Last season I decided to drown myself in the tubular cross tire Kool-aid. I spent somewhere around $1k on a gaggle of Dugast Rhinos. Knowing nothing about how to glue sewups I perused the internets on the subject and had a friend walk me through it to boot. A year later, after racing them in the wettest New England cross season I can remember I have some interesting findings.

First off, Dugast have that cotton casing which is what privides that baby's butt smooth ride that's so sought after. Problem being that cotton doesn't do too well with moisture. So you're supposed to seal it with the aqua seal. But I haven't found a decent tutorial on how to do that or which aqua seal product to use. All I know is that how I did it was wrong. This is what a cotton casing looks like after a season of wet.

That doesn't look pro at all. But who cares because it's a cross tire and it should be covered in mud the whole time anyway. Well rotten casings apparently aren't all that strong either. This is what happens when your tires rot.

That doesn't look good. I have six carbon wheels and six expensive pieces of mildew on them. So they all have to be ripped off and thrown away. This brings up another interesting thing, deep v beds on tubular rims are not so good for 34mm cross tires. I layered on lots of glue to build up the center of the rims for the tires. But apparently that wasn't even close to enough.

See that shiny part? That's where the tire didn't contact the rim. Apparently I rode an entire season with the tires only glued on to the edges of the rims and nothing in the middle. I've heard a rumor that I'd get a spanking from an official if I rolled a tire during a race and the official saw that my tire was glued on so poorly. But it appears that the tape glue combination is far stronger than I ever could have guessed. You may notice that there is no tire in the above picture. It's because even that small contact patch on the edges with tape and glue was enough to rip the cloth backing when removing the tire. I did this six times and tried to be more careful each time. Not one tire made it though in one piece. The glue job was still stronger than the adhesion of the tire to the cloth backing.

In conclusion, don't take lessons from me in how to glue a tire on.

What an arrogant prick. Here I am yesterday afternoon showing off a Tallboy I bummed off Francis on Facebook.

Such a cocky bastard. "Pratice is over." Oh really? As is evidenced by this twenty second video practice obviously isn't over.

Video Link

Francis behind Russ, Francis overtakes Russ, Kirt puts his face on the dirt for no reason whatsoever. That's pretty much how the whole night went. Ride a little while, eat it, ride a little while, eat it...

On top of the fact that I don't know didley about full suspension I forgot to set my bike up first. My fingers would get pinched behind the brake levers. Basic things. I made a list.

• Put a flight saddle on.
• Replace the chain I snapped.
• Replace that spoke I popped out of the rear wheel.
• Put a big front tire on.
• Adjust the brake levers.
• Put new grips on.
• Tighten the seat post.
• Get some 29er tubes.

29er tubes. You'd think I might have thought of that one earlier. I guess I was too glittery eyed by the pretty rear shock to remember that it's also a 29er.

That said it was a hell of a ride. We all thought we were going for an hour or two and it ended up being three and a half hours. Peoples' lights were dying, we ran low on food and water, the dog bonked. Call me sadistic, but I love rides like that.

Please excuse the noise in my RSS feed. I'm moving my feed over to feedburner so I can get some get stats on the three of you.

This blog's been a wee bit quiet this year. I've been following the rule that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. So here's a look back before I move on to what's coming next. I'm pretty sure that all the crap that was about to hit early in 2010 was purely the universe trying to achieve balance with the unparalleled beauty of my combover.

It all started Christmas Eve. I know that's technically still 2009 but it was at the start of pre-season for 2010. Christmas morning I walked down to the car to find that Santa Claus had made this spectacular revision to the vanagon.

A week or two later I discovered that someone had obtained my debit card information and emptied my bank account.

Shortly after that I found this bit of luck as I rode past the vanagon on my way to work.

Now all that is just life. Everyone has the world shit on them from time to time. The real bad news came when I got tested again. I was overtrained at the end of the 2009 cross season so I took December off to rest up. But after a month of solid training through January I was slower than after a month of sitting on my ass.

There's no use continuing to train myself into a hole so I sat on my ass for another month. At the end of February I was chomping at the bit to burn off some pent up aggression and entered the Ronde van Brisbeen. Low and behold five laps into the race I crashed and broke my clavicle.

Come. On. I'm trying really fuckin hard here but this is just bullshit. With a broken bone I was staring at another month off the bike at least. Thus I'd have one month of training out of the previous four months to kick off my 2010 season. My 2010 racing season was in serious jeopardy. Mountain biking in any form was out of the question until at least late summer. Road racing too. Training on the road is all I could hope for.

