Trendsetting and Sportspersonship

It is no accident that Yard Sale Cyclocross has its roots in the sandy soil of the crumbling edge of the continent, where Southern California slowly erodes into the Pacific Ocean. Lacking the bedrock upon which tradition can be built, and generations enslaved to the purposeless repetition of the preceding generation's mistakes, we are free, like the shifting sands, to chase whatever trend catches our collective trendspotting eyes (those clever porkpie hats all the kids are showing up at concerts wearing, convinced they will be the only ones sporting such a jaunty, faux-retro look? Well, Cleveland, you are welcome).

Which, of course, brings me to the subject of cyclocross.

Last weekend, being comprised of the 23rd and 24th of October, was the perfect weekend to stage a Halloween-themed costume race, one that would take place at night (ish) and would include races for people wearing costumes other than brightly colored stretchy clothes with the names of commercial concerns plastered across them. As is our way in So So SoCal, the trend would be set with SoCal Prestige Series Number 5...dum Dum DUM...Spooooooooooky Crosssss (eerie whistling moaning sounds would emanate from a more technologically advanced blog - our people are on it).

Of course, if trends are to be set, YSCX must be on the scene if the scene is to be made. And scene-bound we were, prepositional confusion aside. Our presence was noted by the Race Director and Sometime Announcer herself, Dot Wong, with amplified cries of "Hey Yardsale, who are you? Where do you come from?" Heh heh heh. Seeds of confusion sewn, it was time to don my eversoclever costume: Stevil Kinevil!

(Little known fact: SPEEDVAGEN cross machines are so fast and so light they will fly away if you do not hold them down firmly)

My race was excellent. I exercised brilliant strategy and put all my training to work by lining up directly behind the fastest guy in the universe, Bobby Langin, Sr., silver medalist in my Category at last year's nationals. My months of brutal training were further vindicated by being directly ahead of the crash that took out or delayed all but the first five guys to the stairs. Seriously, you just can't practice having the crash happen behind you enough. And I rode triumphantly to victory by passing Chrissy at the YSCX Mobile HQ latched firmly onto the back of the speeding lead group like a lamprey on a cheeta's ass. At which point I had won the race as far as I was concerned. I am told that most, if not all, the other riders did not get that particular memo and continued to race for the full 45 minutes for which the event was scheduled. What. Ever. As a coda to my symphony of personal triumph and glory, I would like to note for the record (a redundant phrase as can exist in bloggerdom) that Mr. Langin, Sr.'s fastest recorded lap was his first lap, the lamprey lap, if you will. Later that evening, one Christopher Horner (watch out for this kid, I predict big things) recorded a fastest lap along the way to winning the elite event (dressed as a rider from Team Radioshack - Poser!) only five seconds quicker that the aforementioned lamprey-draggin' Langin. What does that kind of speed look like? Like this:

Much to my surprise, the evening continued after I completed the first lap of my race with the women's main event, featuring Series Race Leader the Bomber. Granted an exemption from the rigidly enforced Yard Sale Cyclocross (Embarrassing And Disrespectful!) dress code to wear the yellow (and more!) jersey of the Series Race Leader, Chrissy exercised excellent sportspersonship (no artificial gender constructs here, no sir!) by allowing pretty much the entire damn field to cram in front of her at the moment her first position call up was given. The race having been turned on, Chrissy graciously granted the fastest girls a 100 meter gap straight away, and politely placed herself at the back of the more leisurely paced second group, oh say, fifteen girls back. How nice. Manners having been displayed, it was time to see what the gals up front were up to. So away she went, at basically the speed of light, which if you're wondering, looks like this:

(The Bomber bending space and time to catch the leaders)

Catching the lead group proved unsportingly easy, so Chrissy began looking for a means to level the playing field. And find it she did: on a course comprised of 99 percent soft cushy grass, she managed to find the only 30 foot stretch of cement and did what any fair minded sportsperson would do - crash on it. Even this, however, had strategic effect as so shocked were the girls around her by the sight of her scraping across the hard concrete that they all stopped to inquire after her well being. Having broken the field's concentration with her cleverly-executed skin exfoliating dismount, the Bomber resumed her pursuit of the leaders, oblivious to the pain visibly radiating off of her:

(That red stuff? It's pain.)

Yet even after starting at the back, crashing, crashing again for good measure, and then crashing a third time just to prove the first two were not flukes (which, as any whale will tell you, come in pairs), the Bomber was once again at the front of the field, ready to collect the last points needed to upgrade to Cat 3 and qualify for Nationals!

