I have trouble figuring
out whether a $2.57 12oz jar of pickles is a better deal than a $3.27 16oz jar
let alone figuring out which time I race on the BikeReg.com page without my blue
tortoise shell Ray Ban reading glasses. Don’t
ask me what category you should race. However,
if pressed to give you an educated answer based on your performance, this
Masters 45+ racer who writes juvenile comedy pieces for top-40 radio morning
shows will pull out his 1983 Texas Instruments scientific calculator and show
you that on the screen, if you type in 5318008, it spells BOOBIES when held
upside down.
Obviously, if you do the
math, the $3.27 jar is the better buy.
But, all cucumbers are not equal.
Other factors come into play. So,
when a fellow Masters racer asked me, during a dark and serious beard
scratching conversation in my paid-in-full Toyota 4-Runner, whether he should
enter the OVCX Masters 2/3 category or the traditional elite category, I asked
him how he likes his pickles.
Are you okay with store
brand or can your distinguished Masters taste buds discern the superior crunch
of the famous Milwaukee Polski Wyrob pickle?
Do you like sweet or sour? Are
you that guy in polyester suspender pants arguing with the clerk fishing
pickles out of a barrel at a Jewish deli in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park,
or you more of a metro-sexual mini-pickle man?
For Sven Nys’ sake, you’ve got a mortgage but are acting like a kid scrutinizing
tater tots in a school lunch line when it comes to clicking a box on
BikeReg.com.
What kind of man are you?
Let me tell you. We discuss the types of Masters Men below. Each is accompanied by a Masters Chore Score
or the amount of household chores a Masters rider can reasonably accomplish
between training rides, work, calling his mother Sunday morning on the way to
races, cleaning both your bikes, comparing hill repeat times on Training Peaks,
ice baths in your en-suite Jacuzzi tub, being a head case to your coach via smartphone
email and running up to the bike shop to have wheels reglued because you have
the money but not the time.
 |
| Who's the Fridge Cleaning Champ? This guy! |
A Masters Chore Score of
“0” means you’ll be training so much you’ll end up with a filthy black ring
around the toilet and be eating off paper plates as you watch passers by slip
on your unsalted icy sidewalk in January.
“10” means you’ll remember your wife’s December birthday, figure out a
way to get the deck stained before winter, and kill enough dust bunnies to
change the bag on the vacuum once or twice.
The “I Just Want To Have Fun Man” Man
If you’re the hippie
dippie type of Master that wants to have fun and feel the competition, by all
means enter the 2/3 Masters. If you
crack the top 3 before your left hip, you’ll win some great prizes. If not, you’ll be trading wheels with fellow
grey beards for 40 minutes straight.
Masters Chore Score: 8 (Yes Honey, I’ll clean
the fridge this weekend)
The “Bowling with the Champs” Man
95% of my readers under
35 and from outside Wisconsin just tuned out.
Growing up in Milwaukee in the late 70’s, when real men, not hipsters,
with chunks of meat and blood on their work boots drank Pabst Blue Ribbon,
there was a local live TV show called Bowling with the Champs. Yeah, think Dancing with the Stars, only with
bowling. Equate Milwaukee to Belgium,
South Side to Brussels and Bowling to Cyclocross and you get the picture. The premise was, if you practiced hard
enough, you, a cigarette smoking pitcher of beer drinking meat cutter from Wisconsin
like my Dad, could share the South Side lanes at the Red Carpet Bolero with
your bowling heroes.
If this is you and your orthopedic
insoles are putting a spring in your step over the barriers, race the 2/3
category but consider the occasional elite level Masters event where you can
race with your cycling heroes like Katie Compton’s husband, but it’ll be, as my
father used to say in his 40’s, for shits and grins.
Masters Chore Score: 6 (Oh crap, it’s garbage
day!)
 |
| Elite Masters in Natural Habitat |
The “Skunk Rubbin’ Man
At the top of the USA Cycling Ranks page the paragraph states, “Our revamped rankings program aims to
provide increasingly accurate rankings using an innovative new algorithm
emphasizing quality over quantity.”
Ganarf. I don’t know what kind of
NASA rocket scientists they have working on this project but its accuracy is
worthy of a Nobel Prize, especially for me.
In college I took a
course nicknamed “Math for Creatives.”
Consequently, I develop a turrets syndrome type tick when I read the
word “algorithm.” Ganarf. While I can’t explain the buttons on a
scientific calculator, my real world experience is that if you race against
faster guys, such as in the combined Elite/Masters Elite field of OVCX, your
USA cycling rank number will improve. More
or less, if you rub a skunk, the stink’s going to wear off on you.
The hitch is that this
number is basically useless, aside from one important fact. Call-ups on the grid at Nationals are based
on this number. The lower the number
goes, the higher your place on the grid, in January, in Madison, with 100 guys
on the line. Consequently, your chore
score decreases dramatically the more you use the word “tabatas” to describe
your training rides. If you aspire to be
competitive at Nationals and Worlds, consider springing for a coach, like Chris Mayhew at JBV,
and rubbing skunks with Elite riders on Sunday.
Masters Chore Score: 2
(Honey Do Blues)
