The 2016 Rockwell Relay Race Report, Part 1: Before the Race

06.21.2016 | 11:52 pm

Today is June 22. It’s 4:47am. I’m in Dublin, Ireland. It’s light outside, and I’m completely awake. You know what that means? I’ll tell you what it means: it’s time to begin my 2016 Rockwell Relay Race Report!

Yay!

I’m tempted to go all Tarantino on you on this story. Start in the middle, and work outward to the beginning and end. And it wouldn’t be just to mess with you, either. The fact is, somewhere in the middle-ish of the race, one of the freakiest, scariest moments of my life happened. This moment became the centerpiece of a race that would have been plenty dramatic even without this central event.

But I’m not going to start there. And more importantly, I’m going to ask commenters with knowledge of the events in the race — and pretty much every person who was at the race knows what I’m talking about here — to avoid talking about it, too. No spoilers, in other words, no matter how badly you want to.

All that said, I can’t resist teasing you with a picture from the day after the race. Specifically, one of my teammate and nephew-in-law Ben and me:

There are a few things you should note from this picture. First, that Ben and I both look ridiculous, but his form of ridiculousness is much less goofy than mine.

Second, you can see that both of those helmets are in really bad shape.

And third, you can see that Ben and I are just fine. And in fact, all four of The Fatty Family were just fine by the end of this race. Considering the story I’m going to tell over the next few days, that’s probably worth pointing out ahead of time.

OK, let’s get started.

Taking Advantage Of Nice People

The first half of 2016 has been a crazy first half of year for me. Problems with the job, then no job, and now: new job. Cycling (and, let’s face it: blogging) has had to take a backseat to life.

And so I’m very lucky that I have good friends who will step into the gap and help me out.

First of all, The Hammer took complete responsibility for boiling the bratwurst for the pre-race WBR fundraising BBQ in the days before the race. Thanks, Beautiful.

Second of all, the four friends of Fatty making up Team “What Were We Thinking, Part Quattre” — Yann, Dave T, Chris, and Craig — took responsibility for grilling those brats. 

Thanks so much, guys. And thanks for saving a couple for me once I got there.

And finally, my friend Cory let me use the SBR Sprinter van during the race:

Since our other options were to use a pickup truck with a camper shell or a seventeen-year-old minivan, this was the upgradiest of all possible upgrades.

A Moment of Irony

I woke up on the morning of the race with one single, important thought: “Oh no.”

No, its wasn’t concern or fear for the beginning of the race. Although I had that, too. It was the realization that I had made a massive planning error: all of my bike lights were completely dead. 

I knew they were dead because I had charged, then completely discharged, them just the day before, to ensure they were working.

However, I had not had time to charge them again before heading to Moab. 

So here we were, with the race starting in a couple hours, with six completely dead NiteRider setups. 

Perfect.

“I’ll have to tell Danny about this,” I thought. “He’ll appreciate the irony.” I plugged everything in to charge for the few hours between when I woke up and when the team left — we figured we’d have the rest of the team swing by the hotel and pick up the batteries after the race started, bought a couple inverters at the local grocery store to continue charging the batteries once we were on the road, and then hoped for the best.

Meet the 2016 Team: The Fatty Family

For the first few years The Hammer and I did the Rockwell Relay, Kenny and Heather raced with us. Last year, our good friends Cory and Lynette raced with us.

For 2016, The Hammer and I had an idea: put together a family team. 

Specifically, I’d race leg 1. My niece Lindsey would race leg 2. Her husband Ben would race leg 3. And the Hammer would race leg 4.

Labeling this as a “family” team may have been just a little bit of a red herring, however. Sure, we are all in the same actual family. But we all also happen to be pretty darned committed cyclists; out of the group of four of us, I’m pretty confident that I’m the least-fit rider.

The morning before the race, The Hammer and I went to Denny’s for our traditional pre-Rockwell Relay breakfast; Lindsey and Ben skipped it. “What is it with you two and Denny’s, anyway?” Lindsey asked.

Tradition. Just tradition. Plus we like to take a traditional Denny’s selfie.

And then get the traditional team photo:

Oh, well those are kind of awesome-looking jerseys. They sure look like they could be FatCyclist jerseys, but with a new design and some interesting and different colors. 

Hmm. I don’t recall selling a jersey like that. Interesting. Oh well, no big deal, don’t worry about it. The more important thing is that we then got a terrific — and traditional — team jump shot:

Four great jumps, four totally different styles. I’m going to give us full marks for that.

Strategic Head Games

I was trying to just enjoy myself — to make this race into a vacation instead of yet another thing to be worried about — but I couldn’t help myself: I wanted to win. 

And I didn’t just want to win for winning’s sake, either. I wanted to win because I knew that the racers from Team Infinite Cycles also wanted to win. That they had been thinking about the victory we had snatched away from them in the last stage of last year’s race.

Their team name had changed: Now it was VR5. Or ZZTopR. RaZR maybe. We could never get the names straight, to tell the truth, and enjoyed not really trying to. But we did know that instead of just two teams working against us, this year they had brought three: two coed teams and a men’s team to work together, giving them the advantage of a working paceline for the entire race.

We had countered this tactic by bringing…one team, just like we always have. (And also by having me forget to charge the lights.)

I approached Danny to tell him about my light story, and then to ask him to straighten out who was on what team.

Danny hemmed and hawed, circumlocuted and just generally talked in circles.

“You’re not exactly being forthcoming, Danny,” I said.

“Troy told me not to tell you guys anything!” he blurted.

“That’s cool, we actually know everything about your team already,” I said. Which wasn’t true, but which also didn’t matter. At this point, our team strategy was locked in, and was very obvious. (I did in fact know a lot about their racer order and saw some big flaws in it, but I’ll get to that later: for now it was beside the point.)

And also, there was one tactic we had up our sleeves that team JVC didn’t know about.

And that tactic was going to make a huge difference once the race began.

Which is where I’ll pick up in the next installment of this story.