The last few laps were spent dicing with Celo Pacific's Laurie Tremor (worst pain face EVER - far too smiley) for second and third. Satisfied that the points were in the bag, and fair play had been given to all, Chrissy crossed the line in third, good enough to grab the points needed to punch her ticket to Bend. In recognition of her accomplishment, Steve Wynn flew in an authentic Vegas showgirl to adorn the podium.

(All Photos by Corey Keizer)

The evening ended with Chrissy offering Chris Horner tips on how he too could grab a series leader jersey in the SoCal Prestige Series, should he decide to give up on the whole "Pro Tour" thing they seem to be so excited about in Europe. It remains to be seen if this Horner character has what it takes to follow Chrissy's example.

It comes as a surprise to no one in trend-setting central that the crossers of the Pacific Northwest have decided to throw their own costumed cyclocross racing event, on the rather predictable date of Halloween. So the YSCX mobile HQ will throw itself up in the air and hope to land in the Astoria Oregon in time to take part.

Stay tuned for more exciting trends in cyclocross bicycle riding.

The Mostly True Story of Doctor Spectacular

"If memory serves" can be prelude to nothing but fiction, however well-intentioned it might be. The fact of an event happens once, and then disappears beneath the waves of the retelling. Thus is the legend born.

Well I won't have that. Before this thing gets too far out of control, I want to set down, once and for all, the origins of Doctor Spectacular, that gravity-taunting gentleman who adorns your kit.

It started with my second bright idea of the last 25 years (the first was to get Chrissy to agree to marry me before she developed a true appreciation for my special brand of genius): Yard Sale Cyclocross. In a sport that all but guarantees that which cyclists otherwise avoid like a pack of Team In Training triathletes, that is, falling often and repeatedly, plastering "Yard Sale" across your kit is the ultimate rolling "I meant to do that." I fell? Of course I fell. This is Yard Sale CX. Thankfully, none of us are possessed of a sufficiently broad ass to properly display the original team motto: This Side Up. I Hope.

Hard to believe now, as the accolades come pouring in from far and wide, that not ALL YSCX'ers actually raced in Yard Sale kit during our first year. Which is ok. No one around here is going to call a Board meeting if your socks don't match. Which is a good thing, if you've ever seen my socks. But of those of us who did race in Yard Sale kit, none were truer to our embryonic ethos than Kevin Max. From showing up late for his race - a tradition I'm happy to report he still embraces - to stealing someone else's bike from the pit, Kevin displayed the sort of panache that comes from not merely a complete lack of training and preparation, but an active avoidance of anything that even suggests a familiarity with cyclocross. However, Kevin has one special talent that allows him to race as if he was raised by a Belgian nanny in a muddy crib: he is made of antigravitium, the antigravity element.

It was cold on the afternoon of December 10, 2009 in Bend. Nineteen degrees at the start of the Men's 40+ non-championship event. I should have known that in an event whose name ensured not even the winner could declare himself a champion, Kevin would be in his element. Or of his element, as the case may have been. Photographs suggest my pre-race focus was excellent, and that Kevin had nodded off for a quick pre-start nap.

Or perhaps his antlers were a bit heavier than anticipated. Whatever the circumstance, I lost track of him soon after the start. Why? Because I was racing. And race I did, until the sun dipped behind the Deschutes Brewery, and the course turned to black ice.

Sometimes Yard Sale is a noun: What team (gang) are you on (in)? Why, Yard Sale, of course.

Sometimes Yardsale is a verb: What happened when the sun went behind the brewery and the course turned to ice? I yardsaled. Yardsale, Yardsale, Yardsale, Yardsale...AND Yardsale. And that was just lap three. Surely, I thought, no human can stay upright for more than a few meters at a time in these crazy, frozen conditions. And I was right, everyone was falling around me, over me, behind me, on top of me. Then I noticed Kevin had somehow worked his way ahead of me on the course, and was riding as if he could do anything he wanted except for two things: 1. Stay up. And 2. Fall down. He looked as if he was being tossed and shaken by some evil cycling demon that would do anything but let him end his suffering by actually crashing to the ground. Over the next several laps I thought nothing of myself or my own progress around the circuit, so engrossed was I in the living cliffhanger episode playing out in front of me. With each crash avoided my certainty only grew that the next would spell the end of Kevin's race. Perhaps it was the cetrifugal force of his flailing limbs, perhaps is head really is filled with helium and it's not all an act, perhaps he's a marionette whose strings are pulled by a palsied adolescent from a parallel dimension, any of these explanations are more plausible than believing my lying eyes as he crashed dozens of times per lap yet never hit the ground.

