and over to climb bigger and harder and faster. My heart is operated by cogs and chains and wind and speed, the same way theirs are operated by ropes and hammers and lichens and altitude. What's special isn't cycling, or climbing, it's how cycling or climbing speaks to us.

I would never ask that we eliminate the poetry in cycling writing. It's a poetic activity. Let's just keep it real every now and then and remember that we are who we are and that's just fine, and sometimes a ride is just a ride. 

The Mis-Roubaixification of Cycling.

The Big Story of the past few days is the revelation that the Specialized bike company has threatened legal action against Canadian bike shop Cafe Roubaix if it does not change its name. The shop owner went to the press, the story exploded on social media, and suddenly it seems like this is all anyone in the cycling world is talking about.Even those who aren't incandescent with rage are thinking about it, mostly by wondering if or why they should be angry. 

I think it's worth looking at both why one should be tempted to dismiss the anger as overblown, and why it still makes sense to be angry with Specialized. For me, it comes down to the name of a post-industrial city in northern France, Roubaix, that has hosts the finish of one of cycling's oldest and most famous races.

Let's get straight down to brass tacks: "Roubaix" is way overused in cycling culture. Rather than being evocative, it is hackneyed. It is lazy. It is as empty of authentic, personal meaning as "epic" (also TM, Specialized). Of course, it is also a powerful marketing association for any organization in cycling to make, precisely because it is so hackneyed. The fact that it has become imbecilic shorthand for the romance of mud, cobbles, hard men, hard days and transcendent victory is the very reason that Specialized and this bike shop in Canada want to use it to sell their products and services. It's not like either Specialized or Dan Richter are guardians of the sanctity of Roubaix. It's as commercial as Coca-Cola at Christmas. But there is still some sort of faint hope that, at the end of this we at least we have one fewer cycling institution leaning on a haggard old trope rather than contributing to building a fresher, more original, more relevant cycling culture.

Still, none of that makes Specialized look like any less of a bully, and there's no reason why they should be the ones to win out over the right to Roubaix. If anything, the sheer universality of Roubaix in the cycling vocabulary magnifies the extent to which Specialized appears to be run by a bunch of assholes. And threatening legal action against someone who can't afford, even if they are actually and unambiguously legally entitled to use the word "Roubaix" in the name of their shop, to prove that they are right, is the definition of asshole behavior, isn't it?

So maybe, after the dust settles, there's a bike shop in Canada with a slightly less stupid name. That doesn't mean there's no reason for anyone to care. That Specialized itself has worked so hard to suck out what few drops of blood remained in "Roubaix" is reason enough to find the way they cling so jealously to its husk distasteful. This word is the domain of hucksters! Of mental midgets! Of empty imaginations too cynical and lazy to build their own stories or their own (brace for it!) brands! So let it go, Specialized. Be bolder.

I, personally, am watching this story with more detached astonishment than raw anger. I've only got so much fury to go around. Right now, it's devoted to the mundane aggravations of my daily life. But Specialized sure is looking like a bunch of dicks, and I'm completely empathetic with the people who do care so much. And now the story has got even more interesting,  since ASI (Fuji bicycles, basically) saw a PR opportunity and swooped in to "magnanimously" grant permission for the beleaguered shop owner to use the name. So I'm sure we'll be watching and ranting and raving on this story for  a while.

Update 12/13/13: This issue is since resolved, and Specialized even appears to be reconsidering its aggressive policy on intellectual property enforcement. I now hope this post can now stand on its own as a plea to cycling fans: please, please consider going to a different well to build a brand for yourself. Not because you're less likely to be sued, but because you'll be telling a truer, more personal story.

Myth versus Reality

I've become a fan of cyclocross, but it took me a while. That feels a bit funny to me, because I was intrigued by the thought of participating as soon as I heard of this whacky discipline. Racing what are essentially road bikes around in the dirt, dismounting to hop barriers and climb over obstacles? The sheer lunacy had instant appeal. But unlike road racing, I didn't feel compelled to seek out videos on YouTube and steep myself in the history of the sport. Before I had toed a starting line myself, I was watching or reading about generations of epic battles over Alpine climbs and pitted cobblestone tracks. Cyclocross didn't have the same sense of grandeur and mystery as the road, and it didn't cast the same spell on me. Somehow, a sense of epicness is an indelible part of the image of road racing, and it can grasp a certain sort of personality in powerful claws. The long history of European road racing gives the sport a sense of enormous scale and shrouds the actual events of the past in myth. It is difficult to compete with myth.

There isn't actually anything intrinsic about road cycling to justify the hazy grandeur that surrounds the coverage of races. It is true that the distances professional racers must cover seem incredible, and they are, but for at least half of them the riders aren't even racing. This has changed a bit as distances have contracted and television coverage has expanded, but the road racing rituals of the early break, lieutenants riding tempo and eventual explosive action as the race enters the decisive sectors placed in the final hour to hour and a half of the action have been established because it isn't possible to race all-out over 200 kilometers. The mythic storytelling has survived from the days when races were covered only by newspapers, who could concoct whatever fanciful version of events would sell the most copies. I'm not completely sure why the veneer of epic heroism is still with us today, but I suspect it is because, even with end-to-end video coverage of races, we still only have the tiniest window into the events of a professional road races. Much remains hidden. There are hundreds of stories for a single stage of the Tour de France. We might see three or five of them on television. We might hear another handful through journalists' reports after the stage, but that's all.

The earthbound grittiness of cyclocross and the hard, tactical intensity of track racing seem very different by contrast. To the naive viewer (the younger me, in other words), they feel somehow spare. Not dull, but far less expansive. Less mysterious. It's easy to mistake the mystery and the strangeness of road racing for greater substance and the smaller scope of disciplines contested in velodromes or on cyclocross tracks for less. But really, the substance of cyclocross and track racing is intensified and compressed into a comprehensible distance and timeframe, and more importantly, 90% of it is right there in front of us, fully accessible once a fan has started to learn the secrets of the discipline. As a result, as I've become more familiar with cyclocross in particular, the races I watch feel tangibly real in a way that road racing does not.

As I've matured as a cycling fan, the mythical spell of road racing has relaxed its hold on me, for a number of reasons. I don't think the way we've constructed road racing storytelling has done the sport or its fans a lot of good. If nothing else, the unreality of how we think about the races and racers may something to do with the willingness that we had for far too long to accept the literally unreal performances of racers who were doped to the gills. Not that track or cyclocross are safe from doping at all, but at least we don't already have a narrative for them of superhuman performances in epic arenas.

And, if nothing else, as a bike racer myself, it is difficult to relate what I do to what I watch on television during the Spring Classics or the Tour de France. I am not capable of racing my bicycle for five hours over hundreds of kilometers and thousands of meters of climbing. I am not even interested in doing so. Anyone who has done a bike race over two or three hours long knows how mind-numbing it is. But I race for similar times over similar sorts of terrain as the cyclocross pros. They are much faster and much more skilled than I am, but the 'cross races I do fundamentally resemble what they're doing, while the criteriums that make up most of my road racing have almost nothing in common with a stage of the Tour de France. I can watch how Sven Nys handles a particular kind of technical section and actually learn something to apply to my own racing. I find that I'm getting as much or more out of watching bike races and thinking a lot more clearly about my own riding and racing having got my head out of the epic clouds. I will never stop loving European road racing. But life is better down here on the ground. And there are even more bike racing videos to watch.

Suboptimal

Often what I need is not the best, but what's good enough. Not the newest, but new enough. Not the lightest, but light enough. Not the fastest, but fast enough. I don't think I'm alone in this. I want to ride fast, but I also want to get to work. I want to race well, but I also want to sleep and eat cookies and cake. I want the best technology I can get, but I want a wallet that isn't already empty when times get tough. I want to ride everywhere, but I can only fit a certain number of bicycles in my apartment. Can I be and do and have all of these things? I think most of us would like to.

I've had a lot of bicycles, in the pursuit of these desires. Somehow I always fall into the trap of thinking that this bike or that one will be the final piece in the puzzle of my complete life, so I keep acquiring and discarding them. I need one to go to work on, another one to do road races on, another one cheap enough to keep outside all the time and avoid maintaining. Many of these bicycles end up as disappointments, but some have been delights, and a very few have achieved bicycle genius and enabled me to expand my abilities and myself.

I shipped one bicycle to myself when I began my great Southern experiment, so it was waiting for me in Nashville when I arrived, lonely, broke, with only some empty rooms, some belongings that didn't fill them, a sleeping bag, a pair of shoes. And within a day of arriving, a bicycle. It was an old beginner's racing bike, as old as I was, it was garish, it was heavy, it was suboptimal for everything. I bought groceries on it, I rode it to school, and I raced a summer of criteriums in the shadow of the Titans stadium.  When the summer was over and all of my stuff, including a new racing bike and a new commuting bike had moved down to join me, I sold it. I didn't have room for it. It was too big for me, really. It was suboptimal.

During that summer and sometimes in the years afterward, the friends I made in that summer of racing marveled that I raced criteriums with six cogs and downtube shifters, with a steel fork and single-pivot brakes, as though people didn't used to do it all the time. But it was easy, really, the easiest part of a hard summer. For one and a half months, my bike was my meal ticket, my race machine, my daily commuter and my escape. It was humble, and it was suboptimal. For one and a half months, it was the perfect bicycle.