That's a new one

Completely by accident, Sunday in Norfolk was filled with all sorts of firsts. I came home tired, satisfied and a little bummed, all at once. I wasn't sure that could happen.

It started with a late-Friday/early Saturday decision to do the masters race along with the straight Cat. 3 race. For state championship events, USA Cycling says masters races are 30-plus, 40-plus, 50-plus, 60-plus. Doing an extra race had pretty much nothing to do with trying to win it and everything to do with making the most of my time. If I'm going to drive two hours each way, it's going to be for more than 45 minutes of racing.

So Lucas and I met early, early, early and headed off. We rolled into town a little before 7, got set up with Eric and Shim and Mike and headed to the line. Lucas had half the bunch freaked out just by showing up. Hey, his racing age is 30 ... .

At the whistle, Jordan Brasch jumped off the line and had the tempo rolling by the first corner. In our brief team meeting, we talked about who to watch, and Jordan was the guy. So I got on his wheel. Halfway through the lap, we were up by almost a full block. I didn't feel like we were going fast, but the gap was rising quickly.

So I told him nobody was there and we went for it. A few minutes later, when it looked like we were going to be shut down, Shim jumped across, cranked up the tempo and we were gone. We stayed away the entire time.

That's a new one for me. A 45-minute break from the whistle. Shim wanted me to attack with a half-lap left, forcing Jordan to bring it back. After that, Shim could jump him for the win. When I went, I went hard — full gas. Jordan probably saw it coming, but it worked. Shim won, I was third. And because they handed out age-division medals, I'm the masters 30-plus state champion. Ha! And EOB took the 40-plus win after Lucas led him out. Shim is the 50-plus champion. Double ha!

We had a couple of hours to the next race, which I knew was going to be tough. They didn't combine the fields (which is their right), so it was 3s only. Really, we just didn't want to let a couple of guys get up the road. The downside is that none of us was strong enough to go with them when the went, so we basically just kept the whole thing together. Eric said he had good legs, so we started counting down the laps and getting ready for the sprint.

With three to go, I heard a funny sound coming from the back of my bike. Kevin Murray said it sounded like my rear derailleur was skipping. Actually, no — that was a flat tire. Ssss ssss ssss ssss. Nuts. No free laps left, so I put my wheel on, got lapped and collected my rider of the year points, such as they were. Gonna be tough to win it this year, I think. Oh, and I've never flatted in a race before. That's a new one, too.

The 1/2 race was scheduled to go right away, and Darrell Webb (the head official) asked me if I wanted to do it. The answer, of course, was "no." But for some reason I filled my bottles and headed to the line a few minutes later. The 3s race was taxing, but I could have done what I needed to do had I not flatted. I was counting on that knowledge to get me through the 1/2 race — another 60 minutes on the course.

I got popped pretty quickly, owing to a lot of fast, fresh guys in the 1/2 bunch. But I was counting money places, so I figured I'd get in with a chase group, spin around a bunch and then grab some cash on the way out of town. I fell in with a good group — Joe Savoie and Kenn Pike — and sat in. I took a few pulls, but I was pretty cooked.

About 20 minutes in, I got really dizzy and lightheaded. I hung on for another lap after that, but I was done. I pulled the plug and sat in the shade for a while. Another first — a DNF in a 1/2 race that I shouldn't have been in to begin with. I knew going in it would be pretty bad, but the Norfolk guys put on a good race every year — I kind of felt like I owed them my best effort, even if it was short.

Today I'm going to ride into work very slowly. I'm kinda tired.

Missing miles

I came up a little short on mileage this month. That's due partly to racing, a little to traveling and a little bit of "I just don't want to ride." You get that now and again.

Anyway, I took Tuesday off after a long ride on Monday. And Wednesday, because of impending doom, turned into only 8.8 miles. I rode to work, planned on Wednesday Night Worlds and then got a ride home. It turned out to be a perfectly nice night to ride.

