The fourth lap

Mags and I spent the weekend in the desert.  The original plan was to hike down one tributary to the Escalante River, follow the river downstream for a few miles, then hike up another tributary to complete a loop.   Everything went as planned until we got to the river, which was running bank full and bitter cold.  Faced with the prospect of carrying my, and then Mags’s backpack across the waist-deep river umpteen times over the next six miles, I decided we were going to have a more relaxing trip in the desert.  So we spent the next two days exploring all the forks of the box canyon we were in. 

We camped high on a ledge overlooking the canyon floor, savoring the silence that was interrupted only by an occasional canyon wren or coyote howl.  That’s where I read Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel and found what it takes to ride the last laps in a race as strong as I do my first laps.  Well, it didn’t exactly say how to do that in the book, but it did say the first step toward mastery of an art is a physical loosening of the body, continued with a mental and spiritual loosening, making the mind free and agile. 

Herrigel explains the next step with what may be the origin of the phrase “It’s not the arrow, it’s the Indian” that cyclists use to explain why having the lightest, geekiest carbon fiber bike won’t necessarily make you faster.  He says:

For master archers it is a fact of common experience that a good archer can shoot farther with a medium-strong bow than an unspiritual archer with the strongest.

Shooting an arrow farther does not depend on the bow.  Riding a mountain bike faster does not depend on the bike, but on the presence of mind, on the vitality and awareness with which one rides. 

So there you have it.  If I can ride my fourth lap with the same presence of mind that I have in my second lap I won’t fade in the final standings.  Instead of wishing I were done, I just need to maintain my presence of mind for all four laps. 

I know what you’re thinking.  First, a few months ago I said that mountain bike racing was not a Zen thing to do.  I guess I was a wrong about that.  Maybe racing fits into that area where Zen and Confucianism share some similarities.

And second, you’re probably thinking this is just another of my cockamamie schemes to rationalize my way out of a real training program.  To which I say you’re absolutely right.  But it has gotten me this far, so maybe the Buddhists are on to something. 

St. George

Some observations from Saturday’s race in St. George:

1. I like my new 180mm cranks.  I recommend them if you've been blessed with long femurs.  You wouldn’t think that an extra 5mm in crank length would amount to much, but I really felt a difference.  The downside of longer cranks is that your feet are 5mm closer to the ground at the bottom of the pedal stroke.  Mountain bikers are masters at calculating the exact location of their feet with respect to obstacles on the trail.  It’s a very complex calculation involving calculus, vectors and sinusoidal trajectories.  When we get it right it’s pure elegance. When we add 5mm to the radius of the circle, it can make for a bumpy ride.  I whacked my pedals on rocks at least five times. 



2. I don’t pay enough attention to the national mountain biking scene.  During my pre-race warm-ups, Bob told me that he saw Travis Brown here and that he expected me to beat him.  I just nodded and pretended to know who he was talking about.  Turns out he’s a former Olympian and national champion.  I finished three minutes behind him (and 13 minutes behind the winner).



3. Lots of people asked me how I liked the new geometry in my new Paragon.  I feel kind of dumb by saying this, but I haven't really noticed much of a difference.  I did feel faster on the descents, well, at least I did when I had the energy to ride aggressively, but the new geometry is meant to enhance control at low speeds, not high-speed descents. 



4. Apparently a ‘training’ program of yoga, skate skiing and weekly bowling in a sanctioned league is a pretty good regime.  I finished 10th out of 24 pro men.  I felt strong for the first two laps, but my legs started to feel heavy in the third lap.  By the fourth lap I just wanted it to be over.  I wonder what will happen when I start adding a bit more cycling into the mix.  Incidentally, my bowling average is up 8 pins over last year. 
   



5. You can read about the race and see the results here.

Oh, and thanks to Chris and KC for providing excellent support. 

The on-season

The trail is your future.  You, the bike, and the trail, you’re part of a continuum.  The vehicle is just a means, just an enabler, an extension of your idea.  That’s the joy of it; the journey. --Chris Stevens

I shaved my legs last night.  First time in months.  I was so hairy that I clogged the tub. 