So I took a trip to Uruguay with Natalia where I temporarily adopted a stray dog.

Around that time there was talk of moving to Spain with Natalia. I always wanted to race in Europe and I was now staring at a perfect opportunity to move there to live and race, compounded by the fact that my 2010 race season was already in the shitter I jumped at the chance. Who wouldn't? So I shelved the turd formerly known as my 2010 season.

But alas, after planning and coming to terms with the job market there, in combination with my leftover 2009 racing debt, the financials of moving to Spain just weren't panning out. So I bit the bullet and got an apartment. After moving ten times in 2009 I finally had a place to call home.

But this place was small, and I didn't own a bed. Since I fancy myself an amateur woodworker I decided to build a bed that I could store my bikes under. It was originally supposed to be just a quick, crappy loft that I'd whip up in a weekend. But I often get carried away with my projects, and this one was no exception. In short order I was figuring out ways to hide all the screws and bolts. The damn thing even has adjustable legs.

There was still a notion that I would try to salvage what I could of the upcoming cross season but alas putting together an apartment from scratch is ten times harder than I thought it would be. I never thought much of a place to sit until I didn't have one.

At this point my 2010 racing season was hosed. I figured I'd live a little. I bought another surfboard since I sold my old one last year. But it was the most soul sucking blue I've ever seen. I had to jazz it up a bit or I'd end up on suicide watch for sure.

The rest of 2010 was filled with random shenanigans and such.

Riding with Lander in Tahoe. I know, I should stick to bikes.

You'll notice that the name of this site is StarvingCyclist not StarvingKirt. There were plenty of great things that happened this year but they didn't have anything to do with cycling.

That's it. Goodbye 2010, Hello 2011.

Looks like Cross continues it's upward trend for 2010.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=cyclocross&date=all&geo=usa&ctab=0&sort=0&sa=N

Actually it was two months ago. I don't intend it to be forever, maybe a couple months. Interesting thing I noticed now that I can't burn all my time drinking. I workout a shit ton. I've got nothing else to do that doesn't involve booze.

As a result of turning over this new leaf, I threw my back out. I wish this craptacular body could keep up better somedays but that's what you get when you neglect things. They turn on you. If my body were a puppy I'd be getting raided by whoever raids places to protect abused animals.

Is this thing on?

Sorry, this one post is for vi tweebs like me (i.e. code monkeys).

Video from the sidelines. The wide angle cam is apparently best left on the bike. Click through to the original post if you're on The Facebook.

"I can do two watts per kilo more than a normal adult, I deserve special treatment."

For those of you that want the cliff notes: I've raced every weekend since the beginning of September and double race weekends since October and I've driven myself into the ground.  Whether it is over-reaching, overtraining or mentally burned out the answer is always that I should have taken a few weekends off this season.

I've never been here before.  In my former life I raced for years and years and everything always made sense.  When I got my ass handed to me it was because I was a slacker and hadn't been training.  When I was ripping fast it was because I put in the time that season.  When I had off results from that pattern it was always because of some mental bullshit but I recognized that later and over the years I've become a more consistent rider for it. 

This right here, this is frustrating.  I'm going backwards when I've been a good boy and did my training.  I should be going faster faster and instead I'm going slower slower.

As a rider on the other side of the country from my coach, racing and training becomes a game of inference.  If I'd been back home this whole time we would have been doing testing and we could have seen when I crossed over the line of overreaching and backed everything off.  But out on my own with all this racing every weekend we can't even design a plan, we have no numbers for anything and all we have to work off is how I feel.

The puzzle here is that I'm riding like ass when I should be flying.  There are three possible explanations: 

Undertrained?

Considering that early in the season I had to recover all week between races and had the largest gains of the year undertraining seems highly unlikely to explain a fitness drop of this magnitude.  How could a training regiment that gives me the same gains in a month as the previous ten months combined have me fall flat on my face from rest?

Mental Breakdown?

I've been at this racing shit for a long time.  I've seen myself crack in more ways than Eskimos have names for snow.  I haven't had a single race this year where I finished and said "I mentally took myself out of that race."  If this was mental and my body was fine then I should have seen flashes of brilliance here and there.  There would have been a race where through sheer coincidence I pulled my head out of my ass and killed it.  There was none.  I should have had laps where I got it together and started ripping by people like they were in another category.  There was none. 

I reboot my head during races when things don't seem right.  When I see myself getting frustrated, when my riding seems off, I drop all my thoughts, relax, ask myself what hurts, legs? chest? then I adjust anything that needs tuning, and get back to putting power on the pedals, staying relaxed, picking good lines and riding at whatever my top output happens to be and fuck everything else. 

