By: Frances Morrison Thursday April 29, 2010

There has been many a time when I have been asked by my friends, well, more like asked in a disgruntled manner by my friends, why in the world I race bikes. There are many perfectly legitimate reasons for my friends to be disgruntled with me. ‘You’re never around, you never want to go out, and we can’t do anything on the weekend because you have a bike race.’ And I do feel bad! I really do. I know that I am half-human half-bicycle, and if you have the off chance of actually getting me to be social there is a good chance I will be yawning and blearily responding to your queries. I must look like a soulless zombie. When it gets to this point, where I realize I haven’t seen my friends in weeks, or I missed an ‘awesome party’ because I had to go to sleep for a bike race I start the long chain of regret. What if I was a normal girl? What if I went to parties, and went on dates and went shopping? I usually get to about this point, and then the reasons that I do lead the lifestyle of bikes come back to me: I won’t be fat in ten years, I’m not a hung-over disaster on Saturday morning (those are reserved for post collegiate nationals), and I have a goal I want to achieve.

I look at the general trend of what a normal life consists of, that same normal life that I sometimes lament not having when I have to suit up for a four hour ride after work, and I have to admit I pout sometimes, but then I look closer and I start to see the cracks.

From what I can see a normal life of someone from my generation means partying like it’s 1999 every weekend, being hung-over from Tuesday to Wednesday, and then starting the cycle over again on Thursday night. Hmm. When I do happen to jump into this cycle is never ceases to amaze me. All the girls around me preen themselves like peacocks to go out for the evening. Now don’t get me wrong. I love going out for beers with friends, but all night? When my friends do manage to drag me out I am an interesting human being to contend with, especially if I happen to be wearing shorts.

“Frances, you cannot wear those shorts.”
“Why not?”
“You have the most RIDICULOUS TAN LINES.”
“But I like my tan lines!”

After this battle is over, and my friends grudgingly let me go out in public with my tan lines we go through the usual motions, but it’s always the same. It gets past one and I am ready for bed. I’m grandma of the group. I want to go home and go to sleep, or you could give me more beers and I will tell everyone at the bar how awesome my tan lines are. Pick one.

The ability my friends have to stay out until five in the morning playing beer pong however, still manages to impress me. The stamina, the stamina! But then I realize that nothing is without a price. I wake up at a normal hour, drink some water, and I’m ready to go. My friends wake up at three in the afternoon, cover their heads with a pillow, and curse the day they were born. See, I’m not so strange after all! I have the normal amount of energy for a person my age, I just funnel it into things during the day, like bike riding, and hot dog eating contests, so I am tired at night damnit! If I slept until three then you’re damn right I would be able to stay up all night.

This whole revelation got even better a couple mornings ago when I stumbled upon a housewife magazine called Real Simple. Between the ads for bathing suits for women with ‘generous hips and thighs’ the four page articles about the merits of various cleaning products coupled with pictures of a joyous housewife in a polka-dotted sundress merrily standing on a ladder dusting the top of a light, and the inspirational quotes about how women love cleaning I think I may have burned my retinas. I cannot un-see this. This is an entire magazine about being a household slave. It’s thick too! It’s no small page-flipper. If this were all a sick joke I may be able to forgive them, but it was not, to my horror, it was not.

What’s even worse is this could have been my potential future.

Is that what my generation is going for? A decade of partying followed by an insidious slide in housewifism? No thank you. I don’t want that, I don’t want that to be my life. So in moments like this, I go quietly down the stairs to where my brand new BH bike is waiting patiently for its next ride and I hug it. You and me kid, we’ve got a ticket to sanity.

By: Frances Morrison Wednesday April 14, 2010

Endless rolling hills of dirt, looking up to see not the horizon, but a picturesque dirt wall, flanked by green pastures, shooting straight up into the blue sky: this would be beautiful, if I didn’t have to go up it.

