06.29.2016 | 10:06 pm
A Spoiler Warning from Fatty: As you know, I’m a big fan of the Paceline Podcast. I’m afraid, however, that in the current episode — the one that just came out today — I’m a complete blabbermouth. I tell not only how the race ended for us, but go into deep detail on the major event I will be describing over the next few episodes in this blog. So if spoilers are a problem for you, allow me to recommend you hold off on listening to this episode ’til I finish this multi-parter.
Ben is my niece’s husband. Which makes him…my nephew-in-law, I think?
Yeah, let’s go with nephew-in-law.
Ben is very mellow and easy to get along with. Here he is, in the back of the van, completely chill and mellow and not even remotely freaked out that it’s his turn to ride next.
See what I mean? Completely chill. In fact, during the entire race, I never saw Ben get out of sorts or flustered. Including during a moment when fluster was 100% called-for.
I would like to point out that in addition to being mellow and easy to get along with, Ben is fast. As in, really he should have been racing leg 1 because I’m pretty darned positive that he’s faster than I am. This hasn’t always been true, but it definitely is now.
So perhaps it’s not too big of a surprise that by the time we had loaded Lindsey and her bike into the van and caught up with Ben to do our first checkup on him — see if he needed any water or anything — he and the 50+ team had already caught another rider.
But this wasn’t just any other rider. This was Farrell S, “The Beast” of the “Beauties and the Beasts” team. (Check out the arms and legs on the guy in front and you’ll get a pretty good sense for why he’s called “The Beast.” Also, remember Farrell’s name…because this is not the last time you’re going to hear it in this story.)
Yep, Ben had finished catching us up. We were now tied for first in the Coed Competitive division.
Yeah, that’s something to smile about, I’d say.
The Strategy
But while it was clearly an awesome thing that Ben had caught up to this guy, it put us in a strategic dilemma. See, we knew — having watched teams come and go at the second checkpoint — that there was no other rider in catchable distance. And attacking this group of two with the intent to solo it would be pure folly, because the route was almost entirely slightly downhill with a headwind:
That’s pure poison for a solo breakaway against two strong riders.
And so Ben’s fate was sealed for this leg of the race: work with these two riders and plan on finishing this third leg more-or-less tied with our fiercest competition.
But we didn’t like that idea much, for one very important reason. We had met the next rider on team BatB, but we had no information on her. We didn’t know whether she was stronger than, as strong as, or not as strong as The Hammer.
But one thing we did know was that we needed to have a gap on her right off the line in order to keep her from drafting off The Hammer. That would be the only way The Hammer could build enough of a gap that Nate wouldn’t be a lock for re-establishing BatB’s lead.
And so we came up with a plan.
If you look up at that elevation profile, you’ll notice it’s almost entirely downhill. Forget any thought of breakaways there, especially into a headwind.
However, you’ll also notice that at about mile 49, the road turns uphill and climbs for a couple miles. And that’s a spot where a very thin, strong climber might be able to attack and gap a man with Lou Ferrigno’s upper body.
So we pulled alongside, signaled for Ben to drop back, and told him: “When the road turns uphill at mile forty-nine, you need to attack with everything you’ve got.”
“Forty-nine?” Ben replied.
“Yep, forty-nine.”
And then we took off. We — so sadly — wouldn’t be around to see this glorious attack and whether it worked. We needed to get The Hammer out to the next checkpoint and ready to ride.
The Execution
I wish we could have been there to watch the attack. I really do, because it worked. Worked beautifully. And I can tell it worked beautifully because Ben rolled in all by himself, the two guys he had been riding with nowhere to be seen.
Ben had done it: he had broken the link to BatB and now The Hammer was free to fly: our best opportunity to preemptively reverse the damage Nate was certain to put into me in the next leg of the race.
A minute or two later, the guy from the 50+ team finished, and a minute or two after that the BatB rider rolled in, far enough apart that working together wouldn’t be a “gimme” for them, either.
“Nice work, Ben; you did it,” I said.
We stood together, looking up the road, relishing the moment.
