On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 6/1/2012
The Merry Month of May
(My apologies at the top: this column is going to run a little long. If you're up for it, fill a water bottle and stuff a banana in your pocket and get ready for a lengthy ride…)
We are blessed with a climate in this part of Northern California that is pleasant or at least plausible for cycling every month of the year. But if you had to choose one month that has the best weather of all for riding around on a bike--or at any rate the month with the highest likelihood of best weather--you would almost certainly choose May. It can be delightful in March and April, but there is still that Russian Roulette chance of getting nailed by a late-season rain front…the April showers that bring May flowers. It does occasionally still rain in early May too. Our club’s Wine Country Century runs every year on the first Saturday in May, and we get at least a little drizzle about one year out of five. And then there’s the Amgen Tour of California: after suffering through some miserable, freezing rain storms when the event was in February, they switched to mid-May to escape those winter rains. And what happened that first year in May? They ran into rains of almost biblical proportions…cold, hard, and nasty.
But all in all, year in and year out, those rainy days in May are uncommon. What we more typically see in May is something approaching perfection, not only with respect to the weather but also in terms of everything else that goes with that lovely weather: the pastures and meadows are all carpeted in green grasses. In Northern California’s seasonal turnings, the green grass arrives in November and hangs around until early June, so May is the last hurrah before the green leaches away and the Golden State turns golden again, through its long, dry summer. What we get out of May is that perfect little window when the grasses are still green, when the wildflowers are still blooming, but when the rains have pretty much petered out. In other words, the best of both worlds: all the glorious color and fecundity that the rains promote, but without the rain. It only lasts for a few weeks before the lack of rain shuts down the busy energy of the grasses and flowers, but those few weeks are wonderful, and they go by the name of May. What's more, the nippy temperatures of winter and spring--down to freezing or a little below--have given way to balmy days in the 70's and 80's. And usually, we have not yet arrived at the the bake-oven heat of summer. We'll see that by the time the Terrible Two double century rolls around, in late June, where the thermometers top out at triple digits and the riders wilt and expire. I call May the Goldilocks month: not too cold, not too hot, but juuuust right!
So we have this wonderful window of nearly perfect paradise called May, when cycling is as good as it’s ever going to get. And so of course we make the most of it. This year, we not only had our traditional Wine Country Century, we also had the Amgen Tour of California starting and ending Stage 1 in Santa Rosa. The two events were on the first two weekends of the month, and between them, they pretty much turned Sonoma County into the cycling capitol of the country, if not the universe, for a span of about ten days. (I say this with all due deference to the Giro d'Italia, running through most of the month of May. It is by far the more prestigious of the two stage races, compared to the AToC, but thanks to the wonders of streaming video, we were able to enjoy them both…an embarrassment of riches for cycling fans. I'll have more to say about the Giro later.)
For a few members of the Santa Rosa Cycling Club, prepping up for the Wine Country Century begins many months before May. But for most of the 400+ volunteers and for the 2500 riders, things really start happening on Friday afternoon, May 4. That’s when our club warehouse becomes a busy hive of activity, with a fleet of rental trucks bringing in tons of food and supplies. The trucks are reloaded with food and with ice chests and cutting boards and serving trays and canopies and a hundred other items that go into the club's vast support system…all ready to head out to the rest stops, first thing on Saturday morning. Meanwhile, a mile away, riders are arriving at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, where our staff of registrars is waiting for them at Friday check-in.
The WCC is a very popular event. It has a lot going for it. It has, first of all, that fortunate date on the first Saturday in May: that perfect moment of springtime paradise. It also offers wonderful routes. Just as May is the just-right month, this course is just right too: not too hard to be brutal for beginners, but not so easy to be boring for seasoned riders. And it's very scenic, from the namesake Wine Country vineyards to redwood groves to several crossings of the Russian River; from high meadows of green grasses to shady runs underneath bay and oak trees. And then there's the support the club provides, which is pretty much the best support you will find on any century anywhere. It's a killer package and our participants appreciate that. When registration opened on the first of February this year, all 2500 entries were snapped up within 14 hours (without one bit of promotion or advertising).
On Saturday morning, the full armada of riders arrive and the full force of the club’s support juggernaut is deployed around the course. Soon the riders are streaming out across the Santa Rosa plain, headed for the west county hills around Sebastopol, Graton, and Occidental. I'd done most of my volunteer tasks already--designing the t-shirt and jersey graphics and getting them produced, drawing up the maps and route slips and getting them printed--so I made a low-key contribution to the volunteer tasks on the day of the ride: I rode as a course marshal, back and forth along the early miles, doing a little policing--Single up, please!--and generally acting as an ambassador for the home club. My little view of the event was entirely benign. The weather was perfect, the riders were having a great time, and there were no reports of conflicts with motorists.
And that's how it went for the entire day. No significant problems anywhere, all day long. The logistics were spot-on. The riders mostly had a great day. There were only five crashes requiring medical attention. That's five too many, of course, but then, when you think of 2500 riders logging around 230,000 miles, collectively, that's a very good safety record.
We sold out our entire run of 750 commemorative jerseys. We either sold (to riders) or gave away (to volunteers) over 900 t-shirts. The Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition had a beer concession at the finish. Lagunitas donated an enormous amount of IPA and the Coalition pulled a lot of pints and made a good chunk of change off the deal, all of which gets poured back into efforts for cycling advocacy in the North Bay. The Willie Bird-catered barbecue at the finish was a big hit. And so on…
Last year, I wrote a piece in this space called Good Neighbors, where I crunched the numbers on what an economic boon an event like this is for the local community. Since then, I've read other pieces that tend to support the position that my fiscal estimates were way too low; that the financial benefit is even greater than what I had estimated. However one crunches the numbers, an event like this, run as well as we run our event, is a big net-positive for the region. Visit our club’s Facebook page to plug into more of the excitement around the event. This is all relatively small-scale compared to Levi’s GranFondo, running half a year away in October, with three times as many participants and entry fees much higher than ours and more out-of-towners, so more hotel rooms filled, etc. But each event is worthy and is a great day for cycling (and a great day for the local community too). Our event, now about 35 years old, is the grand-daddy of big, pay-to-ride events in this region. It creates a huge positive buzz locally and makes all sorts of people happy, cyclists and local merchants alike.
Then, talk about making people happy: on the next day after the century, we have what may be the best club party of the year. We have the WCC Workers' Ride and Picnic. At least 250 of the volunteers from the day before get to ride the same course, complete with rest stops (run by more club volunteers) and then they join even more of the volunteers to party all through the afternoon at the picnic at the finish, where another great barbecue feast is laid on by my old pal Matt Parks and his team from An Affair to Remember catering. If possible, the weather for the workers' ride was even better than it had been for the main event the day before: highs near 90° in the late afternoon. Fast but not killer pace lines with our friends, relaxed rest stops (with more of our friends), and then that great party. What a nice day.
Most years, we have our workers' ride one week after the actual Wine Country Century. But this year, that would have put it one day ahead of the first stage of the Tour of California, starting in Santa Rosa. We knew that was going to be a crazy day, with loads of other things our members would want to be doing around the ToC, so we adjusted accordingly. And for sure, that entire week between our WCC and the ToC was all bikes, all the time in Sonoma County. It's one thing to have your town be a ville d'etape (as they say at the Tour de France): a start or finish venue for a stage. It is quite another to be the start site for the entire tour, and what's more, to have that first stage not only start in downtown Santa Rosa, but also return there mid-stage for an intermediate sprint, and then finish there, after the long trek out to the west county hills. All of that meant that the town and indeed the whole region was wall-to-wall cyclists for all of that week, with all of the hoopla and hype building on itself as the week went along.
I doubt you could have booked a last-minute hotel room in the county at any price during that week. Every lodging worth its name was reserved months ago. For local cyclists (and visitors too), it was a feast of fun on all fronts. Almost any time you went out for a ride, you were likely to run into one pro team or another, getting in a training ride. I wrote one of these columns a couple of years ago called Spot That Pro!, which was about teams doing their winter training here. Well, this was like that, except instead of two or three teams training here, it was the whole pro peloton.
Club members were firing off notes to our chat list every day about pro sightings all over the map, either single riders or whole teams with support cars in tow. Just to give you a sense of it, here's a note from my friend Doug McKenzie. (I quoted him in my Spot That Pro! column too.) Doug has a regular ride listed for noon on Thursdays, especially for retro fixed-gear bikes, although anyone is welcome to come along. On Thursday morning, he sent this note to the list: “Awesome weather today. Noon fixie ride from Spoke Folk. Be there. We'll be chasing down the ToC teams... 'why do you need all those gears???' we'll ask them. See you there, Doug M” Then, that afternoon, he followed up with this: “What, you didn't believe me? We took the Westside-Eastside loop. Six of us total. Heading up Eastside at a good clip, low 20's. Mostly tailwind so it was an easy pace. I'm leading and suddenly a rider comes by. I'm thinking it's unusual as I'm riding a good pace and usually our group will wait for the leader to peel off. I look over and it's a Radio Shack rider, then six more and the team car. I jump on the back with Jeff and Mike on my wheel. The car sees I'm on him and passes the Radio Shack riders. So I jump up next to the odd man on the back...Jens Voigt! Do I ask him why all the gears? Of course! He gives me a strange look and says, 'why all the spokes?' We laugh and he says, 'this is the tour of California; I'll be using all these gears!' I agreed. More small talk…very nice guy. Seemed to enjoy the company. All this while cruising at an easy 26+ mph. Made my day.”