The Tour of the Battenkill, the largest one day race in the country is set in and around the beautiful countryside of New York State. Normally I am not one to expound on the merits of New York State. I travel there to race, and I often make it a game to see how many names of rivers I can count that have the word ‘kill’ in them instead of river. Regardless, New York isn’t usually on my top list of pretty vacation hot spots, but for Battenkill, I will make an exception. The 62 miles of rolling countryside and dirt roads that myself and the rest of the pro women’s field traversed through were nothing short of gorgeous, horrendously, painfully gorgeous. I do wish I was using the word painfully as a modifier to gorgeous, but unfortunately it stands on its own. You don’t race Battenkill because you like to ride bikes, you race Battenkill because you like pain. However, judging by the steep entry fee, and the hundreds and hundreds of eager entrants willing to pay that fee it may not be a stretch of the imagination to say that we cyclists enjoy pain, that we even seek it out. Judging that I paid that fee and then subsequently tossed myself into the women’s elite field for three and a half hours of suffering I suppose that makes me no better.

The hills and dirt of Battenkill are not solely to blame for the absolute suffer-fest that each participant is signing up for. Each category (and there were a lot them, I had no idea that Men’s Cat 4 came in 4 brilliant colors) doles out it’s own special brand of hell. I’m not entirely sure which of Dante’s circles I ended up in by competing in the pro women’s field, but it was at least past the one where fireballs endlessly rain from the sky to burn your flesh off.

Before I started Battenkill I spent the remaining 20 or so minutes spinning up and down the starting stretch, to the Mavic tent, and then back to the pace cars. It was cold, in the 40s I believe, which was cold enough that most of us chose to cover up with myriad arm and leg warmers, vests, and warm gloves (something I would regret when after the start the temperature instantly shot up 10 degrees). I sized up the competition, looking aghast at the several Team Kenda women that were starting sans leg warmers, their skin was already prickling with goosebumps. There were over 50 of us, including Team NanoBlur Gears down from the Canadian north. As the minutes ticked down I managed to squeak myself in to the very first row of the starting line up. At this point I was still blissfully unaware of the suffering that awaited me: I had never done Battenkill before.

It didn’t take long before any notions I had of doing anything remotely considered well in Battenkill were crushed, along with my legs, the entirety of my poor, bedraggled cardiovascular system, and the rest of my hopes and dreams. These crushing notions came crashing down upon me as we reached the first steep dirt hill. The women around me stood, mouths gasping open for air, powerful legs pushing upwards at a blistering pace and I realized with growing horror that my body was not ready for this. Too steep too soon. My thoughts began to blur together as I desperately tried to block out the feeling of burning fire erupting from my legs. I don’t know if it was the steepness of the hill itself, the onus of Battenkill hovering over me, or maybe even those bad hot dogs I accidentally had eaten the day before but I was breaking apart. My muscles felt like they were blistering under my skin, peeling off the bone, my arms were shaking, my searing lungs unable to pull in enough oxygen for my failing legs.

The first half of the race wasn’t even over and already I had been reduced to rubble.

I put my head down, still gasping for air, and I watched the dirt sway back and forth in front of me as I pulled what little was left of myself back together and managed to make it over the hill. Amidst my own self-recriminations for failing so thoroughly so soon, and the burning that continued in my legs like a bad sunburn I chased. There is nothing so humbling as fruitless, solo cashing. My heart rate monitor mocked me as I looked down to see that yes, I was still at Threshold, yes I had been there for some time now, no this didn’t look good for my prospects. With no opportunity to let myself recover I was a little surprised when a pack of women came up behind me after half an hour. Silly me, I should look behind myself more often. I tucked in and instantly my heart rate shot down. Recovery was sweet, but even though we reeled in the chase group ahead of us, I knew the race was over. We weren’t going to catch the leaders, the best we could all do now was tough it out together until the finish line. And that’s precisely what we did.

I looked beside me every so often as we crawled up hill after hill, noting with satisfaction that the women around me were gritting their teeth and grimacing just as much as I was. Doggedly, we all made it to the line, even after a surprise dollop of dirt stair steppers in the last ten miles that I was less than pleased to have to conquer.

As we duked it out for the line I was glad to have simply finished the race. As the high school volunteers came by to snip off our race chips I chatted happily with my comrades of the last three hours. There is something about suffering together that just makes you want to be friends, or maybe it’s just the relief of not having to pedal anymore. Either way, we all seemed pleased to at least be over the finish line.