Over the past five weeks, no race has seemed right.  I've been rebooting my head like it was running Windoze.  If this was all in my head then one of those reboots should have seen me tearing like a bat out of hell.  Instead I get a lap time two seconds faster.

Overtrained?

How do we disprove this one.  Well perhaps the schedule really was too easy so I asked some hot shit racer friends of mine what they thought of racing thirteen weekends in a row.  The most colorful response was from Ryan Iddings: "You would have to be the Hulk or something to sustain that.  If you had done years of heavy racing before this you could probably handle it but not in your first year back."  The other riders all said similar but less quotable stuff.

Then there are the classic symptoms.  Trouble sleeping, decrease in max heart rate, fatigue, and mental strain.  I haven't been keeping track of my resting heart rate but you can be damn sure I will from now on.

In races I just can't go hard anymore.  By mid season before I tipped over I was finishing races and was pumped because I hammered the whole race.  For those of you wanting to look at results for evidence of this, it's not there, it took me the same half season to technically and logistically get my races dialed in so even though I was riding well, my results still look terrible.  It wasn't until the second half of the season that I got cross racing dialed in like a cougar on Ray Storm's speed dial.

I remember specifically last weekend, there was a huge runup that could be ridden.  I started it fresh with a bunch of riders that were roughly my level and they just rode away.  I took a glance at my thinking several times up that hill just to make sure it wasn't mental garbage.  What's my body doing here?  Not breathing that hard, legs hurt a little.  Okay, just attack this hill!  Nothing.  Okay, back to basics, look forward, breath focus and sprint!  Give it everything!  Give it ten feet!  FUCKING GO!!  I couldn't bring my level up at all.  It was like I car with something wrong with the throttle.  No matter how hard I push the pedal to the floor the throttle only opens half way.

Moving Forward

Now that I've reasoned it out, my season makes sense again.  I'm still in new territory to me but that's not a bad thing.  I was only concerned with one thing when I decided on this three year endeavor, and that was that I've never stepped over the line between training too little and training too much.  I had no way to recognize the signs because I've never been there.  So although this means that my results don't represent my ability and sponsorship will be a more difficult project than I would like next year, in the long run I'd rather have this happen to me during my designated training and learning year than next year or the year after when my results actually matter.  Now I can be a more consistent rider with this knowledge and the relationship with my coach is more complete now that we know what pushing me too hard looks like.

Moving forward into this final month of my first year of training my goals are to rest rest rest and make damn sure I crawl out of my hole before training starts for next year.  But my best results for the season are behind me.  I have to check out and begin recharging for next year.  Training more will only dig me deeper.

To My Sponsors

I apologize, this won't happen again.  This season was a bit of a gamble and I feel we came up a bit short.  I have achieved my goal of ending this year at the fitness level that I left the sport with five years ago, but my other goal of throwing down the results that I was also capable of is now highly unlikely.

Jingle Cross - Day One from Kirt Fitzpatrick on Vimeo.

Not too exciting, but there's a monkey in a tree.

It's been a while since I've opened my big mouth.  I have a couple blog posts up in my head and lots of cam footage but I just haven't had the time to get to them.  I'm actually writing this post from a rest stop on I80 just outside of Iowa City.  Hooray for government sponsored WiFi.

It really hit me the other day as I was walking out the door to drive to the Southampton cross race, my life is surreal.  It's so detached from anything that resembles normalcy to me that I now feel like I'm a passenger in my life.  I don't directly live my life anymore.  I experience it as an observer.  My body does all the motions while I sit at the private bar in my head drinking a beer and watching the spectacle.

Lucky me I managed to hook up a "working remotely" gig before leaving SF so all during the week I'm in front of a computer building objects that don't exist.  Sure they represent data that has meaning but they aren't tangible.  I have giant systems of these objects loaded up in my head and the relationships between them all strung together into something that's visual, but it's not real, it's just shit I've imagined up in my head to help me understand the system so I can figure out where to add the two lines of code that it needs.

Every Monday the carnage left over from the weekend somehow is dealt with.  The laundry gets done and I nurse my wasted body and mind back to health so I can hope to plug it into that imaginary world by Tuesday and earn money again.

On Friday, somehow more laundry gets done and the car gets packed and a departure time is determined and I open the front door, walk through it, and close it.  I have no control over this anymore.  It just happens.

So that is the third person existence I live Monday through Friday.  As I enter the weekend things get weird.  first of all there is usually a long ass car ride by myself to get to the race.  If you've ever gone on a long car trip you already know that they get a little trippy.  Try that twice a week, every week since your seven day solo drive across country.  I've never really left that state to tell you the truth.