If you didn't have one of those chance meetings out on the road, you could drop by any number of meet-and-greet events put on by the teams and their sponsors, often at local bike shops. There was one for the BMC team at one bike shop, another for Radio Shack at another shop, and a third one for Omega-Quick Step at yet another shop. There was one for the Rabobank team too, and I even got a VIP invite to that one, but I didn't go. As I've said before, I'm not a groupie. I get no special charge out of hobnobbing with the pros at one of these events. I can't for the life of me understand why I would want to have one of their autographs scrawled on a piece of paper or on my jersey or whatever, and if I'm going to have my picture taken with one of them, it won't be a posed photo but will be because someone happened to take our picture while we were talking…or riding. So I gave them all a miss, except the BMC deal. I know some of the folks on the BMC team, so I thought I might run into some of my friends. They had advertised that the whole team would be there. In fact, as far as I could see, there were only a couple of team mechanics and lonely old George Hincapie…always the nice guy and always doing his duty as a good team player. None of the BMC folks I know showed up, so after watching people get all googly over George, I rode on home. Friends of mine who attended some of those other events said they were lots of fun. Everywhere you went, there seemed to be a buzz of excitement, and I suppose if I had worked the town a bit harder, instead of being such a non-groupie misanthrope, I would have plugged into all sorts of hot happenings.
But that's okay. I was keeping my powder dry for the weekend. We had a regular club ride on Saturday, up and over the Geysers, which, if you don't know it, is a pretty fearsome climb. I somehow missed them, but other folks on the ride said they saw the entire Rabobank team at the Geysers summit. I tell ya what: that is a serious climb, and it strikes me as a rather hardcore ride to be doing as your last taper ride on the day before the Tour starts. But then, that's why they're pro racers and we're not, and hey, their main man, Robert Gesink, eventually won the GC for the Tour. So maybe doing a little leg-loosener up and down the Geysers is just the ticket. We had several out-of-town visitors on our club ride. They were in town for the race and were picking up on a good local ride the day before. The Geysers is not only a challenging ride, but also quite spectacular. And it ends with one of the best, wildest downhills around. I like to think we showed our visitors another side of Sonoma County, in addition to what they would be seeing the next day along the race course.
We had a cycling house guest for the weekend. You may recall my story last year about the tragic death of our young friend Matt Wilson. We had his sister Rachelle (from Seattle) staying with us during that very emotional time. Now she was back, under much happier circumstances, down to see the races. She and I rode into Santa Rosa in the morning on Sunday, well ahead of the start time for Stage 1. I had arranged a couple of VIP passes for us at one of the enclosures right along the start/finish line. There was a little difficulty with the passes, but I got it sorted out and we watched the start. Rachelle decided to stay downtown all day where, as you can imagine, there was a huge mall of bike expo booths and street entertainment, not to mention video screens all over the place, showing the progress of the race. Not to mention the endless buffets of great food in the VIP tents.
I elected to ride out into the west county hills to see the riders go by. (The course had that loop in it that took them back to Santa Rosa for the intermediate sprint, so it was possible to see the start and still beat them out to the country roads they'd be doing later.) As I rode west, I fell in with a horde of riders, all bent on doing the same thing. Only problem was, they were all from out of town and had only the vaguest idea of where they were supposed to be going. Once they learned I was local, they all jumped on my wheel and let me lead. I rode out to a feed zone on Occidental Road. There, I finally ran into some of my friends from the BMC team, getting their feed zone organized. Chatted with them and picked up a little insider gossip and just generally hung out, schmoozing. Talking with a Highway Patrolman, I mentioned I'd done crowd control before, so he immediately deputized me to be in charge of the cross road there (Mill Station).