One of the high school boys that was volunteering for the race came up to me as I was talking with a friend.

“Um, your nose is bleeding.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Do you want some medical help?”
“Nope. Happens all the time.”

He left a bit bewildered and my friend and I giggled at his naiveté. We had both just finished Battenkill! Who cares if I rubbed all the skin off my nose?

Somehow I found my way back to the car, where I ate a sandwich I had packed the night before, and then promptly fell asleep in the front seat, glasses, gloves, shoe covers and all still on. When my friend Jeff woke me up over an hour later after finishing his own race, I was bleary-eyed and a little disappointed. I wanted to do better, but I suppose that is every racer’s lament who is not the first wheel across the line. Even so, I guess it’s all right for my first elite road race.

When I got home I was unfortunately revisited by that lovely burning in my legs as I tried to walk up the stairs. Touché Battenkill, touché…

By: Frances Morrison Wednesday March 31, 2010

The air is cold and fresh; the early snap of spring is carried through the air on the wind. Eighty-five racers stand over their metal and carbon machines, cold hands swathed in windproof gloves, gripping the hoods tightly. The final countdown goes by in a blur and then one hundred and seventy legs push off of the pedals and we’re off. I am suddenly surrounded by a field of testosterone, burly legs, stubble and the occasional beard, all dressed to the nines in brightly colored spandex. It is the first few races of early spring and I am racing with the dudes.

As I’m sure many of you know, who are of the dude persuasion, racing amongst your brethren is very different than racing in a mixed gender bag. I’m sure a lot of you enjoy the sausage festival that is your very own race, where you can grunt and swear at each other and rip each other’s legs off to your heart’s content. However, throw a female into the fray and it seems to change the dynamics a bit. When I am racing with the guys, they don’t quite know what to do with me.

As I snake my way through the field, brushing an arm here, squeezing through a spot there my presence is met with both surprise and disdain. I have to admit I do enjoy the surprised exclamations I get when I sneak my way into a spot a few wheels up the field that is too small for some of the bigger guys to get into, but it seems that some of the guys are less than pleased to see me moving up the field.

It is kind of annoying to be dogged around a field by someone who seems to be pissed of by my very existence. Yes I am a chick. Yes I am racing in your field, please get over it. Fighting me for a wheel like your manliness depends on it when we are fifteen back and there are four laps to go is a bit silly, but by all means, establish your dominance by squeezing me off that wheel! You are doing me a service, as my petticoats could get caught in the chain, and if I crashed, my embroidery would go untended for weeks. Seriously guys.

For me, racing with the dudes is kind of like racing next a bunch of bulldozers. I could be plowed over and buried in the ground at any given moment. Touching wheels with a woman of comparable size to you is slightly different than touching wheels with a guy that looks twice your size. For this reason I try to stay clear of tussles and wheel-bumpers who would seek to drive me towards another illicit affair with the pavement. Ah, pavement, we have met several times before. Our rendezvous have been short and intense and I think we both left each other with lasting impressions. Me, with the imprint of your love along my leg and forearm, you, with pieces of my skin that I had bestowed upon you. However our love was merely a tryst, as we are from different houses, I cannot, and do not want to see you again.

It’s not all mud-flinging and shit fights, however. Some dudes take it with a grain of salt, pulling through after I jump to catch the break, letting me rotate in on a hard pull, or just generally being friendly.

“Are you that girl that crushed the elite ‘cross field last season?”
“What? Um, no.”
“Really? Because you’re pretty strong.”

“Dude, are you asking her out on a date?”

In the end we are all here for the same reason. We’re here to race bikes. That’s why I’m here, that’s why you’re here. So dudes, don’t mind me if you see me in your field. I want the same things you want: to have some fun, and crush some souls.

See you next weekend.

By: Frances Morrison Wednesday March 17, 2010

Egg sandwiches, cookies, english muffins with jam, bagel with coffee and French toasted doughnuts. Ah, delicious, ridiculous snacks: one of the finer points of early season outdoor riding. Riding snacks are special, special because they are pretty much free food, unaccounted for. Yes, even the French toasted doughnut will be consumed and processed post-haste for that little but of extra snap on the final stretch home.

Riding snacks are personal, especially homemade ones; everyone adds their own special touch. I prefer cream cheese and jam slathered on two pieces of whole wheat bread, however my housemate has been known to make a sandwich of ham, peanut butter, jam and an egg to top it off. Yes, eating on the bike means eating weird. We’re not going for taste so much as piling on as many things that our bodies need during a ride into one, strange sort of pseudo-sandwich. Still, this is not as weird as being on a veritable IV drip of some sort of mix and various packets of gel once racing season gets into full swing. Yes, that counts as weird. If you step back for a moment and think like a normal, non-cycling human being, you’ll realize that pounding six packets of berry-flavored snot in an hour is not usually considered normal eating.

So for the moment I am savoring making my own snacks, but while creating your own on-the-bike delicacies is a special ritual nothing beats riding to snacks. I love everything about riding to snacks. That final push up the last incline after slogging around for two hours somewhere in the snowy hills of Massachusetts, to find yourself at a quaint country store that serves the most delicious (to my befuddled, tired brain) coffee and pastries you’ve ever had. Of course once I’ve gorged myself on whatever wares they may be serving and am feeling a bit more human I usually also notice that the employees of the store, and also many of the patrons are giving me the weirdest looks I have ever received in my life. If you ever want to feel like a freak, all you really need to do is walk into a coffee shop in mid-March in full cycling garb, including leg warmers with your sponsor on your shins, and full coverage booties.

Personally I think it’s hilarious. People try to glance at you out of the corner of their eye as you waddle to the bathroom on your cleats. Clip, clop. Small children stare at you with wide eyes, their mouths gaping. We must look like Martians to them. The employees glare at your with annoyance and mild disdain as you earnestly ask them, ‘Can I leave my bike in here? I don’t want to leave it outside and I don’t have a lock.’ For all of this strange attention I may as well have walked in with a mohawk on my helmet. I don’t care though. If they are serving snacks, damnit they are going to serve them to me.

So really, this all boils down to the proven fact that I love snacks. I will make them myself, or I will face a form of public humiliation to obtain them, it doesn’t really matter to me. However it’s probably good I’m a cyclist, because if I wasn’t boy would I be large.

By: Frances Morrison Wednesday March 3, 2010

Who invented potholes anyway? Who thought that they would be a mighty fine addition to our nations roads and highways? Come on, raise your hand; I know you’re out there, hiding from my scrutiny. It was also you who decided to fill them with water, wasn’t it? Fresh, sweet, snowmelt, dribbling as though from a bubbling brook, settling over the jagged, hidden counters of your despicable, tire flatting, rim busting abomination! Alright, alright, I know. I can’t blame some random person for potholes, or for the fact that I am hitting them and flatting my tires.

Why am I ranting about potholes? Why, simply because I have begun to ride outside again. With February hunkering back down into it’s dreary hole for the next eleven months and the first few days of March tentatively stepping onto the stage things look…optimistic for us cycling folk. It reminds me of the phrase, ‘out like a lion in like a lamb.’ I may be applying this to the wrong two months, but with February spitting and snarling snow, slush, and rain at me in it’s last week of 2010 existence, and March strolling onto the scene with sunny skies and melting snow, I think I will change its application.

I feel very similar to March right now, or perhaps similar to a bear coming out of hibernation. I sneak outside every morning, sniff the air, assess whether I will wear twelve or twenty-four base layers (just in case) and then suit up to go foraging for food, I mean journeying about on my bicycle. I must be jinxing myself. Weather this pleasant at the beginning of March is just begging for a three day blizzard to come and dump six feet of snow back on the roads. This would merely be a minor inconvenience to my base miles, of course. Why, in the days of Napoleon we rode on top of the snow!

It’s not all sunshine and butterflies (cold, semi-frozen butterflies) though, as there are the certain evils of early season riding to contend with. Case in point, potholes. Sometimes it seems like to avoid one, you have to jump into another one, or alternatively, you are faced with my favorite situation: a pothole, a large puddle, or a large truck. Oh yeah, date night at it’s finest, but who to choose… The puddle of course leaves you with a streak of mud halfway up your backside and the usual residual splatter. I love riding around looking like I had an accident with some Indian food. The pothole may wish to buy me dinner and then flat my tire but this is not my idea of a fun night out. The truck…I know it wants to love me violently but I don’t love it back.

Although this is all small beans when you think about the fact that riding outside is about a thousand times better than riding on the trainer indoors. There is not a movie in production that has enough constant explosions to keep me entertained for more than an hour on the trainer. Even Mr. Schwarzenegger falls short in this realm. So for this reason I will deal with the potholes, and the flat tires that ensure. I will deal with the muddy butt, and I will deal with the trucks swerving around you in confusion, ‘CRAP. The cyclists are back swarming all over my ROAD.’

Happy outdoor riding everyone. (Please don’t hit me with your car.)

By: Frances Morrison Wednesday February 17, 2010

You know what I hate? I hate being cold. You know what I hate more? Being cold and wet. Do you know what I hate even more? Being cold, wet and nearly naked. Given this, it’s no small wonder that I like cyclocross.

A large percentage of cyclocross racing is being cold and wet; it’s inevitable. Even on the wettest, bitterest, muddiest of days, I don’t care if you ride around in a trash bag with someone holding an umbrella over your head you are going to be cold, and you are going to be wet. A large part of cyclocross racing for me is keeping myself warm. I gave up on keeping myself dry a long time ago, however that does not mean that I am any less comfortable, and being wet means being cold is not far off.

Let me diverge for a moment here and explain to you why I hate being cold. If I am in a room any lower than 70 degrees in the winter months my hands and feet turn purple. I sleep with about a bazillion blankets on me at all times lest a small wisp of cold air were to touch me in the night. I own a snuggie. This should all be substantial proof that I hate being cold. But boy, do I sure love cyclocross. As you can see, the above description of my hatred for cold and my love for cyclocross don’t mesh very well. Why should I love a sport that exposes me to the cold, wet, miserable conditions I hate so much? Simple. I’m a hypocrite. I once lined up for a collegiate road race this past spring where it was thirty seven degrees and raining. By the time I got back to the car I was cursing my existence and I was so cold I didn’t hesitate to take every piece of drenched clothing off, in full view of the parking lot. Not that anyone really minded though, as that was pretty much what everyone else did as well.

The coldest, wettest of cyclocross races feels about the same. We’re all huddled under what little protection we can provide ourselves with as we shiver at the start line. Teeth chattering, warm up long gone, and thermal jackets pulled tightly over our shoulders like capes in a futile attempt to keep the cold at bay. At the call out for thirty seconds to go there is a mass disrobing and coats are chucked helter skelter at bystanders. Hopefully you know them, hopefully you’ll get that coat back later, but it’s too late now. The last fifteen seconds are the worst. I stand there vibrating with cold, my hands already going numb, then we’re off and for forty-five blissful, but painful minutes I am not cold. I am burning, my lungs are searing, my muscle fibers are tearing apart, but I am not cold. After the race is over, I am allowed a small, five-minute window where the lingering adrenaline keeps me warm. This is never enough to make it back to the car. Make it back to the car I do however, shaking and shivering and again, cursing my existence, wishing I were a walrus so I would at least have some sweet, sweet blubber to keep me warm. I bet walruses would be good at cyclocross.

I’m in the car, and once the door is closed I usually exclaim something along the lines of, ‘GYAAAAAAH COOOOLD!’ while frantically stripping off every item of clothing on my body. So here I am again, back to the place I hate to be. I am sitting in a frigid car, and I am wet, I am cold, and I am naked.

At the time, I always wonder what kind of sane person would put themselves through this, weekend after weekend. I always end these forays into the frigid praying that the next race will be sunny and dry. But now, in the dregs of winter, sitting in my oven-warmed kitchen, warm, and reasonably comfortable, all I can think is, ‘boy, do I miss racing cyclocross.’