Which is when the guy Ben had been riding with — the one from the 50+ team — walked up to me, and let me have it.
The Blowback
“Is your fourth racer fast?” the racer on the 50+ competitive team asked me.
What a strange question, I thought to myself. Fast compared to whom? That said, I think it would be over-humble to not call The Hammer fast, so I answered honestly, “Yes, she’s fast.”
“Is she really fast?” he asked. Aggressively. Angrily. Like he’d rather be punching me than asking me a question.
I had no idea why, though.
“Yeah, I’d say my wife’s very likely one of the fastest women racers here today. Why do you ask?” I asked.
“Because my team is going to drop your team like a rock,” he said, spitting out the words. And then he turned to Ben. “Got it, compadre?” (And yes, he really said “compadre.”)
Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
“I don’t understand what just happened,” I said to Ben. “I am pretty sure he’s really angry at us, and I have no idea why.”
“Whatever his reason is, I think his revenge is that his team is going to ride faster than our team,” Ben replied.
“Why would we care what speed his team goes? We’re not competing against them,” I said. “And why would he care what speed Lisa goes?”
“I think maybe he’s mad at me because I dropped him on the climb,” Ben mused. “Maybe he thought we had some kind of alliance.”
“Did you give him a ring?” I asked.
“I didn’t even ask him on a second date,” Ben replied.
“Oh well,” I shrugged. “This race sure just got weird.”
But it was about to get much, much weirder. And scarier.
Which is where we’ll pick up on Monday.
Comments (19)
06.28.2016 | 8:22 pm
A Podcasting Note from Fatty: I just posted the most recent episode of the CyclingTips podcast, and it’s my favorite so far: extreme racing, like the Trans Am Bike Race (remember that awesome documentary by Mike Dion) and Everesting.
It’s a panel discussion with the guy who won Trans Am last year (Jesse Carlsson), the guy who invented Everesting (Andy Van Bergen), I couldn’t help myself and wound up doing a lot of talking.
You can find this episode at iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, by RSS feed, by downloading direct, Google Play, and by just listening in the handy player below:
I assert — no, I demand — that you will enjoy this episode and then subscribe to this podcast without further ado.
2016 Rockwell Relay Race Report, Part 4: Not With a Whisper
I was being hangdog. Self-pitying. Despondent, even. In one single first leg of the race I care about more than any other race, I had put us an incredible seventeen minutes (at the time, I had thought it was eighteen but the results have since made me feel one minute better about myself) behind Beauties and the Beasts.
“Guys, I am sorry,” I said, sincerely and dramatically. “I’ve ruined our chances at winning this race. I am fat, and he is fast.”
As it turns out, only two out of those things were necessarily true. Because while I am fat (the same nine pounds too heavy I’ve been since February) and Nate is fast, we didn’t know anything at all about whether the rest of The Beauties and the Beasts (let’s call them “BatB” in the rest of this post, to save me typing effort) were as devastatingly strong as Nate was against me.
And since the BatB rider had a seventeen-minute headstart against Lindsey, we wouldn’t know for a while whether we were gaining on them, or whether she was increasing BatB’s lead.
Which is, when it comes right down to it, a big part of the Rockwell Relay’s appeal: you can plan and strategize all you want, but for big parts of the race, you just have to accept that there’s a lot you don’t know, and then do the best you can on the bike.
To Go or Not to Go
With Lindsey off and riding, I took a few minutes to clean up, change, and keep an eye out for the FiverZ teams. I knew Mary had had a couple of flats, so figured Marci, Mary and Bill would be at least a few minutes behind me — but considering my own dismal performance on the course, I wasn’t sure.
But twenty minutes later, they were still not in and we were starting to worry about leaving Lindsey out on her own for too long. What if she had a serious mechanical issue? What if she were out of water or food? What if she needed more cowbell?
So we figured an at-least twenty minute gap in front of who we had expected would be our main competition would be enough knowledge for now. They’d either be closer or further away at the next checkpoint, and find that out soon enough.