I left my bike and kit at work to easily facilitate a Thursday ride. And that didn't happen, either. Sometimes, you just don't want to go for a ride. It's probably for the best.

Anyway, I ended up with 756 miles for the month, which puts me at 3,596 for the year. And I had far too many sodas. I chalk that up to post-race "I do what I want!" and traveling. A road trip and a Coke just seem made for each other. I'll bring it back in line for June.

Mileage-wise, I'm a little behind of my imaginary goal. It'll even out in June and July, though. No problem.

Out here in the fields

We headed north for Memorial Day weekend this year. I took a day off on Friday to stretch things out a bit. The drive up there is a slog to begin with — 3.5 hours on a good day — but it's made worse by having nothing close to a direct route. Oh, and two kids in the car doesn't help.

I planned on riding on Saturday from Chris' parents' house in Humboldt to Algona. By car, it's a straight, 23-mile shot up Highway 169. I managed to make it a 60-mile gravel ride.

The first 17 miles or so were on the Three Rivers Trail — a rails-to-trails project that stretches about 35 miles total. I rode part of it over Christmas on my headwind death march. It was windy on Saturday, too, but I had a tailwind this time on the trail. Chris rode the first part with me this time, too. It's nice that both of us have 'cross bikes.

What did I see on the ride? Lots of grain elevators. Dozens, probably.

This was one of the bigger hills of the day. Yes, really. 

After getting off the trail, I rode gravel to a town called West Bend, which is home of the (somehow) world-famous Grotto of the Redemption. After that, I had a heavy cross-headwind for about 12 miles. This was the scenery for the last half of the ride.

I was hoping to find a couple of actual dirt B-level roads, but in retrospect I'm glad I didn't. While it didn't rain much farther south the day before, up near Algona it did. That meant this road was soft. Not muddy-soft, but it was loose and made for a ton of work. I ran out of gears at one point, which was not exactly thrilling.

Near the end of the ride, there's a little area near Algona called Little Africa. I have no idea why it's called that, but there are a few actual hills down there. We used to run there for cross country workouts. Now I'll probably visit on my bike more often.

On Sunday morning, I wandered out of the house hoping for another two hours or so. It was windier than Saturday, somehow, so I didn't wander too far. And it was hot, too. Saturday was cloudy and threatened rain throughout my ride. Sunday was all about sun and wind.

I had high hopes for this road — I pictured it cutting between fields and spitting me out a couple of miles away. It had a street sign and everything.

Instead, I ended up here, looking back from where I started.

This is the sign outside Blackford Park in Algona. John Blackford was one of the original settlers (I think) in the 1850s. So when he kicked, his kids donated land to the city for the creation of a park. Today, that park houses the sewage treatment plant and the city dump. Sorry, Blackford.

My great-grandma used to have a tiny house on this property. Been gone for a while now.

And my grandma used to have a house on this property — right where the log pile is.

Just some cool steps at a playground. Jack and I rode bikes a lot in Algona. It's so flat, so traffic-free that he was able to ride on the street to a couple of parks, plus Dairy Queen. He's getting better at not riding all over the place. I still feel more like I'm trying to herd him than ride with him, though.

And that's northern Iowa. After growing up with this, you can see why I like hills so much.

Brutus

If a person is going to make a zillion mistakes, college is probably the best place to do it. Provided the big ones are avoided — drop out, get arrested, etc. — there's no better place to do really dumb things. The place is an incubator for stupid ideas.

Most of them turn out to be pretty harmless, though some have a lasting effect. Like, for years afterward. That's how my parents ended up with their dog, Brutus.

When I was a junior, I moved off campus to a big red house just a few blocks away on University Avenue in Cedar Falls. For some reason, that house came with a concrete, yard-ornament rooster on the steps. Early in the school year — I'm guessing mid-September — someone stole it. In all honesty, I'm surprised it stayed there as long as it did.

So, having had our cement rooster stolen, my idiot roommates and I set out to replace it. We went to the Earl May garden center closest to campus — just down University — in search of a new mascot.

They didn't have any yard poultry, though. They did, however, have a Brutus. And he was $10. After a few minutes' discussion, a little puppy of unknown breeding origin came home with three college guys.

See? Pretty dumb.

That Brutus survived the first few months is a small miracle. Having never had a dog, I had no idea how a dog should be kept during the day, or ... well, anything else. We had an enclosed front porch that ended up as Brutus' temporary home. That worked until he got out one day.

We eventually found him at the Humane Society (that would later house Tonka) and picked him up a day or two before he was placed on the "put down" list. After that, I bought a plastic kennel and he stayed in there during the day. (That solved the house-training problem, too.)

At the end of the school year, Brutus was pretty much full-grown. He was also dirty and had super-long hair and needed to get fixed. After a couple of months at the house, it was pretty clear that he was my dog. So I intended to take him with me when I moved out.

The place I secured for the next school year wouldn't allow dogs, though, so he ended up in Algona instead. I intended for a temporary stay, but by Christmas time he was pretty firmly entrenched in my parents' house.

They took care of everything that needed to be done. My dad took him for walks all the time, sometimes twice daily. My mom taught him how to sneeze on command to get snacks. They took him to the lake near Algona and he chased ducks and geese and ran through the grass and did dog stuff.

He had spots on all of the chairs in the living room — as in, "This is my spot" — and he slept at night on a pile of blankets in my old room. Jack later shared that room with him, and he still sometimes calls it Brutus' room.

Brutus was a fixture at my parents' house for years. People passing by knew him and gave him a few scratches on their way past. He had the run of the place, and he knew it.

If you're doing math and you realize how long ago college was, you realize also that Brutus is an old dog. He'd be 15 in late July or so. He won't make it that far, though. Brutus has maybe only a couple of days left. He's mostly blind and almost completely deaf. His back legs are good only a couple of times a day. After getting far too excited about us arriving on Saturday, he spent the rest of the weekend not moving very much.

He needs help to get up and get walking sometimes. He needs help getting down the front steps and getting back up. My dad held him up so he could eat the other night. It's truly, utterly heartbreaking to watch a dog that for so many years was so active, now struggle with even moving.

It's time, though. He led a much better life than anybody could have expected. He had the sole attention of his two owners for a very long time. I have no doubts that the love given to him by my parents is what allowed him to live so long. 

I made sure to give him extra pets every time I passed him this weekend. I tried to explain to Jack why he should, too. It was hard to put it in terms that he could understand. I basically just settled on, "He's old and tired, so he needs more love than normal."

Leaving was tough on Sunday. As he licked my hands one last time, he thumped his tail on the floor lightly. I struggled (and failed) to keep it together (just like right now, actually).

In the end, I didn't say goodbye. I just told him what every dog should hear as often as possible.

You're a good boy, Brutus.

Flatwater Cycling weekend

Heading into the Flatwater Cycling weekend in Lincoln, I was really looking forward to a pair of Cat. 3-only races. I'm just shy of a full year since my last Cat. 3 race. Since July, it's been all Cat. 1/2/3 all the time.

That's good, I guess, in terms of racing as a team and learning. But sometimes you'd rather not have to worry about what Limpach or Lee are doing.

As registration closed up in Friday, though, I could see that the field sizes for both the Cat. 1/2 and Cat. 3 races were small. We'd be together both days, probably. Oh well.

While I missed out on a chance to level the playing field, I'm used to riding in a combined field. Plus, our team is pretty solid. So with possible storms looming later in the day, Chris and I packed up the kids and headed to Lincoln.

$100 is a lot of money

Because the fields were combined, there was a gap in the racing where the Cat. 1/2 race should have been. That meant we'd get to warm up entirely on the course. That was nice, just spinning easy for a bit and then slowly ramping it up. I forgot how bumpy parts of that course are.