The peloton came by a few minutes later. Standing by the side of the road, waiting for the racers to come by and then watching them go by in one quick, busy whoosh, is a funny little subset of cycling behavior. I've never done it in Europe, for one of the Grand Tours. Only a few times for California events. I've seen enough Euro-events to understand that it's a quantum leap more elaborate, more intense, etc, over there. Here, on a few mountaintops, it can almost look like what we see on TV from the Tour and Giro. But most of the time, most other places along the course, not so much. What is somewhat interesting is how many non-cycling locals come out, just to see what's going on. Inevitably, if they learn that you are an informed font of lore about bike racing, they will ply you with questions--some naive, some intelligent--and you can bring a good deal of color and context to their appreciation of what's going on. It becomes a sort of community get-together and it was, in this case, entirely positive. Being near a feed zone makes things a little bit more interesting: lots of bustle and potential for mayhem. But nothing bad happened during our few minutes of busy-ness. A breakaway group came through with an 11-minute lead, then the main group, with the many, assorted vehicles before and after.
Then I rode back into Santa Rosa, along what would be the finishing miles of the course. Other years, I've gone out to the high country to watch the riders summit on Coleman Valley. This year, I had reasons to be downtown. Amgen has this nice promotion they do in conjunction with the race called Breakaway from Cancer. They gather cancer survivors and care-givers together for a warm-and-fuzzy feel-good session, and they all walk around a section of the downtown course before the racers roll into town. During the little march, survivors wear blue t-shirts and care-givers wear white. I could have worn one of each: I have leukemia and was the care-giver for my first wife when she was dying. But I probably wouldn't have involved myself in this at all except for the fact that a very good biking buddy of mine was right in the middle of it all. Bill Ellis and I go way back in the bike club. I'd guess I've known Bill and ridden with him longer and more than almost anyone else I know. We have shared a lot, from completing epic rides and tours together to many a marathon gourmet dinner to many a long yak on the phone. Bill is, or has been a superb cyclist, at times about as good as amateur riders get. Years ago, I wrote one of these essays about the difference between amateurs and pros, and I used Bill as the classic example of a club rider/racer working at the top of his game as the point-counterpoint guy in the introduction to the essay. I didn't mention him by name, but he's the one I'm talking about there. But in more recent years, Bill's battles have been on another front. He is deeply engaged in a fight with a rare but lethal cancer. He appears, at this point, to be winning the battle, and that's wonderful news for all of us who know him. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a nice article in the days ahead of the Tour of California that covers Bill’s story, so rather than belabor it here, I urge you to read it there. It's a great story about a great guy and one of my best friends.
So I wanted to be a part of this Breakaway deal, not so much because of my own involvement with cancer, but because of Bill. We met up at the appointed time and listened to a couple of pep talks, then donned our t-shirts, trooped out and did this walk around the course. Coming down the finishing straight in this group of a hundred or so cancer survivors and care-givers was rather moving, with thousands of fans behind the barricades cheering their brains out for us. Many of the Breakaway marchers are locked in life-and-death struggles with their diseases, and it's hugely emotional and cathartic for them…life-altering in the most fundamental sorts of ways…a seriously Big Deal. Bill and I walked along, with Bill's wonderful wife Evelyn and his mom, and I said to him: "Bill: we're still here; we're still alive, dammit! How about that?" After a quarter-century of friendship and who-knows-how-many thousands of miles of shared bike rides… Yeah, it's kind of corny, but most of life's really important moments are kind of corny. We were somewhere between all choked up and all ecstatic about how beautiful and precious life is.
Being on the wrong side of the race barricades allowed me to bump into many of my friends, all down the finishing straight. So I lingered there, working the crowd: chatting and hugging and laughing with dozens of old friends lined up along the other side of the fence. Odd as it may seem, a few of them even wanted to get their pictures taken with me, as if I were some sort of minor-league celebrity. Nobody asked for my autograph though. Eventually, I retired to one of the VIP tents, right near the finish line, and plowed a wide furrow through the food buffet while watching on the big TV screens as the peloton steamed its way into Santa Rosa. It was cool to watch on the screen, as they got closer and closer…and then, off the screens and into real life they came, boiling up Third Street in a classic field sprint, right past us, inches away, in that super-intense, almost violent blur that is a mass sprint…like standing next to railroad tracks when a big train goes rumbling by, with the crowd doing its best approximation of bedlam.
And then it was all over. Oh, they had the awards ceremony as a sort of wind-down, decompression mechanism, and then we all drifted off while the army of workers knocked down the movable village that is the Tour's infrastructure and carted it off overnight to the next stage down the road. I rode home, satisfied with a full, colorful day. Rachelle hooked up with a friend and went off to San Francisco for the next stage, and I went back to the quiet world of everyday. Of course I followed the balance of the Tour as it worked its way down the state. I have to say it was not a very exciting tour, all in all. No fault of the organizers or the racers. Everything went according to plan. All well done and ship shape. But the only tension revolved around how many stages Peter Sagan would win and who would prevail on Baldy. And don't forget the time trial in beautiful, broiling Bakersfield. (If Gesink hadn't done so well in the ITT, his good work on Baldy wouldn't have meant much. He didn't used to be all that hot in the time trials, but he's getting better…something to bear in mind come July.)
One note about our local boy, Levi. As you know, he broke the minor bone in his left leg in a car-bike crash in Spain, not that far in advance of the ToC. Obviously, he was not fully recovered in time for the stage race, but I think his 6th place overall at 2:13 was a very respectable showing, under the circumstances. As part of his recovery, on April 28--two weeks ahead of the ToC--he had participated in one of the local Grasshopper races. These are Sonoma County cult classics, attracting strong fields of local pros and top-notch amateur racers. This one featured a course that was arguably harder or at least steeper than any stage of the ToC, including a two-mile descent on loose gravel with pitches near 20%. (I did the same descent as part of a 200-K the week before, and I can tell you the surface was seriously scary-sketchy.) Levi flatted on this ultra-hairball descent and got dropped by a half-dozen riders. My friend Marc Moons--the 2011 CTC CTC Stage Race Champion--hooked up with Levi in their chase after the leaders. Marc sent me this note: “We had a strong group towards Ink Grade with Levi commanding the pace line. He left our group behind on the Butts Canyon climb to chase down the leaders, whom he caught on Spring Mtn. Levi won. It was fun to be the guy behind him in the pace line and to see him take off with a crushed leg.”
Meanwhile, half a world away, the Giro was unfolding up and down Italy. Now that race had plenty of tension and excitement! That one had all the drama and cycling entertainment anyone could wish for. I loved it, and thanks to SteepHill.TV, I watched almost every stage…certainly every stage that mattered. This is the last item on my Merry Month of May checklist, and although I only enjoyed it at great remove, sitting at home, in front of my monitor, It was as good as any of the stuff I was involved in first hand. It was the bow on top of the package for this very busy month of bikes.
Because this column is already way, way too long, I'm not going to do one of my armchair quarterback analyses of the whole Giro. I will just say that the two final mountain stages--to Pampeago and Stelvio, respectively--were right up there in the annals of good bike racing. Not the best ever, but very good…a feast for any serious bike race fan. And Stage 15 to Pian die Resinelli was also wonderful, with the heroic solo breakaway surviving to the finish…epic! I haven't ridden to Pampeago, but I have ridden some of the Stage 15 roads around Lake Como, and I most definitely have ridden Mortirolo and Stelvio, the two monumental ascents on the last mountain stage. So I was on those roads again, vicariously, as the riders grappled their way up them…a stage with no less than 20,000' of elevation gain. (Bill Ellis and I did those roads together a few years back…part of our rich trove of shared memories, shared friendship.)
It was nice to see a new hero emerge on the world stage of cycling. Ryder Hesjedal has been nibbling around at the edges of greatness for a few years now, but I didn't expect him to rise to the top as he did in this Giro. He and his Garmin team rode smart and strong throughout, and he did just enough to bring home the bacon. I kept expecting him to crack, but he never did. He almost cracked: he bent a little on the Stelvio, but he limited his losses (with the help of Christian Vandevelde) just enough to be able to come out ahead in the final time trial. It reminded me of the stubborn, dogged way in which Cadel Evans limited his losses to Andy Schleck on Galibier in last summer’s Tour de France, saving just enough time to come out ahead in the final time trial on the final day. Very similar, equally gutsy rides.
Hesjedal is from British Columbia. My good friend Robin--also from BC--was cycle-touring in Italy during the Giro. He just flew home yesterday and dropped by for a cup of coffee this morning. Needless to say, he, like all other Canadians and British Columbians in particular, is just a wee bit excited about their new champion, and who can blame them? It's a great result, and it was best-quality bike entertainment watching him get it done.
There was one more really exciting cycling adventure for me toward the end of May, but as this column has gone on long enough for now, and as that item is of a rather different nature, I am going to hold it over for next month's column. You'll understand why when you read it. But for now, let us just revel in what the bulk of the Merry Month of May brought us: a sensory overload of cycling excitement. I am delighted to have been a small part of it all, and I hope I've managed to share some of the color of it with you.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net