Iceman Cometh
This past weekend I found myself traveling to Michigan for a dose of Midwest racing at its finest--the Iceman Cometh.
I'm pretty sure the odds were stacked against me going in, which made for a rather entertaining weekend. My first mistake
was having a flight connection through Chicago O'hare Airport, the bermuda triangle of airline travel and bike transport.
I was convinced that they would either a) lose my luggage and/or bike, or b) delay my flight and arrival time at a reasonable
hour. Turns out, they only damaged the bike and delayed my flight. I arrived about midnight in Traverse City and was absolutely stoked and rather surprised to see that my luggage had arrived. My pre-race dinner consisted of several delicious Cinnabon cinnamon rolls at the airport, and topped off with some late night carbo-loading at the local drive-thru Wendy's. Race day dawned with blue skies and a balmy 44 degrees for a high. Luckily for me, the weather was condusive to wear the full length, one-piece, aerodynamic Trek "rocket-boy" skinsuit from 1989. Got to the start about an hour before go-time and began building up the bike. Shortly after starting my solid 15 minute warmup, I realized that the derailleur hanger (and der cage) were totally mangled from the flight. Upon seeing this, I set about attempting the roadside repair approach of eyeballing the thing till it kinda-sorta-maybe looked straight. With race time approaching, I rode through the parking lot and arrived at the start line with a couple minutes to spare. With 3 minutes until the gun went off, I looked down and noticed a soft and nearly flat front tire. I frantically ran through the parking lot to find a front wheel and handed mine off to some random dude. Found the wheel after the race and heard the story of my front wheel flying off the roof of his car going down the freeway on the way to the finish. The whole weekend was a comedy of errors! The race went ok, except that mid-west racing is really hard and I guess I'm not in very good shape when it comes to riding 30mph on flat roads with sandpits and no technical riding. I got spit out the front group about 40 minutes in and proceeded to stop on the side of the trail more than a couple times to jank with the roached drivetrain and pull the chain out of the spokes. You start
to lose motivation after a couple of forced pitstops, but nonetheless I finished and had a good time doing it. The crowds up there were ridiculous, you can't help but be energized by the throngs of crazy fans cheering you on. There were so many cowbells and screaming people that it seriously hurt my ears to ride through it! Good times followed up with a kickin' party on saturday night. I look forward to giving the mid-west bike racing thing a try in the future!