I’ve got a new bike with an uncracked frame.  It's got something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. 

Now it’s time to see how my regime of bowling, yoga and skate skiing works as a race training program.   

Here’s the end of another off-season.

Aristotle, Jimmy Buffett and bit of religion.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is strictly business and 10 is pure hooptedoodle, today's post is an 8.5.  Hold on tight.  This one goes all over the place. 

Aristotle said that our success at living a good life depends on two things.  One is having the moral virtue that enables us to make right choices day by day.  We don’t have to make the right choice all of the time, just more often than not.  Think of moral virtue as having good habits, like flossing your teeth or riding your bike. 

The other thing our success at living a good life depends on is being [blessed, fortunate, lucky—you pick] with good opportunities.  As our moral virtues and good habits point us in the proper direction and (usually) keep us from doing things that are bad for us, being blessed, fortunate or lucky gives us the goods, means and opportunities that we cannot obtain by our own power or choice. 

Dan, Darren and I headed south to St. George on Friday morning.   Ryan and Aaron, who likes us to call him Seldom Seen except in the presence of his wife, showed up a bit later.  You might say that winter mountain bike trips to Dixie are morally virtuous, or at least a good habit to have.  The weather report called for sunny skies and temps in the 60s, which is to say that we were blessed, fortunate or lucky that the weather would be perfect for mountain biking.  The plan was to repeat last year’s Mardi Gras celebration by riding the Dixie Trinity, but first we cruised a lap on the Desert Rampage race course on Friday afternoon before cutting over the hill to Bearclaw Poppy.    That’s where we first met the mud. 

The Bearclaw Poppy trail is famous for being a smooth, hard-packed roller coaster of a singletrack ride.  It is that way because of a high clay content in the soil and a near absence of precipitation in area, which is part of the Mojave Desert.  But this has been an abnormal winter, especially for St. George.  They got several inches of snow last week, and that snow was slowly melting and soaking into the clay when we tried to ride there on Friday.   

We made it about 50 feet down the Bearclaw Poppy trail before our tires were caked with mud.  We probably could have gone on but chose not to be the guys who ruined a great trail for everyone. 

We tried the JEM trail the next day, and had the same result.  We thought about the Holy Goose but heard rumors that it was sitting under six inches of snow, so we didn’t even try. 

So while we wouldn’t be communing with the Dixie Trinity, we were in a position to ride some drier, lower elevation trails for the first time.   We
unknowingly decided to take a brief tour of some world religions at the same time. 

First up was Church Rocks, which, of course, represents western Christianity and could arguably be a fourth member of the Trinity, but that would make it a Quatnity and that just doesn’t make sense.  I really have no idea why the ride is called Church Rocks.  I’m just making this stuff up, which by now you should expect from a blog called hooptedoodle.  Some people choose to get married in a church.  Others think Church Rocks is a good place to pop the question.   

Next up was the Paradise Rim, where we sampled the relatively new Korean faith of Chundoism and its aims to convert our society into a paradise on earth.  Rather than amaze my riding companions with my astounding knowledge of world religions, I decided not to mention Chundoism to them at this time.  Instead I suggested that maybe there’d be cheeseburgers at Paradise Rim.  You know, “Not too particular not too precise, I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise.”  I bet you didn’t know Jimmy Buffett was a Chundoist.  Don’t worry if you don’t get it.  My riding buddies didn’t get it either.  But go ride Paradise Rim anyway.  It’s “Heaven on earth with an onion slice.”

Finally we visited the Zen Trail.  It’s like Gooseberry Mesa on a slant.  It twists its way across a rocky slope with biting rocks and oppressive drops that only a transcendent cyclist can master.   

We found an ancient Anasazi bicycle seat at the top of the Zen Trail.  Aaron, who reckons himself an authority on the ways of the ancients, decided to demonstrate for us how it was used,

but in doing so he slipped out of his Zen state and dropped it.  I’m pretty sure he’ll be cursed with visits from evil spirits.