I didn't line up in the front row, somehow, but the course was wide enough in the first few hundred meters that I could easily get where I needed to be. And so I did. I planned on surfing the field for the first half of the race and then moving up farther and going on chase duty.

About 20 minutes in, a good group had gone off the front and a couple of small groups were trying to bridge up. The second and third groups probably wouldn't have made it across, but that lead group likely would have stayed away.

On the home stretch, we'd typically come out of the last corner, accelerate and then slow a little, bunching up just shy of the start/finish line. Right around the 20-minute mark, that bunching up caused a pileup that took a few guys out of the race. And it pushed me onto the grass median.

There are worse things you can take away from a crash in a crit. I was on the left-side curb anyway, and the push from the crash made me scrape it and then slide onto the grass. I have a bruise on my right knee from banging the top tube, too, but I couldn't feel that at all until much later.

John Vondracek got the worst of it, with a broken scapula and three broken ribs. We saw him at the Sunday race and he looked like he was doing OK. Well, as OK as possible considering. (Yay, pain meds!)

The officials stopped the race for nearly 25 minutes to get John and the others off the course. In the meantime, everybody cooled down, then had to warm up again. I was just starting to feel solid when the crash happened, so I really hit it hard warming up.

Once we got rolling again, the breaks were all reeled in and we went into attack-chase mode. Lots of sprinting, lots of time on the rivet. As the lap counter ticked down, it was clear it was going to be a bunch sprint. I started moving my way to the front so I didn't get pinched in a corner.

With five laps to go, I was near the front when they announced a $100 preme. "One-hundred dollars is a lot of money," I said out loud. As we rounded the first corner, I saw that nobody was moving at all —just marking tempo and looking around.

So I went. I had a good gap really quickly and even expanded it. I went pretty much all-in, thinking I could get it, sit up and then jump back on in the middle of the group. A Kaos guy followed me and about 2/3 of the way through the lap, I saw him sitting on. I told him to pull through and we could split it. No response. I asked again a few seconds later. No response.

He jumped past me after that, taking off way too soon to try to win the prime. Lee Bumgarner came flying past and ended up nipping him at the line. Neither of us got it, which I thought was pretty fitting. Should have pulled through, dude. Could have had $50.

My plan of jumping back on didn't work very well, by the way. Lee had the pace whipped up from there and it stayed hot. I dangled for three laps and then fell off the pace. I was hoping to put in one more good surge to keep things fast, but I didn't have it. It was worth it, though. $100 is a lot of money.

Sketchy Sunday

Typically, a fast, tight crit will be the sketchier of two races, when the other is essentially a road race. But Pioneers Park on Sunday was sketchy as all get out.

Once the lead groups were established, the rest of the pack went into chase/attack/attempt to bridge mode. So lots of stomping on it, stringing it out, sitting up and then doing it again. Since we had Mark in the lead group and Jay and Lucas in the chase group, we didn't need to do any work in the main bunch. Ideally, we'd wait until the end and then up the tempo high enough that nobody else could jump and we could take the bunch sprint plus a few more places.

About 35 minutes into things, when people started getting tired and dumb, I found myself defending my front wheel from drifting riders beside me. One dude drifted through pretty much every corner for a couple of laps. Somehow, it was like I had magnets on me. I could not get away from the guy.

At the top of the hill, where the roadway was split in two with cones, someone on an attack guttered the group against the cones, which is fine if you're second wheel but less fine if you're, say, eighth wheel. Cones were jumping out all over the place and bouncing around. Brady was in front of me at one point, and he moved to his left to avoid a skittering one. I was probably a bit too close behind him, though, and his rear wheel got a good rub against mine. That could have been very bad.

