Sitting out

Everyone’s ready to start the race—except the race promoter. 

I may have downplayed the severity of the injury to my calf muscle in my last post.  I’ve been telling people it’s a bruise, but I don’t have a black and blue spot on my leg to prove it.  It’s just a little discolored, maybe a bit yellow, and still slightly swollen one full week after I whacked it with my pedal.  I kind of wish it was all black and blue; it would make explaining it a whole lot easier.   

Hipster Aaron and I made the trip down to Hurricane (pronounced hurr-uh-cun by the locals, myself included) on Friday without knowing for sure if I would be racing.  We made it in time to pre-ride the course, where I made it about fifty feet down the trail, to the first rocky section, and decided that I certainly would not be racing.  My calf felt fine on the flat sections, and climbing wasn’t too difficult, but the technical and rocky sections caused lots of pain.  I now have a little more empathy for women who don’t like to drive down bumpy roads because of the jiggles.  Maybe I should invent an apparatus with straps and latches to support injured muscles for times like this.  I could call it the calfzier. 

It was a hard decision not to race, but because it was the Cholla Challenge in Hurricane the decision wasn’t as hard as it should be.  This is the most poorly run course of the Intermountain Cup Series.  Every year you can count on  them to start late, to fail to sufficiently mark a few crucial turns on the course, and to take twice as long as necessary to finalize results.  In addition to those annual minor inconveniences caused by the race promoters’ not having their act together, every year they seem to come up with one major whopper that outdoes all the previous years. 

Two years ago, my first time doing the race, they neglected to mark the course through the intersection of about four trails.  I followed a group of about five riders on the wrong trail, and none of us realized it until our second lap.  Last year, on an unseasonably hot day, even for April in Southern Utah, they managed to run completely out of water at the neutral feed zone—before we arrived on our first lap!  I had lost my water bottle in a crash and had been depending on that feed zone for water.  If Rich hadn’t shared his bottle with me I might not have finished the race. 

This year’s whopper was their failure to deliver port-o-potties, they call them Honey Buckets in the Pacific Northwest, to the start/finish area.  The story I heard was that they were delivered some two miles away.  About thirty minutes before the start of the race—er, the scheduled start of the race, because they started late again—some guys showed up with one port-o-pottie in the back of their pickup truck.  That’s right, only one Honey Bucket for three hundred-some-odd people.  I think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere that describes the race organizers as a whole.   

Instead of racing I made myself useful by passing out water bottles to my brother (at left), to some of my teammates, to some of my friends and to a few strangers that looked thirsty.  I had bottles ready for Hipster Aaron but he never showed up.  It felt good to pay back some of the good will people have spent passing water bottles to me, but I’ve got a long way to go to restore my karmic balance. 

After the race my brothers and I took our mom to see the house our great-great-great-great grandfather, Moses Harris, lived in.  It’s right in the center of the town he founded and called, what else—Harrisburg.  I’ll post a picture when I get it developed.  The house has two front doors, which should tell you a thing or two if you know anything about Utah history.