Mass transit

Mags and I went to see the Peking Acrobats on Saturday night.  If you ever get the chance, go see them.  It’s worth every penny.  The thing that stuck out most to me was the absurdity of the stunts they did.  I mean, who would ever think about diving head first through a hoop five feet off the ground? Or why would anyone want to do handstands on a platform held 10 feet in the air by martini glasses?  What about lying on your back and twirling an end table in the air above your feet? Who would ever even consider that? 

Toward the end they had a man on a bicycle riding in circles on the stage, at every turn he would pick up two passengers, somehow finding room for them on his bicycle.  He did this each time he went around until there were ten people on one bike. 

The most people I’ve ever had on my bike was three, counting myself.  That was when I carried Mags and one of her friends across a parking lot.  We were coming home from dinner and I think I could have made it all the way but my passengers were starting to complain that their butts were sore. 

Another time my brother carried me and two of his brother’s-in-law on a BMX bike.  It was so easy for him that he decided to do it backwards, sitting on the handlebars.  Also note that the back tire is almost flat.

When I look at  that picture now I can see some places he might have fit one or two more passengers, and with a bigger bike we might be well on our way to ten.  All we'll need then is some pink leotards. 

Rednecks and materialists alike

I helped out a motorist this week.  It was on my evening commute after a snowy afternoon.  It wasn’t very cold, but I was bundled up nonetheless because if I don’t wear my extra layers home in the evening they won’t be available for me when I need them the next morning.  I’ve been wearing extra layers over my entire body—except my face; for some reason I never wear anything over my face—to deal with the single digit temperatures we’ve been having lately.  Over all of those layers I had on my über-bright hi-vis cycling jacket.  I quit thinking über-bright cycling jackets were dorky a long time ago, but I think some people still do, and based upon how I looked on this particular evening I’m sure they would have thought I was an über-dork.

Anyway, I was waiting at one of the 18 stoplights I curse every single morning and evening when I smelled the acrid stink of burning rubber.  There was a guy in a pickup truck on the other side of the road that was stuck in the snow-packed gutter. 

I judged him.  He was a younger guy with a goatee (the mullet of the new millennium). He was dressed like a manual laborer.  He probably likes NASCAR and I found out later that he has the grammar to prove it. 

I deigned to watch him spin his tires a few more times to let my perception sink in before I mercifully decided to go over and give him a push. 

It took me less than a minute to push him out.  He didn’t seem to be aware of the rock-back-and-forth technique to free a snowbound vehicle but he caught on quickly.  When he got out he thanked me and I said it was nothing.  I suggested that he get some sandbags or bags of kitty litter in the back of his truck during the winter so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again.  He said he would.  Then he said something that completely reversed the roles I had projected onto him and me. 

He asked me if I wanted any money for my time.

I felt like such a jackass.  Here I had decided that this was an uneducated redneck who needed to learn a few things about living in modern society, but in his mind I was the one who needed help.  Was it because I was riding a bike?  Or was it because I was dressed like a dork? 

Is this how the general public perceives cyclists, as either elitist snobs like I was acting that night, or as dorky ne’re-do-wells that can’t seem to catch a break, like I was looking that night? 

The perception that cyclists occupy only the bottom rung of the economic ladder is more common than you’d think, in spite of my one-man crusade to convince people otherwise. 

Just last night I was reading an article in the alumni magazine from my undergraduate university.  It was about reducing materialism and it offered some questions to determine if we are materialistic.  The last question read:

Do you look at the person in the luxury automobile and assume that he is more successful and more intelligent than the individual riding a bicycle?   

OK I get the point.  While I’m out there justifying my suffering through winter bicycle commutes by thinking elitist thoughts and misjudging people by their appearance, rednecks and materialists alike are looking at me from behind their steering wheels and misjudging me. 

All four tires

Whaddaya think? Did I do the right thing or did I let this guy off too easy?