#Cyclocross Pitting For Dummies

Where's my bike? (Joel Quimby Photography)

They call it the credit card, when the rear wheel gets slid through a rider’s rear end on a botched cyclocross pit exchange.  It’s the dreaded remount bobble, caused mainly by having a drunken person pitting for you.  It was the biggest mistake I saw in the pits at the muddy Kings CX race on Sunday.  The 2^nd biggest mistake was seeing riders pull in the pit looking as if their car was stolen from the mall parking lot, only to realize their pit crew was still on the opposite side of the pit Tweeting about how great their rider was doing in the race.  Contrary to popular whining, no matter how many middle fingers get thrown between riders and their pit person, the rider is ultimately responsible for everything that goes wrong in their pit.

If you’re going to put a dummy in the pit for you, the best thing you can do is realize that they’d rather be back at the hospitality tent checking Sunday football scores or shopping for pretty shoes on their smartphone.  Outside of actually finding someone who has a fetish for rain gear and mud or someone with a vested interest in how well you do in the race, the second best thing you can do is prepare them.  Realize the dummies in your pit crew are only as good as your instructions and how much Chipotle you bribe them with. 

"A yuk-yuk.  Sure I'll pit for y'all!"

Outfitting Your Pit Dummy

Unless they wear as much latex as Lady Gaga, don’t count on your pit dummy to come prepared to be wet.  Bring the following for your dummy:  a pair of rain pants with belt or suspenders (because for some reason rain pants are only available in Paul Bunyan size), long johns, a sweatshirt, rubber boots, rain jacket, hat and waterproof gloves.  If you’re really smart, you’ll give them a team hat so they feel like part of the team and you can pick them apart from the 40 other people wearing yellow jackets in the pit.  Plus, if you pack a spare backpack with all this stuff and carry around a giant burrito wrapped in tin foil, you can raise your CX scepter and appoint any gap-toothed weirdo your pit dummy. 

All Hail The Conical Brush

Tools for Dummies:

Unless you’re shacking up with someone with perpetually grease packed finger nails, chances are your dummy is no mechanic and thinks an Allen wrench set looks identical to a set of measuring spoons.  Do not trust a pit dummy with unfamiliar tools.  The cassette brush will be challenging enough.  Give them the basics: a bottle of lube, a few rags, a bucket, a bottle of dish detergent, a chain/cassette brush and a conical brush.  Tell them if something is mechanically wrong with the bike to take it to the neutral support guy under the tent with the tools and bike stand and repeat exactly what you shouted at him when you dropped it off. 

Clean BioWheels Exchange (Joel Quimby Photography)

The Most Important Thing:

Tell your pit dummy that the most important thing is not cleaning the bike.  It’s not catching your dirty bike, getting the bike back to you in a ½ lap, lubing the chain, or other mind numbing details like making sure your drive side pedal is in the 2 o’clock position when you get on the bike.  The most important thing while pitting is making sure you go to the bathroom before the race starts.  The 2^nd most important thing is …say it with me…making sure the rider mounts the new bike smoothly.  Nothing else matters as much as you getting cleanly on the clean bike and out of the pit.  Show them how to hold your spare bike correctly and practice an exchange or two.  See “The Hand Off” for dummies below.

The Pit Signal (Joel Quimby Photography)

Communicate:

Tell your pit dummy to take mental note of the riders in front of you, so they have an idea when you are due in.  Tell them you’ll most likely be in the top 10 riders, or in my case, the one wheezing like a donkey mid pack.  Explain that on each lap you’ll pass by the pit twice, once on each side.  Since lap times are about eight minutes, you’ll pass by the pit about every four minutes.  Tell your dummy, you’ll raise a hand in the air a turn or two before pitting which is a signal that you need a clean bike.  Tell them to wave back or shout “ready” when they see your hand.  Tell them, if you don’t get confirmation you won’t come into the pit. 

The Pits (Joel Quimby Photography)

Claim Your Pit Home:

With the bucket, your bin of rags, tools and brushes, along with the spare bike or wheels, stake out an area of the pit with your dummy to call home prior to the race.  If you’re lucky, you’ll set them up next to a friend maybe with a stick of beef jerky and a flask of bourbon, or perhaps a granola bar and a can of soda.  Put some dish detergent in the bucket and fill it up with the pressure washer.  This is a perfect opportunity to show them how to operate it…the pressure washer not the bucket. 

Clean Hand Off (Joel Quimby Photography)

The Pitting for Dummies Routine:

Tell your dummy to clean your bike the same way every time.  Upon seeing you off, they should quickly take the dirty bike back to your place in the pit.  Other riders are coming in and it’s very important to get off pit road as quickly as possible.  To save your pit dummy from trying to figure out your gearing, before you come into the pit shift into the gear you wish to have when you pick it back up.  Then tell your pit dummy not to mess with the gears.

1 DECHUNKIFY.  Using the conical brush, dip it in the soapy water and run it above and below each brake shoe front and back.  Then, run it through the bottom bracket area between the wheel and frame and between the crank arms and frame.  Then knock the big chunks of mud off the frame.  If there’s time, they can clean their ears with it.  If the brush goes in one ear and out the other, you have a perfect pit dummy.  Done: 30 seconds.

2 POWERWASH.  Since the bulk of the debris was knocked off with the brush, time at the power washer should be minimized.  Since most pit dummies don’t understand the laws of gravity and jet propelled water, tell them to wash the bike top down: saddle, bars, top tube, down tube, seat tube, brakes, wheels/tires, bottom bracket, rear derailleur & pullies.  Done: 1 minute.

3 BRUSH DRIVETRAIN: Facing the rear of the bike on the drive side, supporting the bike with the right hip, use the smaller brush to get the debris out from in between the front gears and rear wheel gears.  Believe me, explaining the difference between chainrings and cassette cogs is like explaining Skype to your grandmother.  Spinning the pedals backward while brushing works well.  Then work to remove the stuff from the derailleur pullies, also known as that thing the chain snakes through on the back of the frame.  Done: 45 seconds.

4 LUBE CHAIN:  Still in the same position, spin the cranks backward and squirt lube on the chain as it spins.  Tell them to do it exactly like they did on their Huffy when they were 11 years old.  Done: 15 seconds.

5 RETURN: Take a rag, head to the opposite side of the pit the bike was picked up at and look for the rider.   With the rag quickly wipe the bars, saddle and shifter levers.  Time permitting, pick any loose leaves or grass still in the brakes or drive train.  Watch for the raised hand from the rider and signal and call out “ready” when you see it.   To alert others in the pit, have your pit dummy shout “rider up” when you are a turn away from coming in to the pit.

One Man Pit Crew (Joel Quimby Photography)

The Exchange:

I saw 10 year olds catch bikes perfectly Sunday.  Any dufus can do it.  You know who else is great at catching bikes?  The ground.  Once again, say it with me, the most important part of the bike exchange is…yes, going to the bathroom before the race.  The 2^nd most important thing is getting the rider cleanly on the clean bike.  Let the dirty bike fall into the grass if need be.  Tell your pit dummy to ask someone nearby to catch your bike when you come in.  If that’s not possible, they can do it solo. 

Whoever’s catching the bike, should stick their left hand out at handlebar height toward the rider coming in, look them dead in the eye and say “your mama was right, you are ugly.”  No really they should say something to the effect of “Right here Dude.  I got it!”  That way there’s no confusion on where the bike is going.  If they’re doing double duty, catching and handing off, it’s not so much a catch as a slowing down and gentle deflection of the dirty bike to the ground with your left hand.  The pit dummies main focus should be on making sure the clean bike is ready for the hand-off. 

Two Hands Two Bikes (Joel Quimby Photography)

The Handoff. 

There are ways the pros do it, but there is only one way your dummy should do it, with the most minimal involvement possible.  Tell them to position the clean bike over the pit line, angled toward the best exit to the pit with the handlebars pointing forward.  The drive side pedal should be up and forward at around the 2 or 3 o’clock position.  Tell them to hold on to the bike’s saddle with their right hand at the rear edge on the drive side and not let go until you pull the bike away from them.  Repeat this to them.  Assure them there’s no need to hold the handle bars.  The fewer interfaces with your pit dummy and your bike the better.  This way when you grab the bars, the bike gets pulled from their grip and you’re on your way in the best direction.  

They should not push you.  While it works in bobsledding, the guy in the blue shirt with the USAC badge frowns upon riders getting an unfair advantage.  He also frowns at just about everything.  The last thing you want to do is get DQ’d because your pit dummy is a dummy.  Secondly, pushing a rider off essentially hogs the limited space on pit road by putting yourself in front of other rider’s pit crews.  Lastly adding extra arms, legs and heads around the bike is a recipe for throwing the rider off balance and making for a bobbled transition.  Let the rider make the mistakes.  A pit person should be a dummy.

Cincinnati: Now Rainier than Seattle and Portland

The drench-o-meter at the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky airport shows 10 ½ inches of rain this April, an all time record.  You’d think that’s like Portland rainfall.  Not even close.  Portland’s average monthly rainfall for April is a wimpy 2.4 inches.  Even in the cute rubber rain boot capitol of the US, Seattle gets only 6 inches of rain in its rainiest months of December and January.  We passed Seattle rain two weeks ago.  Before you start feeling like one helluva hardass for not missing one training day due to rain, consider our 10 ½ inches is a third of the average monthly rainfall at Kukui on the Hawaiian Island of Maui, where at an elevation of 5,788 feet, the average monthly rainfall is 32.81 inches.  According to Velominati’s Rule #9, you’d be one hell of a badass to ride in Kukui or get killed trying. 

My cassette looks like a chocolate Krispy Kreme donut stuck in my spokes.  Black silt covers my fork like a beard.  A dull gray sheen has come over my silver Sram Red brakes.  The sad thing is my bike got the full-meal-deal cleaning last week.  I even overhauled my headset, for the 2^nd time this winter/spring.  It’s easier said than done to HTFU when you start feeling like rain is acid falling from the sky chiseling ruts in your rims and rounding off your cassette.  Just like riding with a wet chamois, it’s not so much the water, but that fine layer of grit that’ll make your groin and bike beg for mercy.  Here are some tips to save your bike in the rain.

Make Your Friends Buy Fenders

That way your bike doesn’t look dorky, but you get the benefit of not having to drink or wear their road spray.  As an added bonus, you’ll get to sit on the back of the ride and avoid pulling because no one will want to ride behind you.  Use the $30 you saved on fenders for some nice white bar tape and bust it out the first week of summer sunshine.

Ride The Least Expensive Drivetrain

A friend expressed shock that I was riding my sweet carbon Kuota KOM in the rain instead of my IF Planet X cyclocross bike.  “The Kuota’s plastic,” I said.  Unlike the Planet X, a carbon bike isn’t going to rust.  Sure the Planet X is supposedly an all weather bike with sealed water bottle braze-ons; it’s also steel and has a Sram Red drivetrain.  When it comes to wear, it’s much less expensive to replace a workhorse Ultegra chain, bottom bracket and cassette than swanky super high end race stuff.  Brush, clean and lube your drivetrain after every rainy ride.

Ride Your Square Tires

Hanging in the garage, we all have a set of tires that’s as square as Will Smith’s Fresh Prince haircut with a few cuts and divots in ‘em.  Put ‘em back on.  Sure they’re not going to have that new tire grip or match your bike, but why kill a set of new tires.  Rain water picks up every spec of dirt and glass, sticks it to your tire, and turns a new set of skins into old ones in a week.  Save the nice tires for a whenever this rain stops or August, whatever comes first.

Monkey Pick Your Brake Pads

You’ve seen the Monkey’s at the zoo picking fleas out of each other’s fur.  Do the same with your brake pads.  Sharpen a spoke and monkey pick the grit out of your brake pads after rainy rides.  However, if you’ve been dying to get new wheels, but find it impossible to justify the expense, ride through every single puddle you can, then ride through a beach and slam on the brakes a few times.  Then show your wife the concave braking surface on your wheels and tell her you’ll stop buying Cheetos at work for the next 2 years.  

Snowicane: Winter Bike Repairs

Over the past few winters, I’ve discovered there’s always a few snowicane days where the degree of winter nastiness overrides my motivation to go outside over even stay inside and do something active.  I reserve certain bike related repair and maintenance projects, listed below, for those days.  There are a few hard core riders I know that have the clothes and equipment to ride or run in even a Hors Category Snowicane.  For the rest of us there’s some combination of cold, wet, and snow that steals our motivation to even exercise indoors.  These are the days where we shrug our shoulders and gaze out the window remembering when the trees across the street were blooming and we rolled out of the driveway bare handed.  Today, I find it hard to picture a day when my short fingered gloves were hanging from the drying rack and I had no idea where in the hell my shoe covers were.  It’s mindboggling fuzzy.  We’ve had too many snowicane days over the past week.  Last night, after getting let out of work early, I stood and gazed out the window as the thick snow rushed sideways under the streetlight.  No thoughts of wedding ring sunburns came to mind.  Instead, I remembered what snowicane days like this are for.  I headed downstairs to the Best Bike Man Cave Workshop and got crackin’ on some winter bike repairs.  Based on the category of snowicane, here’s what I do.

They Let Us Out Of Work Early

Patch Inner Tubes

Reorganize and clean up workshop

Check air pressure on suspension & tires

Pull out, clean and relube seat tube

Clean and lube drive train while it’s on the bike

Check and adjust wheel bearings

Check tires for wear and inflate to proper pressure

Snow Emergency

Put new sealant in tubeless tires

Pull apart and clean and lube rear derailleur pulleys

Take off, clean and lube cassette

True Wheels

Take the good stuff off your cross bike and put it back on your road/mtn bike

Check for chain stretch and replace if necessary

Put on new bar tape (with patience, care, karma and style) 

The National Guard Should Be Here Anytime

Pull out, clean, check, and lube bottom bracket and headset

Remove, clean & lube bolts on brakes, saddle, derailleur’s, seat post clamp, and stem

Replace oil and fluid in hydraulic brakes and suspension

Check and replace slow performing cables & housing