A bit of this, a bit of that, and a whole bunch of other stuff

Looking back on this past month-plus, it becomes obvious that I don't live the life of the typical retiree. The by far longest off-time at home came right after my return from Birmingham, when I spent a whopping seventeen days in Lubbaville! But—I need to add—right in the middle of that time I underwent cataract surgery on my right eye, and that obviously had an effect on my comings and goings for at least a week, allowing me to play cook.

I am happy to report that the surgery came off without complications and that the recovery and outcome far surpassed my expectations. My right eye had seen some drastic deterioration over the past year, making me feel uneasy on the bike since checking for traffic behind by looking over my right shoulder yielded nothing but a greyish curtain and no useable info. Now, exactly five weeks after my surgery on August 18, I'm done with administering daily antibiotic eye drops and I see much, much clearer. I'm just hoping that the left eye will hurry up and get worse quickly so that I'm eligible for another visit with the very personable Dr. Anderson and his office crew. My own private optician, Ms. Sandy, was an incredible help and offered so much support. Thanks! (She also has a knack for taking pre-op and post-op photos!)

Exactly ten days after surgery I got into the Z4 to drive over to Wichita Falls for the annual madness that's officially known as Hotter'n Hell Hundred. Longtime readers know that I usually refer to it as the Dumber'n Hell Hundred: Why on Earth would thousands of people spend good money to enter a ride in the most miserable of conditions and not even stand a chance to win a dime in a tour that they believe is a "contest"? At least the ancillary USA Cycling races (in comparison, they attracted only a few hundred racers in comparison to the tourist ride of the weekend) had prize lists, and the number of crashes was fairly low, too. I left Friday morning, worked the afternoon crits, slept, worked Saturday's road race (trailing the men's P/1/2 field in a follow car), and was back home for dinner. OK, so I was a bit worn out, but the paycheck was bigger than what I used to make in a week of teaching back in the days.

Whenever I was home, I tried to go for a ride as often as possible. Lubbock was and is hot, but it couldn't compete with the heat indexes of Wichita Falls, Birmingham, Los Cabos, or the Katy Trail. My home routine during this summer was simple: Sleep until I wake up (sometimes 6:30, sometimes 8:10, depending on how many busy dreams had kept me awake at night), check emails whilst having coffee on the porch, kit up, ride for 2:05 hrs to 2:15 hrs depending both on how the strength of the wind and how I felt (but always 28 miles), and then take an outdoor shower and enjoy the Jacuzzi before having my lunch sandwich while watching the German Tagesschau via the internet. Yep, pretty predictable. The afternoons were spent more inside than outdoors because most days were above 95F degrees, with several cracking 100F. Sandy would come over for dinner a few times every week, and sitting on the porch with the water feature running and the heat breaking was the daily highlight, whether together or solo.

Hard to believe, but my 70th b'day balloon is still floating,
despite being shriveled like an old man ...

My daily ride takes me past Will Rogers, here done up
for the beginning of the semester

Five days after the HHH, Sandy and I left for our Labor Day trip to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. All three hotel nights were taken care of with certificates or points, and Sandy's Pearl (a white Nissan Rogue SUV) is a surprisingly economical vehicle so that even the insane gas prices were more of an annoyance than a real issue. That left money over to visit a few new brewpubs, enjoy Il Vicino's pizza, and even take a gondola ride up to Sandia Peak, something that Sandy had never done before. To get from SF to Albuquerque, we took the route via Los Alamos and through the Jemez Valley, and I could tell how much Sandy savors all those sights and new impressions.

Three days after our return I took a Lyft to the airport and flew to Madison, WI, where a rental car waited for me to take me to La Crosse, also in Wisconsin. It was the weekend of USAC's National Gravel Gravel Championships, which started and ended in Le Crescent, Minnesota—just across the Mississippi from the host hotel. It was my third time to be the chief referee for a national championship this year, and I worked with another eleven USAC refs (eight of them on motorcycles) to keep 625 starters fair and safe. I should have pressed harder for an extra day on the ground: Arriving at noon on Friday and having to fly home just 48 hours later was just too quick, especially in light of the airport transfers and racers' and officials' meetings on Friday afternoon and a race start at the crack of dawn on Saturday. Still, I managed to add another four microbreweries and a fabulous taproom to my list, and I did enjoy myself. Sleep, as always, is vastly overrated.

Fishing the Mississippi, seen from Wisconsin and the far bank being in Minnesota

My crew of mostly moto commissaires

You know you're in Minnesota when ...

Even after 106 miles of gravel it sometimes comes down to barely an inch

The first two days after my return were so damn windy that I simply could not get myself to going out on the bike. Instead I busied myself with preparations for the final two races on my 2026 calendar, the first one this past weekend in the form of the Texas State Road Championships. Once again, there was a lot of preparatory work for the chief, but that's part of the job. On Friday, I dropped the BMW's roof and drove down into the Hill Country, to Oatmeal (near Burnett). We had a crew of eight commissaires, almost all of whom I have worked with over the years. The race took place on Saturday, and not wanting to push my luck on the long return trip I drove for just a couple of hours to Comanche where I used 15,000 Sonesta points for a free stay in the surprisingly decent America's Best Value Inns. On Sunday I completed the drive back to Lubbock. By now, gas prices have hit $4.00 a gallon, but Ozkar is happiest at 2,000 RPM and sips like a Prius. Just today I read in the NY Times about hypermilers; I am definitely one of them!

When I publish this blogpost, autumn will have officially arrived in the northern hemisphere. Right on cue, the heat has broken and I can enjoy almost two weeks at home before Sandy and I will fly out to Grand Junction, CO, for my fourth and last national championships as PCP this year, our collegiate mountain bike nats. Sandy is excited as she has been accepted as a stagiaire, or less impressive, an apprentice. Before then, there will be lots of emails and other race preparations, but there will also be a chance to cook some decent meals and enjoy those cooler fall days.

Jürgen

When racers at an event are called athletes and the race is anything but a race

That's an odd-sounding title for this relatively short blogpost, but it sums up the UCI BMX World Cup in Birmingham, Alabama, which I attended last weekend. When we hear "BMX," we think of adult men racing kids' bikes around a pump track for about 35 seconds. But BMX has another side to it, and it is quite different: Think of skaters doing jumps and tricks on tiny bikes that have no brakes. Welcome to the world of BMX Freestyle.

Even though Freestyle (the Park version only—more on Flatland in a minute) has been included in the Olympics since 2020, it's certainly not as much mainstream in the US as regular BMX racing, and thus one has to see it as a niche sport among niche sports. If there is awareness, it is most likely with the younger crowd because of its resemblance to skateboarding.

Flatland is less thrilling and sexy than Park as there are no jumps and ramps; riders stay on the flat ground and do routines on their bikes that involve twirling handlebars 360°+, rolling back and forth on one wheel, and doing things on and with the bike that require absolute balance and body control. (When I grew up in Germany, once in a while we'd watch Artistic Cycling on TV, a discipline requiring men and women to perform handstands on the handlebars or put their shoulder on the saddle while outlining a figure eight with their coasting bike. Artistic Cycling is still a UCI discipline, but it is totally obscure on our shores.)

For a niche sport, BMX Freestyle is relatively big business, obviously not as big as the Tour de France or mountain biking, but big enough to have a year-long World Cup competition with four events on three continents. Sponsors big and small are on board, and athletes from about 40 nations participated in this round. Birmingham had been able to score the rights to host the second stop for the 2026 season, offering infrastructure left over from the city's hosting the World Games in 2022, an event that attracted more than 3,500 athletes who competed in over 100 disciplines. If you're not familiar with the World Games, they are sometimes described as the "Olympics for non-Olympic sports."

Since I no longer do UCI work you can probably guess why I was in Alabama. Like in every other sport, BMX Freestyle participants are subject to medical controls in and out of competition. I was joined by my friend Linda, with whom I had worked a race in Puerto Rico earlier this year. Over the years we have developed a close rapport with each other, and it is always a treat to be paired up with Linda.

The event was set up in a very interesting location: under the elevated lanes of Interstate 20! The droning of the cars and trucks above us was drowned out by the kind of loud music that you'd expect at an event that counts Monster Energy as one of its main sponsors. Looking at the "crowd" (four-day passes to the event were sold for $47 through Ticketmaster, and it wasn't until the day of the ill-fated finals that there were maybe 200 spectators in attendance; the qualifications were held in front of fewer than 50 individuals who were not directly related to the competition), tattoos are a tribal symbol, as are at times outlandish outfits, spectators and athletes alike. Security was surprisingly tight, with a chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter and TSA-like entry points. Linda and I had to think back to the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Snowshoe that attracted an estimated 15,000 paying spectators in a location that required for most at least a three-hour drive.... Remember what I said about "niche." 

Birmingham is a pleasant city of about 200,000 inhabitants, and the metro area is said to top a million people. There are a few skyscrapers in the downtown area, there are several well-kept parks and historic buildings, and there's even a free art museum (that we never got a chance to visit). The general pace seems to be rather Southern, a bit on the slower side. And why hurry in this heat and humidity? During our stay, daily rainstorms added to the sauna-like environment, and just walking the few steps from our hotel, the Sheraton,  to the venue challenged the sweat glands. 

In a perfect world, the venue would have been weatherproof, but with all the metal scaffolding to attract lightning and the one-foot gap between the west- and east-bound lanes of the elevated interstate enough rain made it onto the field of play to cause numerous delays, schedule changes, and finally the cancellation of the Park finals on Sunday. No worries, we had athletes on the podium to take home prize money for winning this first BMX Freestyle World Cup in the United States The winners were determined based on the outcome of the earlier semifinals (men) and qualification round (women).

Linda helping waterproof athletes

Whenever we work such events, Linda and I (and our colleagues worldwide) are dependent on local volunteers without whom we couldn't do what we're doing. One of the highlights of our job is to meet these locals and learn about their life in a place that we're visiting for just a few days. Some of them go out of their way to not only be helpful but make us feel at home. Veon and Ty were two such individuals, and we enjoyed our conversations with them in which they shared so much of themselves. Veon smiled in three days more than other people in a month, and Ty, who initially had signed up for only one day of volunteering, decided to not only return on a daily basis but to also take Linda and me around town to two breweries for a few beers and dinner (even though he himself doesn't drink). We felt so at ease with these good folks and can only hope that we treated them with the respect and friendship they deserve.

Linda left on Monday morning to go back to her real job in the Portland, OR, area, and I left a few hours later in the afternoon. For a while it had looked as if Linda might have to hang out in Denver for an extra seven hours when a (United) crewmember didn't show up in time for her initial flight, but somehow she made it home at a decent hour. My AA flights, for once, were on time (actually, the DFW to LBB hop was delayed by ten minutes since we waited for some late-connecting passengers—for once, somebody at American realized that nobody connects onward from LBB and thus six stressed-out passengers were spared the usual wait for the last-flight-of-the-day routine).

And then, surprise, surprise, Sandy showed up at the airport to take me home! A good trip, indeed!

Jürgen