Roads, Cheese, and Other Superweek Randomness

Land of the frost-heaved pavement
It seems as if every road in Wisconsin has frost heaves every 5 feet. After 6 days of riding, my hands were sore. Even an easy spin after arriving on day 1 created a challenge to find a smooth section of road. The worst was the race in Racine. [...]

Is it Stupid?

I first went to Superweek in 2000.
“Oh, you mean Stupid-week”, someone said to me.
“Yeah”, I laughed, like I knew what he was talking about. Really I was thinking, “if it’s so stupid, why would you go?”
I told some people at work I would be taking vacation. When told that I was going to [...]

Time to Not-Rush

Superweek is one of the rare occasions when I have a lot of time to do nothing. It’s mostly just racing and resting. I’ve got plenty of time to get where I need to go, and I’m not in any hurry to get there.
Driving to the races, and I can feel the tension and [...]

I Don’t Know What We’re Yelling About (*)

Certain guys have reputations for yelling at other guys during races.
I don’t want want to be one of those guys.
I was thinking about this during the first race here at Superweek. When I see someone else do it, it seems really stupid.
Mostly I’m easy-going, but there have been times when the lactic acid has [...]

Results on a stick

For years I’ve driven by the Vrooman Road exit off I-90. I always thought it sounded as if there should be a drag strip off that exit. You know, Vroom-man Road.
Actually there is sort of a drag strip off that exit.
Thursdays at 6:30PM during the summer months, Jim Behrens hosts a low-key time [...]

Skinny Guy Convention

My wife was looking around the parking lot before the state time trial championship.
“This is really interesting”, she said.
She hadn’t been to a time trial before. The time trial is cycling’s version of an arms race: high zoot bike frames, carbon everything, disc wheels, pointy aero helmets. But she wasn’t talking about that.
“All these skinny [...]

Fred?

A friend at work — motorcyclist and fluent German speaker — sent an email to a few of us cyclists at work with the subject line “Fred?” and a link to this Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_(bicycling)
I was perplexed by the ambiguous question mark in his subject. Was he asking us whether we knew of the term? [...]

Even the Panhandlers are Polite

Outside Magazine tells me I’ve just been to one of the “The 20 Best Towns in America”.
Returning home from Louisville after Masters Nationals, I found the latest Outside magazine waiting in the mail stack. Louisville is on their “top 20 towns in America” list. So … was it?
First night there, eating dinner and seeing all [...]

Karma and Crashing

Karma
A few hours after returning my found-trainer to its owner, I got an email from my daughter: “your cell phone has been returned to the officials at the start/finish.”
I reached in my pocket. No cell phone. I flashed back to the last time I used it. I returned a few messages while [...]

More lucky

Cooling down after the time trial at nationals, I come back to my car to find someone had left a CycleOps mag trainer. My first thought iss that my teammate Ray had left his for me to use. I call him. Not his.
Who would have left a trainer by my car? [...]