Race Report - 2022 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Introduction

Last year I started a new tradition—the Non-Race Non-Report of the Bike Race That Didn’t Happen—and was looking forward to continuing it. But a number of complications arose: the COVID vaccine enabled groups to gather again, so the Albany High School Cougars mountain bike racing team (for which I’m an assistant coach) started back up; the Fort Ord CCCX Cross Country Mountain Bike Race returned to the calendar; I somehow built up enough fitness to decide to have another go; and, crucially, I realized the Non-Race Non-Report format was already too tired a concept to spawn a sequel. And so, here I am again to report on my agonizing attempt at glory in an actual race.

Note: if you care about the race itself, and my tactics, and how they played out, and all that other chess-game-on-wheels stuff, you’re in the wrong place. (Perhaps you got here because I stuffed my report with juicy SEO-friendly search terms like iPhone, Tesla, Marvel, Netflix, Disney, Coca-Cola, bacon, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, Minecraft, Halo, and PUBG, in which case I apologize.) In keeping with a long race report tradition, I focus herein mainly on the food.

Executive summary

• I gave up beer for five weeks to lose weight for this race (and it worked, I dropped 7-8 pounds), which gave me the gumption to train and race extra hard so my great sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain
• My pre-race dinner was so extra
• I rode super hard through the Start/Finish section every lap but I’m not sure my student-athletes were even watching and thus may still view me as a concierge, not an actual athlete they can take seriously
• I suffered in a novel way, which is kind of remarkable after forty years of this
• I got poison oak again
• I buried myself far more successfully than last time, trading short-term agony for the blissful avoidance of at least a year of self-loathing
• I ate well post-race
• For only the second time in five tries at CCCX, I made the podium

Executive limerick

CCCX is a course for the fearless,
Racers who shrug off the crash or the near-miss.
Alas, I’m so old that I’m utterly timid,
Braking, then having to sprint at my limit …
Doing okay only ‘cause I’ve been beerless.

Short report

Race stats: 19.9 miles (vs. 22.4 last time); 1,987 feet of vertical gain (vs. 2,362 last time); 13.6 mph average speed (vs. 13.3 last time); 156 bpm average heart rate (vs. 153 last time); 174 bpm max heart rate (vs. 164 last time); 0:07:40 at redline (vs. 0:00:27 last time). Conclusion: I was 2% faster than two years ago, and averaged a 2% harder effort, with a 6% higher peak effort, despite being two years older. This reverses a three-year trend of slowing down every year. Before this race I had almost given up on myself, so to achieve this (albeit modest) redemption has me chuffed to bits. (Note: if you’re thinking of attributing my higher average speed to the flatter course, you have a point … but I actually do better on the hillier courses. As mentioned in my limerick, fast, technical courses like this one favor the bold and skilled, whereas hillier courses give me a chance to take back ground.)

Pre-race dinner: The bar at Los Laureles Lodge in Carmel Valley

As you’ll surely recall from my 2020 report, last time I did CCCX I carbo-loaded the night before with a delicious pasta with cream and steak tips, so you can imagine my excitement to see a similar item, creamy steak fettuccine, on the Los Laureles menu. But the price was $37! There’s no way I can do that. To be honest, I know my way around homemade pasta, not to mention a real cream sauce, so for $37 I’d have to be blown away. I couldn’t take the risk, being The World’s Cheapest Man. So I went for the $18 loaded burger (swiss, griddled onions, bacon, avocado, etc.), which was roughly the size of a cantaloupe. I had to unhinge my jaw to take a bite of that bad boy. I felt like my friendly neighborhood squirrel must feel when he eats the face off our Jack-O-Lanterns. It was a good burger, too … it was cooked rare (pretty red inside) and was really greasy, so the grease was just oozing out all over my fries (more on those in a minute). This wasn’t that gross kind of grease you’d get at an inferior restaurant, where the fry king has to occasionally skim off the skin that forms on top and/or fish out the cigarette butts. This was, like, high-end organic fair-trade grease, that had an innocence about it, almost like broth. The bun was just coming completely apart because how could it stand up to the sheer mass, and juiciness, of that burger?

Now, about those fries. They were freaking good, like they had some kind of special second-starch coating so they fried up crispier than just a strip of potato. (I know I’m not describing this very well, but what am I, a restaurant critic?) They were just great—and the portion was crazily, grotesquely, irresponsibly huge. There is only one person in existence with a high enough caloric need to justify such a huge portion, and it’s a lucky thing that person happened to be me.

Was there bread, a salad, an appetizer, a drink, or dessert? Hell no. What would be the point?

Breakfast: in the team tent at the race. I had a firm banana and an onion bagel. It’s funny: I’ve been more careful about my diet lately, so when I saw the bagel this voice in my head scolded, “Bagels have like five times the calories of a slice of bread—nobody should eat them!” How strange. Then this other voice said, “You know damn well you can’t get a real bagel outside of NYC.” That wasn’t as unexpected, because I recognized it as being my own voice. I really have no idea whose voice the first one was (and in fact a bagel has only three times the calories of a slice of bread). But the bagels weren’t from a grocery store—a team parent had taken some trouble to find fresh ones, and they looked good. So I told both voices to piss off, and slathered that bagel with cream cheese and wolfed it, chased by black coffee. And I’d do it again. Take that, diet plan! I’m back!

During race: four bottles, each two-thirds full, of fruit punch flavor Gatorade, mixed strong. The bottle I drank on the first lap was just for the sweetness, which improves performance irrespective of calories (as explained here). The second and third bottles were to fuel me, obviously. The fourth was just because it tasted good and I wanted whatever psychological comfort it could provide, and because our recently revived team had some fresh blood in the feed zone who could use the bottle hand-up practice. Speaking of blood, the drink was dribbling all down my chin, and one of our kids commented after the race that I looked like a vampire. “That’s because I fill my bottles with the blood of my rivals!” I declared. He then accused my rivals of doping, and thus me as well, by extension. These modern kids … so cynical!

Glycogen window treat: in the team tent. There were various sugary treats available to aid in my recovery, but some part of me was just too elitist to partake … I really miss the oatmeal cookies that I had in 2020, baked by the (then) team co-manager, E—. Her son L— graduated and they moved away, so she’s no longer co-manager. But L— has returned as a coach and was at the race … so why weren’t there cookies? He probably stole them, in which case all I can say is: well played! I’d have stolen them myself. Anyway, there was chocolate milk which I got excited about for a moment, but it was lactose-free and though I have no problem with lactose-free, I also have no problem with lactose so I figured I better leave most of it for whatever Cougar(s) can’t handle lactose. Besides, what did I need to recover for? My work is done for another year!