As it turns out, they’d come in a few minutes after we left: twenty-three minutes behind us. The Strava Flyby of that leg shows that thirteen (or so) of that minutes was due to them being at two complete stops — fixing flats, I assume.
So while I had lost eighteen minutes to Nate, I had gained ten moving minutes (plus thirteen not-moving minutes) on the three Z5R teams working together, even though I had been twisting alone in the wind for a big chunk of the leg.
Which makes me feel better about myself. A little.
My Niece is Awesome
I am happy to say that Lindsey (my sister’s daughter) was definitely taking care of the “do the best you can on the bike” part of our race strategy.
She had gone out with the three Racer 2 counterparts of the group I had rolled in, and was working well with them.
Which means I had, inadvertantly, done one thing right: setting Lindsey up with a paceline to battle the headwind (or crosswind, depending which way the road was currently winding) with.
And as the smallest person in the group, she was guaranteed a good draft. Check her out, in third position (Friend of Fatty Chris, of Team What Were We Thinking, Part Quattre [WWWT4 from here on out] is leading):
We had put Lindsey in the Racer 2 slot because of two things:
- She’s a great climber
- She’s a great descender
And for all three of the legs she’d be riding, both those attributes would come into play.
But in this leg — more than the other two — climbing and descending would be vital. It’s a punchy rolling segment, with lots of quick climbs alternating with steep and twisty descents…and then ending with a big descent at the end.
We got out often, cheering. Lindsey looked great. Fast. Happy. Strong like bull.
The wind improved as this group of four — which winnowed down to three — just hammered away. They were making fast time — as witnessed by Lindsey’s Strava results, which include no small number of QOMs.
And then, the group got to the final climb, which ends at the exchange: 1200 feet in five miles. Not an especially big or difficult climb, unless it’s a really hot day and you’ve been racing for thirty-nine miles already.
Which of course was the case.
At this moment, physics came into play. Specifically, the physics of power-to-weight ratios.
In this case, this meant that my strong-but-very-light niece just floated away from the strong-but-not-as-light men (to be clear, there wasn’t a heavy, slow person in the group).
Lindsey rolled in with a gap of a couple minutes on the group:
I swapped the timing chip over to Ben, and he was off.
Into the wind, but not by himself. The racer from the 50+ team — the Mike Nosco Memorial Team — went out at the same time. You can see the rider in the background in the picture above.
Ben wouldn’t be alone, but he would be on the hunt.
You see, I was being a little bit coy about how fast Lindsey and her group had gone. Because just three minutes before Lindsey came in, the BatB rider had come in.
That’s right. Lindsey had just pulled back fifteen of the seventeen minute deficit I had earned in the first leg.
A couple minutes later, the other riders pulled in and we got a photo with our team and Chris, of team WWWT4:
We still had no idea where the VZR55 team was (as it turns out, Lindsey had added to the gap I had built and they were now twenty-six minutes behind us), but we were no longer in a distant second place.
We were now just two minutes off the winning Coed team, and we had ourselves a race.
Which is where we’ll pick up in the next installment of this series.
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06.26.2016 | 9:29 pm
I had been keeping my eye on the ball. No question about it. Indeed, since I had been hyper-aware that the ball the had been keeping its eye on me (in this metaphor, “the ball” is the RX7 teams, and thus the ball has eyes, for some reason), I had been keeping my eye on that ball (you know, the one with eyes) even more vigilantly.
My problem was that I had mistaken a cycling race for a ball game.
Seeing Red
I’d like you to take a look at this blurry photo. Not because it’s an impressionistic masterwork (I call it “Water Lillies on a Bicycle on a Warm Summer’s Morn”), but because it’s the only photo taken of me that illustrates my point.
If you’ll look past the blur, you’ll note that there is a white-on-red race number pinned to my back. This race color identifies me as being part of a competitive coed team.
There weren’t a ton of these white-on-red numbers in front of me during the first leg of the race. Indeed, after Billy notified me that Marci and Mary were far off the back, I had assumed that there were exactly zero white-on-red bibs in front of me.