With a couple of laps left, Shim called Brady and I to the front and told us to empty the tank on the last lap. I used up pretty much everything on the long-hill, into-the-wind bit and then held on for dear life. I'd hoped to have enough to make a good run up the hill one last time, but I didn't. As it was, I picked off a few places at the back of the bunch, but I probably should have tried to move up a little farther.

As it was, Mark won both races and we took home a lot of top-10 spots both days. I didn't do as much to contribute to things as I'd hoped, but I'm happy with what I did. I felt like I left it out there both days.

It's a rest week now, so I'll spin easy to work and do as little as possible on Wednesday night. Then it's a quick wind-up for the state crit in Norfolk on June 3. I'm optimistic for a Cat. 3 race, but I'm not holding my breath.

Growing up

Kerry Wood is a little less than three weeks younger than me. We'll both be 35 within the next 30 days. The bulk of my adult Cubs fandom — distinctly different than my childhood fandom, because I actually pay attention to the game — has included teams with Wood on the mound.

He's retiring today, after the first game of the Cubs-White Sox series. 

The highs have been thrilling — I caught the post-game report in my car when he struck out 20 batters to tie a major league record in 1998. I was just coming off Highway 20 south of Cedar Falls, Iowa, trying to figure out exactly what had happened. No-hitter? Perfect game? Nope, something even more rare than that.

He was on playoff teams in '98, 2003, 2007 and 2008. And then he wandered away to the Indians and Yankees for a couple of years. But he came back in 2011, still throwing gas. He was re-signed late in the offseason and came back for 2012.

He has been unquestionably awful this year, though. Still throwing gas, still with nasty stuff, but with almost zero control. And he has a bad shoulder. And a bad back. He's blown pretty much every lead he's been given this year. He's getting old.

It's been hard to watch, mostly because I've seen him pitch so well, so often.

Of course, I've also seen him throw 100 pitches in four innings, unable to harness the upper-90s heat and devastating movement. When he spent more time on the DL than on the mound, I remember calling him the most overrated player in the majors. That might be true — he's still never won more than 14 games in a season.

It's strange to think that one of my contemporaries — we're almost the same age, exactly — is done doing what he did so well. And it's strange to think that, as a 34-year-old, a baseball player announcing his retirement can make me go wistful.

But that arm. Pure, unfiltered gas. Almost unhittable when it's on. If I had to choose a favorite player from these last 14 seasons, it would be him. He was my guy, even when he wasn't.

Crossroads

I've ridden pretty well the last few weeks. I actually feel strong and ready to race and all of that. Life on the bike is good.

Despite all of that, I'm still pretty bummed about last night's ride.

I wondered a few weeks ago if the Washington County sheriff's deputy that accosted one of the riders in the group had been waiting for us. As in, he and the three others who got there alarmingly quickly were waiting for us. Maybe, maybe not.

Last night, for sure, a deputy was waiting for us. At a T intersection in the middle of nowhere, one that features a three-way stop that is rolled by everybody, we were pulled over. He informed us that every vehicle, including bikes, had to stop at stop signs. He was trying to be polite, but the words dripped with condescension.

"Next time, I'll issue citations to all of you."

And with that, we rolled on.

There have been complaints about our group — some of them justified, some not. I'd bet any amount of money that those who complained have never, ever stopped at that stop sign. And those who complained were probably delayed by 20 seconds on their journey. It's such an inconsequential delay.

I don't have a problem with being asked to follow laws. I asked that myself a few weeks ago. I do have a problem, however, with being singled out for the 20 minutes we spend per week on that road. What about those who speed on that road daily? What about those who roll that stop sign daily?

Will Washington County step up its patrols to make sure those people are following the letter of the law, too?

I doubt it.

After all of this, I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to just striking that county — and those intolerant people — off of the route map. You don't want me on your road? Fine. You can have it. I know of plenty of roads where cyclists don't have a bulls-eye on their backs — both for unnecessary law enforcement and idiots in pickup trucks.