Bay Area Biker

Bolstered by the fact that I had had the endurance to have been able to finish and even enjoy the Kings Ridge Grasshopper road race/ride, I decided to swing to the opposite side of the racing spectrum and try my hand at a high intensity short track mountain bike event, the Summit Shorty Series.

I heard about this series from Dain Zaffke (WTB), who’d won the A class at the season opener the week prior. It sounded fun, so I loaded the S.I.R. 9 into the car and drove up to McInnis Park in San Rafael.

What a great short course! The start-finish is wide and flat fire road, that veers left onto a 35yard doubletrack climb. At the top of this, you make a sharp left and hit the first quick descent down a narrow singletrack, over a small whoop-de-do before a scrambling uphill that crests a nob and throws you back down another steep, narrow single/doubletrack. This bottoms out into a hard right-hander just behind the start/finish and after a tight left-hand switchback you’re on the backside downhill, a singletrack that runs first through some trees and then out across the open hillside. There’s some texture on this downhill that makes it a little tricky - there was one lefthander in particular that I overcooked on every lap. The downhill spits you out on a paved road, where you make a left and climb back up the hill. After a quarter-mile, the pavement turns back into dirt and there are two kickers to make sure you’re paying for it, then through a flat rocky section, down a dropoff and you’re back at the start/finish.

B class: 21 starters, 6 laps. I’d planned to sit-in the whole race, since I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to respond to the intensity. First lap, wasn’t dropped = good. Second lap, felt fine = even better. Third lap, the pace slowed so much on the paved climb that I made a move despite myself, and the move stuck = great..? I was alone off the front for a couple-few laps, riding my brains out, and… not paying enough attention to what lap I was on. So, a couple-few laps later, when a rider caught me midway up the paved climb and asked me if there was one more lap to go it reinforced my delusion that we were on lap 5 rather than 6. The big difference between me and that guy was that his legs were willing to ride as if it were last lap, whereas mine were not. He started pulling away. Going along the flat rough section just before the finish I “let” two other riders sneak by me, thinking to recover a bit and take the positions back on the “last lap.” However, there was to be no “last lap,” and as I rolled through the finish line, fourth place is what I got.

I think I’ll install a dummy rear shifter on my single for keeping track of the laps. Lap 1(click); lap 2(click)…

This past Saturday, May 9th, I rode the King Ridge leg of the Grasshopper Adventure Series; 84 miles of hard, hard riding along the gorgeous North Coast. It was my return to the world of NorCal road racing, after 3 long years away, and it was complete radness.

To illustrate how long I’ve been off the scene, or simply how bad my memory is, I was convinced that the last Grasshopper I’d ridden was King Ridge in 2005. So for the past three months that I’ve been talking about doing this ride, I couldn’t figure out what year they’d added the extra dirt section, since the only one I remembered was Willow Creek. Well it turns out it was the ~20mi shorter Fort Ross Grasshopper that I rode in 2005, not King Ridge. So it was going to be an ever harder test than my memory was leading me to believe. Fortunately, I didn’t realize this until this morning, when I finally did my research before writing this post.

This would also be the ultimate R&D for my newly resurrected road frame, onto which I recently brazed some replacement seatstays. Going in, I knew there was about a 25% chance that either my legs or those seatstays would break somewhere along the route. It’s a given that the legs would break on some uphill portion, but I could only hope that the seatstays wouldn’t fail in the middle of a 45mph+ downhill on Skaggs.

Friday night I beercarb-loaded with some buddies who weren’t riding the next day and in the morning I topped things off with a leftover burrito and a cuppa Taylor Made French Roast. I got to Occidental plenty early, dropped the $15 for entry and one-day license (license?!), got my commemorative direction card (sadly lost en route), and then I was on the bike cruising the town, looking for familiar faces. I didn’t have to go far to run into my old Mud Puppy captain, Yuri, and teammate Aren Timmel. Long time! Very good to see those guys again. As WTB’s Dain Zaffke was giving me a hard time for warming up, up rolls Jason “JC” Cardillo and proud new papa John Staroba in a borrowed 1980s Chevy stretch van, sunfade beige, complete with bolt-in moto wheel chocks and suction cup curtains that didn’t wrap all the way around. They were running a little late because JC had been pulled over not once but twice on his way up from San Francisco for having expired tags.

On the Start Line
As we were waiting to start, I went over my tactics: repeating the words “front group” over and over to myself until I no longer knew what they meant. My plan was to start near the back, let things shake out on the first climb, find a good mid-pack group, and keep the needle out of the red.

The descent out of town was thankfully sane, and it wasn’t until we were going through Cazadero that I had to put in a couple of accelerations to avoid getting gapped off the back of what I think was the main group. I was feeling very nostalgic what with the drop bars, skinny tires, riding in the pack, getting gapped, bridging the gap…

As we started climbing King Ridge Rd. the sense of my plan becamse apparent. I got stronger as the climb wore on. Up on the ridge I found myself in between groups. I could see a group of five about a half mile in front, but I sat up, took in the incredible views, and waited for the group behind to catch me. I wound up in a group of about 10, made up of JC, a couple NorCal riders (incl. Staroba), a few Gianni’s, a couple DFLs, and a couple others. Though I was content to sit at the back, worried as I was about subjecting my 50mile legs to an 84mile ride, I was still feeling pretty good by Tin Barn Rd. so I got on the front a couple times.

The descent down Skaggs Springs was unreal. I threw caution under the wheels of the belief truck, knowing that a seatstay failure at 45mph+ was no more dangerous than one at < 30mph. I rode in fourth wheel most of the way down, following a couple of Giannis and a DFL who seemed to know the descent very well. Fast, twisty, tree-shrouded descents will never ever get old.

We hit the coast and were directed left by the gentleman on the (¿Piaggio MP3?). I took a second out of being perpetually in awe of the beautiful surroundings to remind myself that we were only halfway through the ride. Checking with JC confirmed this fact.

Our group tried to form a pace line going down HWY1, but thankfully weren’t able. Kruse Rd. shook us out, and JC and I landed somewhere in the middle of the split. We crested onto Sea View with a trio of Giannis, at which point we split a can of my secret weapon. We picked up a fourth Gianni shortly before Myers Grade to become 6.

Willow Creek
After a water stop in Jenner, JC and I trudged on towards Willow Creek. In an effort to delay the onset of pain, JC procured a pinch flat on the potholes in the first mile. I waited with him while he fixed it and as we set off again we picked up another rider. As we entered the trees, it was my turn to apply a mechanical against suffering as a branch got in my front spokes and snapped a spoke (nearly two) off at the nipple. I stopped, wrapped the flailing spoke around another, opened the front brake, and pushed on.

JC was riding really strong on the lower section of the climb, and we lost our third party. We rode through a fallen tree that at first I was convinced had *just fallen as it looked impassable, but upon riding closer I saw that there was a well-worn path that weaved through. It was just like that scene in Indiana Jones 3 where he doesn’t believe the bridge is there until he throws sand on it.

The appearance of the Two Sisters triggered my inner singlespeeder and I immediately jumped off and started walking, while JC continued riding for a dozen more meters. It was at this point that I hit my groove. As I remounted at the top of the Sisters two contradictory things happened simultaneously: my stomach hit empty (no more burrito burps!) and I got another wind. I flew up the top half of the climb and picked off 6 more riders before the finish.

It was an absolutely fantastic ride; I love that loop. And it seems I can call my midpack finishes just like Di Luca can call his wins: I came in 56th o/o ~135 in just under 5 hours. And my seatstay braze job shows nary a crack! (Now to go hunt down some spokes and rebuild this front wheel before I have to return it to my buddy…)