But you know what they say about the word “assume.” Specifically, that whenever people use that stupid “make an ass of “u” and “me” phrase, that it’s perfectly acceptable to punch them in the throat.
What I’m trying to say is that as the front group winnowed down to fewer and fewer people, I realized that there was another guy wearing a white-on-red number. I then realized that I had seen that guy’s number many times during the leg thus far, but hadn’t connected the dots.
Now, though, it finally occurred to me: this guy was on a coed team, he was riding at the front like it was nothing, and I had no idea who he was.
Time to find out.
Meet the Mini-Beast
I should probably note at this point three very important facts:
- The rumors about Yann being a full-on cycling monster-man are fully accurate. He was killing it out there.
- The wind was strong, hot, and directly in my face.
- I was suffering. I could tell I was suffering because I was experiencing what I like to call my “internal tell:” the thought process I start having whenever I’m about to have a Massive Discombobulating Cycling Event (MDCE): I start mentally composing the story of how I bonked and why it was completely justified — and quite possibly heroic. (“I had given it my all, and likely more. My legs cramped, my heart screamed, sweat streamed into my eyes, and my lungs actually ignited.”)
All of this leads to a fact so important that I didn’t even include it in the above list: even working my way forward to this mystery coed was not a simple thing for me. Dropping him was out of the question.
Still, I managed to (casually, hopefully) introduce myself. “So it looks like you’re my competition for the day. What’s your name?”
He said his name was Nate, he was with the team called “Beauties and the Beasts.” He was the “mini-beast,” and the other man was the real beast. Like, a body-builder beast who’d be crushing leg three of the race.
Nate proclaimed was an analyst and so he felt no shame in having researched my team and the ZZRZ teams.
“You’re certainly a strong cyclist,” I said, obviously and without irony.
“I just wish everyone would stop going half-gas,” he replied, also without irony.
I did not reply that I knew of at least one person (hint: me) who was not going half-gas.
Then the wind picked up, at about the same time we began a big climb. Nate, along with one other very strong rider on a different team…well, he stopped going half-gas.
What was left of the front group exploded. I stood and did my best to stay with Nate’s group, hoping Yann would be there too.
And I held on. For a few minutes, I held on. And then I was no longer holding on. I was, instead, sliding off the back of this very fast group.
The thread snapped, and I was on my own.
Some kind soul dropped back and helped me bridge back. But it didn’t matter; I couldn’t — and didn’t — hold on.
I slipped back, behind the lead group, but far enough ahead of the chasers that I wasn’t sure whether I should sit up and wait.
Nate and his group rapidly disappeared off the front. I didn’t dare look back, out of fear I’d see Marci and Mary (and Billy) barreling toward me at an uncatchable pace.
My team rode by, parked, and set up for a bottle hand-up. (That’s The Hammer on the side of the road in this picture; I had just tossed my empty bottle before I got to her. The bottle I am holding in this photo is the one she just handed me.)
“How far back is Yann?” I yelled.
“Really far back,” they yelled back. Not the answer I wanted.
I was on my own.
Isolation
Now solo, in a hot headwind, overextended after riding above my ability for many long minutes (I have to use vague terms like “many” because I really have no idea how many — fewer than it felt like, I’m sure, but it felt like a long time).
I slogged along, despairing. Nate — my competition in this race — was obliterating me. “We are going to lose this race today, against a team I didn’t know exists until half an hour ago,” I thought to myself. “And when we lose, it’s going to be because of me.”
I despaired because of the wind. I despaired because of the heat.
I despaired because I wasn’t as fast as I needed to be.
And more than anything, I despaired because I had made a massive tactical error: after going out of my way to forge an alliance with Yann for this race, I had managed to separate us just when it would have been smart to stay together.
I had — as is my way — let my ambition overrule my brain. And now I was paying for it.
Kindness from People I Thought Were Strangers, But Aren’t
Then, as I rode in my small ring on the flats (really!), completely shattered, two different people from different teams were awesome to me.
First, a guy on the side of the road yelled at me (easy to hear him because I was downwind from him), “Want water on your head?”