(This is where the "mostly" part comes in. Of course he fell. And it was spectacular!)

Mercifully, we were pulled with a lap to go, overtaken by non-champions intent on being heralded as the greatest non-champion of them all. We crossed the finish line arms raised and clasped, and I swear I felt my tires float from the ground.

Months later, as preparations were made for the YSCX 2010 team kit, we realized we needed an icon, a totem, a talisman to shield us from....well, ourselves mostly. It's not like we're forced to do this. In a flash of inspiration, I contacted legendary cycling blogger and noted liker of things made of art, Stevil Kinevil, of AllHailtheBlackMarket.com. Surely Stevil, who knows they take cyclocross seriously in Boulder and that there is honor in ruining the race for everyone, would be able to make real what until then was only in our heads. In one of our early exchanges I told him the story of Kevin's glorious non-championship ride. "It was like he was trying to fall, but he couldn't," I said, "Every time he went flying towards the ground, he missed."

Within days, Stevil gave us the image you now proudly display. And without ever having seen the flying refutation of the laws of physics that was Kevin Max's non-champioship performance, he gave us a name as well: Doctor Spectacular. Which I think we can all agree is better than calling it Kevin.

Here are some more artsy photos of my dirty wife. I try not to lick her teeth after races.

This is our teammate, Karen Oppenheimer. Because the YSCX operation has become so large, mentally, many of you may not know her. She is a doctor in Bend, Oregon and her other interests include yoga, ballroom dancing and kids. Here Karen is depicted muscling a corner in which she routinely took her foot out of its safe clipped position to use as a kickstand going around the corner. Her bike is so cheap that it doesn't have a standard kickstand. In the YSCX spirit of giving, and in the coming (holi)days, we should take up a collection to buy Karen a kickstand.

This is Sean "Seamus" Rogers, not related. His focus is so singular that virtually anything outside of his skinsuit is black and white. You may know him for his phoenix rise in popularity from his recent self-disqualifying move in last week's race, in which he stopped to shout, "Is this slow enough for you?" to a nagging observer.

His race was characterized by flourishes of color in an otherwise black and white field. Now that I've broken the code on this blog site, I wish to add you all to it in some lesser way. Email me for instructions between the hours of 10 and 10:05 on Thursdays of months that begin with T.

October 17 Cross Crusade: Equestrian Center, Wilsonville

It was awful, to begin with. There was no rain, it was warm, people were happy and, worse, agreeable. By all accounts, these conditions are difficult for the vast talent portfolio of Yard Sale CX, of which I'm YSCX XL. Under normal conditions (soaked to the soul and cold to the marrow), YSCX thrives. By thrive, I mean, of course, shows up. Under these wonderfully inclement conditions, we'd typically only have to compete with the heartiest ilk--the bearded, the tattooed and the men.

A brief synapses of what went right/wrong.

Sarah won the Women B class, simply by coming out of nowhere and sandbagging her classification. This is a brilliant strategy that I've thought we could all deploy except for the facts, that we're no longer "out of nowhere" --if you don't know YSCX, you don't know shit-- and that the Russian judges who run this operation haven't created categories so shitty that we could legitimately (or illegitimately) dominate.

What they've left us with is an unreasonably early starting gun for the old and slow categories, virtually pushing us over a ledge to gruesome humiliation among the young and fast. With tens of minutes of training this year, God bless, I was able dig deep and do what Phil Liggett called, "turn himself inside out," when referring to the Herculean effort of Tour cyclist and my eating coach, Andy Schleck, in the 2010 race.

In any case, I felt myself and felt myself growing stronger more confident through the first 500 meters of the race. Someone who's never

studied geography, cartography or even looked at a map, however, plotted hills into this race course, and more than one. You can say a lot about the Russian judges who run the Cross Crusade operations, but double the negative of these observations for the course setters. If I could figure out how to drop in another photo here, you'd see the determined anguish that I conjured to get through that lap and other like it, but these others being progressively slower.

At the end of the day, I finished a respectable 80th out of a field of 89, plus seven DNF, which, I assume, means they're from East Germany. But to legitimately outpace nine Americans and seven East Germans, who, we all know have a reputation for doping, speaks volumes of velocity.

I'll post more photos as soon as I read the manual on this blog site. These photos will show, beyond the shadow of a doubt, shadows and doubt.