The final few spring races

My week in Utah is slowly coming to an end, and by the time I publish this post I will be back in Lubbock. Since my last, post-Germany ruminations, life has been fairly routine (at least for me who is on the go so much). Actually, things were a little bit calmer than originally planned as the Troy NICA high school race, already rescheduled for the weekend after my return from Germany because of rain and then again rescheduled for a different venue in College Station, had to be cancelled at the last moment because of yet another massive round of torrential rains.

So, instead of unpacking, repacking, and driving off into the sunrise I got to stay home for a whopping eight days! (Yes, the NICA race would have eaten up four of those eight.) Weatherwise, it's been a rather cool and moist spring, and it seems as if my time at home always coincides with the worst of the weather. So, while I did get to go out for a few rides, it wasn't the usual mileage that I would cover this time of the year. Add to that the increasingly tender arthritic shoulders and—truth be told—riding has lost some of its luster for me. When I do pop a Meloxicam for the arthritis, riding is somewhat less uncomfortable (most non-cyclists would call it painful), but the pure joy of riding and hitting a climb hard has been relegated to that treasure trove of cherished memories. Go out for that ride, dammit, because if you stop you'll never start again—that's the new mantra.

OK, so let's add to the bad news that age brings with it: My visit to my opthamologist friend, Greg, revealed that there are the beginnings of a cataract in the right eye, something that's not requiring immediate action but that will need to be addressed later on in the year, when things are a bit less busy. Anything else?

I spent a good part of my ten days at home removing live oak leaves from my backyard. For those of you who are not familiar with this species of tree, unlike other oaks they don't lose all their leaves in one fell swoop during a three-day span in the fall (that's how "normal" trees in Lubbock act) but rather exchange their foliage over a three-month span starting in earnest in the middle of winter. Leaves gently float down, but when the wind kicks in at 25 mph or more, it's a veritable blizzard of leaves. And the wind, of course, does its part to build piles of them here, there, and everywhere throughout the yard.

Even with various blowers, vacuums, and a "mower" that collects the leaves from the artificial turf, it is pretty much a sisyphean task to rid the yard of all that detritus. I have no idea how many 60-gallon barrels of dead foliage I have collected and deposited in the back-alley Dumpster, but I know that I treated myself to several full-body workouts that lasted an entire afternoon. Sure, after clean-up the yard looks beautiful enough for me to plop down, switch on the water feature, and kick back, but the next hard wind will negate all the efforts.

My friends Donna and Bobby set me up with some plant-life for the living wall that Bravo Xteriors had planted with annuals, not perennials as had been the plan. The ground plant life mostly survived the winter, and there are colors here and there. I thoroughly enjoy walking out into the yard in the morning with my cup of coffee and inspect my little fiefdom, taking note of a new shoot here or a budding flower there. Maybe one of these days I am going to grow a green thumb longer than just a centimeter!

Before I knew it, the time had come to get back to the airport to fly to Oklahoma for a weekend of working rounds 5 and 6 of the 2024 UCI BMX World Cup. My friend Andrew from Toronto joined me, and after work we had a chance to go to a few brewpubs and enjoy the feeble nightlife of Tulsa. Our hotel—the Hyatt Regency—was in the heart of downtown, but the entire place was deader than a doornail. Maybe it was the weekend's tornado watches that kept people at home, maybe it was some concert that was happening Friday night that syphoned off humanity, but it was dead. Four days on the road, job successfully done, not much else to tell.

Not even a week (and a needed haircut) later I was back on a plane, this time headed to Utah. Longtime readers my remember that for the past four or five years I have been on the officiating crew for the Soldier Hollow Bike Fest races. Since the humble first race I had been part of this event, which every year I put at the top of the race wishlist that we submit to USA Cycling ahead of the start of the season. For some reason or another, this year I was not assigned as a commissaire, something that I felt a bit sore about since over the years I had contributed a lot to the success of SOHO. And last year, I had been one of two USAC members who had, during an intimate VIP dinner at the Tree Room at Sundance Resort, provided our input to the organizers as they were preparing to land the 2024 Pan-American Mountain Bike Championships for this venue (a quest in which they were successful).

But sometimes fate plays in mysterious ways, and just a few weeks ago I was approached by Switzerland whether I could replace a colleague who was not able to go to Utah, after all. Even though this is the weekend of our NICA State Championship Finals (which are right now, as I am writing this on Sunday at noon, battling torrential rains in Longview, TX), I decided to work the American Continental Championships (or for short, the Pan-Ams)—high school race versus the biggest mountain bike event in the Americas this year has a clear favorite.

My colleague Juan José from Colombia and I have been spending our afternoons at the venue, working with a small number of athletes inside of a warm building after the conclusion of their respective races—and until yesterday, these races were run in extremely cold and wet (and muddy) conditions. When we arrived here, the area was under a winter storm warning, and we had fresh snow on the ground. There has been a gradual warming trend, but for our Central and South American riders especially, these conditions came as a total shock.

On Friday, Juan José and I had to make a run down to Salt Lake City to the fancy, new SMRTL laboratory, and we seized the opportunity to do a little bit of sightseeing around Temple Square. It is the first time for me to work with my Colombian colleague, and we're having a fabulous time together and have gelled into a great team. I hope we'll get some opportunities in the future to spend more time together. Seeing him gorge himself with Popeye's ("best restaurant!") chicken was a sight to behold.

In hindsight, I am very glad that instead of working as a commissaire all day long in the windy cold and enduring the occasional shower we can show up early in the afternoon, set up our workplaces, instruct volunteers in their duties, and then spend some time one-on-one with some of the best mountain bike racers in the world, warm and comfortable. Sure, we get back to the hotel well after the commissaires have left the venue, but we're certainly not pushing their hours. Not bad. And the pay is better....

Juan José commented on how many people I know here (and how many more people seem to know me!). Well, that's what working an event several years in a row and calling all of our national referees who were present my friends will do. This kind of experience has made our job really easy, so this turned out to be really much more of a vacation interrupted by occasional high-pressure tasks than a weeklong work slog.

The racing will conclude late this afternoon, and quite likely we won't wrap things up until after dark. Juan José will fly back early tomorrow morning, and I will make another visit to the lab before heading back to the airport, returning my rental car, and flying home to Lubbock for about two weeks before heading for the East Coast and then the Rockies for two commissaire assignment. Spring is done, and now we're looking forward to the summer racing season.

Jürgen