“YES,” I yelled with all my might, wanting to be sure he heard me.
He ran alongside me, emptying a full bottle of cold water onto my head and back.
Heaven.
Later, when I finished the leg, the guy who did that, came over and said, “I’m the guy who asked you why you were slow at True Grit.” Sounding apologetic as he said it.
“No, you’re the guy who brought my core temp down when I really really needed it at the Rockwell Relay,” I replied. Because that’s who he is. Plus, as it turns out, his question at True Grit was a good one. I am slower than I was last year. (And the reason is: I’m heavier, thanks to stress-eating and a lack of discipline and motivation this year.)
Then someone handed me a little can of Coke, ice cold. It looked like Big D from last year, but that didn’t make sense to me. Shouldn’t he be racing?
Yeah, I was really that addle-brained. I fumbled with the Coke, too, having a rough time opening it, and then dribbling most of it down my face, chest, and leg.
Even so: delicious doesn’t even come close to describing that Coke. I truly and sincerely believe that the single best flavor in the entire world is cold Coke on a hot day during a long cycling effort.
It’s just unbelievable.
Here Comes the Cavalry
My team had gone on ahead to get Lindsey ready for her leg of the race. I, meanwhile, soldiered on, with about eight of the 54-ish miles left of this leg of the race to ride.
I was moving so slowly, however, that they had plenty of time to pose for cute group photos at the exchange:
To be honest, I was moving slowly enough they probably had time to write and direct a feature film.
I kept going, though. Not giving up. But feeling like I didn’t have it in me to do any better. I was just twisting in the wind.
And then, I heard a voice behind me.
“Hey, Fatty.”
Yann. Yann. And he was riding in a group of three or four (I can’t remember which, honestly) riders in a neat rotating paceline.
I would never have expected I’d ever be so grateful to be swept up.
I grabbed on to the back of the train. They let me stay there for a couple minutes and pull myself together. Then I was able to take my place in the rotation.
I tell you, being able to work with people in a race can be such an enormous advantage.
Eighteen
We rode the final eight or so miles together, much faster than I had been going before, and sweeping up a couple of other riders who had been left out to ride as human windsocks in much the same way I had.
Finally, we got close to the exchange. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been so happy to finish a leg in this race. And I’m certain I’ve never been so smoked after a single leg of the Rockwell Relay.
I saw Lindsey and braked to a stop, putting my timing chip leg down as I got behind her:
Ben then pulled the chip off my leg…
…and moved the chip over to Lindsey…
…and then she was off:
And that was it for me. I had survived it. The Hammer gave me a hug, telling me she was proud of me for time-trialling for so long in that brutal headwind.
And I got a cold Coke (so good), and a photo with Yann, where I tried to express how I currently felt:
I was glad to have finished, I suppose, and I was trying to be proud of my effort: I had given it my all.
But the fact is, I had just lost badly to a coed team that had completely blindsided us, then crushed us.
Saying I had lost “badly” to Nate doesn’t even cover it, really.
Because in the first leg of this race, I had put our team an incredible eighteen minutes behind who I was a thousand percent certain was going to be the new coed team champion at the Rockwell Relay.
My only hope was that the rest of my team could make up for what I was confident would be an enormous deficit I’d rack up every time I rode against Nate. But eighteen minutes is a lot. a whole lot to ask.
Too much to ask, really.
On the other hand, Lindsey, Ben, and The Hammer are pretty darned strong. And Lindsey had started the leg with a good-sized group of riders. So it’s possible that — with eleven more legs and about 470 miles left in this race — we shouldn’t count ourselves out just yet.
And that’s where we’ll pick up in the next episode of this story.
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06.23.2016 | 8:54 am
I’d like to tell you a little story about a young man I once met. His name was Yann. Well, his name is still Yann, but really, that’s not the point. The point is, he and I met at a LiveStrong event, where I admired this somewhat-overweight young man’s pluck for finishing a century ride, even though it depleted him so badly he had to be carted off to the hospital.
I am not exaggerating, nor am I making this up. Here he is, on his way to the hospital:
Since then, Yann has transformed himself. In a huge way. More to the point, he’s transformed himself into a not-huge person. Even more to the point, now he’s downright thin. Here he is, right before the start of the Rockwell Relay this year:
And here’s another picture of us, after I told him we should get a photo of us with our game faces on:
I can’t believe he bought into that old trick.
So why am I telling the story of Yann’s transformation here? Because at the end of my first installment of this race report I mentioned that I had a trick up my sleeve.
Yann — and in fact, his entire team, “What Were We Thinking, Part Quattre” — was that trick.
Yann has become a cycling monster. He, more than I ever have, has become the poster boy for how a committed person can become whatever kind of cyclist you want to become.
Yann is now, in short, freakishly strong, and freakishly fast. And he and I have been trading email during the weeks before the race. Which is a fact I’m pretty confident the folks in Teams V05R had missed as they conducted their oppo research.
If it turned out that three people from Teams ZIZRS attacked a solo rider from Team Fatty, they might find out that solo rider wasn’t so solo after all.
I had given Yann — and each member of his team — one of the super-new, super-secret, super-rare (only twenty exist in the world) FatCyclist jerseys…but I had asked him not to wear it on the first leg. No point in tipping our hand.
Sneakily, we didn’t even stand quite together in the starting area.
There was no contract, no bond that we’d stay together no matter what. Just a friendly agreement. Just in case, you know.
As it turns out, however, all this skullduggery wouldn’t matter in the slightest.
Or would it?
Let’s Go
I had good reason to want the possibility of some help in that first leg, because I knew that Team ZIZRS would be deploying three very strong riders against me: Marci, Mary, and Billy (OK, actually I didn’t know about Billy being in leg 1; I can’t hold that much information in my head at once), each of which had proven to be an incredibly strong adversary in 2015.
I had my doubts about whether I could hold my own against that power trio, especially Marci, who is a remarkable climber. Still, from what I understood, these three teams were bound together by their vehicle strategy, if no other way, which meant that they weren’t going any faster than the slowest of the three.
Was I faster than their slowest rider this year? I wasn’t sure, to be honest. But I was going to find out soon.
The gun went off, and — for once — I stayed with the group, restraining myself in spite of the huge surge of adrenaline I was experiencing. I would stay in the back of the lead group.
Yann and I got to within a couple bikes of each other, still not necessarily or obviously riding together, but within reach in case the RVRS teams did something heroic, like a three-person breakaway.
OK, I admit it: I really wanted them to try that, so Yann and I could play our hand.
But…that didn’t happen.
Anticlimactic
I started the race marking Marci and Mary, but before too long, they drifted back toward the back of the lead pack. Billy, however, stayed near the front, even when the group started winnowing down.
“Hm,” I thought to myself, “It looks like the men’s team isn’t attached to the coed teams after all.”
Then I found out why Mary and Marci had disappeared. Billy said, “It’s you’re lucky day; Mary and Marci have been having all kinds of mechanicals.”
“That’s not good luck for me,” I said. “We can beat them on the bike. We don’t wish mechanicals on anyone.”
Billy didn’t say, “Sheesh, I was only joking,” but he probably should have. The thing is, though, I wanted a straight-up competition, with no mechanicals or excuses. Because while I was
Shortly after that, Billy disappeared. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was to wait for Mary and Marci and then work with them.
Thanks to an unlucky pair of flats, the Z5R teams (yeah, I was bound eventually to use the correct combination of letters and numbers) had lost fifteen minutes to us within the first hour of the race.
That said, that fifteen minute gap was still the closest they’d ever be to us this year. Apart from at exchanges, we’d never see them during the race this year.
Which is not to say that we wouldn’t have competition. It was just going to come from a different team this year.
As I was about to find out.
Which seems like a good place for us to pick up in the next installment of this story (Monday).
PS: OK, I’d be writing more in this post, but my flight’s about to take off, and I won’t have internet during this seven-hour flight. I figure it’s better to post this much now than nothing at all.
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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.
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