Detroit Invitational Cyclocross

(The above image -- which is frickin' awesome -- is by Ducky Detroit.)

Driving in this morning to the Detroit Invitational Cyclocross Race, I passed Chrysler's Mound Road Plant and had a sort of Pavlovian averse reaction. In college, I worked for a company that manufactured aluminum intake manifolds, and spent most of my work days at Chrysler's Trenton Engine Plant. But every once in awhile I'd get called in to this or that random plant at 2 a.m. to sort parts all night. Mound Road was one of them. I was happy to pass it en route to a bike race this morning, pretty much right across the street.

Dorias / Dorais Park is on the corner of Mound Rd. and Outer Drive on Detroit's east side. At the southeastern part of the park is an old concrete velodrome, recalling a time when track bicycle racing was the absolute biggest sport in America (pre-dating the 1969 Dorais Park track, of course, but go with me here). Track racing was once bigger than baseball. Bigger than boxing (which defined epic back in the day). The original Madison Square Garden, in fact, was initially built for bike races.

Today's festivities would be hosted by the RACING GREYHOUNDS. The 10 a.m. race was apparently the last race of their internal series for the year; the 11:30 invitational would prove to be a largely goofball throwdown between the rest of us.

A few warmup laps upon arrival revealed that on this course there could be nothing so petty as warming up. Steep hills; cambered hairpin corners; obscene, knee-deep mud you could only properly describe as "Belgian"; a set of obstacles that made you duck in the middle; a pile of snow; and a tour of the aforementioned velodrome. . . . This, boys and girls, was nothing short of an object lesson in suffering happily.

The RACING GREYHOUNDS did their final proper race of the year under 55 degree skies, strung out along the course at the end like so many hopes and dreams, the guys in front racing their hearts out, and the guys in back -- where I'd soon be in the next race -- just kind of enjoying a morning of hard riding with friends.

We queued up for the invitational race at the top of the hill, all jokes and the anticipation of pain. Flew down the hill together, maybe 40 of us, toward and around the velodrome. I'm feeling good, mid-pack where I seem happiest so far in my short career. Back up the hill to the "Tequila Shot Shortcut," which is the option of a tequila shot in lieu of a hundred-yard death march down and back up a soggy, slow-ass hill. I fly by (or maybe I crawled) as nearly everyone else lines up at the shortcut; I'm thinking "shit, maybe I shouldn't wait until my last lap or two to take a shot." Sure enough, "mid-pack" becomes "way-the-f@@k-at-the-back" as almost the whole, now-solidly-on-the-way-to-drunk peloton screams down the back into the mud while I, with a couple other suckers, struggle up the Sucker Hill.

The next two laps are this: I pass the same few people down by the velodrome over and over again as they pass me up on the hill with shots. Meanwhile, the real race is happening always somewhere else on the course where skinny tubular 'cross tires have been inflated to meet, in just such a way, today's race conditions. I have no idea where that is. I'm just happy to not have Jason McBride breathing down my neck (see my previous post, Stomach of Anger, Lansing), which is to say, I'm not quite ever near death today. But I'm still riding pretty hard. And every once in awhile, I even sight, like a yeti, that guy dressed as Bob Marley, drinking at least as much as he's riding, even as he hammers with distinction -- if not dignity -- through his second race of the morning.

The whole 45 minutes are a muddy, soaked blur of beer bacon donut dollar playing-card hand-ups (oh yeah, we're also playing poker), snowmound bunnyhops, obstacle walks-not-runs, and run-ins with the ghosts of the old velodrome. My claim to fame was making it up, three times, the steep-ass backside hill behind the tequila debauchery (which is also to say that I walked it four or five times. I lost track of the laps). By the end of the race, my bike was so bogged down in mud that it refused to shift properly. DNFs started littering the course en masse somewhere around the third lap.

I started taking tequila shots on lap four and realized, to my chagrin, that by "shots" they meant more like "half shots." Shit, man! By then it had become clear that if you want to be competitive in the RACING GREYHOUNDS Detroit Invitational, you have to basically throw back some sauce on every lap (and if you're toward the back on the last lap, also apparently just kind of use the course as a guideline at that point). I'll definitely be back next year with more proper race tactics (which isn't to outright admit that I might also carry my own playing cards).

Afterward, a bunch of people from the race headed over to Kuhnhenn Brewery, some just to scream at the U of M / Ohio State football game. Awesome beer, good pizza, and for me, time spent as well with a couple of my best friends.

All in all, a great party of a race. A wonderful event put on by a pretty crazy group of local bike racers. And to that sadistic CX Czar, Jeff: that course took a few years off of untold lives today. Not cool, dude. You and I are emphatically not cool. (PS I'll see you there next year! & in all seriousness, thanks for an epic day. It was basically a perfect distillation of every reason to ride bikes in the first place.)