One rider’s year in review

By Ian Landau

Part I
The long and boring preamble that is not a review of my season but a look back into the recesses of my cycling, um, career, ostensibly to provide context for my thoughts on the season just ended.

The end of 2009 closes the book on my seventh season of bike racing. Back when I began in 2003, I was a clueless 31-year-old who ended up getting dropped in every Cat 5 race I entered. To say I underestimated the difficulty of road racing would be an understatement. I’d been riding regularly since the previous year—New York Cycle Club rides, loops in the park—but I was far from race fit. A career as a music journalist throughout my 20s helped see to that—late nights, smoking, drinking.

I’d gotten the idea of racing the previous summer. One earlyish morning in Prospect Park, I stumbled upon people in uniforms with numbers pinned on them, some hauling spare wheels on their backs. “What the hell’s this?” I asked someone. He said, “Just the regular weekend Kissena race.”

Hmmm. Bike racing 10 minutes from home? I gotta try it. I was riding a Trek 510 those days, a rig I’d gotten when I was 13 to do a bike tour of Cape Cod and the coast of Maine. It was “modernized” with clipless pedals but otherwise the same setup as when I brought it home from the shop in 1984. By the following spring, I had a 2003 Cannondale CAAD 5 R600, had joined Kissena, and fallen down the rabbit hole and into the alternate reality that is life as a bike racer.

Bike racing, of course, is not really a sport. It’s an obsession. Over the past seven years, I had two kids, worked, got laid off, lived life. But everything over that time has been filtered through the prism of bike racing. A week’s vacation in the summer? How will that affect my training? A movie on a Friday night? But I have to get up at 5 on Saturday morning to help at registration, then race. Some kid’s birthday party in April? But that’s the same day as Battenkill!? We all know what it’s like. Unless you’re a hermit, you have obligations to your family, your job, your significant other, any and all of which can get in the way of your being the best bike racer you can be. It’s all about balance, right? Sometimes I think, If I’d only started racing at 21, or in college, imagine what I could’ve done through my unencumbered 20s: five-hour rides both weekend days, races out the wazoo, stage races. Stage races!

But let’s face it: to be good at bike racing, to be really good, you need to live like a monk whose devotion is not to god but to training, racing, and recovering. Not many people are lucky enough to pull that off. See, I can’t get away from the idea that living such a limited life could be fun. As I said, obsession. Instead of being good, we live with the alternative: being as okay as we can be. Of course, there are those freaks of nature who are really good even though they aren’t hermits, and don’t seem to train any more than joe racer. These are the people with so-called natural talent. I hate them. And, of course, with New York being a magnet for Type A overachievers, we happen to have a healthy helping of former world-class athletes kicking around the local cycling scene. Elite athletes aren’t just people who train a bit harder than you or I; they are a different species of human, one that gets very, very fast without as much effort as it takes a normal person.

So that’s how I’ve lived the last seven seasons: I train when I can, as smart as I can, but the truth is, my racing plateaued long ago. Yes, I did upgrade, and somewhere in my second season I didn’t get dropped in a Cat 4 race. I steadily got stronger, but I couldn’t get results to upgrade to Cat 3. So here I am, 39 years old, my “racing age,” seven seasons after I started racing and a Cat 4.

Part II
Wherein I provide a recap of the season just passed.

To begin, I must first take you back to 2008. The autumn of ’08 was a watershed moment for me. I raced 10 cyclocross races that fall, and I did well. For the first time I got some results that proved I wasn’t all that bad at this cycling thing. I’d always loved cross, but now there was some proof that I was good at it. So as 2008 drew to a close, I planned to focus my 2009 on being as prepared as I could be for the ’09 cross season.

So it began with a very long view of things. With my eyes on autumn, the idea was not to worry about my road racing. I’d actually been trying to write off road racing for a while, since I decided a few years back that I simply didn’t have the hours to train to be good at it—a diagnosis I stand by today. But every year, as the first races rolled around in the spring I’d get swept up in the excitement, start racing, do poorly, get frustrated, and wonder why I couldn’t stick to my plans—or have the sense enough to quit. So, lo and behold, the first race of the ’09 season is a Kissena-sponsored race in Prospect Park on Feb. 28. And what do I do? I go. I did fine, finishing in the pack, but getting the racing bug that early was simply not what I needed.

From there, I’d have to say the spring and summer were a bit rudderless. Training for me is never consistent. I can never keep to an actual periodized plan, because I can’t steadily build my fitness from long base miles rides into a more intense build period, then into a hot-and-heavy race period. Family obligations keep me to riding or racing one day of the weekend. So my training hours look like waves, up one week, down the next. But I really still haven’t figured out how to eke the most training bang for my meager training bucks.

In hindsight I believe I should’ve been spending weekend days in the spring riding long and not racing for a little over an hour in the park. But it’s easy to tell yourself that racing is the best training, even if the corollary to that axiom is that you have to race a lot for it to be really good training. Anyway, as I’d resolved to not do any out-of-town road races to save my road trips for cyclocross, this meant I was stuck racing at Floyd Bennett and Prospect. Floyd Bennett I love for the sheer difficulty of it; Prospect is a 10-minute ride from my front door. As in years past, I kind of peaked in June without planning to, the proof of which was some strong riding around that time at Floyd (riding that netted no results but still felt good to be on the front with some zip in the legs). Prospect was Prospect—trying to get away in a break, failing, sitting out the bunch sprints.

Cyclocross
And then just like that, cross season was around the corner. Since for the last couple of years I’ve kicked my cross season off around Labor Day weekend at the Blunt Park race in Springfield, Mass., cross comes early for me. After the success of ’08, I had high hopes going into the new season. Those hopes were quickly dashed, though, when I had an attack of the gags at the first MAC Series race. Whatever was behind that (psychological? physical? both?) it continued to bedevil me throughout the season, robbing me of the joy of racing cross. I don’t think I was as fit this year as last, but really, who knows? I can’t say my season was any kind of honest portrayal of my strengths because it was utterly hobbled, paralyzed by this problem that I just couldn’t shake. Yet I still love cross the best of all the cycling I’ve done, and I had a great time traveling to races with my teammates and seeing my cross friends. But it was hard to take the idea that I should have been doing better than I was.

Part III
Resolutions.

So that was my year. And now, in the spirit of the season, I present my resolutions for 2010.

In 2010, I will:

• Relax. I can’t worry about the training I can’t get done. I just have to work with what I have and be cool with it.
• Wait. No need for me to race in the spring. I will spend March, April, May riding long when I can. I believe the lack of a sufficient aerobic base hurt me for cross this year. I just didn’t have the solid engine as support for the intense efforts of cyclocross.
• Race masters only. This one may get bent a bit. But psychologically, it’s way easier for me to race against people my own age—even if some of the guys in their 40s and 50s around the area used to be pros.
• Do a mountain bike race. Last summer I borrowed an MTB so that I could race it but it never happened. This season, I’m vowing again to race the fatty tires. It seems better prep for cross than road racing, and I just want to try something new.
• Not gag at my cross races.

I’m sure there are other things that should be on my list, but that’s all I can think of for now. As always, the brink of a new season brings nervous expectation: How will this season go? Will I accomplish my goals? This year for me will be about getting back to basics: riding long, enjoying the bike, and not sucking.