Once I get to the race everything is already out of my control.  From three hours before the race until sometime afterward, all the decisions are already made.  Pick up number, decide on race clothing, pin number on, check bikes, food, pre-ride course, brew coffee, warm up, etc...

Then we get to the icing on the cake of this whole ordeal, The one hour I spend in the most physical setting possible.  A setting so physical in fact that I have to spend most of it trying to control my own mind.  Is the pain real?  Can my body go harder anyway?  Which line is faster?  Should I sprint through this section?  Negative thoughts are so far down my list of mental shit to monitor they barely even deserve a mention.  They're cake compared to the rest of it. 

When I get right down to what it really takes to push the body that hard for that long in such a technically challenging way it seems like the race is all in my head.  So there you have it.  If you meet my body give a wink to the guy up in my forehead area having the imaginary beer at the imaginary bar.  That's me.

Even by New England standards this has been a muddy cross season.  I've been away from mud for five years and I have been getting schooled in how to race mud for the past month.  I thought I would share some of my revelations here for my west coast brethren.

For the purposes of this post I'm talking about serious mud, not just a damp course.  Think mud soup, pissing rain, mud bath, the kind of race where it doesn't matter what kit you're wearing because it's going to be dirt brown after the first lap anyway.

Pit Bike

If the forecast is rain, bring beer.  You will need it to get someone to pit for you.  You may be able to finish a race without washing your bike each lap.  But depending on the course, you competitors are gaining thirty seconds to a minute each lap solely because of their pit man. 

Toe Spikes

Before I broke down and bought toe spikes I encountered several run-ups where I simply could not run or I would slip and fall flat on my face.  This was incredibly frustrating because I wasn't working hard on the run-up but could not go any faster.  The lesson I learned from this is always pack toe spikes and the tools to install or remove them before the race.

Course Inspection

It's not as simple as just make sure you pre-ride the course.  Picking the wrong line can sink your race faster than blue lights in your rear view on the way home from the bar.  Take your time.  Go slow, turn around and re-ride sections that are difficult.  Pay attention to the entire width of the course.

Wear clothes that you're not going to race in and get them muddy.  Sometimes the best line is through the worst mud.  Make sure you don't shy away from mud on your freezing cold, miserable pre-ride.

Rims - Deep V is better.

This hurts to hear because it means money.  I was talking to someone a few weeks ago about why people use these expensive deep-V carbon fiber rims in cross and I couldn't figure out a worthwhile reason.  Now I have a pretty good idea..  Here is why:

1. In deep mud, the deep rim acts like a rudder.  You're tires aren't doing jack in four inches of mud.  It's your rim.
2. They roll faster through deep mud.  A box rim has to pull up mud as it rolls up out of the mud.  On the other hand a deep rim may not get entirely covered by mud and when it does, it slices out of the mud which lets you roll faster.
3. The last nail in the coffin is mud accumulation.  Box rims pick up lots of mud and then deposit this mud on the bike.  In very short order this will make your bike drag like you have your brakes on and double the bike's weight.

Competition

Supposing you were a good boy and forced yourself out of the comfort of your warm car and out on to the course for a pre-ride and you know lots of decent lines.  Now that you're in the race, pay attention to the other riders around you.  They will always have a few lines that you didn't see.  Also, as the race progresses, new lines will emerge that were not there in practice.

Tire Pressure

We all hear stories about people running tubulars at 28 psi.  I've had the odd course where I needed to run such low pressures.  However it's not as simple as "more mud means lower pressure", the best lines may be through some bad mud where you simply cannot see what rocks are waiting to flat your tire or wreck your wheel.  In these cases you may be forced to compromise and run slightly higher pressure (~35 psi) so that you can take faster lines without breaking your equipment.

Power

Some sections just plain suck.  There is no easy way to get through them and you have to slog it out until you're on the other side.  I have noticed that occasionally in sections like this adding more power can allow you to get the bike rolling well enough that it doesn't get bogged down by the mud like it does when you run at your usual power output.  Try it out here and there, you may be able to add a little more power and breeze through that section.

It's mustache growin season.  Money raises awareness for men's health issues.  Donate here.

This one's pretty good.

Seriously guys, this one's kinda boring. If you're really a cross geek and want a taste of serious mud then click away.

2009 Downeast Cross, Day One from Kirt on Vimeo.

Providence Cross Day One from Kirt on Vimeo.

Is this thing on?

Leisurely cross ride around Keene from Kirt Fitzpatrick on Vimeo.