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| Choose Handups Wisely (by Chris Jones) |
You ever wonder what it’s like when a gust of wind blows up
while teetering on tight rope between skyscrapers, to drive 100mph down a black
iced winter Wisconsin freeway, to cut your regulator hose 35 feet under while
scuba diving? The acrobat grips the wire
between his toes gently holding the balancing pole. The rally car driver nearly spins off the
road still gripping the steering wheel and finessing the parking brake. The diver always knows which way is up. At the bottom of a mud covered off camber
hill at the Kings CX OVCX finale I slipped to a stop with both feet engaged to
the pedals and my hands on the bars. Until
my shifter and pedal anchored me to a stop, “I got this,” I thought.
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Me on Heckle Hill (Photo: Karen Wells Hamilton)
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What makes cyclocross so different from road, track, bmx or
mountain biking is that in a muddy race, you’re not certain of the exit. It’s like Plinko, the game on TV’s The Price
Is Right where you drop a disc down a peg board and it randomly pops out at the
bottom making you a winner or a loser. In
the one hour race yesterday, I can’t count the times I went into a muddy
section, only to exit 3 feet to the left or 4 feet to the right. Sometimes the same trusted rut would shrug me
a different direction each time through.
Still I blindly drive my bike into the muck at full-tilt fully expecting
to be head up and rubber down on the doormat sized piece of solid ground on the
other side. Suddenly my opening analogy
doesn’t seem so ridiculous.
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| HeckleOnline.com Monster |
Turning right, the front wheel slid away as fast as Herman Cain’s hopes
for the presidency, down the hill to the left.
Naturally through my experience in Wisconsin winter driving, I steered left
into the slide. It hooked up. For .32
seconds I had it, then lost it as fast. It
was like a hydroplaning track stand. I
got this, until PAFFF! I pancaked into
the hill. I still wasn’t done
moving. Like falling off that
skyscraper, with my hand clawing the ledge, feverishly swimming to the surface, seeing the road that was in front of me in the rear-view, I distinctly remember riders going by
above me, at least four if not five.
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| Peter Hills (Photo: Karen Wells Hamilton) |
I
could’ve whipped out my phone and had a pizza delivered to the pit in the time
it took my butt to grind to a halt. I
could’ve made an OVCX series winner’s mug out of the mud. I could’ve married and divorced Kim Kardashian
in the time it took to fall, slide and stop. From the pit, I’m sure it looked like another one of a
hundred slips du jour. It was. Everyone who fell, thought, “I got this!” Until…they didn’t.
Early Kings CX Day 2 Video featuring Heckle Hill
Kings CX Weekend - Day 2 Highlights from
Corey Green on
Vimeo.
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