Lunch (post-race): in the team tent. Our team’s co-manager of 2020, F—, isn’t around anymore either, which, from a barbecue standpoint, is kind of like the Edmonton Oilers losing Wayne Gretzky. But some new parent was doing a yeoman’s job grilling up sausages and burgers. I had a sausage that was delicious but the entire time I was eating it (about ten seconds) I was keenly wishing there was sweet pickle relish for it. I’ve never in my life been as preoccupied with the absence of a condiment. Don’t get me wrong, I was very glad for the sausage, but that relish became an obsession. Maybe I’ll bring relish to the next race, even though I’ll only be coaching.

Dinner (post-race): back home. My wife made some innovative three-bean chili with pumpkin in it, I’m guessing for the high iron content. (Yes, I know it’s only the pumpkin seeds that are high in iron, but who actually eats those? Perhaps the proximity of the pumpkin flesh to the seeds works like a homeopathic remedy.) She also made, from scratch, macaroni & cheese. I washed it all down with a long overdue beer.

Post-race Beck’st

Here is the “Hardware Beck’st” I sent to my pals just before dinner. (I know I said a second ago that I washed dinner down with the beer. I didn’t. That’s just an expression, a nice idea. I drank the beer first … it’s best that way.)

(If you don’t know what a Beck’st is, get thee to a brewery! Or better yet, click here.)

Full report

I’m of the school that says your race number is always an omen. This year I got 101: how cool! It represented how I was about to get totally schooled in the race, and also how terrifying bike racing is (cf. Orwell’s “Room 101”).

I had a strange problem during my warm-up on the stationary trainer: I was listening to my workout megamix and my Bluetooth earbuds somehow got out of phase. The music in my left ear was a fraction of a second out of sync with the music in my right. The effect was extremely jarring for complicated cognitive reasons, and in fact made me almost nauseous. Meanwhile, pondering inconsistent Bluetooth latency isn’t conducive to a focused warm-up. Fortunately, being absurdly well-organized, I’d brought backup headphones and was able to proceed.

Due to some problem out on the course, they kept us sitting on the start line for at least twenty minutes. We passed the time with bike tech-talk, so you can be glad you weren’t there. I had a slow leak in my tubeless rear tire, and hadn’t gotten around to reinflating it, so instead of confidently saying, “I’m running 23 psi in the rear for the sandy conditions,” I could only describe the tire’s firmness as “al dente.” One of my student-athletes, meanwhile, was running his tires “pillow-soft.” By the time the ref rang the bell to start the race, I was no longer warmed up. Alas.

The course starts on a slight uphill, and is a wide, straight road for about a quarter mile before you turn onto the single track, so there’s no excuse for not hitting that dirt near the front (except of course being slow). I started the single track in second place. Before long my teammate M—, a fellow Albany High coach, passed me and took the lead, which was fine with me. I wasn’t feeling so hot. My legs were oddly okay, but my throat was burning and I could taste blood. My breathing was way harder than it should have been for my (albeit elevated) heart rate, and I was feeling stressed, frustrated, anxious, and agitated. In short (I suddenly realized), I had COVID! Exercise-induced COVID! Is that a thing? But I kept at it, and decided that having a burning, raspy, blood-flavored throat could become part of my new normal, like everything else. So I relaxed a bit mentally (but not physically!) and just settled into the burn.

Just a couple minutes later, on a descent, the guy ahead of me suddenly slammed on his brakes. I was like “What are you doing!?” and he said, “We missed a turn!” Dang it! By the time we got back on course, I had no idea how many guys were ahead of me.

Oh my god, I am so sorry … this is so freakin’ boring. Suffice to say, I somehow found the motivation to hammer much harder than last time for the entire race. At least some of the credit goes to my younger daughter, who—though she’d never shown much interest in my cycling before—surprised me, when I left for Fort Ord, by wishing me luck and saying, “Dig deep!” (It’s not that she’s not into sports, being a wrestler who describes herself as “secure in my masculinity.”) So I did dig deep, and it worked. By the end, I was totally satisfied with my race despite having no real idea how I’d placed. I’d given it everything I had, hadn’t miscalculated my pacing, and was perfectly empty by the end. And, as I mentioned before—and will probably mention again, until everyone is sick of hearing about it—I managed to snag a spot on the podium … which distinction I’m not sure I’ll ever achieve again.

All the guys on our podium (this being the Category 2, 45-54 group) are high school coaches. The guy on the second step is my Albany teammate, who breaks my legs twice a week. Look at the dude who got fourth … why are his legs so filthy? Did he find some puddle on the course and try to cool off?

Epilogue

No, of course I didn’t really have COVID. And no, exercise-induced COVID isn’t a thing. I confess I just worked that in to seem more timely, and to help this post perform better in search. Say, that reminds me: iPhone Samsung Galaxy Android Tesla Silicon Valley Oscars Billie Eilish Leonardo Dicaprio Emma Watson Ethereum Fortnite.

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Non-Race Non-Report - 2021 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Vlog

It occurred to me that some of my readers might be the types who unconsciously mouth the words they’re reading, as though they were reading aloud, and that others might be the type who turn their entire heads instead of just moving their eyes to track along the lines of text. Either of these types of people might get mocked while reading my blog, and I don’t want that. Meanwhile, still other people (I’m told) simply prefer a video. Thus,  I’m providing the vlog format here, and for everyone else the text follows below.

Introduction

It’s become a tradition for me, at this time of year, to head to Fort Ord in the Monterey area and do a mountain bike race. Normally, I’m a high school cycling coach and this is an opportunity for my riders to watch me suffer. But this year the NorCal League and our team are shut down due to the pandemic, so we didn’t get to go. And this means I don’t get to blog about my wretched, ill-fated race … another tradition stymied.

For a moment, I considered embracing the fake-news zeitgeist and writing a purportedly true but actually totally fabricated race report. After all, as we already knew but formally learned by watching The Social Dilemma, false information is much more interesting than the truth. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Then I considered doing a short story, but in my experience, people seem to prefer their fiction be labeled fact.

What follows is a completely honest report of the race I didn’t do (inspired, perhaps, by a story I dimly recall from the early ‘90s called “We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek). In accordance with the high standard set by my bike team for race/ride reports, I focus on the food, and provide the report in various versions, starting concisely before waxing verbose.

