Dazed and Confused
Or maybe, “sleepy and sore” is more accurate.
This entry comes to you from a coffee shop in Girona, Spain; a place I called home for the better part of my (first, road racing) career. As of the last check-in from Levi’s Fondo, Laura and I raced the opening race of the Life Time Grand Prix in the form of the Sea Otter Fuego XL mountain bike race, then Laura set off to Washington with the kids while I jetted to Portugal.
Not actually bushwhacked at Sea Otter. photo: Gretchen Powers
Mountain biking was my introduction to cycling ages ago. I was adequately deft navigating my bike through singletrack and did well in regional and national races. Then I set off on a decade spent exclusively on the road bike, so when I got back into mountain biking in the late twenty-teens, the sport had changed. Gone were the days of 3 hours endurance events over two or three laps, and in came the super technical, explosive races of today. Red Bull televised competition which was characterized by short, sharp, and highly dynamic events. Manmade rock gardens that riders would charge over a half dozen times or more, the sport resembled the quick lap style of cyclocross which was easily easily produced and highly entertaining to a TV audience. Having honed my diesel domestique engine accustomed to towing the peloton along for hours at a time, this new age of mountain bike racing didn’t suit me. It’s not as thought I was trying to make it another career in mountain biking, so that was just fine. But in that ten year interim away from the sport, it introduced a new style of racing to the young whippersnappers who are whippersnapping legs nowadays in the Grand Prix.
That’s the poetically waxed way of saying I got 33rd place in a foolishly stacked field there at Sea Otter. While somewhere between 32nd and 34th place isn’t something I’ll boast on a race resume, I’m happy with the day, to be honest. It would have placed me something like 23rd among the Grand Prix field, in which I’m not competing, but it’s still an interesting metric of comparison. Going into the event I knew I wasn’t going to be the hammer, instead I excitedly signed up for Sea Otter to log the absolutely absurd training stimulus as well as to be part of the Sea Otter festival. More specifically, I tallied just shy of an cumulative hour riding above 500 watts and the friends, sponsors, people, and ATMOSPHERE that makes Sea Otter Sea Otter is something to behold.
I also went 20 minutes with an average power 40 watts higher than last year, so it’s hard to be disappointed with that level of improvement.
Oh, and to the mountain bikers who claim that Sea Otter is a “roadie” course, with the exception of Alexey Vermeulen (who is handy on an MTB and did try his hand at professional mountain biking after his stint in the World Tour), nine of the top ten finishers are first and foremost mountain bikers and most of the top 20 are of the same ilk. So don’t @ me.
The Fuego XL took place on a Friday morning. Laura and I both raced that, so upon my finish and her still on course, it made sense for me to race back to our AirBnB a half-hour away in Monterey to relieve the babysitter in order to rush straight back to the venue for the schmoozing, socializing, and having fun which is enjoyed after a top tier race. That is to say, no matter how cool as a cucumber you are, it’s hard not to have at least a low humming level of nervous energy before a race, but afterwards it’s very nice to bask in the relief it’s over! We visited lots of supportive friends at various booths and throughout the venue for the rest of the afternoon, so that was loads of fun.
Saturday morning I hosted a group ride with UnTapped, then rushed to pack up my bike so that I could take it with me to Portugal on a flight Saturday afternoon. These are self inflicted wounds, I recognize, having booked this travel schedule myself, but it was somewhere in the hurried race to the airport amongst (admittedly light) Bay Area traffic that I was reminded just how busy Sea Otter weekend is. And maybe I won’t double book my Saturday next time.
Arriving in Portugal, I met up with Laurens ten Dam as we were hosting the three-day N2 trip with our friends at inGamba. Knackered from a day of travel, hankering for some local cuisine, and not knowing a lick of Portuguese, yet knowing how to read a picture menu, I saw a hamburger with an egg and ordered a pair of those for the two of us. If you’ve ever had a hamburger with an egg then you know, just like pizza, it’s enhanced with an egg on top. Little did we know we’d just ordered the typical sandwich-slash-cholesterol bomb of the region, the francesihna. The picture on the menu in no way resembled what you see below, which is inarguably a vegan’s worst nightmare. Namely a meat laden sandwich that’s encrusted in melted cheese and then is drowned with a rich tomato sauce. Whether or not you’re salivating having heard that, I encourage you to watch the first 1:20 of this video as it takes you play by play between its unctuous layers.
As we digested this 74,000 calorie monstrosity, we also digested for the first time just how long the upcoming 738km ride would take riding straight down the center of the country. Namely, we had back to back 140 mile rides followed by a final 170 mile push. (Please pardon the metric/statute switch-a-roo, but in my mind it makes sense. Specifically, you see kilometer markers the entire route south. I’d estimate there are 700 of the 738 kilometer markers dutifully lining the road. And then I migrated back to statute, because of my largely American audience and I know in a group we can maintain 20mph, so a quick round of maths gives me an estimated ride time for the day.) Ergo, two seven hour days capped off by an eight and a half hour ride… actually just eight on the final day courtesy of a ferocious tailwind.
The ride was great! inGamba’s level of TLC is second to none, the intrepid group who signed up for this sort of adventure was fantastic, and to be able to call this “work” is a blessing. It’s rare to log that kind of training volume at any point of the season, so it’s convenient to have landed right when it did as I continue the build into the heart of 2024. This is the longest the time away from my kids ever, so that’s more than a bit of a bummer. But chalking it up as a business trip of sorts, sometimes work just gets in the way of things.
And then four days later, having at this point digested the entire francesinha, it was immediately off to Girona where I literally now sit with my cup of coffee. It’s hard to imagine being a fly on the wall in this city for the past 1200-plus years since it’s first inhabitation, but there’s something to be said about how quickly it’s changing. My last time here was in 2015 when a coffee cost one euro and you ordered just that, un cafe. That coffee you received was indistinguishable from the coffee you’d get at the next cafe across the street or across town. To order an Americano or Flat White would be as foreign a term to the barista as the person ordering it. That is, until Christian Meier and his wife Amber started La Fabrica, which began an arms race to modernize the Gironan coffee scene.
I happen to have an inside perspective on this industrious duo as they took me into their apartment when I first moved to town from my previous dwelling in Switzerland in 2009 before finding my own apartment. I believe I’m correct in saying Christian had just won 3rd place in the Aeropress World Championships which is a competition that still baffles me to even exist given the variables are so limited in making an Aeropress. I probably make 200 Aeropresses per year, so that surely that previous sentence speaks to my naïvety. If you visit their new shop, Espresso Mafia, you can see the "bronzed” (or more accurately, brown plasticized) Aeropress trophy Christian took home a decade and a half ago. The couple would also would regularly visit Barcelona as that city started to have a different view on coffee, which Girona had not yet adopted.
The point being, you now can’t walk a single block of Girona these days without stumbling on a spiffy new coffee shop with organic baked goods and sixteen ways to make an espresso drink. Similarly, you can’t ride through town and blink without passing a new aged bike shop with a sparkling new bike in the window display and contemporary cycling gear bursting out the door. It’s no wonder that Girona was a popular magnet for cyclists to visit Europe in my day a decade ago, but only has double, triple, heck quadrupled down on cycling since then!
If you build it, they will come.
It feels very special to be back in town and I’ve already logged more miles of gravel than I did in the half dozen years I called this place home. I’m very excited to have the Traka this coming weekend and see what European gravel is all about. But in the meantime, I’m soaking in a bit more RnR. The three day, 22 hour effort in Portugal has me a bit dazed and confused — or sore and sleepy, rather. Nothing a little coffee can’t fix.
Ahh yes, we also released the second video of the 2024 season. With the season full speed ahead, here’s my go at MidSouth, the unofficial season opener of the year: