Northstar and Lake Tahoe: two gems in the California sierras

How do you top a week in Utah? Well, you go a little farther west and work a race just 45 minutes away from Reno, at the beautiful ski resort of Northstar, California. Barely 36 hours home I was back on a plane, heading west.

If only everything had been as smooth as writing this is. You may not believe the story that is about to unfurl, but it is true. I had a brainfart of epic proportions when I checked in at the American Airlines counter in Lubbock--almost nobody there, small-talk banter with the check-in agent, taking my two checked pieces of luggage to the TSA screeners, waltzing through security with TSA pre-check printed on my boarding pass. no problem. With about 50 minutes until my flight to Phoenix I settle into the work area that the airport provides and, focused on my upcoming races, hammer out a few e-mails. When the incoming plane arrives at the gate I pack up my laptop--and then, holy St. Moses, where is my rollaboard? Really, where is it? Amazing how quickly the mind works, re-living an insignificant period of our lives, one that we thought we'd never revisit. Even while racing back to the TSA check-point I realize that I had never put the Away bag on the screening belt. Back to the gate, how much time do I have before you close the doors? Enough to leave the secure area--so, off to the check-in counter, no bag, where the hell is my bag, somebody must have seen my bag, dammit, what an idiot I am. The TSA line now is 25 deep and I blatantly jump the line (nobody complains), explain to the TSA guy that I've lost my bag, he points me to a courtesy phone that's directly connected to Airport OPs, no, we don't have a bag here nor have we had any reports. My heart totally sinks.

With two minutes to spare I make it onto the plane, sans bag, of course. My heart is pounding, thoughts race through my mind, how can I do my job without my uniform? Hell, I don't even have any underwear except what I wear. I'm sitting in 1A, in First, and talk incoherently to the fellow across the aisle who commiserates and offers that there are more good people in the world than thugs and that the bag will show up. And with nothing else to do I sit back and nurse G&Ts and worry my head off.

In Phoenix, I immediately call Lubbock Airport OPs again, in the futile hope that the bag have been turned in. I'm told to call Airport Police to report my bag as stolen. I talk to a friendly officer, Heath (first or last name I never figured out), who hears me out, takes notes, and tells me he'll call me back ASAP. Fifteen minutes later my phone rings, and Officer Heath asks a few more questions about the bag, to truly identify it, and then he tells me that the bag is in Phoenix, on a plane bound for San Diego. It turns out, the gentleman sitting across the aisle with his young son and his wife and infant child in the row behind him checked in shortly after I had. Somehow, confusion reigned and neither he nor his wife (or so I presume--maybe just two good friends traveling together?) realize that they check a bag that is not theirs to San Diego, my bag, the bag that is patiently sitting right where I left it at the counter when I rolled my checked bags to the screeners.

Officer Heath--who had gleaned all of this info through reviewing security tapes and then talking with the AA check-in personnel--gives me the phone number of my fellow traveller. I call him, but he is already on the plane to San Diego and about to leave Phoenix, but he promises to take care of things once in SAN. Oh, by the way, what does your bag look like, he wants to know. Talk about a tragicomedy.

To bring all this to a happy conclusion, traveler X retrieves my bag, talks to American personnel who put the bag on a flight to LAX and then onward to Reno where it arrives around midnight, long after I had made it to Northstar. In the morning, my benefactor provided me with a baggage claim number, and as I had to go back to the Reno airport anyhow to pick up a rental car I was reunited with my bag after less than 24 hours of separation yet more extra heartbeats than are good for one's health. OMG, have you ever heard of an odyssee like that? Footnote: Upon my return Monday night two officers stand in the Lubbock terminal, and I approach them to ask whether they happen to know Officer Heath. Of course, he was standing in front of me, and the selfie speaks volumes.

On to my otherwise GREAT time in the sierras! Thanks to the nature of my work I had some spare time on Friday and Saturday for two long rides--100 miles on Lake Tahoe and through the Truckee river valley and then some. Even on Thursday--after retrieving bag and rental car--there was time left over to explore the greater Northstar area on my Ritchey Outback. I had been here back in 2010 as Chief Referee for our Collegiate Mountain Bike National Championships, and so I knew how beautiful this area is. This time the race was the Enduro World Series, Round 7, and my role was not that of a referee.

As a little bonus, the organizer had provided housing in a very nice condo that I shared with USAC's Justin and Ben, the latter of whom I had roomed with last year in Missoula. Justin and I, of course, had last seen each other a few weeks back in Winter Park. We all had private bedrooms, but being able to cook together and knock back a few beers on the porch, looking at the forest, was a real plus.

Really, what was not to like about this assignment? My ride on Thursday took me across Brockway Summit and then back down to King's Beach, on Lake Tahoe. Oh, it is so beautiful here! I rode the eight or so miles to Tahoe City where the Truckee drains from the lake and carves a beautiful valley down to the town of Truckee. Lots of cycling lanes and bike paths make riding out here a pleasurable experience. In Truckee--wouldn't you know it?--I just had to check out to new brewpubs before completing my 47-mile loop, all of it above 6,000 feet of elevation.

Friday's ride could have taken me around the entire lake, but at 72 miles that's a pretty long ride and I had to keep an eye on the clock, so I decided on an out-and-back along the lake shore, starting at Kings' Beach. The vistas were magnificent and I certainly got my fill of climbing as the road undulates more than you'd think when looking at the map. No brewpubs that day, but I made it back early enough to use my gondola and ski-lift privileges to go up onto the mountain where the first day of the competition was going on. Another great day!

The bulk of my actual work was done on Sunday, and all went smoothly and without issues. It's always great to work with organizers who are supportive and provide the resources that I need. In return, I try to be as unobtrusive and maintenance-free as possible, and usually everything clicks. The race was extremely exciting, especially in the Elite Men's category where the margin of difference in six timed downhill sections came down to less than one second between First and Second! 

Monday came much too quickly--I could have easily spent a little more time in this paradise! But since my flight didn't leave Reno until 2:26 pm I was able to take things easy, get most of my paperwork done, stop by FedEx, and then have enough time for brewpub number 308, the unremarkable Silver Peak Brewery. A couple of uneventful flights and then I was back in the Hub City, where temps had reached 109F that day. Give me a week, and I'll be ready to run away again!

Jürgen

Playing at the 2019 Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah

Riding the local roads....

For a non-Mormon, I spend a fair amount of time in Utah, and I'm sure glad about it. The scenery is second to none, the weather has always smiled on me, and the people I've encountered out here are at least as friendly as Texans, which says a lot. So accepting an assignment to work at the Toughest Stage Race in America, as the ToU likes to bill itself, was a no-brainer.

Those who think they know me will swear that I accept these appointments only to add to my ever-growing list of brewpubs, and to appease them I went on the Tour de Brewtah upon my arrival on the Saturday before the Team Managers Meeting. My co-USAC official and friend Kris had worked out a meticulous plan to introduce me to the finer establishments of the Salt Lake City brew-scene, and the two of us spent a delightful evening sampling watered-down 4.2% excuses for beer that flowed off the tap in what are good, if not very good breweries. Really, it's not the brewmeisters' fault that Utah law limits what can come off the tap in a brewpub. Arcane laws allow canned beer with essentially unlimited alcohol content to be poured in the same brewpub whose taps can't serve anything with umph.

Tour of Brewtah organizer Kris secretly background scoring in SLC

A few days after our Tour de Brewtah I learned about the so-called "Zion Curtain" that was just recently lifted: Until abut a year ago, Utah's brewpubs were forbidden to locate the beer taps where  patrons could see them, lest someone be negatively influenced by seeing alcohol flow from the spigot. Fair enough--we have enough religions in the world to fill a book with what may seem odd to us as non-members of a particular group. So, it may all seem weird, but that's the way it is out here. I met enough good Mormon folks who embraced me and I respect their way of life. Traveling will teach you a lot.