Executive summary

• We didn’t have our annual team dinner in the windowless back room of the Monterey Brewhouse (slogan: “We’re actually in Salinas”)
• The GPS didn’t direct me to a lonely stretch of a desolate road in the middle of nowhere only to announce, “You have arrived”
• No student laughed so hard a French fry came out his nose
• The portions weren’t so small I had to beg for the shrapnel from my daughter’s plate; after all, she’s off at college now and the meal never happened
• At the team tent that wasn’t erected in the morning, nobody forgot to bring the coffee, thus the lack of coffee was actual
• During the non-race non-warm-up, I didn’t fail to secure a student’s bike properly to the trainer, thus he couldn’t literally crash at zero mph
• All the training I didn’t do never had a chance to not pay off
• The race did not knock the stuffing out of anybody because there was no race and no stuffing
• I did not make an endless speech afterward, during which the parents clapped politely and the teenagers suffered silently
• When I didn’t return home because I hadn’t gone anywhere, I did not pour a beer and toast my own robust good health, nor did I drown my sorrows over the loss of my cycling fitness, though that loss (and my beer) are very real

Short report

Race stats: 0.00 miles (vs. 22.4 last year); 0 feet of vertical gain (vs. 2,362 last year); 0:00 race time (vs. 1:41:07 last year); 0.00 mph average speed (vs. 13.3 mph last year). 

Conclusion: I have no reason to believe I will ever again have the fitness necessary to race a bicycle. As far as I can tell, life will not go on—not in any recognizable way. You might say wait, that’s not true, this COVID pandemic shall pass. To which I respond, perhaps. Only perhaps. Consider these words from the writer Vladimir Nabokov: “At best, the ‘future’ is the idea of a hypothetical present based on our experience of succession, on our faith in logic and habit. Actually, of course, our hopes can no more bring [the future] into existence than our regrets change the past.”

Non-Pre-race Dinner (the night before I didn’t race):

• Lamb steaks that were deliciously rare because they caught fire under the broiler and had to be pulled out prematurely
• Mashed potatoes with salted butter and extra salt
• Sautéed zucchini
• German-style purple cabbage
• Rocky road ice cream with hot fudge because what do I need to be fit and trim for?

Breakfast (on the morning I would have raced)

• Two eggs, scrambled, burnt because I was too impatient to gradually wait for the pan to warm up and instead put a big flame under it so it was too hot—I could tell it was too hot because the butter smoked, and I knew I should hold back the eggs, take the pan off the heat, let it cool, wipe out the burned butter, and start over—but damn it fuck it all I just didn’t care and poured in the eggs in the pan anyway
• Two slices white bread that I thought would be wheat because the package said “Whole Grain Oat Nut” which was a lie but I was caught off-guard because the bread aisle was disorienting because my glasses were fogged up by my mask and I wasn’t at my normal store, where they require a reservation, a temperature test, a long line, a letter from your doctor, and support a maximum occupancy of like five, and I’m only slightly exaggerating
• An apple that just wasn’t very good because see above

During the non-race: nothing but half a bottle of water because my legs just kind of petered out halfway up South Park because I’m just so tired from the work week since my colleagues, newbies at teleworking, take all the time they would be commuting and pour it into working more, which in a perfect world would help everybody finish early, but instead everyone just launches more projects, generates more deliverables, and creates an overall culture that brings to mind that study NASA did of spiders given too much caffeine.

Unnecessary glycogen window treat: more ice cream because it’s so rare to have it around the house and even with one daughter no longer around, I better get the ice cream while I can; also a macaron that my daughter made, from a recipe that was incredibly complicated and took like a day but then a) the cookie was amazing, and b) what else is she gonna do with her time?

Full report

To my discredit, I was not very successful in looking around at the start and deciding who the fastest guy was likely to be, because there was no start line and no racers, not even myself. As soon as the race did not start, I didn’t get right on the wheel of the fastest guy, but if I had, he would have passed everybody during the slight uphill asphalt run-up to the dirt. I would have hit the single-track in second position, and then died on the guy’s wheel for a few minutes, and then the single-minded, sport-obsessed, totally unbalanced evil tech titan quasi-retired uber-fit bike bastards would have started passing me. It would have been a long race, four or five laps, and my strategy would have been to pace myself and wait for the guys ahead to start detonating so I could pass them.

If I were in racing form this year, that would make uphills a blast, obviously. I could be at the CCCX race and see a horrible 12% grade looming ahead, and I’d think, “Yeah! Bring it!” I’d look at the guys around me with something like pity. But of course I’m not in racing form; why would I be? I’m taking this shelter-in-place opportunity to develop the physique better suited to my current lifestyle: more like the shape of a Coke botte, or a bowling pin, or those inflatable clown bop bags or a Weeble that may wobble but it won’t fall down. That would stabilize me in my desk chair. Maybe if I can add some flesh to my face, I won’t look so gaunt, and thus so old, and after all nothing below my waist shows on a videoconference so why not develop a big soft woman-y butt? Perhaps an extra fifteen or twenty pounds would give me an air of gravitas.

Anyway, notwithstanding my new COVID physique, the non-race wasn’t too bad. I mean, how bad could it have been? I did find that on the climbs I wasn’t doing that I could, or perhaps couldn’t, put the hurt on any of the people who weren’t there. I’d heard these climbs described as “really long” but they seemed really short, as in actually literally nonexistent. It was a fun race, if only in my mind. But that’s actually overstating things. The race did not exist even in a reverie … this is the first time I’ve thought of it even hypothetically.

It’s been rainy in the Bay Area so there would have been several very deep puddles on the course that we’d have bombed through, sending water gushing up everywhere like one of those amusement park water rides. Oddly, only my trailing foot would get splashed. By the end of the race I would have had a drenched left foot and a bone-dry right foot.

On the last lap of my race, had there been one, I might well saw have seen this guy I’d remembered from the previous years’ races whom I’d have been chasing for the whole race (though most of the time he’d have been too far ahead to even see). His jersey would have said something pompous like “Woodside Beasts,” or some other rival high school team, meaning he’d be a coach too. I’d have started to close in on him on the final climb, right toward the end of the race. It would’ve looked like I wasn’t gaining fast enough and that he’d hold me off, except that I’d have been able to tell he was just dying.

I’d have dug deep, deeper, and deepest, and literally 50 feet from the end of the climb I’d have finally passed him. Damn, what a sucker-punch that would have been! He’d still be pissed off about it! The tricky part would have been holding him off on the fast, technical descent to the finish line. I’m not that great a downhiller because my wife would kill me if I crashed, but I’d have gone for broke, and presently on a narrow single-track section I’d have come up on a young high school girl who wouldn’t have been going that fast. I’d have realized that if I got stuck behind her, the Beast would catch up and surely pass me in the twisty bits near the finish line. On the other hand, there would be no place to pass except the thick bramble alongside the trail. Bramble is a notoriously tricky surface to ride on, because the ground can be really bumpy, even rock-infested, beneath the brush, and you won’t know until you’re on it. You could run over a rock, a beer bottle, a human skull, an empty bottle of hand sanitizer, maybe even a landmine because what the hell, this is all speculation anyway. I’d have taken the gamble, and though it would’ve been indeed bumpy—my bike would have heaved like a bucking bronco—I’d have made it past the girl, returned to the single-track, and never saw the Beast again.

After the finish line, feeling truly shattered, I would have been filled with the sublime feeling of having truly given it everything, so it wouldn’t have mattered how I’d placed—which would be good, because I would really have no idea about that. It’s better that way, I think, to decide how it went without worrying about the more or less meaningless matter of how I compared to those who happened to show up and race my category. Had they actually shown up. And had I.

But instead of being at peace no matter the result, I feel only a gap, a void, a lack, a profound sense of nothingness, the absence of any feeling about the race because there was no race, there was no course, there was no pit zone, there were no team tents or trailers, there was no podium and there was nobody there at all at Fort Ord, in the gentle dunes that would have been the course. Well, to be really accurate, surely there were hawks, and rodents, and earthworms, and it’s possible one or more of these creatures perceived something different this year, no groaning of cars and trucks and racers, no whirring and clunking of chains, no ticking of freewheels, no static-sound of tires on dirt, no cheering, no PA system, no nothing. This year, there was only—to quote the poet Peter Kane Dufault—“one huge hush the whole day.”

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Race Report - 2020 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Introduction

“When we were sixteen, my friend Shelly and I would mix rum with grape soda. We called it Welch’s Belches.”

I wish I could continue in that vein, but that’s not my story to tell. My subject, alas, is just another bike race. I’m on two teams: a road team and (as a coach) a high school mountain bike team. Both teams have a loose tradition of writing race reports. In the case of the mountain bikers, coaches have to really lean on student athletes to get some snippets, which are compiled anonymously, as you can see here. The grown-up roadies are more apt to write, but less apt to race … especially me. My only routine outing is the Central Coast Cyclocross (CCCX) Cross-Country (XC) mountain bike race at Fort Ord near Monterey. (Just in case that’s not enough juicy keywords to attract readers: iPhone Samsung Galaxy Tesla Silicon Valley Oscars celebrity gossip Scarlett Johansson Jessica Biel Mila Kunis.) At this event, both the kids and their coaches get to race.

Fortunately, my tradition is to go heavy on the food descriptions and mercifully light on the race details. With no further ado here is my report (Gucci Ballenciaga Valentino Prada Versace). If you’re in a rush, fear not: there are several versions, from briefest to goriest.

Executive summary 

• Dinner wasn’t as huge as everybody said
• Had my student athletes paid more attention they’d have seen me be a hypocrite
• It turns out I kind of suck at this sport
• Pointless suffering can be really fun in the right company
• I came away with poison oak rash again
• At least I enjoyed my beer afterward, and took a great Beck’st from the experience...

Executive limerick

A biker and wannabe bruiser,

Did a bike race and came out a loser.

He thought he was fast

But this myth couldn’t last

So he’s trying out being a boozer.

Short report

Race stats: 22.4 miles (vs. 19.6 last year); 2,362 feet of vertical gain (vs. 1,608 last year); 1:41:07 race time (vs. 1:26:27 last year); 13.3 mph average speed (vs. 13.6 mph last year). Conclusion: I was 97.8% as fast as  I was last year, over a race that was about 15% longer and 46% hillier, plus I’m a year older. I guess I should be happy about all this, but actually, isn’t it pathetic that I have to shore up my ego this way? Meanwhile, last year I missed the podium by just one spot, and this time I was much further from it. (How much further? None of your damn business.)

Pre-race Dinner: At Gino’s in Salinas:

• Cream of asparagus soup that was hella good (I was thinking to myself, “This rivals what they have at Duarte’s” and a second later our head coach said, “You know, this soup might be as good as Duarte’s”);
• Slice after slice of bread and butter because I was dying of hunger and the entrees were made-to-order (i.e., a bit slow to arrive);
• This crazy pasta special of fettuccine with cream, brandy, stock, mushroom, spinach, and Gorgonzola with steak tips which was actually very, very good (though I needed the 5,000 calorie size, not the 3,000).

I also inherited some fettuccine Alfredo (alas, not as good as what I make) from one of my student athletes who, incongruously, couldn’t finish it. Everybody was groaning about how full they were and several of them, particularly the adults, left food on their plates. I wanted to go around scavenging because I was in one of those moods where I could not be sated.

Breakfast: Two thick slices banana bread; one cup super-strong coffee, black; the tip of a croissant I broke off because I couldn’t commit to a whole one (as they’re often gross, though this was rather edible).

During race: Two sleeves of Clif shot blox: one GoLytely flavor, one Jagermeister flavor (okay, kidding, they were both salted watermelon, 2x sodium); a large bottle of energy drink; 2 ½ bottles of water.

Glycogen window treat: At least four oatmeal cookies. A fellow coach shared my towering gratitude that whatever unsung parent baked these amazing cookies last year is still around this year (or has been replaced by an equally talented baker).

Lunch (post-race): Tri-tip tacos with grilled onions, jack cheese, fresh tomatoes, and guacamole … are you fricking kidding me?! Also two or three cheeseburgers, hella kettle chips, and a bunch of Acme bread. Probably some more cookies too, knowing me.

Dinner (post-race): Eggplant ptarmigan (clearly autocorrect isn’t familiar with the word “parmigiana”) that was really good because my wife knows to salt the dickens out of the raw slices first to disgorge that bitter brown liquid that has ruined so many ptarmigans. I washed this down with a beer … a real treat since I was foolish enough to swear off beer for six weeks to try to lose weight for this race. (If that seems like a ridiculous sacrifice to make for a meaningless amateur bike race, consider that it’s arguably less of a sacrifice than training harder, particularly if you’re as fundamentally exhausted by life as I am.)

New for 2020: “behind-the-Beck’st” report

Here is the post-race Beck’st I sent around:

(If you don’t know what a Beck’st is, get thee to a brewery! Or better yet, click here.)

A correspondent replied, “Apparently you were too tired to give us any details.  Also too tired to consider a safer spot for your pint glass than sitting ON your laptop, just waiting for an errant elbow to knock it down…”

So, yeah, details. There’s a lot to unpack with this photo. You can see my old-school bike computer in its PC cradle at the left, and its output—the course profile and race stats—on the laptop screen. If you zoom in you can see how hilly the course was. Also check out my race checklist (the need for which I learned the hard way). You can see all these checkboxes with “DA” next to them … up until this year, there were boxes for “DA” and “AA,” because my older daughter and I went to these races together. Now she’s gone off to college and it’s just “DA” (sniff). You can also see were I’ve scrawled some stats and calculations … figuring out how much I’ve slowed down, and if our team’s new head coach rode faster than I did. (He did, of course, even though his Category 1 race was a lap longer). You can also see how badly I wanted that beer … by the time I’d set up the photo, it was half gone. (My friend needn’t have worried about it spilling on my laptop … it didn’t last long enough for a stray elbow to come around and knock it over.) Finally, in the background you can see a photo of my brothers and me, more than two thirds of my lifetime ago. Could I possibly feel any older? Sure! Ask me tomorrow!

Full report

It was mighty cold during the first wave of races. We have a lot of new riders, racing in the beginner category, concurrently with the beginning adults which included a couple of our coaches. One coach stopped when he came through to tell me one of our freshmen had crashed, somewhere out on the course, and might need medical attention. I scrambled around, phoned the kid’s dad, phoned another dad who was near the medical tent, talked to the medics, couldn’t learn anything, and was just getting ready to head out on the course to go find the fallen rider when I heard another report that he was back on his bike. This fire drill fouled up my warm-up pretty badly, such that our second wave of student athletes, who’ve heard my endless exhortations about getting a good warm-up, got to see me scrambling around in the last ten minutes, barely getting any trainer riding in.

Nonetheless, I had a great start. Maybe it’s all that sprinting out of corners in criteriums in my past life as a road racer … on the uphill asphalt section at the top I got almost all the way to the front and was sitting snugly in third when we hit the single track. NOOICE! Unfortunately, people started passing me right and left (literally) after that.

Wow, this is already totally boring! I’m sorry about that. Of course you don’t care what happened next, and I don’t really either. I almost didn’t care at the time … it was too much like life. I was riding as hard as … well, not as hard as I could, but to the limit of my motivation, really feeling the futility of it all, like I was just going in circles (which of course I was). Here’s a photo so you can see all the bastards swarming behind me. Also, marvel at how old I look. I don’t think the clear sunglasses help. I might as well get bifocals.

This was a real bike-handler’s course, and I’m not a real bike-handler, at least on the dirt. I kept getting passed on the downhills and then I’d catch the same guys on the short flat sections, draft them through the headwind, and drop them again on the climbs. That was pretty fun, I have to say. I know better than to have any concrete goals for my races anymore … perhaps the best I can hope for is brilliant moments, however fleeting.

One guy took so much time out of me on the downhill sections on the last lap, I ran out of climbs via which to reel him back in. I’d given him up for lost until the final flat sections when I realized he was completely dying. I dug way deep and chased him all the way to the finish, just nipping him at the line, throwing my bike like a real sprinter.

I was pretty stoked about that until I checked his number. He wasn’t even in my category! I have just discovered (looking at the online results) that he’d started two minutes after I did, in the 55+ group, and made the podium. At least he didn’t laugh in my face or anything after the race. I hope I’m as gracious when I’m that age. I sure as hell won’t be that fast.

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Race Report - 2019 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Introduction

On my road cycling team, we have a tradition of sending around race reports, which detail everything about our races, starting with our goals, the way we tailored our training program to them, a mile-by-mile analysis of the race Strava file, a deep discourse on how the tactics played out, and an absorbing lesson in what worked, what didn’t, and what we’ll try next time.

Wait, don’t leave! I was just kidding! All we actually write about is what we ate before and after, what we washed it down with, whether or not we hurled, and perhaps a few words about the race itself if and only if anything amusing happened. And because we’re all getting too old to spend a lot of time reading, we start with very brief summaries and work up from there. This report details my first mountain bike race in almost a year, the CCCX race at Fort Ord near Monterey, California. I raced with the Category 2 age 45+ group.

Executive summary

• I had 1.5 dinners the night before and (this time) no beer; 
• Race-day weather was iffy but basically dry other than my left foot; 
• I suffered mightily but vaguely, due to the data-free, non-electronic void I found myself involuntarily plunged into; 
• I lost the race but ate well afterward; 
• Judging by the increasing itch on my legs, I might have been exposed to poison oak again.

Executive haiku

As head coach of my daughter’s high school mountain bike team, the Albany High Cougars, I commanded my daughter to solicit, in her capacity as team captain, race reports from her teammates. These can be as brief as the kids want and will ultimately get combined into a single, anonymous literary mash-up. So far she’s received only two contributions: mine and a (clean) limerick from another coach. Kids these days. Sheesh.

My contribution to the Cougar team report included this haiku:

Bikers out in force

Plucky Cougars kick it off

Crazy, kick-ass course

(The “it” in the second line refers to the bike racing season, this being the students’ first race of the year. It’ll be my last as well … the high school races don’t have any grown-up categories.)

Short version 

Race stats: 19.6 miles (vs. 23.2 last year), 1,608 vertical feet climbed (vs. 2,343 last year), ~1:25:00 race time (estimated – my bike computer died right before the race). Here’s the map and the elevation profile, like you care. 

Pre-race Dinner: Cream of asparagus soup; hella bread & butter; 2/3 plate fettuccine Alfredo with chicken (not as good as what I make); at least half a plate of my daughter’s pasta (the most expensive one on the menu because that’s just how she rolls, with lots of seafood in it; she must have filled up on bread), including some delicious (and doubtless farmed) salmon, at Gino’s in Salinas (slogan: “Sorry our parking lot is so small”)

Breakfast: A bunch of banana bread; several unwise bites of a burrito from the previous day’s lunch that had spent the night in the car; two cups motel coffee, black

During race: two sleeves Clif shot blox: one Acai Berry & Rose Hips flavor, one Frankincense & Tea Tree Oil (actually, they might have been Mountain Berry and Salted Water Buffalo, er, Watermelon)

Glycogen window treat: Clover chocolate milk – da bomb! Also some birthday cake that another team, in a neighboring tent, brought by. I love the plate … the kid’s mom must have forgotten he’s not 10 years old anymore.

Lunch (post-race): hot-off-the-grill cheeseburger that was just dripping fat (in the best possible way); one half of a secondhand burger from my daughter that was starting to congeal (in a way that had its charms, actually); a hunk of tri-tip (if you’re not from California and haven’t heard of tri-tip, just think of it as steak that is better that what you’re getting); a hot dog that was weirdly salty, even by my standards, but good

Dinner (post-race): Asian-ish noodles with tofu; sautéed bok choy; a bunch of chips and salsa because I’m getting back in touch with my inner fat bastard after dropping some weight for this race; one Lagunitas Maximus IPA featured in this official post-race Beck’st:

I couldn’t get my head right for this race, for the longest time. I finally located my mojo during the last five minutes of my warm-up. I suffered pretty seriously, though not as much as last year because it was a demonstrably easier course (less climbing, shorter overall). I just missed the podium (i.e., came in sixth place), which was a bit of a letdown until I remembered that nobody cares anyway and I shouldn’t either.

Long version

The suffering started about three weeks before the race, because a) I stopped drinking beer, figuring it’d be a lot easier to lose weight than to build strength, and b) I fretted unduly about racing poorly. It’s an old story: I was pleased with my race last year and feared I wouldn’t live up to the new standard I’d set for myself.

On top of that, my derailleur hanger broke during practice the week before the race, throwing my preparation into a tailspin. You’d think it’d be easy to scrounge up a new derailleur hanger but it turns out they’re almost as unique, one to the next, as snowflakes. Everyone recommended a different source for a replacement: Wheels Manufacturing, North Shore Billet, Amazon, some place in Italy, some place in France … by the time someone said, “Have you tried derailleurhanger.com?”  I thought he was joking—but he wasn’t. Thinking I wouldn’t get to (i.e., have to) race came as a relief, so then of course I fell into a deep pit of self-loathing over being relieved. Then the race got canceled (due to down trees on the course), so we postponed until the following week for the next race in the series, by which time the replacement derailleur hanger had arrived and I got to (i.e., had to) race after all.

There was a mix-up at the motel, the Howard Johnson. I had reserved two queen beds but was given a single king. They kept saying they couldn’t upgrade me without charging more money, and I kept showing them my confirmation (on my phone) with the original price, for two beds. They kept saying that couldn’t be my confirmation because it purported to be directly from their website, whereas, they insisted, I’d booked through booking.com—which I hadn’t. I say “they” because a supervisor got involved. He was on the phone with the home office for a good while before figuring out the problem: they were simply looking at the wrong reservation. Seems a guy with a slightly similar name, Dennis Abraham or some such, had checked in earlier and they gave him my room, and then gave me his. They actually misread his name as mine, and vice-versa: the same category of error, twice in one day. “This explains why Dennis came down earlier to complain about not getting a king-size bed!” the guy said triumphantly, as though spending 20 minutes ironing out such a stupid mistake should be some kind of bonding experience for us both. 

I woke in the morning to this weather:

Fortunately, the rain subsided, though the race course was mighty wet. The whole morning my head was just filled with all this negative BS about my lack of fitness and the unsuitability of the course to my strengths (due to less climbing than last year). Yes, of course you’re correct: if I’m not fit, the lack of climbing is actually a boon. (The wimp who takes over my brain is also an idiot.) Fortunately my warm-up on the stationary trainer finally turned things around. Once I started to suffer, the sheer familiarity of the pain and high heart rate set things right. I became more robotic, which is a big step up from actually thinking. Plus I had the right music—my workout megamix—and in particular the Lil Wayne song “Mr. Carter” which is one of my favorites. I’ve never been able to figure out what, if anything, the song is about. It’s just a lot of blather, but really good blather.

I got a really cool race number this year: 151. Why is that cool? Well, I told the kids I like it because it’s palindromic. That was my official story. The real reason I liked it is because this number shows up in some really cool music lyrics as a reference to a (now discontinued) brand of overproof Bacardi rum. In the song “One Mic,” Nas describes how his rap is “Pure, like a cup of virgin blood, mixed with/ 151, one sip’ll make a [fella] flip.” (Yeah, 151 is strong—it’s 75.5% alcohol.) Bob Schneider sings about a guy who is “Hard as boardwalk bubblegum/ And smooth as 151.” So, to live up to this number plate, my job was to be strong and smooth.

Was I strong? Well, it wasn’t too bad. I did find that on the climbs I could put the hurt on people. I’d heard these climbs described as “really long” but they seemed really short. I think that’s the beauty of eating like a pig all the time and drinking beer but still riding bikes: you have to haul that around all that extra weight during training, and then when you start living sensibly three weeks before a race, and the pounds melt off, you still have some strength left over. (Not to overstate anything, of course, since I didn’t even make the podium.)

Was I smooth? Well, I picked the right lines and never came to a stop or had to dab my foot, which is saying something because the course was pretty muddy and had some pretty sketchy uphill sections. Wow, I just realized how boring this is. Sorry.

Eating was a bit of a problem, so when I found a fairly smooth stretch I ate most of an entire sleeve of Clif shot blox at once. This basically cemented my mouth shut for awhile, and left this thick film of blox goo (bloxfilm?) on my teeth, which improved my performance due to its sweetness. (Click here for details.)

I had great support in the feed zone. It was a cool day and the laps were short, but I still went through 3½ bottles in four laps.

There was this lone course marshal in the far-flung regions of the course, and I’d pass him twice per lap. He had this cow-bell he would ring like crazy, which was inordinately uplifting.

There were several very deep puddles on the course that we’d bomb through, sending water gushing up everywhere like one of those amusement park water rides. Oddly, only my trailing foot would get splashed. By the end of the race I had a drenched left foot and a bone-dry right foot.

The skies looked ominous the whole day, and we got sprinkled on by just a bit of rain, but ultimately the weather held out the whole race.

Other than some crazy fast descents, nothing that exciting happened (other than going almost anaerobic by the top of every climb) until the last lap. My teammate Dean, a fellow coach, had won his Cat 3 race earlier in the day with a well-timed attack on the final climb, and said the climb suited our team perfectly (living, as we do, in a really hilly place such that every single ride prepares us for climbing). On the last lap of my race, I saw this guy I’d remembered from the start line and had been chasing for the whole race (though most of the time he was too far ahead to even see). He raced for the Woodside Beasts, a rival high school team, meaning he’s a coach too. I started to close in on him on the final climb, right toward the end of the race. It looked like I wasn’t gaining fast enough and that he’d hold me off, except that I could tell he was just dying.

I dug deep, deeper, and deepest, and literally 50 feet from the end of the climb I finally passed him. Damn, what a sucker-punch! I’ll bet he’s still pissed off about it! Now was the tricky part—holding him off on the fast, technical descent to the finish line. I’m not that great a descender because my wife would kill me if I crashed. I went for broke, and presently on a narrow single-track section came up on a young high school girl who wasn’t going that fast. I knew if I got stuck behind her, the Beast would catch up and surely pass me in the twisty bits near the finish line. On the other hand, there was no place to pass except the thick bramble alongside the trail. Bramble is a notoriously tricky surface to ride on, because the ground can be really bumpy, even rock-infested, beneath the brush, and you won’t know until you’re on it. I took the gamble, and though it was indeed bumpy—my bike heaved like a bucking bronco—I made it past the girl, returned to the single-track, and never saw the Beast again.

I came across the finish line in a world of hurt, lungs burning, chest heaving, and Dean said, “Would you like me to take your bike?” I thought that was a great suggestion but couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. Dean had vanished! Where did he go? Oh, he’s back there! I finally realized that I needed to actually stop my bike. It’s just that I had forgotten how.

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Ride Report - Grizzly Peak Century with Teenager

Introduction

Members of my bike club traditionally send out race reports, with a special focus on what was eaten before, during, and after the event.  I barely ever race, but decided to produce a report of the Grizzly Peak Century ride, a 73-mile effort I took on with my 13-year-old daughter Alexa.  This would be her longest and hardest ride ever, and also her best-fueled.  Read on if you’re interested in cycling, parenting, junk food, and/or a good laugh.

Short version

It was cold. The food was bountiful and tasty. Alexa rode like a boss. 73 miles; 5,770 feet of vertical gain; two pairs commemorative socks.  Post-ride BBQ was tasty, even the lentils. 

Long version

For breakfast, I served Alexa leftover homemade mac ‘n’ cheese.  I sneaked a few bites and man, it was good. But I didn’t dare take any for myself, for hell hath no fury like an Albert deprived of leftovers. The members of my household are like jackals.

We drove to the start, in Moraga, parked, unloaded, built up the bikes, and headed to Registration. As we approached the table the woman said, “You must be the Alberts.”  How did she know?  Well, Alexa’s name was flagged with “minor” and they don’t get many of those.  Huh.  Kids these days ... they have no time for exercise—they’re too busy playing “Grand Theft Auto XIII – Running Over Baby Pandas and Homeless People Edition.”

We met up with my teammate Craig and his wife Susanne and started the ride.  The plan was to ride together so long as we all enjoyed the same pace and I didn’t talk too much.  (I’ve ridden with Craig for years, and I actually had a Latin class with Susanne in like 1990.  She remembers it as being a really easy class and I found it really hard.  Story of my life.)

I don’t need to tell you it was brutally cold.  This Indian Winter is really getting old.  I’m tempted to complain about Global Warming but somebody out there would probably respond with a lame joke about “You call this warming?” so instead I’ll say this:  I’m really getting worried about Global Climate Fuckery.  Upper-80s on Thursday and every other day of spring is like living in an air-flavored Slurpee. I was glad to climb Pinehurst just to warm up a bit. I see one of you painted Alexa’s name on the road, but you spelled it “Alexis.” Thanks for the thought ... please try harder next time.

We cut the course a bit, taking Shasta down to Wildcat to the first rest stop rather than staying on Grizzly Peak the whole way. This is because so many residents on that road like to back out of their driveways without looking, and/or cut off cyclists and break their femurs.  I guess this isn’t exactly an epidemic but one time is enough for me.

I’d talked up the GPC food to Alexa, and she wasn’t disappointed.  Pound cake, banana bread, chocolate-chip/cranberry cookies, oatmeal cookies, crunchy ginger snaps, soft ginger snaps ... we tried it all.  I’m sure I’m forgetting some items.  I even had a cup of coffee, just so I could pee a gallon at every rest stop like I did at the first.

Did I mention it was cold?  I didn’t even have a jacket because I was leaving room for Alexa’s arm- and leg-warmers in the pocket of my Lycra bike racing shirt.  (I was about to type “jersey” and then I remember that there are pockets of hermitic sheepherders in Australasia who think “jersey” means “woolen sweater.”)

We descended Wildcat, hooked a left on San Pablo Dam Road, and went around the “Planet of the Apes” loop, a great little road threading along that piece of land sticking out (I can never remember what that’s called ... isthmus?) and giving a nice view of the Carquinez Strait and its dueling bridges.

There was a lot of ground to cover between the first rest stop and the second one.  As a veteran of century rides, I know to take extra cookies when I can get them.  Of course my daughter benefited from my savvy.

We descended to the second rest stop.  This stop didn’t have any baked goods unless you count bagels.  Craig asked for a sesame bagel; the volunteer picked up a bagel half, turned it over, silently registered that it had poppy seeds instead of sesame, and gave it to Craig anyway. I had a “nothing” bagel with Skippy peanut butter on it—a guilty pleasure if there ever was one.  The alternative was this health-food peanut butter product that looked like diarrhea mixed with gravel.  I think it might have been almond butter, which makes about as much sense as a strawberry newton (i.e., none at all).  I kind of wished there were a New Yorker around to launch into a diatribe about there being no actual bagels on the west coast.

I got some Gu version of Shot Bloks, which were like Jujubes for grown-ups, and Alexa coveted them, so I told her to get her own.  Turns out I’d gotten the last bag, so I gave her mine.  Note to other parents:  this is how to get your kid to do century rides—just relax your normally stingy treat policies during long rides.  (Of course, this only works if you deprive your kids the rest of the time.)

Next on the docket was the fierce McEwen Road climb.  Craig and Susanne came up with a word game to make the riding go more quickly, and this was so effective they dropped Alexa and me.  Once we’d conquered that climb, I told Alexa the next climb would be Mama Bear.  Of course this was false.  The next climb was actually Pig Farm, which is by no means insignificant.  As it dragged on and on, Alexa remarked on how I hadn’t warned her about this one.  (I wouldn’t say she complained, per se, but her displeasure was evident.)  Poor kid.  It can’t be easy having an idiot savant for a father.  (For those of you questioning the “savant” part, I’ll remind you I have great facility with iambic pentameter, which has saved my ass ... well, okay, zero times.)

At the base of Mama Bear, we stopped so Alexa could take off her leg warmers.  She’s normally impervious to the cold, being the odd sort of person who would be perfectly happy pulling an Iditarod sled while wearing gym shorts.  That she waited this long should tell you how frigid the conditions were (even though the sun was doing its best).  While we were stopped, a worried-looking woman rolled up, stopped, and asked, in a quavering voice, “How long is this climb?”  Nobody said anything for a bit, not knowing how to answer.  I mean, it takes as long as it takes, which depends entirely on one’s fitness.  She rephrased her question:  “How far up does this road go?”  All I could think of was, “It goes on a right fur piece,” so that’s what I said.  Got a chuckle out of her, anyway.

Alexa had really suffered on Pig Farm, and when Craig offered her a sleeve of Clif Shot Bloks she happily accepted.  By the top of Mama Bear she’d consumed the whole lot of them.  I found this impressive because those Bloks have stymied me in the past.  Consider this passage from my Everest Challenge 2012 report: 

Hunting in my jersey pocket I came upon a sleeve of Clif Shot Bloks that Craig had given me.  My hand groped it, trying to figure out what it was.  Once I’d identified it, my brain tried to comprehend what Shot Bloks were and what they did.  You eat them, right?  But what are they?  And how do you get into the package?  Is it like Pez?  I gave up trying to fathom this great Shot Blok mystery and managed to find a gel.

I guess all that piano playing has really enhanced Alexa’s fine motor skills.

After Mama Bear, Craig uttered the word “kit” in reference to our bike costumes.  I glowered at him and said, “I can’t ride with you anymore.” So we parted ways.  Okay, that’s not actually how it happened.  He never said “kit.”  It’s just that Alexa descends more slowly than those guys, probably because she knows her mom would kill me if she crashed.  Moreover, Alexa and I wanted to stop at the last rest stop (I mean, free food—hello?!) and Craig and Susanne didn’t need anything.  So they rode off into the sunset.

The last rest stop had more baked goods, and we had one more of everything, except the chocolate-chip/cranberry cookies—we had two of those.  They also had Crystal Geezer juice drinks and we took two apiece.  “So, we just have Papa Bear and Baby Bear, and we’re done with the climbing?” Alexa asked hopefully.  I replied, “Right, though we also still have to climb Mama Bear.”  This was not me teasing my daughter—this was me being an idiot.  Again.  Poor kid.  “Wait, I thought we already did Mama Bear!” she said, distraught.  I assured her she was right.  From now on, I’ll give her the map and have her tell me what’s going on.

On Papa Bear, we passed this angry middle-aged woman wearing mostly black.  It was this weird long-sleeve costume, and under her helmet she had a thin head-scarf, tied in the back, like what a Ninja wears.  In a brittle voice she asked, “Are you two doing both loops?”  Had I known the kind of person I was dealing with, I’d have been tempted to reply, “Hells yeah, beyotch!” but instead I said, “Oh no, just the first one.”  To which she replied, “Oh, well I don’t feel so bad then.”  Like it’s some kind of disgrace being passed by us.  Sheesh.

Baby Bear was a cakewalk (cake-ride?) and then we hooked a left on Camino Pablo.  Rolling toward Orinda, the woman in black caught up to us—probably she pulled a lot of time back during the post-Papa-Bear descent—and she blew right by us by running a stop sign.  On her way past, she muttered, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”  What a fascinating utterance!  Was she quoting Tolstoy’s epigraph, that opens Anna Karenina?  Or was she quoting Romans 12:19 as Tolstoy had?  Or am I paraphrasing her body language?

On that long, shallow climb just past Orinda, after Camino Pablo becomes Moraga Way, we passed the Ninja woman again.  As we rolled slowly by, she glared at Alexa and said, “You possess, in the highest degree, a quality that makes one forget all shortcomings; this quality is blood, that blood which tells, as the English say.”  So it was definitely Anna Karenina she’d quoted the first time, since this second utterance matched Tolstoy’s description of Vronsky’s horse, though I’ll confess it’s also possible that this strange woman said nothing at all.

About this time I became aware that we were being tailed.  This dude with a red jersey, white arm warmers, and a yellow helmet had been behind us, maybe 30 feet behind, for an awfully long time.  It’s not credible that his pace just so happened to be identical to ours.  No matter how many stop signs and stoplights we stopped at, he never got any closer.  I’m pretty sure he was with the Bureau.  Many a father/biker would have been spooked, but I’m pretty good with my fists.

We took a left on Moraga Road:  the home stretch!  There was a slight tailwind and we had a good head of steam, but that didn’t stop the Ninja woman in black from making her final move.  She came flying by, in her best approximation of an aerodynamic position.  Somebody should explain to this woman how to ride on the drops.  I guess she didn’t grasp what that part of the handlebar is for, because she had her hands on the hoods but her elbows bent way past 90 degrees, sticking down low.  It didn’t look very comfortable, nor very safe, but she could not have cared less.  Her face was stony with determination, her mouth a rictus of uncaged ferocity.  This time she didn’t say anything, but to my astonishment Alexa cried out, “She sucks nitro... with Phase 4 heads! 600 horsepower through the wheel!  She’s meanness set to music and the bitch is born to run!”  Okay, okay, Alexa didn’t really say that.  She hasn’t even seen “Mad Max” (yet).  What she really did say was something wistful, along these lines:  “Normally women that age are just waiting for the end, but she’s breaking new ground.  I think this was a big day for her.”  I should pay more attention to that child ... I think I could learn something. 

In case you’re wondering, the angry biker woman easily bested us in the end; she didn’t really even need to run that last stoplight in cold blood.  I wonder if she’s told her own glorious tale on the Internet somewhere, or at her book club, or on the wall of a public restroom.

Dinner was great.  I graciously accepted the  volunteers’ offers of roasted red potatoes, jeweled rice, and even lentil pottage, though I drew the line at the couscous salad.  To my surprise, Alexa also allowed all these things on her plate, though she then whispered to me, “I took the lentils to be polite, but you’re eatin’ ‘em.”  Then it was on to the barbecue station, for chicken and vegetables.  They had eggplant, peppers, onions, all kinds of groovy stuff.  Then, on principle, I covered my plate with corn chips and those glisteningly greasy no-name potato chips that come in the 5-pound bag. 

I was not going to be one of those guys hitting his forehead and saying, “I coulda had a V-8!” so I had one. 

I went back for more chicken.  The volunteers don’t give you that much, so I tried a new tactic:  instead of withdrawing my plate after the chicken was deposited, I just kept it there.  There was a brief stalemate before the volunteer divined my wishes and put more on the plate.  It was like a game of chicken.  (Get it?  Chicken?)

I’d have stuck around and eaten more, but Alexa wanted to get home before the library closed.  Can you believe this kid?!