We started racing on Monday with a Prologue (a very short but super-intense time trial) at Snowbird, a ski resort less than an hour away from Salt Lake. What gorgeous countryside! The racing was intense, I started to connect with my co-workers, and I even got to see a moose standing in the forest just a few meters away from the RV that was to be my office for the next week. What a way to start the race! And then two days later, we had to contend with an overturned ice truck that could have killed numerous cyclists, spectators, or officials when the driver (who, miraculously, walked away from the scene) lost his brakes on the way back down from Powder Mountain, where he had serviced the VIP tents. Wow, this one was scary. A few minutes earlier, and I could have died.

On the way to my office on top of Powder Mountain

Medalist Sports, who is also the organizer behind the AMGEN Tour of California and the (now-defunct men's) Colorado Classic, puts on an incredibly exciting and well-organized seven-stage race here in Utah, year in, year out. Having worked this race three times before this edition I knew what to expect: a car for me, comfy hotel accommodations at the end of the day, and unfaltering support in the job I had been assigned to complete. Medalist, on the other hand, also knows what I need to do my job and stay out of its staff's hair, so it's a mutually beneficial relationship that we have developed and nurtured over the years.

Six stages, preceded by a prologue, means that you get to see a bunch of this beautiful state. Thanks to my independent schedule I am always able to sneak in a couple or three rides when I am on these assignments. I had brought my trusty ti/carbon Ritchey BreakAway along, and since the organizers set me up with a huge Toyota Highlander (who said cycling is a green sport???) I was able to easily locomote from hotel to race start and then finish with an assembled bike and all my equipment and luggage behind my seat (where otherwise eight kids would sit). I managed to ride a total of 140 miles, despite driving close to 600 miles and changing hotels on almost a daily basis.

My rides were beautiful. Plain and simple, this is a great state for bike riding. Salt Lake has amazing bike trails, and in other places I relied on my good ol' Locus app to loop me around and get me back to the hotel in time to shower and get gussied up. When not on trails like the Jordan River Trail I rode through verdant and well-tended farmland, skirted the 'burbs, and enjoyed looking at manicured neighborhoods that are a testament to the state's wealth.

On my last day of riding, Saturday, I traversed the oh-so-pleasant Heber Valley, where the tour would do epic battle a day later. It was Swiss Days time in Midway, that lovely spot that I have called home for three years now whenever I have worked the Soldier Hollow UCI race. I tell you, if it weren't for certain religious realities and if houses didn't start at half a million, I could seriously consider relocating here.

I had a great time in Utah, helped by a supporting organizing committee and dedicated helpers when I was out in the field. And to think that I was actually paid to go out here and play is, well, amazing!

Jürgen

One week in Winter Park, Colorado (2019 USAC Mountain Bike National Championships)

Huge fields of almost 150 riders at nats

Why is it that my blog hardly ever gets updated in "real time"? Why is there always a week in between some memorable experience and the time I finally sit down and write about it? Is it maybe a need for me to digest the experience? Or is it the fact that once I get home there's so much stuff to do, things such as laundry, shopping, cleaning and riding bikes, making more airline reservations, answering e-mails and sifting through the snail mail that my man Ysidro deposits in the mailbox on the specified date, writing the occasional post-event report and finishing paperwork when my travel was "business"-related, calling friends that I have neglected for much longer than I would like, and trying to work on that ever-growing mountain of  recent issues of VeloNews, Car & Driver, Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Bicycle Retailer & Industry News?

Initial course inspection of the Pro downhill course--what's missing here?

Or could it just be that after working 103 officially clocked hours in eight days I'm just simply too exhausted to sit down and write blog post number 320?

Keeping your feet blister-free is part of the challenge--liner toe socks from injinji work for me

Looking back on this most recent trip, which took me to one of Colorado's most beautiful ski resorts, Winter Park, I think that it was truly the physical and mental toll that this huge event took on me that required some downtime afterward. For the fourth time in five years, USA Cycling had entrusted me with the leadership duties of our elite mountain bike championships, an event that--as far as I know--is the largest national championship that is being organized by USAC. For this year, we had more than 1,550 individual racers, most of whom competed in at least two disciplines, if not more. When I worked the race in Mammoth a few years back, we had about 1,200 individual racers.

The mountain guys at work, improving our start ramp for the DH

Top of the Pro DH on race day

USAC's mountain bike nats award Stars and Stripes jerseys to our elite racers (yes, the ones who compete in World Cups, World Championships, and the Olympics) in five disciplines: Downhill and Dual Slalom on the gravity side, Crosscountry and Short Track on the endurance side, and the beautifully all-encompassing Enduro, which really goes back to the roots of the mountain bike era and has a bit of everything--and which has grown exponentially in the past few years and claims an international series of its own, the EWS (Enduro World Series). But this is not just about the elite racers, the ones whom most of you would call "Pro" racers (whether they can actually make a living or not is not the defining criterion). Our national championships award age group medals to competitors as young as six years of age, and in some disciplines we have a 80+ category. And everyone who podiums--regardless of age--is in my view a true champion, and those who "merely" participate are heroes, too. Nationals podiums go five deep for "amateur" racers, and that's a good thing. Yep, years back I medaled, too.

I flew up to Colorado Springs two Saturdays ago and was picked up by my old (no, young!) friend Justin, who once was one of my apprentices and who is now the youngest International Commissaire at the UCI (if you discount the one European whose specialty is Indoor Cycling, an obscure aberration of the sport that is a distant relative of synchronized swimming and is really big in places such as the Czech Republic). Anyhow, Justin is also the guy who is responsible for more things having to do with US mountain biking than you would think one 27-year-old could handle. Without him, USAC would have to scramble, hard. Justin picked me up from the airport and I stayed with him and his wife, Morgan, in their nice CO Springs home for that night. Needless to say that we demolished a few beers that evening.

Justin driving the yellow box-truck

Sunday morning we drove up to Winter Park. Plans were changed a bit in that I drove Justin's car while he had to pilot a rented box-truck that contained some last-minute additions to the race infrastructure. Thanks to some crazy traffic and a one-hour accident-related standstill in Denver we made it to Winter Park with just enough time for me to preview the Pro Downhill course, on foot. The best racers will take a little less than six minutes to scream down the steep mountain side--it took me almost two hours (with frequent stops during which I gave feedback to Devin, the WP dude in charge of the course, in regard to issues with the course) to walk the 2.5 miles. After that came meetings with the timing crew, and more importantly, with Tara, who is USAC's lynchpin in making these races happen. Justin and I hit the local Safeway and the liquor store just before closing, and at 22:20 hrs we sat down in my condo for a hastily prepared yet pretty damn yummy dinner.

And thus we set the stage for the event, with a change in plans, a long day, and improvisations.

The mountain guys planning Enduro deployment strategy--these guys rock!

When I wrote earlier that "USAC entrusted me" with leading this event, it was in full appreciation of the fact that some people at our national governing body for the sport of Cycling think that I can lead a crew for an event of this magnitude. It is an honor to be called upon to be in charge of the officials for what boils down to be the equivalent of football's Superbowl. We have quite a few extremely  experienced, talented, and dedicated referees in the US, and I know most of them and feel privileged to have worked with and learned from them. The nine officials who were assigned to this event, to be led by me, are all in their own right accomplished commissaires. OK, some of our less experienced refs on the crew might not have been able to step in cold-turkey, but there were at least five officials who could do the same job as I did, or so I think after having worked with all of them on numerous occasions. They are, to use an analogy from the field of music, accomplished virtuosi on various instruments--but USAC brings me in to elevate these individual players to form an ensemble that will knock off your socks, without egos and without theatrics. I can't tell you how incredible it feels to be the director of such an orchestra. It's simply humbling.

Officially, the championships started on Monday with packet pick-up and onsite registration, practice sessions, and our first riders' meetings. Tuesday brought our first qualifying events and finals, and this kept going until Sunday afternoon. I had worked well ahead of the event on assigning my commissaires to the various positions that need to be covered--an extremely complex task that took me days to accomplish ahead of the event and required daily fine-tuning and adjustments during race week. For Thursday, the day of the 8-stage Enduro, we actually had to call in extra officials as otherwise we could not have handled sixteen distinct starts and finishes for more than 150 racers, all in separate locations all over the mountain. It was a logistic nightmare that definitely required some out-of-the-box thinking. With everyone's help and efforts we got the job done, and we actually smelled like roses when our officials' scoring saved the day when the timing company's electronic systems experienced some hick-ups. Dude, that evening I felt a big weight lifted off my shoulders.

Scenes from the Cross Country and Dual Slalom

That feeling didn't last long. On Friday the schedule called for three concurrent finals in three disciplines, in three different locations. Do the math: Our temporary officials were all gone (except an old friend from Texas who used to be an official but had not renewed her license in a few years--Justin and I were able to fast-track her renewal and Christine worked alongside the other officials for the final three days of the event). You need to understand that as Chief Referee I cannot assign myself to a particular position as there are always issues that arise that I have to deal with--and you can't do that when you're the starter or finish judge of a race. That Friday was by far the most complex day of racing that I have ever experienced.

A few shots of my crew in action

The days were long, all of them. Most of the time we'd have a meeting at 7 a.m. to make sure that we all understood what everyone's assignments were; at that point, Leslie, our secretary commissaire, would have already been on the job for an hour or so to make sure that everyone had start lists for the day's event. When I'd leave at 8:30 or 9:30 p.m., Leslie would still be helping the timing crew massage the results. She had even more overtime hours than I did. On a few mornings we met at 6:30 a.m., with some of the first racing starting at 7:10 a.m! Needless to say, there was not much nightlife in us after these exhausting days. I enjoyed dinner in a resort restaurant twice--the rest of the time dinner consisted of something to wolf down in the condo. No complaints here as my condo mate was my old buddy Scott from Honolulu (I had seen him last in late 2017 when I had gone to Hawaii for a week of R&R and stayed for a couple of nights at his place). We'd knock back a couple of beers, talk about the just-finished day and preview what was to come, and then we crashed. It wasn't until the last night that I didn't wake up at 4 a.m., thinking of something that I had either forgotten or that I needed to pay special attention to. Leslie told me about her middle-of-the-night sweat attacks, and I can't imagine how Tara managed this week.

Nutty fan at the top, and my good friends Suzanne and Fred Schmidt
from Waco--Fred in the 80+ XC race

So, you might think that this is just a damn stressful job for a retired dude. Why subject myself to sleep deprivation and nightmares? Well, officiating at this level is a bit addictive. It's not a power thing, at least not for me--it's more about the satisfaction to bring out the very best in the people who are looking to me for leadership. It is taking great pride in making the race as positive as possible for all those athletes as well as their supporters. It's about working with the mountain guys, the medics, the timing crew, the announcers, the vendors, the grandparent who has come out to watch her granddaughter race but doesn't know how and where and when to catch a glimpse of her. It's about seeing old friends and acquaintances from all over the country whom I have know forever (and who always know my name even if I can't recall theirs). It's about having untold people stopping me and saying, "Jürgen, you are putting on a great event" and then responding, "No, it's all those other people who are doing it--I'm just happy to be here and make sure that we don't have too much mayhem." And man, if that's not addictive, I don't know what is.

Thank you, USA Cycling, for giving me these once-in-a lifetime opportunities. And to all my crew and everyone else involved: Thank you for making me look good! 

Jürgen

PS: And here are a few movie clips: