KYScoast

The Peter L. Teeuwen Memorial Ride

2010-01-31T08:11:00.010-05:00

I sat in my warm home looking out the window at the rare snow falling, whipped by wind gusts and felt the embrace of the wood stove's presence. The coast is so viscerally raw in these conditions. It's as if it wants to push us all away from the very place buried by the summer's hordes later in the year. Locals here know this snow event thing is rare and fleeting. The rain that followed confirmed this and worked for hours and hours to wash the white blanket away. We are now left with only wind and cold, cold, cold.

Two weeks ago I rode with about 40 other cyclists to honor the memory of Peter Teeuwen in Chesapeake, Virginia. Among the riders were Peter's brother, Gerald and his son John. His daughter, Christina, was at the Grassfield Ruritan Club building with others preparing the potluck meal the cyclists attending had brought this day.

When I arrived riders were going in and out of the building and standing around the back of their vehicles pumping tires and wrapping up for a ride we all knew would challenge only a freezing north wind and not each other. We rolled our bikes out to Shillaleigh Road with Gerald standing by his bike at the head of the group with John, his son, moving to his side.

I noticed Gerald looking around as if someone was still to arrive. Then I noticed 3 guys move into position by his side with the letters "VBW" on the backs of their kits. They were members of Virgina Beach Wheelmen and all were competitive cyclists: Jonathan Nisbet, Tim Shockey, and Tom Tomayo. Their connection to Peter Teeuwen I would learn later was quite special.

We set off down the road, the same road, the same course and direction many here ride in the Peter L. Teeuwen Time Trial known among cyclists as the "PLT." The first leg of the 23-mile course was downwind. The group's riders found their places. I was trying to move up near Gerald and his entourage so that I could do a little eavesdropping. I knew it would be good.

As we wound downwind we settled into a 20-21 mph pace. A rider named Andreas rode to my right and we talked a little on the ride. Turns out he's a Category 3 racer and knows Robert a friend and member of our club, GS Outer Banks. He told me he had recently purchased bikes for his wife and daughter and they all were getting some riding in together.

I remarked how much I loved to hear the distinct whisper on group rides of spokes slicing the air. Gerald came off the front group and dropped back along with John and the VBW riders. The guys on the front strained forward seeming to want to ride faster. We were up to 23+ mph now. I heard someone call my name from behind and I assumed correctly it was Gerald and he wanted me to rein the tempo in a little. So I relayed the message to the front and everybody eased back some.

For many of us, it's something new to just relax and ride with the very people you compete in races against all of each season for years. It's like seeing them and automatically flipping into the race mode.

Peter Teeuwen, according to Gerald, had not died on the road, but maybe as a result of a series of head injuries received crashing in road races over the years. He was forty-one years old when he passed away.

The last 6 miles we were back on the stick of the lollipop course returning to the Ruritan Club bucking the north wind. We traded pulls with plenty of riders to share the work, each thanking the rider coming off the front after his effort.

The Chesapeake police had come out to stand traffic guard for us at the corners of the course just like they always do for the PLT's. It all looked the same as it does during a time trial. But unlike the time trials, today's ride allowed us to ride the course sub-anaerobic threshold. No red lining and spitting up internal organs on the final mile to the finish line today.

Also unlike the PLT's, there was hot coffee and a fine meal waiting in the clubhouse when we returned. Inside there were three rows of tables covered with cloth tableclothes and potted plants called Cyclamens with their floppy pink petals grown by Gerald's family in their greenhouses I suppose. There was another table with a computer scrollng photos of the Teeuwen's racing days and a stand-up collage of friend and family photos.

So we all ate together---the cyclists, the police, and the family. While we sat, Jonathan Nisbet and Tom Tomayo came to the front of the room and told us of three 15-year-old boys who had been lured into cycling and then encouraged and groomed to compete in races by a local bike racer. They were shown how to do it---how to put on the strange tight-fitting cycling kits, how to trust clipping your shoes to the pedals, and how to train and mentally prepare for this very arcane sport in America.

They were carried to races everywhere and discovered a passion and place they didn't know existed. The veteran bike racer who took them even far away to race, endured their adolescent attitudes and behavior with boundless patience even when they drove golf balls in hotel hallways and explored the possibilities of light explosives and fireworks. The races had lit a fire in them.

So here they stood in their mid-thirties still missing their mentor, Peter L. Teeuwen, but still loving the sport he had shown them. However no one misses Peter, I observed, more than this family. Of this I am certain. And here before us all was the human legacy Peter had left. Nothing in this world counts more than this. Nothing.

A Ride In Memorium---Peter Teeuwen

2010-01-08T20:46:00.008-05:00

I'm thinking about going to Chesapeake this Sunday at 1 p.m. to ride in memory of Peter Teeuwen, a ride organized apparently by the family and friends of this deceased former pro cyclist. This is the ride's 18th year. I've been aware of it but never taken the time, been to the trouble. But this year I may go. This is not a ride which demands any special fitness level or even a fancy bike (a reason I can do it I suppose).

I began racing five years ago starting with a few time trials. They were the Peter Teeuwen Time Trials, three each summer. I raced two that year. You race on a 23 mile course shaped like a lollipop with square corners against the clock and your own mind and endurance. I loved it.

Even in my first time trial I noticed a growling, grumbly, irascible old guy who appeared totally in charge. He wore a broad hat and long-legged khaki pants and directed cyclist traffic around the starting gate in the 95-degree heat. He seemed to own the place. He would grumble about something unknown and then make a crack about some obscure part on someone's bike as they rolled to the line, a part I heard him say he hadn't seen on a bike in 25 years. Sounded like he'd been around this stuff for a long, long time because he had.

I became struck by this stalwart figure in command and was dying to know more about him. I love real characters. And this surely was one. After building homes as a carpenter/contractor for over 30 years, I've learned it's one of the things I savor, like sustenance itself. The business trains you to honor these characters who get it done. Gerald Teeuwen, Peter's brother, is such a character. Solid.

One possible reward for my trip to the Grassfield Ruritan Clubhouse building on Shillelagh Road is to ride with Gerald. My gift to Gerald, long overdue the way I see it, is to ride at least one time in memory of his brother whom I was never fortunate enough to know. I'm sure there will be lots of local cyclists there, as there always are. Gerald and his family have supported road bike racing and riding in southeastern Virginia for years. They more than deserve our thanks for the events they support which benefit riders like those in our club and me.

I arrived at the Grassfield Ruritan Club for registration for one of the time trials there in recent years and a photo tacked to the doors caught my eye. I looked closer. Here was a black-and-white shot of three cyclists straddling old style road bikes wearing cycling caps, the tight-fitting kind with short brims. I looked even more closely. One rider's face looked familiar. It was Gerald. His daughter, Christina, told me later that day it was her dad in his racing days in Europe. This was during the early 1970's, a time when riding and racing in Europe was only important in America to those who rode and raced. I bought my first road bike in 1971.

Sunday I'll learn what it is to ride in someone's memory and honor. Should be very positive. I'll let you know.

The Winter Cycling 25---What I Wore Today

2010-01-01T21:12:00.006-05:00

Today I was late and in a hurry to get to a New Year's Day group ride with our club riders. It felt like it took me so long to dress and leave. This always happens when in a hurry to do almost anything. My sensibilities are heightened. If surfing today, I'd be struggling into my wetsuit. In this case though, I was struggling getting out the door for the ride and there was more to wear.

When I returned I decided to study what was behind the delay leaving the house. I went into the bathroom to shower and began stripping. I had already taken off my helmet, under-helmet cap, road glasses, shoe covers, shoes, wind-breaker/Thinsulated vest, winter cycling jersey, gloves, and watch. I was now up to eleven items, apparel and accessories.

I continued this sort of obsessive look into just how far I was into this sport I really do love. But from time to time I do need a self audit.

I peeled off the two socks on each foot, the pair of arm warmers, the club cycling jersey, the club bib shorts, a pair of leg warmers, an Underarmor Cold Gear jersey, a pair of thigh-length, compression leggings, and a heart monitor: 25 things put on---25 items taken off. I stood alone shivering before the shower I surely earned. There was nothing left to take off. I felt like the master of nothing but I remain somehow willing to wear it all again tomorrow so I can ride.

It will be about 9 degrees colder tomorrow with a northwest wind blowing 25 to 35 mph. I love this sport.

Happy New Year y'all.

Reflections on the OBX Marathon 2009, Part 2

2009-12-31T10:19:00.009-05:00

(EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the final part of my account of the Outer Banks Marathon 2009. The first part is below. Thanks for reading.)

The Outer Banks Marathon wound its way through the neighborhoods of Kill Devil Hills west of our U.S. 158 By-Pass. Bobby Mack led the full marathon field with two African runners I spotted some 800 to 1000 yards behind. In a marathon barely one third completed, this is a small distance. Bobby's position was not secure by any measure.

We reached the softer sandy loam road of Nags Head Woods Ecological Preserve where the runners would go on and we would turn back, ride east over to the Beach Road and follow it south to Barnes Street in Nags Head. Here we turned west and rode back to the spot the runners would emerge from Nags Head Woods. Would Bobby still have his lead? This is where I defected my assigned neutrality and quietly hoped to see him still out front. He appeared from the woods alone and I was now fully in his camp as if I was his very own personal coach, soigneur, or cheerleader. His countenance read of intense, concentrated focus. This reminded me of the huge distance between us and why we both filled the two roles we filled, why each of us was here this day.

I returned to my supposed neutrality. Broken lines of watchers clapped and cheered along the streets. Families sat in beach chairs at the ends of their driveways, parents pointing to the lone runner for their children to see. "This is Bobby from Raleigh, our marathon leader," I repeated at each turn.

I let Bobby know what was up ahead and how far he had come. He responded that his mile splits were still good. "You're gonna do it today," I insured him, once again letting slip my neutrality.

We turned right onto the By-Pass at Blue Jay Street and after about another 1/2 mile I looked back, way back behind us and there I spotted the two African runners churning out a steady pace. "Bobby, they're still back there around 800+ yards. You're doing great!" We were now moving through the half marathon runners many of whom were walking. I could see Rick about 100 yards ahead clearing these folks to the right. Many were walking two and three abreast and as he passed, some would return to this. I carried a whistle which I laid on pretty hard from time to time as a more insistent way of clearing our path. We plied on passing Orange DOT cones one after the other on our left. "This is Bobby from Raleigh..."

Water aid stations, some with blaring music and bulging masses of runners and volunteers on both sides of the water-cup tables were to our right. Cars slowed outside the cones, windows down, passengers cheering and encouraging Bobby. My whistle bleated out above the fray. Our small lane was crowded now as we turned west to the causeway, mile 21 or so. The southwester had blown up this morning and was ripping across this stretch of asphalt beside the Roanoke Sound with the huge open expanse of Pamlico Sound beyond. There was enough fetch for a hurricane to wind up over this inland sea and here came a wind racing over it fully able to suppress even the strongest of marathoners.

I looked at Bobby for what I thought would be the inevitable: "They say if you can make it through this point in a marathon, you can make it the whole way," Bobby called to me. Profound pain was creeping over his face now. We were at the foot of the arched Daniels Bridge. Runners and walkers were jamming the lane. I quickly looked back for the African challengers but couldn't pick them out. Creeping cars to our left, people yelling out words of encouragement to the runners and walkers had fused into our landscape now. Commotion, and chaos as we climbed, me plowing through other marathoners on my bike, he rapping out a heavier pace up and over the top of the bridge where the wind had us fully.

I could see Rick way up there moving people aside and them filling back in behind him many mindlessly struggling with their own personal race demons. At two miles out (from the finish) we were to call the race official at the finish line to report who had the lead. Rick was to make this call. I signaled up to him that now was the time. My computer showed just over 24 miles run. I could see Rick, a big guy, standing over his bike making that call. I looked back at Bobby just at the moment he abruptly stopped running, holding his right leg rapt in pain. I knew this look well. He was cramped. It looked like a hamstring. He stood, hunched over, knees locked trying to stretch it out, make it relax.

Just then a runner rushed by me yelling at Bobby who looked up. The other runner pointed to Bobby calling out, "Come on Bobby, get back on it. Come with me. You can do it man." As if on a vehicle which would not stop, he ran right by us and kept on. Bobby told me that runner was a friend of his, Ryan Woods, whom he had run with at N.C. Sate University. He was a little older, but he was a good guy and a fine athlete. Bobby kicked with his right leg and then began to jog up to his race gait once again. He was in tremendous pain. This was awe inspiring to watch.

I realized I had let the new leader of the marathon go by without picking him up to lead him, but this was not to be. I would not leave Bobby out of respect for the effort I was so fortunate to have witnessed this day. Maybe Rick would lead Ryan to the line.

One mile later another full marathon runner passed us. This was Nicolas Robin, I believe one of the African runners whom had been dogging Bobby's lead the whole way. I had heard Philip Cheruiyot, a prior winner of this race and a sure threat to win it again, had abandoned the race somewhere on the causeway.

The last mile had finally come. With his goal of setting a new course record and the lead left so far behind on the causeway, Bobby wound down toward the waterfront in the original part of the old town of Manteo. He finished in third place behind Robin and his old buddy Ryan who won the marathon at 2 hours, 32 minutes and 38 seconds. He will never know what his marathon effort left with me that day. In a way he is still running along with me as I ride my own race.

Reflections on the OBX Marathon 2009, Part 1

2009-12-28T21:56:00.011-05:00

I wasn't sure I was going to like the ride today. I rounded up the really warm clothes, the water bottle, pushed extra air into my tires. I mounted my fixed gear bike for the fourth straight day. Forty-two degrees. West cross wind jamming my spokes at a solid 35 knots. I rode north on Bay Drive along Kitty Hawk Bay once again---the usual route---the one offering some wind cover in trees and among homes farther north. I settled in finding my work tempo. The wind ripped over my ears. It all sounded like high volume, close-in roaring that only I could hear.

Training rides can be introspective when it's like this. You carry with you a private place to consider a multitude of things. Today as I toiled, I thought about the Outer Banks Marathon this past fall and its spell still lingering over me like a veil, a vision. I was one of many locals who helped with the event. Rick Godsey and I were to lead the elite male leader of the full marathon through the course on our road bikes replete with water bottles, gels, cell phone, and Gruppo Sportivo Outer Banks racing kits.

Although a tremendous honor, I failed miserably with my assignment this day. I had even done this before in an earlier race. But I still blew it.

We gathered with the throngs of runners at the north end of Woods Road near Dominion Power at 6:30 a.m. The phrase "beehive of excitement" comes to mind. Runners everywhere warming up and trying to stay warm. People introducing others to their friends and chatting all nerved-up before the monumental challenge they were about to engage. New friends made on the brink of tremendous efforts. The only place I've witnessed greater hope, greater anticipation is in a Little League dugout before the first pitch of the first inning of the first game. The day started cold and sharp but warm among the runners.

We positioned ourselves some 30-40 yards out in front of the start line in the pavement's center, bikes pointed down the road, heads turned back to the runners. In pairs, all our cyclists had different lead runners to lead, male and female runners in both the full and half marathon. The starter's gun cracked the air. Here they came. We pedaled forward nervously with the thousands of runners and the energy they rode so close behind us.

I've ridden in many road bike races. I know well the gamut of emotion and roiling nerves which seem to bind you like a guilty prisoner until you're snatched up by the focus required to race. You become given completely to the sweet moments as they stream past with you and all around you in their embrace. But leading a leaderless race you're not contesting is quite another thing. Peace rests at your center but hope reaches for someone who has not yet emerged to challenge the field. Who will it be? To witness up close a whole marathon alongside the leader, to observe the suffering and embedded joy all at once apparent on the runner's face would leave me with an indelible memory and a bond unlike any I've ever experienced.

By mile one a solo runner had nosed out by ten and then twenty yards. He was sprung, gap growing. So this was our guy. We let him settle in and then drifted back to let him know we would lead him through the course to the finish. There were two or three Africans in this marathon who were known contenders. One, Philip Cheruiyot, had won the 2006 OBX Marathon the day after winning the Chicago Marathon, slipping backwards cracking his head on the street as he crossed the finish line. His feet were laying over the finish line when he fell. I remembered seeing his beautiful, steady open stride, as he passed me that day. He was back there somewhere.

We rode onto Kitty Hawk Village road, a curvy two-lane affair. Our guy was steady at it while it appeared a pair of African runners separated from the unseen following main field somewhere further back. The miles unrolled as we passed clapping, cheering bands of locals all along the course. This event is huge in our community. In my opinion, there is no other land event which unites Outer Bankers like this one. Everybody was out there.

I was told last year every traffic cone possessed by the North Carolina Department of Transportation comes to Dare County for this event. Roads were blocked with them and later when we emerged from the backstreets onto the U.S. 158 By-Pass, we saw the runners' lane they marked for miles going south through Nags Head, across the causeway and bridge to Roanoke Island and Manteo.

Our leader was Bobby Mack, a young, former North Carolina State track athlete. He told me his goal was to beat the course record. He looked down at his watch and at mile 15 said, "Everything's good. I'm doing 5-21 to 24 splits so far" (1-mile splits at 5 minutes 21 to 24 seconds). Poker-faced, I turned around in the saddle and dropped my head in disbelief. I looked at my computer: 11.3 mph. I was astounded!

The course record for the 4-year race is 2 hours 24 minutes and 15 seconds held by Mike Wardian of northern Virginia, set in the 2007 race. He had come in third behind Philip Cheruiyot's first place the previous year, the first Outer Banks Marathon.

Fans were strung all along the route, some dressed in costume. Cow bells clanged as we passed. "This is Bobby from Raleigh our full marathon leader!" I called out swelled with pride. A runner from our state was leading. The knotted crowds along the route lit up when they heard this I believed, for the same reason.

(Part 2 to be posted soon.)

Christmas and Thanks

2009-12-25T15:43:00.002-05:00

I sit here today, Christmas Day, over a huge welling up need to be thankful. I'll try not to be sappy. This is to my true friends. You know who you are. They take their own time to consider things I say or write, and there is often much. They challenge the same with fresh ideas and perspectives. They keep me pointed toward the things they know I love. Sometimes we lose our way to these. They experience these things with me---they make sure I'm there when it counts. I hope I remember often enough to do the same for them. They too need direction occasionally.

I've often said to them at this time in life I may need an attendant (or attendants), preferably wearing white lab coats and carrying clipboards. Sometimes it's that bad. But my friends are much more than that. They help me keep my road bikes and surfboards repaired and ready. They call me when conditions are favorable to us. They invite me to play music together.

They allow me to vent emotion and to not hide out as an enlightened soul work-in-progress, to be a miserable failure in my own eyes, and then turn the mirror my way to remind me the good we all possess. On this day, I thank my friends for meaning so much to me. I hope your Christmas holds you in the arms of love wherever you may be.

This morning I rode 28 miles on a Cannondale framed fixed gear. The onshore wind was east around 18 mph, air temp at 51 degrees. I warmed up circling the monument (Wright Memorial) and took the usual route north along the sound and Kitty Hawk Bay up to Southern Shores where I crossed east over toward the Kitty Hawk Pier. There I took the Beach Road south the 6+ miles to First Street and then home.

The sky pushed down with low clouds and the dampness preceding rain. The white-ish cloud underbellies warned me of the rain moving from the mainland, creeping closer and closer. Would I make it home dry? This is where I start reciting the names of my friends who live along the Beach Road in a chronological order beginning where I am now, who will give me shelter if it gets bad. The ocean water---smell the salt air---is 43 degrees, dropping a full 10 degrees since last week. It now truly is winter. This is the equivalent of our first snow. The cross wind and fixed gear are working me hard now. To counteract this discomfort I thought about my friends.

December Atlantic

2009-12-07T21:51:00.007-05:00

I surfed last Thursday, December 3rd at Martin Street with 3 young teachers I work with at First Flight High School. In the water at 4:30 p.m. after battling a torrent of distractions and then hurriedly fighting my way into my wetsuit---a full 3-2 O'Neill Psycho with boots and gloves. The fighting only seems to occur when I'm in a rush---this time racing a falling sun. Water and air about the same at 57 degrees. I saw an extremely south head-high swell with fierce angle and long open lines of brown water when I topped the dune boardwalk. This is the sand bottom stirred up to the surface. It has that winter water look we know so well here. Right-hand tubes peeled and spit out a sideways spike of spray vapor maybe 15 feet as waves rolled over themselves, paced up over a shallow bar.

I tapped a few nice rights on my old (1982) 7'2" Sunset single fin---so fine. I hadn't felt this kind of ride in 26 years. The current was ripping from south to north at 7 or 8 knots. It felt like a conveyor belt grinding up the coast, riding it from sandbar to bar until the next set came through. All aboard! Ride a long right back to the beach, trudge back up on the beach out of the wash and stroll south. Paddle out again and repeat.

I left the water at last when I could no longer make out the contours of the wave face. I knew this when I took off on a big right closeout and had to pull out, straighten up, and bag it all.

Three of us, including one female art teacher who knows how to ride a wave, walked together up the sloped, soft sand beach back over the dune to our vehicles. I left the water that evening having caught only a few waves. I was content. The sun finally fell into a pool of rouge and maize.

I realized it doesn't take as much for me to reach satisfaction as it used to when I first rode this surfboard so long ago. My appetite for waves was insatiable then. But the measure of stoke now is just the same with far fewer waves caught. The joy in it must never have been in the quantity like so many things in this world. Or have my expectations only adjusted to my age and physical limitations? I really don't care what the answer is. I had these questions to consider nonetheless. You can't let them go unnoticed. Surfing does that to you. It makes you consider its joyful pursuit, its fleeting nature, your inability to own it as only yours. Yet it can give itself to you so completely or, crush and spit you out sending you home master of nothing. But we still go back over and again.

Thanks for reading. Get waves...on whatever you like to ride.

The Nor'Ida Aftermath

2009-11-27T20:49:00.003-05:00

The place you live and see every day looks completely different at bike speed no matter who's turning the pedals. You should try it sometime, and if you have, try it more often. It's an amazing view almost as if you've never really seen it before.

Yesterday I decided to ride north on the beach road from 1st street so I could work into the wind right away and so I could survey the last northeaster's carnage from the week before last. I was riding my fixed gear, a bike sort of given to me by a friend I surf with---a former pro cyclist who has been re-born as a surfer recently having spent a number of years away from the sport. Another friend had just gone over the bike fixing the chain which was bent during my last ride on it, and putting on gum rubber sidewall tires as in vintage 1980. He's a farm boy in Chapel Hill who loves to turn a wrench. He's quite good at it too. Fortunately I can accommodate this fetish with my bikes once in awhile. He's a cyclist also. He understands my quirks on two wheels.

I struggled into yet another northeast wind and was somewhat within myself most of the way toward Kitty Hawk Pier. I did notice the asphalt parking driveways at the beach accesses were swept clean of sand and debris. The towns jumped right on the clean up as soon as the coast was clear.

I soldiered on and rode right past the forensic evidence of the storm now piled on both sides of the road. Was I lulled into monotony by an all-too-common sight? It seems even garden variety northeasters deliver real punch into the infrastructure and homes along the coast these days. The bite of the Atlantic begins closer to its prey each year as erosion takes beach sand captive sending it to some new location---I don't know where---probably on the coast. The sandbars that reflect good surf are re-shaped, or muted, new ones emerge. You have to keep a lookout to know.

I reached well into Southern Shores when I felt a thump, thump, thump on my rear tire. I guessed right away that the vintage tire which hadn't been pressured by 110 psi in quite a long time was coming apart. I stopped to examine it. A split at the edge of the tire face threatened letting the inner tube through and out. I opened my rear brake caliper, relieved air pressure from the tire's hernia, and turned around to limp home. I wondered if I could make it the eight miles home. I had left just enough air to not bang the rim on the pavement, but not enough to keep the bike from wagging around on the squirrely low air tire.

I reached Kitty Hawk Pier and turned south again on the beach road. It was now, slowed down a few more notches, that I really saw what the storm had left behind.

The homes along the beach road in this section of Kitty Hawk are modest and from a time when their owners just wanted "a cabin at the beach". When originally built they stood on 6x6 pilings with single pane windows, many with no floor insulation and not much insulation up top. They were called beach boxes.

This area has been under ocean siege for more than twenty years. During coastal storms now the ocean overwash channels under these homes on their concrete slabs, down their driveways pouring saltwater onto the beach road. The overwash also likes the paved beach accesses too. The towns know this and when coastal storms loom, dump trucks rush to build small (6-8 feet high)sand walls at the ocean end of the accesses.

Along both sides of my route stood giant mounds of sand some 8-10 feet tall with concrete driveways clutching the side of the beach road, hanging on for dear life. There were numerous, intermittent debris piles, still partially assembled stairs replete with picket railings, pilings, sections of decks, pallets, all with beach grass entangled through it. I passed pile after pile after pile, both sides of the road for several miles. It looked as if virtually every oceanfront wood structure had been ripped apart and put in piles along the beach road to await being carted to the dump. So now new ones are being built, all to be fed to the next coastal storm.

For days debris was floating in the surf zone. A friend told me a friend of his landed on floating debris and took a nail in the back when he wiped out while surfing when the wind went offshore right after the storm. Others have spoken about high levels of bacteria in the water from runoff following the massive amount of rain we had. This I can't substantiate.

I hobbled all the way home on that old, split gum rubber sidewalled tire. I guess you can't really go back to what it was like then.

The Latest, Greatest Storm

2009-11-14T21:03:00.002-05:00

I drove away from it as it wound up on Thursday. Had to go down to Morehead City for a training. The Weather Channel was proud to name it Nor'Ida---part of their TV ratings grabbing circus passing through our small beach towns. You know the drill: pull your hood up, strike a wind and blowing rain resisting pose before a camera and break into a rage about how terrible it is and that no one, absolutely no one should be out in this stuff unless you absolutely have to.

How terrible a storm like this is lies somewhere at each end of this spectrum---if your home or business is badly damaged, it's a disaster---if your home or business is untouched or holds up, it's just a bunch of wind and rain. Boring. Maybe you can't get to work for a few days and then life goes on. We clean up, make repairs and mark time by debating beach nourishment until the next storm or stormette.

Meanwhile the circus flies through every once in a while. Cantore's in town. More footage of homes falling into the surf in Kitty Hawk north of what long-time locals used to call "Old Station", and what newer-comers now call the "Black Pelican"(restaurant). We'll see these over and over again all year as lead-ins for Weather Channel features. Unlike regular news-reporting channels we can't be saved from this visual repetition even if some new guy named Peterson murders his wife.

So I drive back today from my visit to the Crystal Coast calling friends living at various vantage points along our coast. They report this: South Nags Head, standing water and debris on the beach road, police guarding streets to the oceanfront where damage was heaviest, several houses have fallen, one or more in the ocean, at least one smashed and pushed back in a pile at Surfside Drive, building inspectors condemning homes whose septic systems are compromised, public water supply lines broken, or have structural foundation damage; Kitty Hawk, Beach Road closed north of Old Station/Black Pelican, sand and standing salt and rain water still on the Beach Road; Hatteras Island, Route 12 impassable between Pea Island, about a mile south of Oregon Inlet's Bonner Bridge and Rodanthe about to Lisa's Pizza, road buried by sand and standing water, some road sections broken and completely gone; Dare County schools were canceled for Thursday and Friday, 15 inches of rain fell.

Early Friday evening wave height at the Duck data buoy offshore was over 20 feet with a dominant period of around 15 seconds. Around 9:30 p.m. the wave height had dropped to 18+ feet at 11 seconds. The wave period is the amount of time it takes for the troughs of waves to pass a fixed point (like a buoy). That means a big, hulking swell. We were impressed.

Back in town, I picked my way down the Beach Road in Nags Head headed for Kill Devil Hills starting at Gull Street---debris and some standing water. Left the Beach Road right before Surfside Plaza as the ocean always overwashes the low dunes where the really old shingle-style Victorian homes hang on year after year. Don't want to drive my old Subaru wagon through up to 8 inches of salt water.

I continued north on the by-pass returning to the Beach Road at Barnes Street and stayed north. I pulled into the Martin Street beach access for a look at the beach. A quick glance showed bobbing wood debris in the beach break drifting north in the current. The road was clear down to Prospect Street east of the Wright Memorial, simply called "the monument" by locals. I could see vehicles slogging through deep standing water north of here. This too was most likely salt water which had come through at the 1st and 2nd Street beach accesses just like it usually does.

There's a steady drizzle outside right now. Maybe tomorrow will give us relief from this crappy weather.

Tranquility in the Swell Window

2009-10-04T21:45:00.002-04:00

I sat on the beach today with a dear friend and marveled at the serenity around us. I saw people in kayaks over the wreck at 2nd Street on the outside bar. Three guys were scuba diving there as well all under a bright blue sky. October 4th and the air was warm, not hot. The ocean water a comfortable 71 degrees. Low tide held small waves over the sandbars, a vast contrast to my last post and all that has passed since on this, our piece of Atlantic coast. This marks one week exactly since the last real surf here and the first flat spell since late August.

There's been Hurricane Bill passing offshore. Then Tropical Storm Danny, followed by an unnamed low pressure system, both bringing open lefts---too much to resist for a goofy-footer like me. Many sandbars are tuned up and working their magic. Offshore winds have ruled and shaped it all, and best of all our local friends are owning what is theirs in the water.

A sad passing of our water buddy, Greg Bennett, marked last week. The last time I saw him was surfing at Barnes Street in Nags Head summer before last with many locals and their children in the water. He was the happiest of us all, savoring his day with waves to ride. We all will miss you Greg.

This flat spell, this quiet day on the beach, let me reflect on these things I am so thankful for---to continue being able to surf after 45 years and enjoy this way of living. No amount of riches could ever buy this happiness with these friends.

I'll keep my vigil watching for the next swell, and surely it will come again as it always does. And we will surely play there.

Hurricane Bill and Our Crickets

2009-09-06T21:01:00.003-04:00

We've now definitely fallen into Fall. About 10 days before Hurricane Bill I saw a cricket on the floor in my office. I had to smile a private smile. That night as I returned in the dark from the grocery store, the Food Line(Lion)as I like to call it, I heard crickets raising hell all around the house. This was now the official first sign of our Fall swell window. We were firmly in it now. The crickets were here! I was stoked.

Hurricane Bill had pushed up between Bermuda and us, about 200 miles offshore. It was moving too fast at 20 mph and its wind speed had dropped to 90 mph as it fed on cooler water east of us. The swell from the storm's approach hit on Friday and was decent in some spots mostly south of Kill Devil Hills. The wind was west about 20 mph. The wind rules everything here. And frankly, we get much better, longer lasting waves from slow-moving storms (less than 10 mph) and tropical depressions---much better.

The next day the wind was northwest and howling up to 20 knots (1 knot = 1.13 mph) under sunny skies. A low pressure trough line approached from the northwest as I walked over the Martin Street boardwalk to look at the ocean. Its storm face is always contorted, exaggerated, and severe when big storms are around. It demands to be witnessed. What I saw is now stamped onto me forever.

The ocean was sticking out its chest and beating on it. The steel-gray clouds of the approaching front rolled under themselves toward the beaches like a great canopy roller riding a 30 knot offshore wind. Massive wave faces stood proud in the shredding air, their crests ripped back in spray and water vapor reaching about forty feet. From north to south, as far as one could see were these spraying mammoths.

Light flashes sparked off the back of my glasses lenses. What I thought must be lightning, were scores of tourists on condominium balconies firing their cameras at nature colliding. The rain began. I walked slowly to my car hoping tomorrow would bring the surf conditions that thrill me. It surely did.

The Page Valley Road Race and My Physical Limits

2009-08-12T18:41:00.007-04:00

So I sat in the grass by the side of the road. My helmet was off lying upside down in front of me, my sweaty head in my hands. I was on the summit of the climb just past the finish line. I was deep in oxygen debt, breathing so fast. I was burning up from the 95 degree heat. I poured hot water from one of my bottles over my head---one more insult. Here is where my race season ended and what a weird,wacky season it's been. The Page Valley Road Race had done me in once again.

A good friend and teammate asked me by email after we had left the mountains of Virginia far behind if I had left my PV experience behind also. He knew I was beating myself up for abandoning my first race. But I had already thought about it and told him you can never leave the Page Valley race behind completely.

It's just that it's so beautiful up there and everything we do together preceding the race is so memorable as well. The training rides taken by themselves are worth the effort and traveling. You can't stay completely stuck in your own race results especially what you might interpret as failures when in this context, this landscape. I can't take my racing that seriously. I raced Category 4 where I race against all ages. My racing age is fifty-eight. Yeah, this race I had reached my limits.

We live on the Outer Banks. Yes, we're "flatlanders". The highest mountain training site for us is the 80-foot high Wright Memorial, U.S. Park Service property. We often do hill repeats there from first light of day until the the park opens. But it's not the same as the PV experience. We do however have wind to torture us on the road, and plenty of it. It's the "mountains" of the Outer Banks.

But we don't have real mountains. You know, the 1-5 mile kind with 6-12 percent gradients. As cyclists we understand you must taste this in order to know the whole of the sport. So we do the PV road race, the Jefferson Cup, and the hills of North Carolina's Piedmont Triad Omnium. I throw myself at it, the PV as such. It's been a nasty sight each year. Then we witness the real, epic climbs of the Tour De France and the climbing specialists. We are reminded where we stand in our lowly world of amateur bike racing. We speculate those Tour riders would take Page Valley's climbs in the big chainring and never strain and fight their bikes the way we do up the mountain.

Robert and I met at Hawksbill Recreation Park Friday afternoon to recon the race course. It was a cloudless day in the low eighties. Perfect. We rode two laps of the 11-mile circuit. We felt great and fought the urge to work hard into the strength our legs offered. From here we drove south on route 340 to Waynesboro and then over Afton Mountain to Mark's family's farm. There we waited for our other teammates Mark and Ricky.

The next morning the four of us did a light 20-mile spin-up on the local winding, undulating roads in the vicinity of the farm. We then drove into Charlottesville for groceries and a visit to Roger Friend's bike shop.

Ricky's and my race was at three Sunday afternoon. We arrived on the scene around noon, registered at the Hawksbill Rec Park, and then drove through the course up to a field to park the car near the feed zone. It was within the last 200 meters of the final climb to the finish line.

The Cat 1-2 race was in progress. A 5-man break was off the front of the main peloton. It contained a rider from each of the domestic teams in the race so the peloton rode the tempo of a Sunday group ride. On the following lap the peloton had fractured but the break was holding together. I heard the race finale and blistering 10-mph sprint to the summit was contested by two surviving riders from the break.

Robert and Chris' Cat 3 race was next. Chris, a close friend who now races for Atlantic Velo, flatted after his second lap. As he flatted he recalled hearing someone in the peloton mutter, "Lucky", as in 'now you get to have a reason for quitting this hellish race'.

Robert looked as though he was suffering mightily as each lap passed. Ricky and I had to return to the Rec Park for our pre-race rituals and warm-ups so we couldn't see his finish. I still don't really know Robert's race results as he is genuinely modest about discussing such a thing when someone like me is around licking his wounds over his own not-so-hot results. I believe he may have finished at least in the top twenty.

AT THE LINE

I rested on my top bar in the thick heat with 99 other Cat 4 riders as the head race official discussed the course. They had reduced the race to 4 laps or about 42 miles. They would enforce the center line rule. This means the peloton must ride wholely in the right half of the road and cannot cross the center line or center of the road. A Sheriff's Department truck with flashing lights would lead the peloton through the miles. Two race referees, replete with striped jerseys, would monitor riders' compliance with the rules. One near the front and one following the peloton's rear on motorcycles had them in good position to catch violators. A pickup truck followed the rear carrying tagged extra wheels riders had placed there prior to the race to cover the possibility of a damaged wheel or flat tire.

I had discussed race tactics with teammates before the race---that is tactics for me---ride at the front where it's usually safe; ride in the rear and ride through the carnage as the repeated climbs take their toll. It would, after all, be a race of attrition. I ended up riding in the middle of the peloton. Our beginning tempo was around 27-28 miles per hour. Other riders slid past me, while others slid backward as the miles rolled under us.

By the end of the first climb I had slid to the rear. As we summited I charged to the following descents and finally snugly back into the teeming mass of riders. I held the steady tempo of the peloton back around on the flats of Kite Hollow, Ida, and Farmview Roads. Thankfully I saw no crashes.

When we reached the lower slopes of the first climb I glanced quickly at my computer: 21 mph! I was pushing up the right edge of the road passing surprised, unsuspecting riders. I knew the upper slopes of this climb and the following climb would take their toll on me. I wanted to have as many riders behind me as possible so as to stay in contact should I fall toward the rear again.

I was firmly entrenched in the peloton's ranks now, though really suffering with the intense climbing pace. The young climbers at the front were laying down a blistering pace just the way they should be to drop weaker riders. I might be one of them. But when you start a race, you believe those weaker riders are other riders, not you.

Every now and then I could see Ricky near the center line through the mass of helmets and hunched, working backs up ahead. He's 24 years-old and super fit. I always have high expectations for him in these races.

On the final climb of this lap I was near the tail of the peloton. I was hurting badly and at once realizing I had to do all that I could possibly do to hold onto the main body. I was told by race officials later that riders were scattering all over the mountain about now. The heat, the climbs, and the pace were exacting the toll.

I bit into the final 200 meters of the 3/4-mile climb at 11-12 mph. I spilled everything I had left into the climb, passing the feed zone begging my teammates there to pour water over me. I was burning hot. I could feel the water pour over me, but could not feel anything cool.

As I summited I watched the gap between me and the last rider widen. I watched him seem to drop into the hot road as he began the first descent. I looked down at the road sliding under me, water pouring down on it from my head and face. I coasted off the right side of the road, laid my bike down, unclipped my helmet and sat down gasping for breath. My race season was over.

I'm now looking forward to the Fall surf I know is coming. There's nothing more fun than that---nothing.

Traveling to Our "A" Race

2009-07-10T09:43:00.003-04:00

This morning Ricky and I sit in the farmhouse at Strayhorn's farm in Chapel Hill. We traveled from the coast last night and stayed here. That way we can split the trip distance in half and arrive in Lexington, N.C. more relaxed. Tonight is the criterium leg of the Piedmont Triad Omnium stage race. Our plan is to arrive at Davidson County Community College in time to ride the time trial course we will race on tomorrow. Scouting a course like this can give us valuable seconds in this race against the clock simply because we'll know the course---its curves, hills, and tight corners.

Last year was the inaugural Piedmont Triad Omnium a race promoted by Jim Martin, a prominent local from Davidson County, who is himself a cyclist. It is a well-run race in a beautiful setting and deserves to be experienced. The Omnium features a criterium through the streets of Lexington tonight, a 14.4-mile time trial Saturday, street sprints back in the town of Lexington Saturday night, and finally, a 33-mile road race on country roads with a rolling enclosure on Sunday.

Our club is fielding more riders than ever with eight, two of which are female. Last year there were only four of us. It's always a morale lift to see teammates in the field competing in the race's various divisions. It's also special to see a rider wearing your team's jersey in the peloton racing with you. I'll let you know how it goes.

As far as surfing at home on the Outer Banks---right now the ocean water temperature is around 78-80 degrees. We have had a few days showing a small pulse of rideable waves in the knee to chest high range in the last few weeks. Nothing remarkable but just some glassy conditions and fun summer swell.

We're moving into the doldrums in the next few weeks however. Tropical conditions will prevail with clear, translucent blue-green ocean water, great free diving conditions and no wave in sight. Then aorund the beginning of August, the real tropics will begin to boil and we'll be squarely in the swell window again. We can't wait. I'll keep you apprised.

My Worst Crash Yet---and Its Lasting Influence

2009-06-26T21:14:00.009-04:00

I crashed out big this time---serious injuries and bike damage. It was the Casey Crit on the last lap in the second to last turn, about 150 yards from the line. It's been about 10 weeks now. I cannot believe how its influence is still so profound. But its been a long Spring and mostly brimmed with the beauty of cycling, the sport, and not the down side.

My feet were spinning over round pedals. The cranks turned the sprocket over and over, the chain wrapping it, clinging to it and the round cog-loaded cassette hooked to the rear hub. This hub drove the rear wheel forward, spokes hushing round and round pushing the front wheel along over the loop of road---one of our local, regular rides. Meanwhile the earth spins, the sport I adore spins me through cycles of sights, sounds, and sites all sticking to who I am and still what I become. Here I have time to reflect on recent road forays.

I retreated to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia last week. Just my road bike and me. Dear friends had loaned me their beautiful small home as base camp. I rode north from Wintergreen on the parkway to Afton Mountain and back. Then from Wintergreen south to Irish Gap and back. The third day I met my good friend, Robert, at Front Royal to ride up onto Skyline Drive at the north end of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I have to say I had amazing good bad luck here. I pulled my bike out to ride and found the rear tire flat. We fixed it. I mounted the bike, turned pedals and the chain broke. Yeah, at least we weren't up the mountain. We re-loaded the bikes and returned to the motel to computer-search for a bike shop. Robert found one with an impressive website. Being a computer (and bike) phenom, at least to me, I listened when he said, "this shop must be decent because they took the time to build a great website." It was in Winchester, Va. some 30 minutes away. Black Bar Bicycles is the name. We set out.

Jamie, one of the shop wrenches/owners welcomed us and went right to work on my bike, a Trek 5000, now over four years old. He suggested a Sram power link to join the chain back together. We talked about my bent derailleur hanger as being a possible culprit. It was bent in the Casey Crit crash and no one (understandably) wants to try to bend it back in place for one critical reason: it is permanently attached to the carbon frame, it is aluminum, and if it breaks while re-bending it---a fair prospect---my frame is f'ed.

The chain now repaired and having enjoyed Jamie's reparte and shop wisdom, we returned to Front Royal. It was getting late, around 6'ish. But Robert suggested we give the mountain another run albeit maybe for only an hour's effort---just to see how far we could go before failing light would scoot us home.

The climb up was about 5 to 8 per cent gradient over 8+ miles. It was wonderful with overlooks giving way to staggering glimpses of farms far below. As one rider confessed to me, "I would come here from anywhere in the world to ride. This parkway is a world-class ride."

We dropped about 2 miles down the backside of the mountain we had just climbed, turned around, climbed back up to the top and at the peak my chain broke again and unraveled right on the road under my bike. It broke in a different place this time.

I pondered the predicament but also my continuing great bad luck. We were virtually on top of the mountain now. I packed the broken chain into my infamous "too large" seatpack (sorry Mark), leg-paddled the bike up to speed and we began our descent. We reached a slight rise (easy for me to say, right Robert?) and as my bike began to slow, Robert put an outstretched hand on my back and pedaled for us both for far too long until we reached the top of the final drop.

We were steady at 39-42 mph for the 7 or 8 miles all the way down---him leading me, me passing him, and him taking back the point, trading leads to the bottom. We felt like 11 year-olds flying down the mountain sure we could reach any speed we had the courage to touch.

Next morning Robert left early for Newport News. I left for Black Bar Bicycles. As I came through the door, a new face greeted me, Jamie standing in the background repair area.

Bill Baker is a 56 year-old wrench/owner of the shop like Jamie. It was he who had built their website, and it was he who took final control of all my mechanical miseries.

I was beginning to get nervous about some of my bike parts, especially drive train and tires, which get huge amounts of wear each race season and should be replaced regularly. I was on a challenging 6-day mountain road training trip and the worn out crap on my bike posed too much danger for my liking. These elements become amplified to the extreme when plummeting down a two-lane blacktop between 40 and 50 miles per hour. In other words---you better have good shit on your bike.

I pointed to the broken chain, the bent derailleur hanger, and worn tires while Bill quietly inspected it all. He removed my rear derailleur, examined it and re-mounted it. He pulled out an alignment tool which gauged hub/derailleur alignment to the rear rim. I harped on about how the derailleur hanger was permanently attached to the carbon frame and blah, blah, blah...as he grabbed it and began bending it. Then the channel locks came out, were clamped onto the hanger and bent it...the alignment tool again, then the channel locks from the other way. I'm pacing behind him. Bill stepped back and eyed up his work. Years of experience and pure moxie are hard to beat. I peeked. The derailleur hanger was nearly as aligned as new.

Now as Bill lubed my Speedplay pedals, the real shop mischief began. He and Jamie offered me any bike in the shop for a test ride. I looked at the Pinarello and then the Parlees, then the Pinarello, and then the Parlees. I told Bill he had his hands full with my bike and I didn't want him to have to go through adjusting the saddle/seatpost height for me or transferring my pedals to another bike. He insisted it was no trouble, "why don't you try the Parlee Z3, if you came home with it, it would surely get you a divorce." The two of them chuckled. I work with carpenters and I got it, I mean the tone that is. (As set up with Sram Red gruppos and American, hand-laid full carbon, lugged frame and fork it rounds out about $8 grand.)

So he rigged me up. I got on my helmet and shoes and off I went. The last thing I heard as I went out the door was, "Don't worry about the bike. Enjoy the ride!"

I rode a total of about 6 miles. The ride was stunning in every aspect. Superb responsiveness. Torsional stability hard to comprehend...so fine. The power transfer to the road was unmatched by any bike I've ever ridden.

I walked back through the shop door and proclaimed Bill and Jamie both assholes for doing what they had just done to me, knowing full well I was headed for the Page Valley Road Race course for a training ride that evening and would have to ride my same old bike. How cruel and calculating they were I said as I watched them both shaking in silent laughter backs turned to me.

I settled up, still grumbling, and left to eat and then to Page Valley for some hard work alone. (Glad I could entertain you two.) I have to say, the guys at Black Bar Bicycles really were so kind to a stranger roadie that day. They even offered me the Parlee for my Page Valley ride.

The work and advice was outstanding. The inventory in the shop supremely tuned in to what's really needed and is available from the top names in the industry. They have my highest recommendation for great service, genuine friendliness---and of course, I was glad I could keep them entertained. Hope to see you two again out there.

As my Hawaiian friends would say, "We talk story later bra', okay?" Glad to be back.

The Month of Maypril is Here!

2009-04-13T21:14:00.003-04:00

Yes, I said Maypril! The month which tortures the place in our souls longing for warmer, dryer weather and fair winds. This cruel month, running from mid-April to mid-May paws and gnaws at our expectations for all that is getting better we hope. I carry a whole year's wardrobe sampling in the back of my truck: from Carhart insulated oversuit to board shorts and sandals, tee shirts, hooded sweatshirts, 4-3 wetsuits, boots, and gloves, and foul weather gear. Eighty-one degrees on Saturday, 39 degrees on Sunday---change is the only thing which remains the same.

So into this crazy 30-some days we plunge. I'm still optimistic, still looking forward to what my piece of coast has to share.

The cycling season is rolling. The surfing scene is slow for me right now. I really hate cold water---anywhere in the forty-degree range. The water temperature at the Duck Research Pier is bumping 50 degrees just about now. The waiting won't be much longer.

The cycling race season left the start line on the wheels of our new club, Gruppo Sportivo Outer Banks, February 22nd at the Snowball Criterium #1 at the Virginia Beach Sportsplex, a beautiful, flat, oval-ish, close to one mile loop. The wind blew around 20 mph, west/southwest with steady rain and mid-forty degree air for the C race. We fielded 7 riders in this race, all about to feel what it means to be "hardmen" in bike racing.

Most of these riders were new to road bike racing on this day. I moved in and around the vehicles which carried us all up from our warm, dry North Carolina coastal homes some 90 miles south. I looked closely at faces framed in an air of doubt, unsureness,
trepidation, and then slowly transforming to a steeled resolve, facing this new challenge posed by horrid weather and a multitude of competitors, many concealing the same seeds of self-doubt.

These new racers without pre-race rituals, without race tactics born of knowing what to do when this or that happens---they still answered the call. Their energy charged and lifted all around them. I wasn't racing this day, but was so compelled to witness their charge around the course, I just had to be there. We all inspire each other this way. Their race was our race as it were. To Rob, Matt, Joe, Randy, Art, Kevin, and Wayne, you all were unforgettable in this race. Three placed in the top ten---all finished first in our eyes for answering the start and being there for the finish.

And Yet Another Winter Coastal Storm

2009-02-28T22:05:00.002-05:00

So hear I sit. My home is warm and dry. It's nestled in pine and live and pin oak trees beside a small canal. It is the same canal dug many years ago as a means of floating by barge the granite slabs used to build the Wright Brothers Memorial very close by. Our home is 1 mile by street to the Kill Devil Hills, First Street beach access.

Another winter collision is about to occur between a coastal low pressure system crawling northward up the coast and arctic air sweeping in from the northwest tomorrow night. We may get snow or sleet or rain. Who knows? We are sure to get wind though---and, as usual, plenty of it.

We can count on our home of 21 years keeping us warm and dry once again. We are grateful for it. This is the home we were going to live in for only 5 years and then build on another lot we have in Southern Shores. But our youngest child was born in it and no one in our family wanted to move from it after Jack came along. It has become a sort of sacred family site. So here we are.

The shed out back has a rack full of window storm shutters I custom built for every window on the house. One of the shutters for one of our front windows has a list of every hurricane our home has been shuttered for. The list includes infamous names, among others, Emily, Fran, Bertha, Floyd, and Isabel. Many unnamed storms never made the shutter including several unnamed northeasters which have blown in excess of the 75 mile-an-hour threshold hurricane force wind, the 1993 "Storm of the Century", the "October Storm", which produced the "Perfect Storm" off the northeast coast of the United States and the largest surf I've ever witnessed on this coast having lived here virtually my whole life. Countless unnamed storms rake this part of the coast regularly, usually going unheralded by the now very fashionable storm-chasing media. They are part of routine living on the Outer Banks.

March is now on the doorstep. The ocean water is 43 degrees. The month of "Maypril" is on the near horizon with it's playful torture of our expectations for coming good weather, and another storm is brewing. I suppose I'll spend some time on the trainer tomorrow and duck another messy winter day.

Listen...

2009-01-31T22:09:00.002-05:00

I'm listening to Sarah Vaughn sing "If Love is Good to Me". Just back through the door from walking my dog. Thirty-four degrees, saw my frosty breath and such an immense, deep, black night sky spattered with stars and silence. The wind died. The wood stove is so warm on my right side. It is fully chest-out winter now.

I rode 32 miles this afternoon with two of my cycling "daddies"---mentors. Patiently they've taught me the fine points. "Daddies" or "daddy" in carpentry is what you call the person who taught you the craft---framing, trim, or whatever. I like folky names like this born of oral tradition, passed along inside the culture of such a craft or trade. For me it has a place in other pastimes. It is transferable. It fits cycling well I think.

We rode from First Street in Kill Devil Hills to Coquina Beach ranger housing/campground where the ocean grinds away right on the other side of the dunes. The northwest wind pushed us hard over our right shoulders. It blew around 24 mph while we rode in virtual silence, the silence seeming to ride with us as if ours alone. When this happens it is certain we will pay the price for such speed, such an unweighted ride when we turned back into the teeth of the dragon. A rider can't keep this out of his head. It's just like riding in the mountains enjoying a plummeting descent knowing full well the longer and steeper you drop, the bigger and more tortuous will be the climb back up out of the abyss whose bottom you will find.

This is one of my favorite steady state, uninterrupted rides. But today I have teammates to share the work into the wind all the way home. They are on fixed gear bikes, I on the small chainring while healing my left knee.

Now it's Ella Fitzgerald, "I've Got a Crush on You". What a fine voice. What a natural treasure. Listen...

Traveling Over the Turn of the New Year

2009-01-23T21:19:00.003-05:00

Hey folks. Well here we are over three weeks into 2009---new year, new president, new hope and certainly a time of transformation in our country. (Editor's Note: I'm going to vent a little opinion here. Please bear with me.)

The way I see it we have a national gut check on our hands. The Age of Entitlement has just ended in the United States and America must re-invent herself in the growing shadow of the revved up global economy. Can we do it? I believe so, with new people at the controls on Wall Street, in Detroit, and politically, most importantly down to the local level. Our children I regard as the transformational figures here.

They must understand that electing a president is not a silver bullet to mend all that we perceive as wrong in this country. It is, given unwavering leadership, a great place to stitch an agenda fully together in the public eye and ear. However they absolutely must not take a consumer mentality to fixing things: The attitude which shouts to elected officials, "That's what we elected you for." Instead they (and all of us) must carry some of the solution's weight on their own shoulders in their own locales and launch it upstream to their representatives. It will take that much effort this time.

Elected leaders must cease talking about how great America is and realize now is the time for us all to get back to work proving it once again. Hard work, self-reliance, this time on a global scale, honest effort at improving life around us and thus our country---it worked for my parents' generation (what Tom Brokaw called "the Greatest Generation") and I believe it can work for our children's generation.

When will Detroit get it. "Robert Lutz, GM's vice chairman for global product development, said the market volatility has made product planning difficult," as reported in today's Virginian Pilot newspaper. He's basically saying that when gas prices were nearly $4 a gallon GM couldn't make enough Cobalts (their gas miser car), but now that gas prices have fallen to the $1.78 range, the Cobalts aren't selling. He goes on to say the following:

"A lot of the media and pundits are maintaining the fiction that we're in a new world and that Americans want small, fuel-efficient cars. But at a buck-fifty a gallon, they don't. I'm sorry, but they just don't."

With leadership like this(and the insipid whining quoted above), I now understand why GM is faltering in the auto market. Yes, I understand the weight imposed by the legacy benefits they must pay former employees and the union stranglehold on their ability to compete in the global and domestic markets, but this guy clearly doesn't get the big picture. Apparently Lutz and GM want to plan production based on the moment's gas prices. They want the market to lead them. They don't want to lead the market. Where does Lutz think the market will end up in the future? There seems to be a limited supply of fossil fuel to drive vehicles and heat and power homes, and thankfully, a growing understanding that we just can't keep burning these fuels without completely trashing our world. Shouldn't an industry leader have the ability to have some semblance of vision about where it's all going to end up if we keep on consuming and wasting resources at disgusting levels in this country.

Meanwhile Toyota keeps rolling out vehicles powered by transitional power plants, using cleaner fuels toward where they must be projecting the auto market will land given current fuel costs, availability, and the condition of the world ecosystem. This is exciting vision intelligent, car-buying people want to own and use.

Sorry everybody. I really need to get this stuff off my chest. I can't take the market-whore mentality anymore. I do remember that this is only a kinda lifestyle, surfing, cycling, life-on-the-Outer-Banks blog. But will the brilliant, honest, resourceful, hardworking visionaries who put American products out front please come forward again? We need you so badly. I know you're out there. Please speak.

Turning Myself In

2008-12-21T14:30:00.002-05:00

Okay, I've been on hiatus see. On the lamb. Gored by a change of situation, work, and play.

The economy has me wrapped up and pinned down not unlike many out there in the blogosphere I suppose. But we're making the best of it.

I took a new job October first---well an additional job. If you've looked at my profile you may have noticed I'm a builder (and carpenter) of custom homes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Our company name is Outer Banks Homes, Inc. We've been building here for just about 30 years. This is where I learned to build in fact. Our work has always included remodeling and repairs and now our schedule is filled by these type projects.

Several new home projects are circling in orbit around us but seem to have much inertia to overcome before we could begin construction. You know the owners have other properties to sell, etc. So the scale of our jobs are smaller in dollar volume and scope now, their approaching rhythm slower with gaps between starts.

So I received an offer to teach Construction Technology at our new high school, First Flight High, one mile from the Atlantic Ocean and about 1000 yards from the site of the Wright Brothers' first powered aircraft flight at Kill Devil Hill. The original teacher walked out after only 5 days. Wonder why? Yeah I did too, but I took the position anyway. With a sagging, maybe even sinking local building economy, it seemed I could handle both work obligations. Yes we continue to remodel, and now I am part lion tamer part teacher. There'll be more on this later. You'll be entertained as I have a degree, but not a teaching degree. I'm making it up as I go.

You see I have a B.A. in English literature along with my years experience as a carpenter/builder. These kids have had a head-on collision with the strangest animal they could ever imagine. Consequently they are required to learn to build and communicate concentrating on the written word. Educators call this teaching across disciplines and it has immense value.

This is translated to this particular audience in this way: "Unless you want to be someone else's "boy" in whatever you choose to do the rest of your life, you must learn to communicate effectively. You must have the ability to recognize and use the appropriate voice in whatever context you find yourself." Many of them are getting it. I'll let you know how it goes though. The challenges are larger than one teacher. Of this I am certain.

So now I have two jobs. Don't get me wrong, this is a happy misery as I have two kids in college. I'm happy to find additional work bike-riding distance from home. But until I'm more sure of the teacher side of myself, this has put a crimp on surfing and just playing in general. The coastal adventure continues. Christmas is almost here again. Meanwhile a chest to head-high glassy wave breaks on the local bars in 52-degrees of salty wetness. More later.

Playing Catch Up, Big Surf This Fall

2008-10-25T20:38:00.005-04:00

The world keeps turning and time keeps carrying us all along whether we want to go or not. Time is the bus we all ride together. We're about to push into November. We've had a very good Fall surf season so far, marked by two huge northeast swells. Each was driven to our beaches by pressure gradients---high pressure systems tracking offshore north of us and low pressure systems rolling along their usual route right over us and into the ocean where both rub against each other, while spinning toward each other and working together to fire off a blistering northeast wind and huge swells.

The first of these swells we covered on the September 25th blog entry. The second occurred last weekend. The surfed was carved into clean lines by a soft westerly wind by last Tuesday morning. It offered hulking, A-frame peaks, double overhead with lots of lefts. There was happiness throughout the land as all Dare County's surf subjects played joyfully together on her coast.

By this morning the water temperature at many of the piers, the Duck Research Pier, Avalon Pier, Nags Head Pier and the Hatteras Island Pier all reported water in the low to mid sixties. That wouldn't be significant if this were late Summer or early Fall, but at this point it portends an unstoppable trend toward the painfully cold water of Winter. So we cling to every moment we get in a lesser wetsuit. We savor the flexibility and lightness of what we wear now in contrast to what we soon must wear to ride waves in the coming months.

Such is the changing of the seasons here. It's not in the leaves or even so much in the air. It's felt mostly by what you must wear in the water, and what a hot shower means to blood circulation and the euphoria we feel after a session, especially in an outside shower at home. There's nothing like it. It's our Outer Banks spa.

A Classic Fall Uncelebrated Swell

2008-10-15T22:09:00.002-04:00

Chest to shoulder high, glassy bowls wrapped around the head of a riptide offering lefts and rights to good friends who don't know each other's names. This evening I savored these conditions between 5 and 6:30 p.m. mostly with other surfers I didn't even know.

The sun slowly descended behind some wood framed, multi-story, time share type buildings thankfully in silhouette. It was an eternity between sets, maybe even 15+ minutes. This time given let me notice the many colors on the ocean's surface---of course shades of gray, but yellows and greens with a boiling riptide perking wavelets through a wavy, mirrored surface.

I felt cradled in this atmosphere highlighted by the smiles of happy strangers now showing up in wetsuits. How truly wealthy can one soul be to have all this---clean, rideable waves in clean water with others under the same spell of wonder?

The Hurricane Kyle Followup

2008-09-28T21:56:00.003-04:00

The surf was pretty big here this morning---up to 4 feet overhead on the morning sets, smaller as the tide went out and the day wore on. High tide was 7-something, the wind light offshore (west-northwest). We looked at it in Kill Devil Hills, then went up the Beach Road to Kitty Hawk. We entered through a huge shorebreak around 10:45 a.m.

Some of you may have read a previous post featuring my whining about the poor condition of our local sandbars. Swells have shown over them this Summer and early Fall, but nowhere seems to break like it used to.

Richard and I stood in a group of long time local elders at 9:15 a.m. as we all came to unanimous agreement on this subject. We also concluded that today's surf was too big to make a swift judgment on the present condition of our sandbars since last week's northeaster---too soon for that. We laughed at two other of our kind hesitating to make the sprint through the shorebreak south of us down the beach. Today it was breaking 3 bars outside. We would need evidence of waves breaking on say, the first or second bar to really know if our sandbars were back again. This is where we usually surf our typical head to 2 feet overhead Fall waves. We'll get to that sometime soon I'm sure. You see, this is the local marine geology learning cauldron. This is where real learning takes place.

However being an East Coast surfer, you learned, like no other surfers on the planet how to be wrong in your predictions and projections about what It will be like tomorrow or the next day after. Shifting sandbars and unpredictable storm tracks, speeds, and intensities help us here too. So....

Today, contrary to my predictions in yesterday's post, we surfed a very large, deep sucking out ground swell with an acute north angle. We paddled out, just the two of us, and surfed glassy conditions on a pitching, huge bowl beside a developing riptide, alone for about an hour. So much for my prediction that the Kyle swell wouldn't reach us till tomorrow or tomorrow night. What do Right Coast surfers know anyhow, huh?

Hurricane Kyle: How a Hurricane Can Pass You with No Wake (Swell)

2008-09-27T22:04:00.002-04:00

Just back from visiting my son at the Barton College Parents' Weekend. Had a good visit, but we all were worried the wind would switch west to line up a meaty northeast windswell created by a 4-day northeaster last week. It's not a good thing to be landlocked 3 hours inland when great surf is born. However early morning calls to local allies told us the wind was still onshore and the waves were "humpy, bumpy, and lumpy". So we could relax and enjoy our day. We may get our offshore conditions tomorrow.

But the real reason I felt compelled to post tonight is the astounding speed Hurricane (almost tropical storm) Kyle is passing our coast apparently with Maine in it's crosshairs. Watching these storms for a lifetime has taught me when they move fast like this one---24 miles per hour---they leave virtually no swell on the adjacent coasts. Hurricane Bell did this in 1976 coming up under the hook of Cape Hatteras and then abruptly pinging to the northeast and then almost straight north at about 16 miles per hour. It was a fairly powerful storm with 110 mph winds wrapped around it's eye. It left behind a strong, double overhead swell crashing our sandbars for a mere few hours. Then just as suddenly, no swell at all.

But Kyle at 24 mph and even on our side of Bermuda? At this time it is a low- rent storm with winds a measly 75+ mph. When a Hurricane moves this swiftly as well, it tows its resulting swell like a fast moving boat wake, not spreading out until the storm is long past. We might not see any surf here from Kyle until late Monday or later when it crashes into New England or Maine. I'll be watching this closely and let you know what happens here at the home breaks.

In the meantime, we should have some fun waves here tomorrow when the wind switches. I'll let you know.

Just What Our Sandbars Need

2008-09-24T22:21:00.002-04:00

Today it blew 30 to 40 knots and is still blowing very hard with gusts up to 50 knots here on the coast. We're caught between two pressure gradients---a classic setup---a high pressure system bringing in cooler air (low 70's day, mid to high 60's night)from the northwest and a low to the southeast both spinning against one another and firing up the present northeaster. Rain should develop into the recipe tomorrow sometime.

There's a considerable size overhead northeast swell that should have no problem whatsoever re-shuffling and re-shaping our town sandbars. They were in such dire need of re-work as none of the classic local bars have been working lately.

The towns, knowing this was about to happen, scrambled to dump and push sand up into the east ends of the beach access parking areas. Many of these are no more than a strip of blacktop extending perpendicular from the Beach Road to the dune line, usually around 100 yards long, and providing parallel parking along both their edges and a way in and out in the center.

I drove my loaded and then empty cargo van across the sound on the Currituck Orville Wright Bridge today and was radically rocked by this northeaster, the van shuddering and bucking the big gusts all the way back to the island.

Will keep you posted on the quality of our sandbars following this latest wind event. Here's to the ever changing Outer Banks land and marine-scapes.

Surf Update and Lance Conjecture

2008-09-10T21:15:00.003-04:00

There were good waves in Rodanthe yesterday. Richard called early in the morning to say he was headed down to Hatteras Island. I chose work for the day. He called around 4 p.m. as I was coming home on the Beach Road. He said it was worth the trip down there as he'd had a good 3-hour session. Said it was ledgie and head high with a lot of barrels to be had. Did I already say I chose work?

On Lance coming back I guess first of all, everybody thinks it's a natural that He would rejoin Johan Bruyneel and the Astana team. I thought the same until pondering the whole thing once again driving home from work today. I see Armstrong as extremely calculating about every move he makes. I've read about his scales and the weighing of all food portions he ate in the off-seasons while he was still harvesting Tours. I can't imagine him announcing his return to the world cycling stage without having already clenched a place to compete.

One of the team bosses who are quoted in Velo News today on Armstrong's return to pro road racing, is playing possum, and I believe already knows Armstrong will be joining his team.

I believe Bob Stapleton's Team Columbia is just as likely a place for Lance to land, maybe even more so, than Team Astana. There he could race once again with his long- time accomplice, George Hincapie. With Bruyneel's new book out this summer recounting how he had a very large part in Armstrong's Tour successes, I don't think anything could be more satisfying to Armstrong than to win a comeback tour "on his own" at 37 years-old without Bruyneel, but with Hincapie on an American team, with transparent proof of his having raced "clean". With these odds, Lance has found a new L'Alpe d'Huez summit finish, a new mountain to climb.

I see Armstrong creating turmoil inside an Astana team boasting two G.C. men in Contador and Liepheimer, whereas Team Columbia's Kim Kirchen, although a strong classics rider, is not the stellar G.C. contender that this team could put on the podium in Paris. Lance would more than fit the bill.

Maybe Bob Stapleton knows more than he would have us think.

Lance Armstrong Planning a Comeback

2008-09-08T22:24:00.003-04:00

Lance Armstrong, now 37 years old, is planning to make a professional road racing comeback according to sources quoted by Velo News and Cycling News. They're talking about Lance signing with Team Astana to reunite with team director Johan Bruyneel and former Team Discovery director Dirk Demol, who has just signed on with Astana for the 2009 road season. Lance reportedly will race for no salary or bonuses.

Apparently rumors were flying wildly at the Eurobike trade show this summer. Neal Rogers of Velo News reports that Vanity Fair will feature an exclusive article in its next issue laying out the details of the coming road racing season and Lance's comeback.

Races Armstrong is said to be participating in are, Paris-Nice, the Dauphine Libere, the Amgen Tour of California, the Tour of Georgia, and the Tour De France.

If this turns out to be true, what a year it will be in professional cycling. I believe the domestic cycling ranks will be transfixed by this all season. I also see this as good for amateur cycling in the U.S. True champions, like Armstrong, are too often never able to see that they might not be champions still. The thought of his attempted comeback may inspire nonetheless. The cauldron he is about to enter, I think, will surely be more competitive now, maybe none more than the Astana team he is reportedly about to join featuring Levi Liepheimer and Alberto Contador both holding the one and two positions in the Vuelta a Espana respectively as of yesterday.

George Hincapie (Team Columbia) says he knows nothing about the Lance comeback. If he doesn't know now, he will know soon for sure. Keep your eyes and ears on him. He is one of Lance's closest friends and former teammates. Should be interesting if true in the 2009 road season.

Tropical Storm Hanna

2008-09-06T17:35:00.003-04:00

Tropical Storm Hanna passed behind us early this morning to the west about 70 miles. It was in a rush moving 22 mph. I'm sure the coastal plain region of North Carolina got drowned by rain. Tropical storms carry so much rain, as if they are a moving funnel spilling all the rain in the heavens over the earth.

The rain cleared out here about mid morning leaving behind only pulsing southerly gusts up to around 50+ miles per hour. I scouted the oceanfront at First Street and watched as the south wind scoured the beaches. The south current along the beach was weaker than I expected. The swell had a pronounced south angle and was only about what looked like a little overhead outside.

Surf tomorrow? The wind will dictate it all. One forecast I saw earlier has a light onshore wind tomorrow, slowly building as the day stretches into the afternoon. We'll see.

Return to Hatteras Island

2008-09-04T20:18:00.002-04:00

Yesterday Robbie Snyder said it best: "this is like a surf trip out of country where, instead, you never have to get on a plane, and the surf is as good as anywhere you've ever been." It was this way again today. This is the Outer Banks in the Fall.

Today we returned to Hatteras Island with the feel of confidence that it would be a repeat of yesterday. The buoys were actually reading around a 1-1/2' larger swell than yesterday. The wind was predicted to remain light and variable westerly.

At first light my internal conflict between work obligations and the draw of rare excellent surf began. I even emailed a close out-of-town friend that I couldn't surf today because I needed to get some things done at work. But my accomplice, Richard called, told me where he was headed and that he'd meet me there, etc. What the heck...this is the very reason I've sacrificed so much to live here. This moment defines it all.

I picked up wax for us both at Stop-and-Shop, checked our hometown break for comparison, and took off south. I once again passed the S-Turns Barnum and Bailey show for the cameras and stopped at a well-known locals break for a check. There were two peaks. A vortex of surfers were knotted up on the primary sandbar. The secondary bar was covered by a sprinkling of riders to the north. The numbers looked bad. I saddled up and headed to the spot we surfed yesterday.

When I came over the dune a ground swell set was pushing through. The sun's glint off the wave faces looked worthy of any surf mag. Yeah, the glamor shot in the unglamorous spot under the radar. I prefer it like that.

The swell direction was now north and opened-ended lefts were everywhere I looked---a goofyfooter's heaven. It would be a good day for me.

Surfers were scattered across peaks spread some 600 yards along the beach. Again I had friends from town in the water, always a welcome sight here, some 30 miles south. Again the surf was around the same size as yesterday with ground swell sets and open lefts. Robbie and I rode a left bowl snapping over a bar with a rip starting up on its south end. If you were caught inside on a set today, the best call was to go to the beach and walk around to the rip and paddle back out from there.

It was a great morning for us. I had ten quality waves in 120 minutes. On most takeoffs it was tail-and-rail only in contact with the wave face. Bait fish were all around. A stingray leaped 6 feet out of the water only 25 feet away from another guy and I. The aloha spirit and many smiles were with all.

When we left the water we knew it would be a while before we would see these conditions again. The forecast for tomorrow is for increasing cloudiness, increasing onshore wind, and plenty of rain as Tropical Storm (now) Hanna moves up and inland behind us (to the west). There will be more good surf fairly soon I'm sure. Will check back later.

The Fall Swell is Upon Us

2008-09-03T20:35:00.003-04:00

Today we left town for Hatteras Island fairly early, around 7 a.m., expecting very good surf. We weren't disappointed. Driving past the S-Turns circus, we searched for the lesser known breaks known amongst locals both north and south of Oregon Inlet.

The tide was nearly topped off high, the wind was 10-12 mph from the west-southwest, and the seawater temperature was about 80 degrees. We found a good sandbar and noticed the south current was running hard between the wash and the first sandbar, about 5+ knots. A friend pointed south to an area cordoned off by the National Park Service to protect endangered turtle eggs and endangered shore bird eggs and chicks as the place to paddle out---about 350 yards south of the place we wanted to be when we finally reached the peak outside.

The surf was consistently chest to head high. But there were deep very impressive, south ground swell sets coming through around 2+ feet overhead every 25 minutes or so. All the tropics are boiling now with 3 named storms all lined up: Hurricane Hanna, Hurricane Ike, and Tropical Storm Josephine. I make the connection to them for the long 25 minute period between these ground swell sets.

This morning we surfed for 2-1/2 hours with friends we've seen year-in and year-out for the last twenty-five, every time there's surf. They are as much a part of the context we are in here as the island landscape or seeing rideable waves lit by the sun's Fall angle.

We return to these breaks tomorrow morning. I'll let you know how it goes.

The Page Valley Road Race and How I Was Sacrificed for the Latest Surf

2008-08-30T13:33:00.004-04:00

Well it's finally happening. The tropics are boiling up storms and hurricanes. Our first official Fall swell came through last Monday. Me? I was in the mountains of Virginia at the Page Valley Road (bicycle)Race near Luray. This was my first Cat 4 road race---in the mountains. Climbs at race speed, some 12 to 20 per cent I guess. My surfing buddies loved me when I returned my having fulfilled the role of sacrifice for legitimate waves head high and larger, clean faces and time for multiple cutbacks, so they told me. Telling me about it was one of their favorite parts second only to the surf itself that day.

It was all about Hatteras Island as the sandbars here in the towns seem non-productive right now. What we need, I suppose, is a real ass-kicker to blow in here and re-shuffle the sand for what I know is coming. How quickly and often things change here, the bottom, the weather, everything, are the reasons the Outer Banks keep your attention, keep your interest. The context is never boring.

Ah yes, the great myth of whom will be sacrificed for the next session. There always seems to be someone to thank for their absence. This never changes.

The bike race had been planned for quite a while. This is something you just don't do here in the Fall swell window. So I'll be avoiding traveling off the beaches as much as possible from here on. The policy now is sit on it till it hatches. I'll probably avoid all travels until after Thanksgiving.

The Page Valley Race was still however, very worth it. It featured as much suffering as any road racing cyclist could possibly want. Climbs which put you on your largest cog, your smallest chainring, standing over your pedals at 9 mph close to spitting up a lung---a situation many road cyclists only dream about.

Around 87 riders were registered in the Cat 4 race. Fifteen mysteriously never started, 12 abandoned the race, and 60 "finished". The range of strength and talent in the field seemed wide. The race was set to include 5 laps around a 10-mile circuit. The promoter reduced the race to 4 laps due to the excessive heat. Of the 60 finishing the race, 27 finished all 4 laps. Some were pulled out at the finish line after completing only 2 laps as they were falling so far behind. Some were pulled out after 3 laps (me) for the same reason.

The finish line was at the top of one of the steepest climbs. I was sure I could've completed all the laps. But let's just say---as I "summited" and the official walked toward my passing bike (yes I was riding slow enough for him to walk)informing me I was done but that he would still "place" me in the standings---I didn't have my happy face on. I didn't hesitate to retire though. For a moment, I even relished the thought of curling up into a fetal position, sucking my thumb, and trying to imagine who else I could blame for my being here this day. Only a momentary thought though. I quickly regained my tough-guy pose along with the other thirty or so guys lining the road at the finish, all either deep in oxygen debt or recovered enough to stand and nervously laugh about our predicament.

After about 15 to 20 minutes of waiting, here came the 4-lap finishers---the real warriors, including Robert, one of the other two riders from our team whom I traveled with up there. Apparently he was fourth wheel going into the last turn at the foot of the final climb and beginning an attack, when suddenly the tubular tire on his rear wheel came off the rim sending him abruptly into a ditch, still upright on the bike. He got the tire back on and still managed to finish 25th of the last 27 riders.

What's more, out of a major display of respect, Jacob Tremblay, the presumed BAR winner for Cat 4 in Virginia and among the lead riders at the time, turned around off the front and returned to check that Robert was okay. They finished together at the rear of the finishing field of riders. I'm happy to say sportsmanship is still alive in cycling at the amateur level.

We expect waves in the next day or two. I'll keep you updated.

What the Beach Road Says About Us---Time to Connect the Dots

2008-08-17T09:55:00.008-04:00

Those of you who have read this blog know that I am a road cyclist and surfer of some years. Almost daily I ride and train on what locals here call the Beach Road. Officially it's Virginia Dare Trail, named for the first English child born in the New World, tragically a member of the Lost Colony.

I try not to ride on the Beach Road during the middle to later hours of the day because of the car traffic and the growing, huge numbers of tourists, and I guess locals, walking, jogging, cycling, crossing to the beach, and just generally promenading. I do love to ride there though when the traffic is sparse. I can ride along on an uninterrupted, steady state ride and see the ocean, check our local sandbars for surf. It's really special.

I've noticed in the last four or five years on the Beach Road that the numbers of people exercising in some form is steadily increasing. It's nothing but impressive. There has also been more and more talk about obesity in our society, especially in children and the general ill effects for all of a sedentary lifestyle devoid of activity. Maybe this show of activity on the Beach Road is the public's reaction.

Let me clear up one thing with you right now though. I'm not on a crusade for health here. My road cycling and fitness escapades are self-serving and intended to prop up my fitness so that I can continue to surf at age fifty-six. Surfing is a big part of what maintains my happiness. The physical and spiritual benefits are too numerous to get into and would probably sound cliche. Suffice it to say, if you surf, you understand.

Let's get back to connecting the dots. My generation was the so-called Hippie Generation, the Flower Power Generation, the Counter Culture Generation. We went off to the college higher learning experience replete with ten-speed road bikes and attitudes which carried a first line distrust for any idea handed down from the "Establishment". Gas prices went through the ceiling for the first time in the early Seventies with gas shortages to boot. When we did drive many of us drove small light cars which sipped gas. My VW Beetle comes to mind. But we rode our bikes EVERYWHERE. There was however, at the time, a nobility in the poverty of functional daily living. Flash forward to now...

This same generation and it's children are the beneficiaries of a prosperity and gain of wealth like no U.S. generation before us has ever known. Many, many are still driving gas-hogging SUV's and bemoaning the $4.00 a gallon price at the fuel pump. These same people are cheering the possibilities of new offshore oil drilling, and cheering the temporary drops in the price of gasoline. I'm sure that if the price of gas remains high enough long enough, the great minds of science and industry in this country will answer resoundingly with viable alternatives.

The longer we delay this important work the greater the pain will be for every single person who enjoys the freedom of driving a vehicle anywhere they please years from now after paying the almost high enough price of gas. If you think $4.00 a gallon crimps your personal pursuit of happiness now, just support the status quo and watch what happens. This and worse environmental implications hang like a noose around our collective necks ever tightening as we fly into the future. Will it take market dynamics and market dynamics alone to finally teach our spoiled, hardheaded vehicle-driving population that this is where it's headed?

The oil producing countries will keep prices just low enough so that our U.S. research and industrial engine doesn't fully engage. Their approach is founded upon the belief that the U.S. population is fat, lazy and are no longer capable of the profound pain and sacrifice it would take to become more self-sufficient again. The pain and sacrifice to which I refer was demonstrated by our parents' generation during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War. It would take the real resolve of every one of us to bull our country out of our present predicament without the market making leadership easy. Can we do it?

Meanwhile our global ecosystem is being trashed by the continued use and addiction to fossil fuel. The obesity-ridden children I referred to above are my generation's children and grandchildren. Maybe we're turning the corner on health somewhat as witnessed by the growing numbers exercising on our 25-mile long Beach Road. I am very encouraged by what I see there now. The Beach Road is actually slammed with physical activity that was never there at this level in years past. It is my local metric revealing whether we, as a nation are getting it. What people do has much more to say than what they say. I still see huge numbers of big fuel-guzzling vehicles on the Beach Road.

But on the side of progress made, I see many new fuel efficient vehicles too...hybrids, flex-fuel vehicles, and many, many more motor scooters for local transportation. One local bicycle shop in Kill Devil Hills rented motor scooters last tourist season. At the end of the season they sold all the used scooters. This year they could get no new scooters because of the overwhelming demand for them on the national market. This is good. We are reducing consumption, finding other ways to get around.

The national strategic oil reserve shockingly though, is good for only about three months oil supply. Think about what that means in leverage to any foreign oil producers who care to put us in a vice over some international issue. Scary thought huh?

We still can't seem to connect the dots on transportation especially local daily transportation which serve our daily needs. Our community planning must begin to support a local pedestrian and cycling lifestyle immediately. I direct you to a website I found which is becoming a clearinghouse for such efforts called World Carfree Network. There you will see another metric for our national awareness on these issues.

I look for signals in the media as well. Advertising is a great indicator of what we as a nation are thinking on a subject and, as if holding a mirror, what the corporations in this country anticipate our posture and positions to be on an issue. There's the T. Boone Pickens ad on TV, there's the very revealing Autozone (auto parts store) ad shown on Versus during the Tour De France of all places, with the scenario of a boy riding his bike who finds an old, giant American gas-hogging car with a note on the windshield, "If you can fix it, it's yours." The kid goes back and forth between working on the car and of course, the Autozone store getting parts and advice until the car finally runs. The narrator victoriously proclaims in the end that the boy will always be able to depend on his local Autozone, but at least he won't have to ride his bike there anymore.

Now this ad speaks volumes. One begs the question, how cash-starved is Versus that they wouldn't filter out an ad like that for a bike-friendly audience watching the Tour. But more importantly here, Autozone's ignorance to the context we are living in, astounds and scares the hell out of me. They like the oil producing nations are betting that the American public just doesn't get it.

Right now I'm shaking my head in disgust. I pray that you are too.

Update From the Beaches and The Chesapeake Criterium

2008-08-11T21:07:00.009-04:00

The wheel of time slowly turns. The familiar autumn slant of sunlight leads my memory to past epic surf. The many years flow together and become one atmosphere, one great big luscious feeling representing all those waves ridden.

The ocean water temperature is pushing 80 degrees. Various water brothers talk now of free diving and spearfishing on the shipwrecks littering our local sandbars. The ocean is flat, clear and the wind is light and easterly. This is what our local islandscape, the context in which we live, is like just before the first real swell comes. So as we wait, we do other things in order to be ready.

Last Saturday I raced in my first race as a Category 4 bike racer. I had had two weeks preceding this race of careful, recovery-type training rides due to persistent groin and ligament strain. I believe this is attributed to lack of weight training in support of the racing season following hernia surgery. Lifting just hurt the scar tissue too much. So I just rode miles and put in time on the bike. I kept the intensity dialed down. I didn't really feel prepared, but resolved to ride in the Chesapeake Criterium anyway.

I rode up with my friend Robert. You could say I'm an entry level Cat 4 racer. He's ready to upgrade to Cat 3, but has decided to finish the season as a Cat Four. So for the first time we got to ride as teammates in a race.

Robert has done nothing less than lead many new local riders into the sport, and in some cases like mine, encouraged a few long time riders to enter criteriums and road races. He has led by putting in a Herculean effort himself to improve his fitness and skills for great racing results. I'll post a blog in the future characterizing the kind of unfailing devotion and commitment this takes in cycling as an amateur racer.

We were to meet one of our team's boy wonders, Ricky, 24 years-old, whom we knew would be armed with a murderous sprint finish. We also knew he was not happy with his results in the recent Piedmont Triad Omnium in the North Carolina foothills. Ricky is a natural sprinter. He would come to race. If he was in any kind of good position in the last 300 meters to the finish line, he'd be in the money when it was over. I'm always hoping I'm close enough to see it at the end. I raced with him when we both were in Cat 5 together. He kept winning so he moved right up to Cat 4 leaving me to slave through all 10 required races in order to also move up.

I lined up on the start line. Ricky tapped my rear wheel with his front to let me know he was behind me. As we started, I let a few riders find the front of the peloton before I fell in close behind, intending to hide from the wind more than I usually do. Robert had lined up on the start line to my right. The rider on the front set the pace which settled in around 25+ mph. I was watching for a break but there was none. I rotated to the front and took a short pull. I was determined to ride in the top ten, the safest place to be in a race, keeping the majority of the other riders behind me as much as possible.

We had been told by the referees at the outset the race would be 40 minutes. They said they would time our beginning laps then put up the number 13 on the lap board so we could watch the laps count down from there to the final lap. As the leaders cross the start/finish line on the final lap, cycling tradition has a bell ringing (like a cowbell)to signal the riders.

The race announcer could be heard briefly as we passed the finish line each time complaining about the slow pace of the race saying,"when will these riders pick up the pace and really begin racing?" Then a four dollar prime (pronounced preem)was announced the next time we passed by. Four dollars to the next rider to lead across the line on the next lap. We were being demeaned. I never did learn who won that prize. We weren't impressed.

I worked hard to hold a position near the front which had much more to do with bike handling skills and maneuvering than speed and strength. Our average speed at the race's end was only around 26.4 mph. But it's the movement in, around, and among the other racers that is the real intensity in the main part of the race. It's intoxicating.

If the pace sagged coming out of a corner, the leaders would be passed on the right and/or the left all at once. Riders would stream by like river current. I would be left having to pick my way back up to the lead group again after sinking backward until I couldn't tolerate my new position.

A rider went off the front of the pack and pulled out about 20 yards away. So I came out of the lead group and bridged up to him, covering the potential break. He signaled me to pull through and help stay away from the pack. I refused and stayed on his wheel. I was really just enjoying a safer place to ride and rest out of the wind.

We crossed the line, the bell rang and the last lap began. I was about 7th wheel from the front. We turned into the back stretch and ran up to around 28+ mph. I jumped over to the righthand gutter, climbed up the side of the leaders and launched off the front. I separated from the others only briefly as I struggled into the wind. I peeked behind to see the others closing on my rear wheel. Swiftly, the last corner before the finishing straight neared. I leaned hard into the turn holding my speed up. As I straightened my line, the riders behind me exploded across the road and up the sides in a maddening, furious sprint to the line. Among them were my teammates Ricky and Robert.

Robert had found the wheel of a friendly rider we knew from another team. When that rider got up to sprint, he put a watt loaded pedal-stroke down and his chain came off suddenly dropping him on his top bar. He managed to keep his bike up, but Robert had lost much of his sprint momentum, skidded and then all at once started his sprint again.

Ricky, waiting for no one, shot by me on the left and finished third. Robert ended with an eighth place. I finished safely 18th in a field of thirty-nine. It was a worthwhile race. Today I learned I could ride in Cat Four. There's nothing like riding with able teammates.

Message in a Bottle

2008-07-31T21:57:00.005-04:00

To Whomever Finds This Bottle,

We're waiting. We've been waiting...for weeks now. Yes we're fully enveloped in the doldrums. But we keep waiting and waiting for it to happen. We squint into the sun, watch the horizon in this crushing heat for days and days for something to ride. The Bermuda High has locked its teeth down and its southwester, a flamethrower, blows searing hot.

Waiting for something to go off in the tropics. If you find this bottle please say a prayer for us. We can make it through yet another doldrum flat spell. By now we've got to be close to the swell window. It's maybe a week or ten days away. I've examined my past logs and am encouraged, hopeful. It's almost time.

Until the first swell comes, we'll work, snorkel, ride our bikes hard, swim, sail, and even rest up. Until it gets here we will endure. You will hear from us again when the first real Fall swell comes. It will be our salvation, our sustenance, future tall tales. God help us arrive.

Riding in Groups and Pacelines---Avoiding the Big Crash

2008-07-25T19:20:00.009-04:00

(Editor's Note: It's been some time since we've posted here. Thank you to those readers who have been patient and continue to visit and read this blog. To say this writer has been distracted lately would be huge understatement. There's been road race training, work, family, keeping my vigil for the tropics to kick off the fall surfing season, and road racing. I have stories. Anyway, back to telling them.)

When we last met, we had unveiled "Anatomy of a Road Bike Crash". Here is the cause of the crash that morning on Kitty Hawk Woods Road. I had just come off a pull on the front of an eight-rider paceline moving between 27 and 28 mph. Not long after I moved into the 6th position, the number four rider, having fallen away from the wheel of the third, surged forward and toward the lost rear edge of the wheel just ahead. He was towing four riders right behind I being one. Evidently as his wheel arrived right behind the wheel of the rider before him, that rider's rear wheel jerked backward, that rider responding to something before him. Rider four's front wheel touched that rear wheel, unbalancing him, touching wheels a second time---the undoing laid waste.

I need to say first that I don't consider myself the big expert on group riding safety. But I do think it's a good idea to pass along some of what I saw and some ideas about safer riding arising out of this unfortunate crash.

I do know sometimes triathletes and others who join group rides comprised of road cyclists, will often complain about the group road cyclists' overbearing vigilance and finicky, picky attention to how others ride. They will cry about the protocols and etiquette involved in group rides.

After witnessing the carnage wrought by mistakes and some inexperience intersecting on a group ride, I clearly understand why experienced roadies will do all in their power to insure a safer ride. It's only about safety. The difficult part is everybody out there has a different way of getting the desired result. It's trying at best to reconcile safety into a group with way diverse experience riding as such.

First something about role modeling on group rides. In a group of mixed skills, in my opinion, time trial bikes and clip-on aerobars have no place at all. Here's the deal: yes experienced riders can ride a paceline in an aero position as in a team time trial. Several things make this unsafe in a mixed group. In road cycling, the strongest-fastest get not just the attention of the other less skilled/fit riders, but more than that, they are role models whether they want that mantle or not. It's one of the laws of the pack.

The other riders drink in every detail about why these alpha riders are successful in the sport: bike brand, frame composition and geometry, drive train manufacturer, wheels, body position, shoes, helmet, saddle, everything. Because many are male, we all have too much of what Jerry Seinfeld has noted is an internal posture telling us that in a group of athletes all up to the same sport, "it's alright for me to take risks and use the most advanced equipment because I'm THE MAN." Get it? So less experienced riders show up with TT bikes and aerobars hoping they'll make them faster too. Because surely it's alright for them---they're one of the main guys too.

Everything the stronger riders do is being watched closely. Some of them are undoubtedly the strongest and more experienced and safer riders and know how to get it across to others. They are superb role models. Others are dangerous because they are so strong and get the attention, but they're not safe riders in a group. I don't have answers for this dilemma. But if you ride in a group, you must be aware of these dynamics.

There are some things I've learned from my experience in fast moving pacelines at home and in races, and also techniques my local mentors have taught me which I'd like to share.

If you really want to learn quickly and especially the really good stuff, then create an atmosphere that allows the more experienced, safe riders to teach you. Ask questions and don't be defensive if they become critical of something you do that looks scary to them. My advice is to carefully consider what's being said and why. Allow learning and teaching to occur. For some adults, I think this is a stretch. The benefits to you as a safe road cyclist are immense.

Obviously, if you get gapped like the number four rider in our crash, use caution in moving back in behind the rider before you. If you are in a paceline with a following rider and you desire to pedal standing, there is a safe way to transition from pedaling while seated to standing. All at once, as your right foot/pedal is moving to the 10-11 o'clock position on the chainring (sprocket), put your weight over that foot and climb up to a standing position as the pedal goes up and over the top of the chainring. This will maintain constant pressure on the bike's drivetrain and keep your rear wheel from stuttering backward seemingly toward the front wheel of the rider behind. He'll really appreciate it.

Ride on the drops (lower part of the handlebars) with a rider in front of you only if you have a high degree of confidence in that rider's bike handling skills. Otherwise ride with your hands positioned near the brake hoods. Braking in a paceline with a following rider however is only a last resort.

Ride with your front wheel slightly offset to one side or the other of the rear wheel of the rider before you. Always be looking for an escape route should a crash occur in your front. Know whether to exit to the right, off the road if the terrain allows, or as a second choice, to the left. This choice is a dangerous one though in the U.S. as this could put you into motor vehicle traffic.

Try to maintain a view of the paceline beyond the rider before you. This can give you a valuable second or more to react to something bad happening up the line. At the same time maintain a safe distance from the wheel you are following. Above all maintain your focus.

I'm sure there is much more to making it safe. But this can be a starting point for you. Don't let bad things happen on the road and enjoy the ride.

Anatomy of a Road Bike Crash

2008-06-29T19:02:00.003-04:00

My eyes were clinched tightly shut. There was silence. I laid on the warm asphalt on my right side. I moved my fingers, toes then my hands and feet until I felt it was safe to move my body. Still lying where I had landed, I looked back where I had just come tumbling out of a 4-man bike crash. This was the worst I'd ever seen, let alone been involved. The next thing I saw transformed into one of those lifetime snapshots you carry in your head for all time.

I was part of an early morning group ride, about 15 riders, which started in Southern Shores, warmed up progressing south on the Beach Road, then worked its way over to roads on the soundside and back north to Kitty Hawk. The ride starts at 5:30 a.m. I met the group riding toward it on the Beach Road as I live 7 miles south of their starting point. The spectrum of road experience and bike handling skills was diverse in the group which assembled that day. Many riders are quite fit and able to carry on pretty vigorous efforts.

Upon completion of the warmup, the group organized into a paceline (single file, wheel to wheel)and began the real work. The morning was beautiful with the sun reaching just above the Atlantic horizon. It felt as though it was ours and ours alone to view as we rolled down a virtually empty Beach Road. The ocean was mirror glassy and flat.

The typical ride goes like this: Sprint markers are embedded along the route, the first of which is the Nags Head Inn. The north end of Bay Drive is next, and the last sprint finishes before the light at the north end of Kitty Hawk Woods Road.

As we approach sprint markers, lifting the tempo all the while, the stronger riders vie for front position and all at once, one attacks launching a sprint toward the next mark. The paceline stretches at first and then riders explode across the road each tracing his own lane to the finish mark. The first riders across sit up and pedal a slow cadence until the group re-forms. Then everybody's off again, the paceline running around 25-26 mph between sprints.

Upon reaching the lead-up to the Woods Road sprint the group divides with the strongest riders now riding lead in their own group. Newly formed groups follow behind at whatever pace they can maintain.

I moved to the front of the lead group to take my turn pulling on Kitty Hawk Village Road and turned the corner onto Woods Road. We were cruising at 25+ mph. One quarter mile further I came off the front as a few riders wanting more speed passed to my left. As I dropped back seven places, I heard Matt coaxing me back into the paceline while opening a space. I sidled safely in ahead of Matt and behind Mark. We were between 27 and 28 mph now and steady.

The riders in front of Mark were in this order: Roger, Chip, Art, Joe and Robert (at the front). Fortunately this day we had two doctors in our group.

I was watching the line of riders' heads and shoulders while peering over Mark's right shoulder. Occasionally I looked at the proximity of my front wheel to Mark's rear wheel, maintaining a safe distance but staying in his slipstream.

The familiar sound of spokes cutting the morning air was in my ears. Riders' heads and bodies were moving in an unscripted, wiggling choreography all the while working to stay rail steady on the bikes.

In one long, long instant Roger (Mark was between us) dropped straight down gone from my view, his head and body twisting to the left. Mark reacted by steering left and catching Roger's now tumbling bike and going down himself. Roger and his bike were now before me as I jambed on my brakes. Matt streaked by on the right plowing into the helpless Roger still sliding on his back, his bike laying over him.

Having no place to veer, I rode my skidding bike into the tangled mess of downed riders and bikes. I can clearly remember attempting to miss my friends as they lay there. My front wheel stuck hard on something and then the inevitable came. I went over my handlebars tucking my head, turning one shoulder to the ground hoping to roll while kicking out of my pedals. I ended the super spill pretty far down the road by myself. All of this in one long, long instant. Roger was one of the two doctors in our group this day.

I was afraid to look back at them that morning. These were special people in the life of a man. We come together only for this hard work---a loose team, growing closer in whatever precision we can muster each day on our road bikes.

I got up as Mark was getting up also. We went to Roger and saw he was unconscious. Matt was on the street edge holding his head and moaning. I ran to my bike seat bag, grabbed my cell phone, cut it on and literally pleaded with the phone to find the "Network" it was searching for before making itself available. I called 911.

The front part of our group was arriving in our midst. Robert ran back up the traffic lane in which we had crashed in order to direct oncoming vehicles around us. The rear group began to arrive. Two riders bent over Roger attending to him as best they could. I directed some to take off their jerseys and cover him lest he go into shock. I had the 911 operator in my ear asking tedious questions. I gave her our location. As I spoke I can remember the absolute awe and bewilderment in the other riders' faces as they took in the scene.

A couple came running to us from a nearby home offering pillows and blankets. I could hear sirens, one coming from each end of the road. I soon realized Art, the other doctor on the ride, was one of the two attending to Roger. As the 911 operator began asking me medical questions about Roger I passed the phone to Art so that he could communicate the medical situation. I didn't know whether I helped or hindered by doing that.

We helped pull Matt and his bike off the road. The other riders filled in around us picking up bikes and parts and taking them off the road. A paramedic was at my side offering alcohol soaked cotton swaths to clean the blood off my right leg and arm, all standard road rash, my only injuries. Mark had the same injuries. Matt had a concussion.

Roger was seriously hurt, a breath away from life changing injury or death. He spent that night in a hospital intensive care unit. His injuries? Four broken ribs, broken scapula, brain hemorrhage, severe concussion and a severe hip bruise causing him to loose 3 units of blood internally.

When the ambulances left us there that morning, we weren't sure if one of our group would live. Everyone went home. I got on my bike and rode south and the long rest of my day. Since this group ride we all have had much to think about---mostly how to be safer and even why we do what we do.

This post will be followed by my own discussion of group road cycling safety in the next post. Also I'll reveal why this accident occurred having now spoken to the riders involved including Roger. In the meantime, if you are an experienced cyclist, I would love to hear your comments relative to improving safety with such a diverse group riding together. If you prefer to respond off line my email is skip.saunders@gmail.com. I welcome your take.

Long Beach Island, New Jersey---A Ride to Remember

2008-06-21T16:15:00.004-04:00

So here we are in the North Shore Inn, one block from the Jersey "shore" (they don't call it the "beach" up here)on Long Beach Island, near Barnegat Inlet. I came up here last year kicking and screaming with my son for his skimboard contest. I had no interest in coming to the beaches in New Jersey. After a lifetime of hearing crummy stuff about the place, I was shocked at how beautiful and well cared for the beaches and the tiny beach towns were when I finally arrived. So here we are again.

I brought my trusty Trek road bike for this trip however and went out for a 30-mile tempo ride this morning. As I was readying for the ride, I spied a guy flying by on the road out front of the North Shore Inn on a hand cycle. I know, what's that? I didn't know that's what it's called either. It's a type of tricycle (high-performance wheelchair) for handicapped athletes operated by turning chain-drive sprockets with each hand and arm. It's frame is triangular in shape with it's rider snug between two approximately 20-24-inch wheels, their top edges leaning inboard toward the rider. A single front wheel, about the size of a standard road bike, projects out in front of the rider held by an aluminum, steel, or carbon fiber fork.

A racing wheelchair, on the other hand, has a smaller front wheel out front about 32 inches. It is held by a straight rod and fork extending forward from the rider's seated position and can be constructed of the same materials found on any road bike.

As I entered the road, I saw a police car, its blue lights ablaze, beside a roadside roped-off area. Adjacent to this was a tent and a gathering of people near what appeared to be a finish line. I was riding along in a race course for a wheelchair race. I looked behind to see racing wheelchairs closing fast.

I moved over toward a group of wheelchair racers who had just finished the 5-mile course. I rolled over to a dark-haired, smiling racer clad in a yellow Cannondale jersey, who introduced himself as Shannon. He had come from Washington, D.C. for the race. He was a 30-year old double leg amputee, the stubs of his legs and his lower body, wore black cycling shorts.

I introduced myself and told him I was very unfamiliar with his ride, so he showed me around and told me some about these special vehicles. His was not a hand-cycle, but a racing wheelchair. The frames were fairly similar, both somewhat triangular, but the means of propulsion were quite different. He said he has a hand-cycle, but prefers to race in the chair. It's his speed machine.

The racing chair is driven with the riders' hands and arms pumping in a vertical motion, with his mitted hands driving the wheels' forward edges downward by contact with a rubber coated ring attached to the outer face of the wheels. This repeated motion has the rider bent over at the waist and face downward toward the road for virtually the entire race. Today's race was a mass start race. Drafting was allowed and is effective with these machines as it is with racing bicycles.

Shannon said his chair, made by Top End, is custom fitted to his body and cost about $5500. Cannondale made chairs for some years but has gotten out of it. Most chairs cost between $3600 and $6500. They even sport deep dish carbon fiber wheels (as his did) and disc wheels, the type used by road cyclists in time trials.

"I wasn't real happy with my results today. I was up real late drinking with a buddy in Atlantic City last night," Shannon confessed. "He came up here with me from D.C. so we sorta stuck together last night. There aren't many out-of-town athletes in this race. These guys are mostly locals," he went on. "I'm from around here so it's kinda nice to come back here for a race like this.

"Well who do you train with at home?" I wanted to know.

Shannon: "The only person I train with around D.C. is an Olympic Parathlete. But I can't really keep up with him. He's super strong. I mean he's a real Olympian. But it's great to have the opportunity to work and learn from someone of that caliber."

As for his training, Shannon said he trains at about 13 to 15 miles per hour. He does long rides of 8 to 10 miles and does intervals to improve his speed. He talks about his training with the same precision of a dedicated road racing cyclist.

As Shannon said this, another rider pulled up wearing a red jersey looking a bit surly and well worn from the road race. "This guy won the race today," Shannon explained. "We're gonna ride back now." Seated inches above the road, he reached up and shook my hand. I also shook the hand of the race winner and wished them both good health and great racing. They took off south down the road intent upon catching up to their racing buddies who now had a head start on them.

They were off in the same direction I was going so I started off as well. I passed the group of them, and as I went by I looked down upon flat backs, faces inches to the road, elbows pumping up and down with a furious rage.

I had an especially good ride today.

My Cycling "How Hot it Was" Story and Other Goings On

2008-06-14T17:50:00.007-04:00

Hey y'all. It's been awhile. Locally we're into the transitional period between the late, mind-blowing epic winter/spring swells, and the summer doldrums. The tourists are filling in now and taking the upper hand everywhere over us locals---the roads, restaurants, of course the hotels, the grocery stores, and all the entertainment businesses. We still have 'em though when it comes to the beaches and ocean, thankfully.

The wind is southerly about 18 mph and we've been enveloped in smoke all day from the wildfire covering over 63 thousand acres in Pocosin Lakes Wildlife Refuge in Hyde County, North Carolina, about 45 miles southwest of Kill Devil Hills. It was started by a lightening strike and is feeding on the marsh peat billowing enough smoke to been seen on NWS national radar. One local woman reportedly saw so many black bears passing through her yard escaping the fire, she said she was afraid to go to her mailbox by the road. We need a soaking rain in a big way.

There's also another fire in Virginia to the north-northwest of us in the Great Dismal Swamp, allegedly started by logging equipment. So we have smoke here on the Right Coast too although so far not too many buildings have been destroyed.

The surf here now is small and locally dependent on the tide and of course the wind. The water temperature is between 70-76 degrees Fahrenheit. We're tropical again and it's so fine. However as I've said before, we're pointed into the doldrums, so for me bike road racing is the thing.

So far, in this late-start season for me (due to recent surgery), I've raced in one duathlon relay (the 25 mile bike leg), two criteriums held at the Virginia Beach Sportsplex, and one time trial, my favorite, the Peter Teeuwen Memorial Omnium in Chesapeake, Va. That particular race that day gets my award for the highest air temperature in which I've ever raced, an astounding 104 degrees F. with humidity around 90 per cent. One of the guys in our Kitty Hawk Cycling Club, Robert Netsch, raced that day and also won the previous day's Va. State Criterium Championship the day before in 107 degrees, a new record for that calendar day in Chesapeake.

Everybody's got "how hot it was" stories, so here's mine. I sat with Robert and a few riders from other clubs he knew under a canopy tent one of them brought. We warmed up on our trainers there and waited our turn to ride the time trial. It was demoralizing just sitting there waiting in the suffocating heat. As each rider returned to our pitiful oasis, he would dismount, shake his head, sigh, and babble something about how poor his time was.

It was my turn now. Riders start from the start line every 60 seconds in this time trial. As I moved into the line, fifth rider from the line, my handlebar tape started uncoiling in my hands, as the heat had melted the tape holding it in a tight wrap around the bars. I tried to quickly tie it, but nothing worked. I flew back to the tent in a panic asking everybody there if they had any kind of tape in their vehicle. One rider did and I followed him to his truck, made a quick repair with some electrical tape, and rushed to the line. Thanks Dave, for the assist!

I took my place at the start line and thanked the official for being there to start us in such absurd heat. I looked down at my two water bottles, enough I thought, to carry me through the 23-mile time trial. I knew it would be close, but felt pretty confident I could make it through.

I looked out on the wafting waves of intense heat rising from the road before me, the first 6-mile stretch. I saw the previous rider's image fade into a distorted figure seeming to melt bike and all into the scorching asphalt. This was profound heat---the kind that can create doubts and second thoughts if you choose to let it in.

My cycling mentors have always told me not to go out too hard on a time trial because the adrenaline surge at the start can have a rider find a speed he would never be able to hold for the whole distance. You must know your own ability and limits. If not, you redline, you bonk, and the lactic acid build-up in your muscles snuffs out your ability to carry the full race distance.

I started, stood on the pedals, and sprinted up to my tempo speed. I dropped down to my saddle and settled in. I was riding on borrowed Zipp wheels, 404's on the front and 808's on the rear. These are carbon fiber, deep-dish wheels like the pros use. For me, this was like Cinderella wearing the golden slippers. They are worth the same amount as my bike in dollars. They were generously loaned by Chip Cowan from Outer Banks Cycle in Kill Devil Hills. Thanks Chipper! I'm sure though, he was entertained to see a rider like me with such high performance gear. You know, one of those "what's wrong with this picture?" kinda deals for the local riders who know me.

So back to the heated time trial. I'm one mile out settling into my steady state tempo. The Zipp wheels are making me feel like Superman plus I was sure I looked pretty cool too. I'm already thirsty so I pull up a water bottle and take a short gulp. I lower the bottle to the top of the bottle cage, blink, and now I'm watching the same full bottle spinning on it's side across the burning asphalt to the far side of the other lane. I turned forward and wondered whether I should go back and get it, start crying, abandon the race, or listen to the inner voice reminding me I can make it on one bottle because I was after all, as immortal and invincible as I'd always been. The heat is only another obstacle standing in the way of my growing cycling credentials. Can't this inner voice shut up just once?

So now the plan was make sure I had half a bottle left halfway through. Water rations no less. I passed riders walking who had abandoned the race. One carried a shoe in his hand. I reached the halfway mark with my half bottle. I poured a little of the almost scalding fluid over my helmet and the back of my neck, shot a little in my mouth in celebration. This heat was demeaning.

The Chesapeake Ruritan Club is the registration building for the time trial. The time trial begins and ends in front of it. It is a white stucco building which can be seen straight down the last say, mile and a half of the course. It is little more than a shimmering white gable end looking as though the road leads right into its side from my distant view. Mostly open fields frame my view of it on both road edges. But there it was heat-distorted ahead finally in my sight. I was now seeing in its simple form the end of my self-imposed torture. I was sure there were people cooling off in the shade with cold drinks in their grip near that building. I was also sure I wanted to be one of them as quickly as possible. I somehow quickened my tempo, relishing the coming euphoria of ending this sublime suffering. I passed several of the riders whom had started before me.

I saw visions of every sort, from fantasy to Dante's Hell as I crossed the finish line, I'm sure speaking in tongues. I was one and a half minutes slower than the same time trial on the same date last year. I was nonetheless alive and on the correct side of the grass, sitting in the shade, under the tent among friends, feeling how superb a freezing cold bottle of water can feel poured over my head after riding in such conditions.

Tomorrow I'll ride in the Farm Bureau Langley Speedway Criterium in Hampton, Virginia. The predicted temperature is a freezing 86 degrees F.

More later. Keep riding........something.

A Surfing Winter-Spring Like No Other

2008-06-02T22:06:00.003-04:00

I've surfed this coast for 40-some years. This winter-spring is by far one of the most memorable for the virtually constant profusion of regular, sizable swell. Seems like every 10-14 days another low pressure system was coiling up into a tight fist while swinging offshore to kick back epic local conditions. Even the water temperature cooperated somewhat, falling only as far down as the mid-forties (degrees Fahrenheit that is). Two winters ago, the ocean water temperature plummeted to 36 degrees, the coldest I can remember here in my lifetime.

What's more, so much of the action is now being recorded in photographs and video and published on the internet. Mickey McCarthy's dogged pursuit of the local action is without peers in my book. I point you to SURFKDH.COM as evidence. Nice work Mick!

For many, many years what happened during the really world class swells was left behind only in the memories of those who were here so long ago: surfers like Don Bennett, Stuart "Panda" Taylor, Scott Busbey, and Jimbo Brothers to name a few of the many who shredded the Outer Banks without fanfare, acclaim, or audience.

The photographic proof pours forth now for all to see. What many of us knew for so long in this spot so far from the more dense surfing population cauldrons of California and Florida, that the Outer Banks juices up real good now, just like it did back then but without the crowds.

We're pointing toward the mid summer doldrums now. I suppose it's a good time to reflect a little on recent swells past. Anticipation will soon build for the tropical storm season looming just ahead. Look out...

A Kind Word at the Right Time

2008-06-01T19:48:00.003-04:00

I've been making a fitness and cycling comeback beginning last winter and, at this moment, I'm just a little bit below where I left off last December when I had hernia surgery. But this is not a story of some heroic, epic effort I made in order to return to bike racing. No, those stories are found in the realm of cancer patients, injured war veterans returning from combat, and thousands who fight off the effects of other more serious diseases day in and day out their whole lives.

My story is of small note. But what happened has had huge influence on my slow, often grudging progress so far this year. I'm not a great cyclist or athlete. I do love riding bikes fast and the competition of racing---strength on strength, pure and primal, painful and purging---euphoric even. It's too easy it seems, to stay tucked safely away in our comfortable routines. Bike racing and all the intensity it pours over us, lets us step out of our safe place in this world regularly much the way one does when very young, and each day brings such rejuvenation and revelation.

In order to do what we do in this crazy, fast endurance sport, we must train obsessively. Some weeks I'm not sure I'm on or off the bike at the moment. Every week we pour over our planners to insure there is time for the right kind of ride we need at the time: group throwdowns, long steady-state tempo, sprint intervals, weight room, spin class, you name it. Many times the superfluous things which come up on the calendar get plowed over like last year's leftover crop. We read articles, blogs, books on everything from the latest technical equipment to fitness and training. Where is the next race? What do I need to do to upgrade my license? How strong will my opponents be in the next race?

But the one thing that rises above all, that seems to drive me forward without faltering, continues to nurture the cause and helps me see that I too can do it, is a kind word at the right time from those around in the midst of these same kinds of big physical efforts. Only they know what it feels like, what it takes to be there, the preparation, the dangers, and what payoff one carries home in the end.

During the past six months, as I've worked hard to get back in it, I've had friends and racing teammates encourage me, compliment my work, and even carry me through by pulling for me when the going was too much for my fitness level on that day's ride. I didn't know there was something even better to this sport. I've been surrounded with support during this time. I am a grateful man. Nothing makes me faster or stronger on a bike.

The Etiquette of Cycling

2008-05-26T10:24:00.007-04:00

There's a certain etiquette and decorum in every sport. These unwritten protocols and unofficial rules make up the very essence of the cultures within each sport. Learning how to navigate this stuff, to me, is a significant part of the challenge of cycling on deceptively simple looking group rides all the way to road races and criteriums.

It seems because the sport of road cycling is still so arcane and strange to most Americans, there doesn't appear to be much written about just what the norms are out there on the road, and not just between motor vehicle drivers and cyclists, but (and especially) among cyclists themselves. So much seems to depend upon who's in the group and their level of experience. Each sets its own unspoken parameters. Being only a Cat 5 racer myself (about to upgrade to Category 4) I often can't recognize the nuance all around me all the time especially on group rides where experience levels mix. Most of us will defer to what the more experienced riders/racers have to say about situations. That is, of course, unless one of them is out of line. Then you're left only with your own internal compass of what is fair to others.

So here's what happened. Yesterday on our group ride conflict occurred between experienced riders---an out-of-towner with fairly high level race credentials versus a few of our riders of the same caliber. Some in the group, like myself, were at least semi-oblivious to what occurred.

We were working in a paceline at a tempo of around 27 mph. Everyone working to the front, taking their pull in the wind, falling off to the rear and continuing to rotate forward as successive riders peeled off the front. I noticed one of our riders fall off the front and the out-of-towner, who was on his wheel, stayed on his wheel as they both drifted to the rear of the paceline. There were about eight of us so this put me and others on the front again sooner. I really didn't hardly notice what he had done, nor did I care. I like getting the work up front. That's the purpose of these rides to me.

I figured he was just trying to stay on with us as he might be racing the next day or wanted an easy workout and was going to "sit on". "Sitting on" or "sitting in" means riding in the pack (peloton) or back in the paceline protected and out of the wind where there is about 30 per cent less workload. If a rider is "sitting on", it means he apparently has no intention of coming to the front to work in the wind for the group. Most experienced riders will tolerate this, no problem. But what happened next, his attack, riding away from the group, demanded an answer from the group and an atonement from the offending out-of-town rider, or outright expulsion by the group by laying down a crushing speed. A single rider often cannot maintain the speed organized riders can lay down after the effort required to attack and then stay away from the group like he had. What I witnessed next was a sort of rare primal justice served.

I had just completed a fairly long second pull down Woods Road in Kitty Hawk. We approached Twiford Road, a righthand turn. As we started into the turn, the out-of towner came out of the paceline from behind and attacked the group. "Attacking", for those unfamiliar with the lexicon of bike racing, means sprinting out front and away from the main group. You'll hear this talk many times in the sports coverage of the Tour De France, for instance, and any races for that matter.

The rider took the speed up to 29 mph or so. Suddenly one of our stronger riders followed him out. I was trying to increase speed and stay on his wheel. We turned left onto Kitty Hawk Village Road and all hell broke out on the road.

The out-of-town guy and our guy were away from the group now about 30 yards. Another one of the guys in our re-forming paceline was second wheel and growling at the frontman to ride faster and faster. The frontman fell away. Our speed went up to 31 mph. We clawed back up to the two leaders and fell in on their wheels. The out-of towner cooled out and drifted to the rear. I never saw him again.

Our strong chaser said he had ridden with that rider and the group the previous day and he had done the same thing---not worked for the group, and then attacked the fatigued group by riding away showing off his strength so to speak. He exacerbated the situation beforehand by bragging about how, in this type of "down" economy, he doesn't have to work as he is a real estate investor. This is not the time or place to put that out to others who may not have the same fortunes. Verdict: our group does not like riders who avoid work and then later, make a display of their (rested) strength on group rides where all have put in their work except him. Those who transgress shall pay.

In a race however, everything changes. We'll talk about that later I'm sure. Thanks for reading. Keep riding (cause there's no surf here right now).

A Real Man, De-Pantsed by the Surf

2008-05-03T13:28:00.006-04:00

Alright, this is directed to all you real men, real surfers, real watermen out there. I once stood proudly among your ranks---strong, unaffected, immortal, a genius even. "You shoulda' been here fifteen minutes ago," you'd proclaim. "It was a lot bigger and the wind was still offshore. You really missed it." You just knew you were the man.

I had this shell cracked wide open two particular times and countless other times. (I'm sure you've had your dose as well. Confessions can be left in the "Comments" section following this blog post. We'd love to hear your story.) I wasn't and still am not the untouchable shredder I may have thought I was from time to time those years ago. Yeah there were specific rides memorable for a lifetime. I've talked about this with a few friends before.

That night after the tube ride of the year, you can close your eyes as your head touches the pillow, and play it back, crystal clear, moment-to-moment as if it were all happening again. It's all there: everything you saw and even heard from the takeoff into the barrel, and the kickout over the wave back, both arms raised to the sky, body clenched. Seems all our efforts in our sport aim at havin' some of that, again and again.

But then there are all the other things that happen---the ones that bring us down from our self-anointed lofty platitudes. I thought wives and girlfriends were the only agents put on earth to pop our bubbles of self-impressiveness, just to watch us fly around the room and land deflated. The surf can do it too---to us all.

Years ago, about 1978, I was surfing in South Nags Head at Domes. My girlfriend sat on the beach reading and sometimes watching us surf. I took a very clean little chest-high right from the first sandbar all the way to the reform inside over the first slough. (I'm goofy-foot, so I was backside to the wave face.)It then wound up spinning itself into an intense little barrel at the shorebreak. I couldn't resist riding all the way to dry sand. I got a bit too high in the wave face. My inside rail lifted, spinning my board up with the tube. As I fell off the tail, the surfboard's (single) fin cut my boardshorts from the leg seam to the waistband in the back, leaving my whole ass completely exposed. I sure knew how to impress the women on the beach and anybody else who got an eye full. I hobbled in humility back to the truck, clutching the fabric together for the benefit of my fellow men and women of course.

A few years before that, around 1973 in Kaneohe, Hawaii, was a similar impressive moment in my surfer's resume. This incident revealed the deepest depths of my modesty possibly residing one notch above resisting death even. I was surfing at North Beach on the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station, a spot I loved to surf as it filtered out the crowds by it being on base.

The surf was solid 12-foot+ faces with stepladder sets every so often. I got caught inside by one of these sets and paddled swiftly outside all the while knowing I was done. The whole horizon seemed to lift up and transform into a wave face. I took off my leash as the wave marking me homed in on the very spot I paddled. As I slid into the water beside my board, pushing it away all in one fluid movement, I saw the wave's nasty-thick lip pitch up and then out. It would land directly on me.

I dove downward when the impact came. In one micro-instant my whole body shuddered and my white Kanvas By Katin's came unsnapped and untied. I don't know what happens in your mind in such a micro-instant, but in mine, as I felt the boardshorts blow down my legs, I actually had the presence of mind to think, "If I lose them, I must return to the beach without my board and with only my manhood before me." All this passed through my brain as my boardshorts flashed from my waist to my ankles, at which point I spread my legs thus holding my pants at my ankles so as not to lose them. I might die. But I would not die naked.

I came to the surface eventually, pulling my boardshorts up and re-securing them as I broke the water's surface gasping for air. Miraculously, my board floated right behind my head. I pulled myself back up, continued paddling outside to the lineup, and re-took my rightful place among the other overly dignified immortals surfing that day. I was shaken up, glad I had saved my britches, but still not finished pondering why I had while under such duress. I love our sport. Get more waves.

What I Saw Today on the Way to Work

2008-04-24T21:03:00.007-04:00

I really love to drive the Beach Road when I travel to and from work, or simply from place to place up and down the coast on work errands. I can keep my eye on the surf conditions. But today I saw a succession of things which underscored what it's come to now, especially for those living on the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk, say between Old Station (Black Pelican) and Kitty Hawk Pier. It reminded me of my childhood on the beach.

Many of you have heard us talk about moving sand around before in this blog. So let me set the mood before I describe what I saw.

Remember when you were a kid building a sandcastle on the beach at the very edge of the wet tide line? We usually started by building a mound dug from a small trench or moat in a semi-circle around it, the future castle replete with drip-sand towers. This was something worth protecting and defending from the ocean's ravages. On the ocean side of the moat we would then build a seawall from sand dug from the first moat and another moat to the ocean side of this new sand wall.

All the while the ocean wash would occasionally roll up over some or all of our new structures built ever so close to the water in the tidal zone. We would quickly repair our sandcastle and if the tide was outgoing, find we could then embellish the castle with more elaborate detail. However if the tide was incoming, we would call for our friends' and work furiously together to stop the onslaught, digging the moats deeper and the sand seawalls taller. And despite our best efforts, the ocean would roll right through anything we built. As little children, this is how we learned not to build our sandcastles in the tidal zone, unless we chose this conflict with the ocean. And if we did, we always knew we were doomed to its overwhelming power.

What I saw today as I drove along the stretch north of Old Station after a high tide, were quite a few Bobcats (the mini front-end loader/bulldozer-type equipment) parked or hard at work around oceanfront homes, a bulldozer, a contractor with dump trucks delivering sand to a particularly endangered section of Beach Road sand dune, and people with shovels helping defend both the Beach Road and homes along the way. I thought of my childhood learning where to build our sandcastles.

Of course this is way over-simplified. When most of these homes and the Kitty Hawk Beach Road were built, the beach stretched before them was far wider, with the pack sand (sand wet or dry depending on the tide)in the tidal influence far to the east. Now the pack sand is beneath many of these homes and on even a garden variety-type northeaster like the one we just had---a measly 20-knot blow---ocean overwash reaches the homes on the west side of the Beach Road.

But the bustle of activity and the call for help to defend what had been built years before, is identical to what I felt as a child protecting my very own sandcastle. So when it blows hard northeast here this time of year, the TV newscasters run down from the Tidewater area of Virginia and the Greenville area of North Carolina and train their cameras on the modest old homes along this stretch hoping to capture sensational live shots of the ocean taking homes from their piling perches.

The ocean forms escarpments in the new sand trucked in along the frontal dune. That sand is in turn, dragged seaward to help form new sandbars and many times better surf breaks. Or the sand is simply transported south toward Oregon Inlet and is deposited at other sandbars. Our mission is to find the new breaks and do our solemn duty to insure its waves are ridden. I shall do my part, I promise...more later. Keep at it.

The Month of Maypril on Our Coast

2008-04-18T22:34:00.005-04:00

Welcome to the half-way point in our coast's month of Maypril...the cruelest month of all. It's actually more than a month because it won't let us go until about the 10th day of the month we used to call May. At that time we are jolted from 52-degree air to 95-degree air with 95-percent humidity.

Maypril is the nastiest season on our coast because it loves to mess with our hope and expectations about great weather "just around the corner". Most normal people think of this as the Spring season. The harsh weather is about to dissolve gradually away into glorious, clear and temperate air somewhere we hear.

But alas, there is no gradual progression to such soothing caresses by airy breezes. In fact, forecasters here can relax during Maypril. They need only predict wind direction. Almost every day here the Maypril wind blows in excess of 20-25 knots and often gale force. Wave upon wave of low pressure systems grind off the continent as the days roll past. Northeasters blow up about every week. And yeah, that's salt water ponding on the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and South Nags Head. (So drive your new SUV through it fool, just like the car commercials on TV. Then take it home and wonder why it's rusting away.)

Carry one of every kind of clothing you own with you every day---from shorts and tee shirts to winter insulated coveralls, from board shorts to 4-3mm full wetsuit with booties, gloves, and hood. You can sample any type of weather here during this hybrid month.

The beauty in it though, is having a head-high to overhead swell every week for the past 4 weeks. That's right Maypril, give us the left hook and then your right jab. Give the dolphins their wave playground and pound the sand on the bars into molecules. Show us your passion. Then pull us all through your keyhole into the sweltering summer lull. Maypril on our coast, is the cruelest month of all.

The Street Cred of Hurricane Forecasting

2008-04-10T21:59:00.003-04:00

Alright, here we go again...Dr. William Gray of the University of Colorado has done it once more. He and his esteemed team at the esteemed university located in the country's middle waist have once again published their annual forecast for the year's hurricane season. How many named storms, how many hurricanes, how many major storms...you know. This event always entertains me and the carpenters I work with daily. This prediction from the people who can't really predict with any certainty, the path of one of these storms when its spinning itself up right off our coast.

Show us your "cone of probability". Tell us where you think the "eye will come ashore" one more time as it rolls over our coast.

Does the good doctor really expect us to base our annual, long range planning on these storm forecasts? What should we be doing with this impossibly unreliable information? Come on, one of you heavyweight, meteorologist, atmospheric sciences expert readers please weigh in here, help us. I welcome your comments. What good is this type of forecasting? Maybe the Insurance Institute for Property Loss Reduction and its major insurance corporation supporters would like us to have this hurricane talk ringing in our ears as much as possible so we'll find value in the thousands we pay in each year on our flood and windstorm policies.

With the attention this gets from the media each year, these are our suggestions as ways to improve/capitalize on this annual pronouncement. Let's make it more of a media-sensational event, more festive.

First, we think Dr. Gray should stand before a microphone reading from a scroll or some similar dignified manuscript wearing a spandex suit emblazoned with his sponsors' name across his chest, replete with cap and maybe a cape (see a professional cyclist's racing kit)as he makes his grand, yearly pronouncement. You know, each year the university could sell the sponsorship of this momentous event kinda like naming rights for an arena or stadium. It all demands a fitting circus atmosphere. Attendants could be seen dressed in foul weather oilskins and Gumby-like survival suits in the background on stage.

To be completely honest, I believe forecasts like this are just one of the things that help mislead the uninformed inhabitants on the coast into believing someone really does have the ability through technology or whatever, to predict these storms. This is just one of many things that have happened in the past 20 years which give some a false sense of security in their newer structurally improved homes. This came as a result of Hurricane Hugo hitting the Charleston, South Carolina area with its whopping 21'+ storm surge and Andrew following in southern Florida in the early '90's with its record dollar value of damage. And then there was Katrina..."Brownie you're doin' a helluva job."

Some won't evacuate now because they're sure their home can withstand the carnage. Some of the new structural building code requirements born in the wake of these storms did raise the price of all homes somewhat, but had particular effect on the price of entry level homes in these high wind zone regions mostly east of Interstate Ninety-five. I believe the inverse effect is that some are left behind in newly substandard construction, not being able to afford one of these new home fortresses.

The science Dr. Gray is attempting to advance holds great potential to save lives and infrastructure some time in the future there is no doubt. But the forecasting track record in general where these storms are concerned tells us maybe he should cool out until near-term forecasting has more accuracy. However, he may as well make a visual circus of it for now if he must persist. Let's have some tabloid fun!

In the meantime, we'd like the University of Colorado and the rest of the U.S. to take a look at our lunchtime-developed, Outer Banks of North Carolina snow forecast for the nation's mid-section for next winter...

How Crowded Was It---How Crowded Is It?

2008-03-30T11:10:00.014-04:00

I live one mile by road, from the Atlantic Ocean's high tide line in Kill Devil Hills, N.C. Lately I'm reminded more than ever of the effects of the sheer numbers of people congregating, living on the coast. Don't worry I'm not about to lament how it used to be. I do have a fairly long retrospective given my age, but I just want to talk mostly about what it's like here on the coast now.

We live in a remote coastal region of the U.S. East Coast on a barrier island, 75 miles from the nearest urban center. I've lived on this part of the coast 28 years and along this part my whole life except a few years in Hawaii, Greenville, N.C., and Washington, D.C. This place offers the most naturally dynamic environment with surf, I've ever seen. Ocean, marine geology and weather systems cavort and romp across the landscape with impunity. When people are added to the recipe controversies spring up in succession. Here's the latest.

A few months ago two environmental groups, The National Audubon Society and The Defenders of Wildlife, employing the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed suit against the National Park Service (paraphrasing here) demanding an injunction to stop off-road vehicle (ORV) access and use of beaches in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore until such time as the Park Service establishes rules limiting beach use by such vehicles. Their apparent intentions are to protect endangered species, for instance piping plovers and sea turtles which nest on the beaches in the Seashore.

(Editor's Note: For you firebrands out there, I'm not expert on the law in this area, nor trying to show off my understanding of the background political nuance on this issue, nor taking sides. If you desire what I consider keen local political perspective and insight, I refer you to three excellent local blogs: View From the Ridge, Outer Banks Republic, and Island Free Press (Ocracoke Island.)

I truly understand the ORV users'(of which I am one) desires to drive on the beaches. I'm familiar with all the arguments supporting continued use. I drive on the beach once in-a-while to access surf breaks and I used to surf fish quite a bit till it got so crowded. I am familiar with the rallying cries: "My family's been driving on these beaches since I was a child", "This is how I make my living (dory fishing)", "I love picnicking on the beach", "I've surf fished in tournaments down there for over 30 years"...and so on. I truly respect all of these folks' experiences.

We're at a critical point on our barrier islands now. I believe planning decisions now must be more slowly transitional toward larger strategic goals in how ever increasing population here will have to live and behave. All the signs are there, however they keep jumping up one at a time. Here are a few examples.

In one of my earlier posts ("Since Hurricane Noel and Why We Must Keep Wearing Leashes in Town", Friday, November 16, 2007) I told the story how a deal to mandate the use of surf leases was made in Kill Devil Hills years ago in order to keep swimmers safe from loose surfboards. To surfers, the deal also helped avoid restrictions requiring surfing only in specific areas or only during certain hours of the day. The "deal" still holds. But there are other signs of too many of us here as well. It doesn't help that we all are somehow imbued with an overwhelming sense of entitlement about having it our way whatever "it" may be: personal right to drive on the beaches or economic right to profit from others doing so.

Now that much of the oceanfront is developed in the towns, we're naturally trying to come up with ways to protect our investments and tax base. The oceanfront development approach used to be, "build light structures which can be lifted and moved back from the encroaching ocean." It has now become, use giant sandbags, proposed beach sand re-nourishment, and any other man-made structures to arrest the erosion and migration of sand to protect our tax base.

Other little day-to-day behaviors have had to change too. Many locals are now walking their dogs on leases, following behind them with bags to pick up their excrement in a responsible effort to avoid fecal coliform pollution of estuaries and canals from runoff---too many people, too many dogs. (I have one too and love him.) There are so many of us here now that it's come to this, to reiterate---we're carrying bags of dog poop around behind our animals. Doesn't this say something to someone about the local demographics and where it's going?

So now it's vehicles on the beach, many vehicles brought by their many owners...many, many vehicles and many, many owners. Arguably the most beautiful, pristine beaches in the nation, now replete with traffic and parking lots just above the tideline. The convenience of having all your stuff at hand on the beach is not lost on me. As I said before, I'm out there too.

But here is another way I reacted to having my truck on the beach with me once. Years ago my wife and I were on Ocracoke Island for a few days and decided to drive down on the beach and relax. We parked tailgate to the ocean, pulled out beach chairs and set up. Other ORVs pulled up and parked near us as the day went on. They kept coming. It dawned on us we could have nearly the same atmosphere if we took our ORV and beach chairs out to our little, local, shopping plaza parking lot and sat in the sun (except for the ocean, of course)---vehicles all around us.

We didn't come here to sit oceanside in a parking lot of oil and hydraulic-dripping vehicles. There's this personal desire by all people to use the ORV advantage to get right where you want to go (because with these vehicles we can), however for us there was also the undeniable conflict with the natural setting exacerbated by the arrival of more ORVs.

I understand the economic, tourism benefits of vehicle access to these beaches. I really do. I just wonder if there might be a way the multitude of ORV users can see through a different lens how this is transforming our beaches, and how each of us is a part of this process. Only then will we all be able to come together to affect a solution that may temper the intensifying use, lest we trample and destroy the very thing we all love so much albeit in different ways.

If the transition is a soft one toward a different approach to beach access, I truly believe the local economies will adapt and ultimately benefit from this change. But not until we all see ourselves desiring the same end result---beautiful beaches with more room for more people and wildlife, but maybe a little less room for traffic and parking lots and ORV clusters. Consider the ultimate lesson our barrier islands teach us---the only constant is change, so adapt.

I don't know, if it's too late. Bold lines have been drawn in the sand now. Both sides stand in stark opposition to the other. And I don't believe it's just about endangered animal species anymore...maybe we're just as endangered by ourselves. There's just too, too many of us.

The Big Swell Arrives

2008-03-19T22:15:00.003-04:00

I think the last post I was predicting a kickback swell from the northeast generated by an intensifying low moving offshore last Saturday night. I thought the surf would get right Sunday night or Monday morning. The swell was there (although smaller)but the wind was down the beach from the north-northeast and then from the south. Finally Tuesday night the wind twisted hard into the southwest, brought 77 degree air, and lined up a mammoth northeast swell topping out around double overhead. The wind tore at the wave faces at a solid 25+ knots and finally clicked around straight offshore (west) before nightfall.

Going to work on the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk this morning there was ocean overwash on the road in numerous places from the earlier high tide. Years ago we learned to creep slowly through any standing water on the Beach Road during a big swell after high tide cause it's salt water. I suppose there are some who visit here in their city SUV's who don't understand this, so they blow through the water, sand, and debris as if they're doin' a commercial for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The rust applauds them later I'm sure.

I was in Southern Shores oceanfront most of the day. Many closeouts seen most of the time. The report I got from First Street, KDH was about the same around dusk. Of course, some guys were trying it on for size, and size it had plenty of.

Water's still hanging around 50-51 degrees. We'll get there yet warm water. Watch SurfKDH.com for Micky's photos of this swell. He'll be on it as always.

The Easter tourists are pouring into town now. Will check back in later.

Change is in the Air

2008-03-15T21:14:00.002-04:00

Water temperatures...Duck Pier 51 degrees, Oregon Inlet (the inlet at the north end of Hatteras Island) 59 degrees. An explosive looking low pressure system is coiling up like an apostrophe just inland from our coast right now. Light rain, lightning, and thunder own the night sky outside. This storm just wreaked havoc down in Georgia and maybe we're next. Tornado Watch all along the coast. Change is in the air. Expecting possible gale force wind from the northeast later tonight.

Some houses in Kitty Hawk and South Nags Head are perched on pilings over the hard pack sand within the high tide's reach on a normal day. Once again some will be gone by the time summer arrives. This is life on a sand barrier island---a grudging, grinding slow attrition of all that is man made. Some plan on this constant process, some don't. Some adapt to it, some rail and whine. The process is bigger and older than us all.

New sandbars will be shaped in new places or places where we surfed long ago as the tide lines slowly shove us all west with all our opinions and ideas and politics as to "what to do about it". This is far and away the most dynamic place I've ever lived. It's changing face is the most constant thing we possess but can never wholly own.

Hopin' for offshore wind tomorrow night or Monday morning and the possible kickback northeast swell. Open long lefts baby, yeah. We'll see.

Sites of Interest

2008-03-07T17:41:00.004-05:00

I like to share cool sites I come across with you all as many of you share them with me. Today I have one new and one local site tried and true. They both will interest surfers or anyone with a profound love of the ocean.

Okay look to the right and notice "Oceanus Magazine" under ONLINE MAGAZINES WE LIKE. It's published online by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute In Massachusetts. This is an extremely well done publication with a myriad of Ocean related articles written to the layman reader as well as those of you with a keener understanding of ocean science, its lifeforms and geology.

First I must compliment any publication which emphasizes online publication. There's no waste of trees/paper in order to pass along current information. Maybe this is the way it should be. You think? I can't quote you the supporting numbers, but the logic goes something like this: How many trees would be saved, how much cleaner would the air be in the world, if we didn't produce so much paper in order to pass along our thoughts, simply to communicate ideas and knowledge? Do you think it would be a better way, I mean with the technology to do this in our hands now? Hmmmm...

I found articles as diverse as these. One covering the undersea search for John Paul Jones' sunken American Revolutionary War ship, the Bonhomme Richard, sunk off the British coast in 1779 after capturing the H.M.S. Seraphis.

I also found an article covering how pesticide runoff may be causing a decline in shellfish in developed countries due to the disruption of hormonal function in arthropods. You see, crustaceans and insect pests are both arthropods. So the intended disruption of the reproductive cycle in insect crop pests or even mosquitoes aren't the only ones being disrupted apparently. Shrimp, blue crabs, and lobster are being affected by the pesticide running off into the rivers, sounds, and ocean. I had heard of nitrogen-rich rainwater (from fertilizer) running into rivers feeding the Chesapeake Bay depleting oxygen causing fish kills and decline in oyster population. But I had never read a clear accounting of how pesticides affect marine life.

This is great reading cause these things affect me directly. I love eating shellfish! Thanks to "Oceanus", I get the picture. Anyway, check for yourself.

Another fine local site I visit regularly is SurfKDH.com featuring the photography of local photog, Micky McCarthy. (By the way, for you out of town readers, KDH is what we call the town of Kill Devil Hills, N.C.) In fact, Mick covers the swell we just had this week on Wednesday with some great shots of S-Turns in Rodanthe. I'll have local links up soon for you, so enjoy.

The 2008 Race Season is On with Snowball 1 Criterium

2008-03-01T18:00:00.009-05:00

Robert Netsch goes hard to the line in the 2008 season's first race . Robert was Kitty Hawk Cycling Club's (KHCC)only team rider to compete as high as the Category 3-4 division. Robert makes the sweeping banked turn coming off the starting straight in the Cat 3/4 race. Competing in the Cat 5 division were Brad Pigage and Rob Bachman from KHCC and Chip Cowan representing Outer Banks Cycle. Read more about the race and our favorite riders from this small part of the coast at the Yahoo Groups website, "KHCyclists".

My Sometimes Shy, Wet Love

2008-02-23T20:12:00.006-05:00

I awoke today to see another gray, black and white, wet world. Early morning rain eclipsed yet another weekend bike ride. So I ate and took my dog to the beach for a walk (for me) and a romp (for him). We went to First Street in Kill Devil Hills.

As I got out of my truck and let Kona go, I looked beyond him at her. She laid there waiting for me as always. Today though, she was shy, demur, and about as gray as the low cloud ceiling pressing down over our heads. The fog from earlier was lifting out now. No swell showed but a small shorebreak rattled into the thick, heavy sand my feet seemed to push deep into with each step. This was the Atlantic's quiet almost depressed manner as counterpoint to the many times she rages or glimmers with full swell and wild whitewater. How moody this massive personality. Few seem to desire her company when she's in this mood. I remain loyal still to this lifelong love no matter.

I turned southward away from a light north-northeast wind and spotted something drifting about 200 yards off the beach. I stared at it through the tiny rain droplets spattering on my glasses' lenses. It appeared a head rolled over from the dark form floating along in the small swell. I looked back at the condo balconies behind me. A group peered out and pointed to the dark shape as I was, transfixed.

Funny how your mind takes off when you catch sight of something unidentifiable floating in the ocean. Was it a survivor from some lost vessel? Was it a bale of "da kine"? Many have been found on this coast in years past when trawl boats feared the law was closing in on them and their whole illegal cargo would be jettisoned at sea. In fact one local business was seeded with dollars from such a find years ago, or so it's said among those of us who were here in 1976.

So we watched our mysterious floating flotsam. We each wrote our own tale of ocean mishap. As I trudged southward I noticed I was walking about the same speed it drifted, and that it was slowly edging closer to the beach. The farther I walked, the closer it moved until finally I could make out about a dozen round shapes seemingly bound together in drift. Another head turned. I strained my eyes. I felt for my cell phone.

When it reached the shorebreak lineup I could identify it. It was about 12 black and white balloons...yeah balloons. Just what sea life need huh? My dog loved it though. As the next waves lifted and then dumped them in the wash, he lunged at them repeatedly and was quite vocal. They broke apart mostly coming ashore and scattering low across the sand. So we chased them down and captured as many as we could. I popped them. We turned back toward our beach access triumphant with our trashed trophy. No throngs, no sun, no swell, cold water, yet a fine morning nonetheless.

The Surf Last Week

2008-02-18T21:23:00.002-05:00

Hey everyone. On my last post we were anticipating decent waves thrown back by yet another front moving offshore. We did get very good waves with the attendant 45 degree water. Thought Thursday morning was gonna be the time, but the front moved through swiftly leaving a sizable overhead wave slanting to the beach with an acute south angle. Yeah open rights. The wind switch to the northwest happened late Wednesday a.m. instead of the predicted Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Everybody was scrambling around their work schedules to get some of it.

We were working on an oceanfront remodel and witnessed the moment the wind switch performed it's magical transformation as we worked on to great distraction. The work got done. Some of our kind got some I am assured. There will be another swell. The fronts keep coming. We still have a while before the sea water begins to warm up again. Patience...

Big Stuff on the Way?

2008-02-12T21:17:00.000-05:00

Okay people, take a look at the weather satellites' view over the Eastern seaboard. A massive front is moving off the coast of New England right now. The wind forecast for tomorrow is southeast 25-35 mph, then to the south, and finally flipping over to northwest at 25 by say, late night. Looks like Thursday morning could be prime time for the ground swell and the offshore wind to get right together. We'll see.

When You Know You're an Aged Surfer

2008-02-10T14:45:00.000-05:00

There comes a time in every surfer's career, when something signals or reflects back that you are no longer the immortal, eternally youthful, bulletproof, hellbent shredder you might think you still are. This day came for me while surfing the north side of Rodanthe Pier on a growing hurricane swell. Don't ask me which storm. There've been so many. I remember this one because our timing and prediction of the swell's size and the expectation of it getting larger while we were there, was precisely what happened. It doesn't always work out that way so you tend to remember whenever it does.

It was around 1995. The boys were on it. There were even rumors that locals (non-surfers)were slashing people's tires if you were parked in front of their homes. I never saw any of that though.

There were mostly good sized rights with light offshore wind. And as I said before, the swell continued to grow as the day wore on.

I took off on an overhead right kind of behind the peak, made the drop, turned down the line backside and the wave face just collapsed on me. I surfaced, grabbed my board and paddled quickly out of the impact zone. Then I heard someone yelling at another guy and glanced back over my shoulder as I see-sawed over the top of a peak close to breaking. "What are you doin'? Didn't you see that "old guy" you just dropped in on?" What's wrong with you, you freakin' idiot?"

First let me explain, I'm not really a surf combatant. Don't take myself that seriously in the water---never have. That's not why I'm out there. Oh yeah there's another whole blog post or more on surfers who I have been around who evidently do take themselves quite seriously. You've seen 'em huh? You know every session is their heat to win. Yeah, those guys.

Anyway, back to the story...I thought it was real nice of that guy to pull back on his buddy a little, apparently they knew each other. Then a few waves later, it hit me: "that old guy"...Did he mean me? He couldn't have meant me, could he? What I needed was somebody to tell my defender that I wasn't an old guy. Would that have helped?

I posted a blog entitled, "Big Waves, Part 1", December 8, 2007 which mentions contemplating the aging dilemma sitting on the beach at Croatan (Va. Beach) with my best friend. We were seventeen. I knew we wouldn't be able to surf after say, age thirty. I was sure. In fact at that age, I was sure about everything, (I'm sure). Weren't you?

Alright so now I'm 56 and still surfing. And I guess I've been an "old guy" since then, 13 years ago. Man, I've been an old guy a long time. Not like Dr. Dorian Paskowitz or Eve Fletcher, but pretty old I suppose. Are you an old guy yet? If you are already, I'd love to know how you came to your awakening.

But I kinda like my old guy-ness. It's very liberating. I don't have to keep up with fashions anymore (never did much of that anyway). I can keep listening to the same music all the time if that pleases me. I don't have to surf like the day's surf stars. I don't have to prove anything to anybody in the water. And above all, it doesn't take as much for me to get the stoke out of each session in the water. My day is here and now and here's my thanks to the young surfer who knighted me that day on Hatteras Island.

And oh yeah, the swell that day produced big, clean, way long rights with young shredders and a few old guys all over it. It was insane and a good day to remember.

Swell Check

2008-02-01T22:29:00.000-05:00

Got a beautiful northeast swell this past Tuesday, January 29th, offering nice open lefts, some rights, all around shoulder high to a foot or more overhead. Checked it in Nags Head at one of my favorite beach accesses in the morning. A low pressure system passed to the northeast along the coast Sunday night and Monday, a raggy but sizable swell appeared, then the wind switched to west and "voila"!

The water was around 42 degrees so everybody was wrapped up tight. The best waves were lefts, open and long. Tim Nolte was killing it with his 10-foot paddle board. I stood on the access boardwalk with a few longtime locals, Dan Corbin, Eric Cleaver, and Edward Tupper. Eric was shooting some video and snapping some photos while his dog stalked the top of the boardwalk railing.

This is the first swell I've seen which resembled the Thanksgiving week swell of 2007, albeit a smaller version. The other differences? Hoods and gloves are out now cause the water temperature is about 14 degrees colder. This day I had to go back to work. I'm also still recovering from recent surgery, so I can't surf anyway, and I don't really care for water that cold. I couldn't think of any more excuses. I decided to turn away and leave my local water brothers to their uncrowded waves. I'll soon have my chance again.

Making It to Warm Water Again

2008-01-28T21:10:00.000-05:00

Many of you have suggested I post something covering what we do to get through the winter's really cold water months. So here it is. But this is mostly about asking you to comment---how do you get through this time of year? Ocean water temp here is down to 45 at the Duck Research Pier now, so this is the time. How are you getting through in between days you surf? Music, indoor soccer, snowboarding, skiing, skateboarding, skimboarding, weightlifting, swimming, music, mountain climbing, cyclocross, pole dancing---what are our surfing brothers and sisters doing in their time between sessions and seasons?

Alright, if you're from up north, a Yankee, I know how you do it. You keep on surfing. Your mutation toward cold water tolerance occurred years maybe even generations ago. Not so all Southerners like myself. Not even my diet of country ham, collards, rockfish, peanut soup, and perfect, sweet iced tea will help me with this problem. But we all manage to somehow make it through to warm water again. But in the meantime...oh the humanity.

If this were the late Sixties, maybe you'd listen to Hendrix and burn blond Lebanese hash or Thai stick till you couldn't see across the room. If it was the Seventies, if you were like me, you were driven headlong away from popular music by Disco, and thankfully into jazz and jazz fusion. Your music world expanded and you waited for wetsuit technology and development to deliver you to the promised land, closer to year-round surfing. The Eighties brought the emergence of cocaine-fueled club nights to some. But the emergence of the thruster fin system was the big news and performance limits were about to fall like dominoes in a gale. But cold water still hurt and blurred vision.

The Nineties brought a new sobriety and awakening to the benefits of fitness directed toward our sport and more performance benefits all in the face of aging. All this could be accomplished during the winter by cross training. For some raising young families tended to fill up lots of winter time. How did you spend your time?

Turn of the century found me taking up road cycling again, but to support my surfing fitness during the 3/4 of the year or so I do surf here. So tell us. What really gets you through between swells or between seasons.

Yeah, and you readers in California can stop the voyeurism and come out with something here too. Maybe you don't have this problem, you know, waiting for the seasons to change and all. I dunno. But I'll bet you have things you like to do between swells or seasons and we'd love you to tell us about it. My friends on the West Coast tell me they can surf virtually year round which I think is cool. So how do you cope? Video games? Naw, come on.

Toys

2008-01-22T21:38:00.000-05:00

Alright, my Socal buddy, Jack Hudkins, has done it again! He's tossed me another jewel. Check out this video y'all! I could hardly believe my eyes. Maybe this is me surfing at age eighty. Look at this. Are we gonna have to compete with this too in the lineup?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_ONutgLuV8

Happy Trails...

How Mercurial Our Sport: Surfing---It's Only About the Ride

2008-01-20T10:54:00.000-05:00

Okay here's where thoughts take me on a winter day like today. I'll blame it on the weather. Thirty-five degree air, wind's onshore, ocean temperature is 48 degrees at Duck Research Pier. While writing this: sun, gray, rain, snow, gray, sun to the north, gray to the south. A low carrying warm moist Gulf air has just rubbed against a high with dry frigid air from the Great Lakes over our beloved coast to give us this weather kaleidoscope, a classic winter setup. We may get a sweet northeast kickback swell off this stuff as the low moves offshore. But that depends on the wind left behind and the tide and of course, where and when you choose to check the waves, the sandbars.

From the first day I was thrilled out of my skin by riding my first wave in 1963, I began the desperate journey to re-capture that feeling. Many who have felt this physical, emotional, even spiritual lift, understand how profound it is and how deeply it touches us. But just as profound, it is equally mercurial and fleeting. In the end though, we sometimes forget it is only about the Ride and how it makes you feel. It's not about contests, it's not about fitness, it's not about sponsors, it's not about stickers and clothes telling the world you're a surfer, it's not about how you think it makes you look, or the vehicle you drive. All this other stuff comes along on its own to some degree for each of us. It is the Ride and the Ride only which has a person remain devoted to the sport for a lifetime.

We soon awaken to how many conditions must come together to produce really good surf: swell generated from some form of low pressure system all the way to the extreme of this, a hurricane, wind direction and speed(to carve the wave into a ridable shape), tide (which influences the wave steepness and projection by the amount of water over the reflecting earth surface, i.e. sandbar, rock, reef at any time), and the aforementioned bottom conditions. We also soon learn that those optimum conditions, when they come together to create what only they can, wait for no one. There are no "tee times" or "kickoff" in surfing. Conditions are even changing while you are standing there checking them. And herein lies the mind-numbing predicament of the non-competitive lifestyle surfer who must balance making a living with his pursuit of the best conditions.

This is my story and I am astounded at how much it is the story of many, many people in our coastal community not unlike any coastal towns where there are worthy waves to ride anywhere in the world.

When my family moved to Hawaii in 1971, I remember seeing classic Hawaiian guns (spear-shaped boards around 8' long) standing ready in the greasy, oily corners of gas stations in downtown Honolulu. These boards had old,used wax on their decks. They weren't there to impress others their owners belonged to a hip cultural group. They were waiting for the next summer south swell. I recall admiring the substance this represented. It was real and genuine.

Our community is broadly threaded with surfers who represent virtually any socio-economic level and any job or career. I personally know carpenters, contractors, tradespeople, building inspectors, politicians, doctors, teachers, school administrators, dentists, nurses, restaurateurs, waits, fishermen, scientists, town planners and local government employees, attorneys, accountants, mortgage brokers, bankers, realtors, appraisers, financial managers, firemen, bohemians, vagabonds, new age hippies and ex-convicts who surf. This is interesting to me because the group noted above possess diverse demands and agenda they must reconcile in order to pursue good surf. Of course there's ridable surf and there's epic surf (see the Thanksgiving Swell posts, November, 2007 for epic surf) with epic conditions wielding the most influence over everyone's schedule of non-surfing obligations.

Epic conditions turn this group inside out mentally and emotionally. Just check 'em out when you know there's a good swell. I'm sure there's a surfer working with you or nearby. If you don't surf, I'm sure this is quite entertaining to witness from the outside. To see them as people fighting a distraction doesn't begin to describe it.

Veteran wave riders are most creative about feeding their addiction though. For instance, by the time you start torturing them by bringing up the subject, they probably have already been in the water for a before-work session. Then there's the "liquid lunch" session and after work session. For the politicians and foundation members in the crowd, having to attend a "board meeting" is often induced as the best way to give cover to their discrete mission. Some travel the world to distant waves as a means to remedy their yearnings.

But the work still gets done, the obligations still met and by a joyful group, especially during or after an excellent swell. The best at maintaining the balance demanded between surfing and work and even family, remain here with their world mostly intact. Those less discrete or committed to their other obligations struggle more.

Even you non-surfing Outer Banks readers, I'm sure can recognize the difference between flat spells of no surf, and the happiness around you when "it" gets really good. You know don't you?

You see, in many ways our community beats to the pulse of the ocean. This is, after all, why we came here in the first place. We will not and cannot forget this. Many of those who helped build our community and continue to contribute to it, I'm proud to say, move with this pulse and so do our children. But it's still only about the Ride.

Wetsuits Finale

2008-01-18T22:07:00.000-05:00

Hot and just in from my good friend and surf photog extraordinaire, Jack Hudkins, in SoCal: heated wetsuits! Yeah, that's what I said and thought to myself, "Why didn't I think they already existed?"

Jack tells me there's an Australian company that's developed a heated wetsuit, actually a waist-type belt which is worn under any wetsuit. It provides warmth for up to one hour using some kind of chemical, or up to two hours using a waterproof battery pack. This for the fully accessorized waterman (or woman) who demands womb-like comfort in frigid conditions. Check it out at http://www.hotsuits.com.au/.

Has anyone out there tried one of these? I'd love to hear from you. As I said in an earlier post, wetsuit technology just keeps rolling along. I guess we have more money than we used to have in the earlier days of our sport, huh?

Oh yeah, check out Jack's website at http://asurfmoment.com for some fine surf photography. His work is also found in the latest edition of Surfer Magazine. Enjoy.

Alright, keep at it.

The Ebb and Flow of My Town---Its Pulse

2008-01-17T21:58:00.000-05:00

Does your hometown have a pulse? No that's not what I mean. I mean a noticeable movement of life throbbing within it. Mine does. Although I didn't know it when I moved here in 1975. It has a sort of ebb and flow of people too, mostly out-of-towners. "Visitors" is the polite term, at least that's what our "Visitors Bureau" would call them.

When I arrived here out of college, flat broke, I had no idea what I was in for during the "off" season. The locals knew and they knew I didn't. They were entertained.

I worked through that first summer at Spencer's Seafood Safari Restaurant. It wasn't really a safari but served decent broiled and fried seafood. I could surf all day, wait tables at night, and go home with a cold Lowenbrau and 40 bucks. It was all I needed at the time, along with superb, uncrowded surf in clean water and air. I had seen California and Hawaii. The only thing I was sure of, was this place on this coast suited me just fine.

The first evidence of ebb was the very day after Labor Day. The hundreds of visitors visiting abruptly left. Everyone. No cars anywhere in sight. Beaches and piers were virtually empty. We walked from Sam and Omie's over to the By-Pass (a two-lane blacktop with no traffic lights). We looked south toward Hatteras: nothing. We looked north toward Jockey's Ridge: nothing. Gone. We laid a towel on the road surface and spread out on it for more than a few minutes. Nothing. Bored, we picked up our towel and left. Now that's ebb if I ever saw it.

Likewise, when Easter and then Memorial Day arrived, they (the visitors)would suddenly return and quickly disappear afterwards, a kind of teaser to the coming summer. Then when schools elsewhere closed for the year, about mid-June, the visitors would suddenly appear en mass again...the aforementioned flow. Year upon year repeated this pattern. Each year it grew more intense.

Over the ensuing years I noticed how during the summer I wouldn't very often see the friends I hung with during the winter trying to stay entertained (more on staying entertained in future posts). Many were working in the restaurants and hotels. During the winter, I wouldn't always see the friends I worked with during the summer. Many of them had left too, like the "visitors". I guess we could've called them visiting workers.

And so the pulse of our coastal town continued. It's still similar today. Except the part about no traffic on the By-Pass the day after Labor Day. There's plenty of that. Back then there were less than 10 thousand people living in Dare County. Now there are about 32 thousand of us spread over about 90 miles north to south, most with large bodies of water on both sides. It's much easier to stay entertained during the winter too and you can see your friends almost any time at meetings covering the issues of the day (there are plenty cause there are so many of us now), and even at school events and activities or in stores cause there are lots of them now too. And when the tourists...I mean "visitors" return, there's too many of them and us.

It's winter here now. This is the time of year which calls forth reminiscences of the past and the way it once was. The surf's not really uncrowded like it used to be, but the long-time locals seem more tightly connected than ever. It's still a thrill to watch them ride.

Surfer's Ear

2008-01-09T19:55:00.000-05:00

Ran into Robbie Snyder at the grocery store today. We both were buying cheap chicken. We were sharing physical ailment stories. Yeah, during winter it gets to this out here. Thirty years ago there was no place to run into each other (except in the water or on the job)let alone buy cheap chicken.

He asked me if I had ever had surfer's ear. You know where you get calcium deposits that build up boney spurs in the ear canal and eventually close it off completely in severe cases. Evidently this is caused when your ears don't drain properly. I told him I have only had swimmer's ear off and on over the years when I surf a lot and don't do such a good job of drying out my ears.

Anyway, he's had a severe case of surfer's ear for many years with his ears getting progressively worse over time. His suffering featured weekly earaches especially when he was in the water a lot. He said he finally decided to turn himself in and let a doctor look at it. He was facing a medieval sounding surgical procedure where they basically put your head in a vice and drill out the deposits built up over the years. Sound medieval enough? Plus it costs about $8 grand. Knowing Robbie, I'm sure he wasn't making this up. Really.

So he was telling his son, Noah, about his plight. Noah mentioned an Australian product called Surfer's Ear. Twenty bucks for a small bottle of liquid you apply to "the affected areas", I guess daily, and it lasts about a month and a half. So Robbie looked it up on the internet, ordered himself a bottle and...voila, surfer's ear gone. For you sufferers out there---just thought you might want to know.

Friends and Wetsuits (Again)

2008-01-06T10:52:00.000-05:00

Was on the way home from looking at an ongoing oceanfront remodel the other day and spotted some friends, Marcus and Gail Felton, who live on the west side of the beach road in Kitty Hawk. My son and theirs have grown up together surfing and playing school and club sports, baseball and soccer. Their house is like an oceanfront home as there are no oceanfront homes across the street, just man-made dunes and beach. The homes that used to be there have long since been taken by beach erosion.

Marcus and I walked across the street to watch his sons and a few other local teenaged boys surf some small glassy waves breaking close to the beach. A little while later Pete Hunter dropped by and then Shawn Mulligan. So we had a regular jawing session going there, standing on the little wood walkway which reached over the crest of the dune. The boys were taking near shorebreak waves in full wetsuits replete with boots, gloves, and hoods as the water was around 50 degrees that day.

This was the first time I can remember meeting Shawn as an adult. I had met his wife once years before at the eighth grade graduation of our daughter and his son. I had even met his son, who used to be close to Molly at the time and through their high school years. Shawn and his family used to live behind our house in Virginia Beach where we grew up in the 1960's. His father was a naval Commander and aviator who had been shot down, captured, and held for many, many years by the North Vietnamese. In fact, as a child, I don't ever remember meeting his father. It seemed like he was never there.

We even used to play sandlot football and baseball behind their house during those years---all the neighborhood kids. We'd call everybody together, lay out bases or a football field and play till dark. My day would end when my father would step out the rear garage door and whistle for my brother and I, our signal to come home. We liked that our Dad's piercing whistle, produced somehow by placing two fingers in the side of his mouth just so, actually made us feel special and unique. No one was called home this way. So we would honor it and him with our obedience.

This neighborhood was near a number of naval air stations and was mostly inhabited by naval aviators although our father was a ship captain. We learned the harsh realities of war as military families when our friends' fathers didn't return. We played as a close knit group, but when something like this happens and as kids age, groups drift apart and form new identities and new ways of supporting each other without announcing to the world that that is what you are doing. Such was my departure from Shawn Mulligan's life I suppose. We never lost track of his father's situation though and were so happy the day in the early 1970's when Commander Mulligan, along with many other downed aviators, was returned to the United States. By then, I was in college.

So there we were, standing on this little walkway before the Atlantic, talking about our kids, where they were in college and stuff like that. Water temperature is always a topic of conversation at this time of year.

Pete mentioned he just got a new, Patagonia full wetsuit, a 2 mil with a wool lining. I said I'd love to see it as he had it with him. The four of us crossed the street back over to Marcus' where Pete's white pickup was parked. He pulled it out of the back of the truck and we all handled and inspected it---a wetsuit with a Merino wool lining. It's cost? It was four hundred eighty dollars with a lifetime replacement warranty. His son, who has one, said very little water even gets into it when other suits usually get flushed out, especially paddling out through bigger waves. "But a Merino wool lining?", I said. On closer inspection, the wool fibers were formed in neat rows of looped, bunched strands all attached at both ends to the neoprene on the inside. There went my "itchy wool" objection. It felt smooth and soft. He said the 2 mil (thickness) of the suit would do in water demanding a thicker conventional suit because of the wool. Pete had not tried his suit at this time. I'll check back in with you later for his feedback.

I have a three year-old O'Neill Psycho 3-2 mil full suit I bought used from Noah Snyder, which I love. But any way you can reduce the weight and the binding effect of a neoprene second skin during cold water months (see blog entry "The After Swell Hangover, The Winter Cometh, December 8, 2007, ), everything changes from stamina to board choice. The material advances in wetsuit technology during my surfing lifetime are astounding. It's a safe bet my son will be just as amazed at this stuff when he's my age, that is of course, if our oceans are clean enough for human activity. I sure hope so.

The Old Year---The New Year

2007-12-31T23:07:00.000-05:00

Farewell 2007! To all our friends and readers out there, happiest and healthiest of New Year 2008! We hope you will be informed and entertained by KYScoast in the coming year. We look forward to your comments and we'll see you on the other side.

Please Speak to Us

2007-12-29T22:00:00.000-05:00

We want everybody to know we welcome your comments on this blog, its subject matter and what interests you particularly. We realize we have regular readers and would love to have your feedback especially.

We are most interested in recording the experiences of those in our community who have fashioned a lifestyle (especially surfing) in this remote, young, non-urban community and either grown up in or raised a family here. The focus here is local surf culture. Our Outer Banks retrospective is long overdue. The cup of local characters overflows.

We'll begin featuring interviews with those we consider iconic surfing and cycling figures on this part of our coast early in 2008. We expect you'll recognize someone you've seen in the water or on the road over the years, but didn't know anything about. You'll most certainly see someone you already know. You may even be a part of their story. So enjoy our story being told and please join in.

We can begin our conversation by using the "comments" button found at the end of each blog entry. Or you may want to email us at skip.saunders@gmail.com. If you read a few of the blogs already posted, you can get an idea of the kind of stories we want to tell. It may be a defining moment in your surfing career, the moment you realized how important surfing (or road cycling) was to you in choosing a place to settle, or even what motivates you to keep at it.

We would love to hear from you. And thank you for visiting our blog site. Your feedback will help shape it.

Thoughts Between Sets

2007-12-26T16:13:00.000-05:00

It was another kamikaze. Again it looked like it was coming right at him straight out of the sun as he stood at his bridge station. His crew was firing everything at it that could shoot. Ack-ack, the mid air explosions from their anti-aircraft fire, pocked the sky around its target. The deafening din spiked into his skull. Everything he saw seemed to slow down as this one of Japan's Divine Wind came steady at him, as if standing at the center of the bull's eye.

There was nothing left he could do now that he had learned since becoming first an enlisted crewman turned officer, then captain of an LSM, an armor and marine carrying amphibious ship. This was the U.S gator navy, full-size ships which landed in the surf to deliver their deadly loads. This was the invasion of Okinawa after all, their first landing on Japanese soil---the enemy's homeland.

He could make out the Zero's markings now, crouching down into the false safety of the bridge's steel railing about to be gone forever.

The impact did not come. He could have reached up and touched the underside of the enemy aircraft as it passed over the bridge. He rose back up full of adrenaline and hope. The fighter cleared the ship's mast, circled tightly, and suddenly flopped down skimming across the ocean's swell crests shattering its prop and halting abruptly engulfed in spray, tail and fuselage settling back to the ocean surface. This enemy aviator had made a choice. The plane's canopy slid back as the pilot stood in his cockpit swinging one leg then the other out onto the plane's left wing. The aircraft would not float long in these seas.

Upon seeing this person who had risked an open ocean belly landing, when only seconds ago surely could have killed him and rained hell on his ship and its company, he felt a strange kinship despite the death and mayhem all around them both. He felt a responsibility to now help him. This after his Pearl Harbor, his Guadalcanal, his Saipan, his Iwo Jima, and on and on---all the young faces lost, some his friends, all the potential gone forever.

He ordered a rescue boat over the side to pick up this man who, in a moment had killed them all, and then given them back their lives. Around them still the chaos as the kamikazes screamed down and the ack-ack cracked the sky.

When they picked him up, he begged to see the ship's captain, this diminutive man-boy who did not look a warrior at all, but instead a schoolroom teacher. When brought to the bridge, he fell at the captain's feet, wrapped his arms around the captain's lower legs and, crying through tears of joy, thanked him in perfect English for saving his life.

The U.S. Navy captain with the Tidewater Virginia dialect and 9th grade education, was stunned to hear what this desperate Japanese aviator said next in clear American English, better English than himself, he thought.

He was in college at Harvard before the war and was called home to Japan as the war was about to begin. Things were beyond desperate in his country now. He had been given enough flight training to take off and fly the plane and only enough fuel to reach the U.S. Fleet off Okinawa. He had not wanted to die like this and especially for what his country had now become.

I squinted out through the early morning sun to the ground swell coming steadily at me only, it seemed, and thought about the day when I was fourteen, my Dad told me his story. He was the ship's captain that day, 26 years-old, about to turn twenty-seven, at the height of his young man's immortality. His enemy chose to live so my Father lived, so I live, and so do my children. It took a stranger to him from the other side of this world---one man's fear-filled decision balanced on a pin point to change so much. I'll never know him, but for his choice that day, I am grateful. Thankful for my life, I turned and paddled into the next wave.

The Perfect Day

2007-12-24T11:46:00.000-05:00

Nineteen seventy-eight. My friend, Woody, and I stood on the small dune across from the original location of the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Kill Devil Hills, looking seaward under a bright hot sun hung in a clear, blue sky. We had checked it in the morning---flat everywhere. We had a day off from waiting tables at A Restaurant By George, and I guess we hoped we could will something out there to be rideable. We just stood there saying nothing. I put my hands on top of each other on my head like a captured prisoner-of-war as sweat began to form on my brows and shoulders as we stared to the east.

It appeared to be the same as this morning until small lines showed on the horizon. We watched these waves from nowhere make what seemed a cautious approach to the beach, as there appeared none preceding them. We watched in silence seeming to both at once decide subconsciously that to speak might spook the potential magic before us.

The first wave presented a long upright face, shuddering and then feathering in a breath-light offshore breeze. It peaked, tossed itself outward into a curl and peeled off from the center, to the right and to the left. It just kept peeling off down the line, uniform and perfect on this perfect stage of sun and sky. Three or so waves followed this one in precisely the same manner.

It was difficult to judge their size as there was no one in the water. But it looked big enough. Without saying a word we trotted obediently back to the car to grab our boards. We waxed up and paddled out. We waited and waited and waited some more. Nothing. I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon, one hand shielding from the glare, water dripping from my fingers and into my sight.

Here it came after almost forever:the next set of waves was showing way outside. As they moved across the sandbar we both made a pick and took off. As I took off on a beautiful left, I could see the sand bottom passing below. The wave was shoulder high at this point---just fine.

Woody and I harvested wave after wave from each set. We got into a kind of rhythm which had us getting to watch each other ride a wave as we paddled back out. This was total stoke. There were small tubes and clear, warm water, and wave upon wave.

I noticed someone standing on the dune watching us and could tell by the silhouette it was my brother Jamey. He shrugged his shoulders extending his arms out away from his sides as a way of saying, "Where's the surf?" I signaled back with one index finger extended upward saying, "Just wait a little bit," which he did. The next set arrived and Woody and I each took off, flying down wave faces, him right me left. I kicked out, looked back over my shoulder to see what Jamey thought, and saw only the sand his feet flicked into the air as he had turned to run back to get his board.

The three of us surfed this swell for another hour or so. The perfect swell vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Over. Gone.

My bet is most surfers have a memory like this of a perfect day. We had nothing to explain why there was excellent small surf for around and hour and a half out of the blue that day. But there was, we were there to get it, and I suppose I'll remember it forever for who I was with, the crowd I wasn't with, and the perfect conditions. These days are what make us who we are over our years in the water. They permanently imbue us with the hope and faith that we can attain this focus and camaraderie again. We all understand how mercurial and fleeting these types of conditions truly are. They are as temporary as the human shells in which we live our lives. But demand we get their best when we find it.

Moving Sand Around

2007-12-21T22:39:00.000-05:00

We do a lot of moving sand around on the Outer Banks. And when we're not moving it we seem to be thinking about moving it, or where we should move it.

We debate beach nourishment, rebuild dunes with dump truck-delivered sand and then re-plant it with sea oat sprigs and sand fence after storms (as done by the Town of Kitty Hawk), and push beach sand back into dunes by oceanfront homeowners (This is when oceanfront property owners replace dune sand lost to storms in front of their homes with sand on the beach pushed into a kind of dune by a bulldozer. Yes, this is a somewhat desperate act.) The various towns will even dump sand in the parking accesses' ramps to the beach to block the ocean overwash usually pushed into these parking areas and the beach road beyond by big storms, especially at high tide.

The sure result of all this is often new sand being fed into our beaches' sandbar system. The net effect is just as often improvement in how the sand bottom around these sandbars influences breaking waves. This is one of the things I entertain myself with during the winter as I scout various sandbars up and down our local coast.

Three years ago, the Comfort Inn in Nags Head sported sand added to the beach by property owners following the carnage of Hurricane Isabel. Sand was lost during the storm, so more sand was added back by people. During the time afterwards, the new sand was slowly chewed away and pulled down into the first slough between the beach and the first sandbar. You could look at the escarpment along the beach and clearly see where the sand had come from. This created a situation unlike any I've seen few times before along a beach dominated by sandbars. It created a beachbreak that stayed around for over two years. You could take off on a wave over the first sandbar there and ride it right to the dry sand along the beach, as there was no deep slough where the wave would stop breaking.

Also looks like the current and swell along the beaches created by Hurricane Noel at the beginning of November all but eliminated the prime sandbar that had stayed with us so long at First Street in Kill Devil Hills.

We'll see what the rest of this winter brings. The only constant, I suppose, is all the changes on the coast.

My Road Cyclist/"Bike Path" Rant

2007-12-17T21:36:00.000-05:00

The time has finally come for me to vent something that's been on my mind for a long time. This concerns road cyclists and car/truck drivers sharing the road on the Outer Banks. My experience is mostly related to roads from Ocean Hill to Coquina Beach, and Kill Devil Hills to Stumpy Point and Lake Mattamuskeet and all roads between.

When I moved here out of college in May of 1975, the rideable shoulder, or "bike path", was the 4-inch wide painted white stripe at the edge of the beach road (Va. Dare Trail). Right beside it was sand. I had left a major university where I rode my bike everywhere for virtually every reason. It was as much a part of my everyday life as starting a car and driving.

One day while riding on the beach road, on the white stripe, a tourist charter bus passed me at speed such that it touched my left elbow and made continuous contact with me down the entire side of the bus. I gave my bike to a friend preparing to go to college the following week.

Much has changed here since then, and not enough has changed. Large portions of the beach road now have shoulders 2-4 feet wide to the right of the white stripe. There are even residential neighborhoods whose roads connect along the sound in Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk. And there are what all of us living here year-round call the "bike paths", for example in South Nags Head and the Kitty Hawk Woods Road.

But at a time when there are more reasons than fitness and racing for us all to be riding bikes, I find there are many incidents regularly occurring on the roads of our community which will eventually result in someone's death. I've witnessed and even been involved in several of these incidents myself.

I was hit by a car while crossing Limulus Street in South Nags Head and while riding on the "bike path" in 2004: Contusions, concussion (even with a helmet), torn jersey, bent wheel rims, ambulance ride to emergency room.

I've had numerous drivers make vehicle maneuvers intended to provoke and intimidate a cyclist. I'm a builder here and I'm ashamed to say that almost without exception, virtually every one of these incidents was carried out by someone driving a pickup truck or van.

Road cyclists do pose a quirky looking culture to the outside eye. I do understand that. But the folks I ride, train, and race with are also drivers as well. We understand what dangers motor vehicles pose to a cyclist, as should all drivers. But both communities of road users could do a better job of sharing the road (please see "sharing the road"). I doubt either group will be giving up the road any time soon.

I believe that drivers are incensed by road cyclists' not using the nearby "bike paths" when they must pass us as we ride at the road's edge---their road. I know this because they often scream this at us when passing us on the road: "Get on the _____ing bike path!"

The "bike path" thing, I think is really at the heart of the local misunderstanding though. The devil is in the nomenclature (the use of words to describe) here. As I understand the role of these "bike paths", they are actually "multi-use paths", meaning they are for the use of everyone, from mothers pushing strollers to dog walkers with dogs on extended leashes, to slogging beach cruiser bicycles.

Road cycles are not meant for "multi-use paths". Road cycles are the bikes with the curled down handlebars and the riders hunched over, you know, with tights and helmet. These bikes are usually doing around 20-28 miles per hour with riders often wheel-to-wheel working in a paceline. These speeds are far too great for the multi-use paths and would pose a serious danger to the other users of the path. Because we are all drivers too, we understand how this looks to someone driving on our local roads. Why aren't they on the "bike path"? Because the road is the only place for road cycles, as it is one of the only places for motor vehicles. We must co-exist peacefully.

We do try to schedule our rides together when there is less traffic or on roads with more limited traffic exposure. We could certainly improve how we ride as a group with drivers around us on the road and we are working on that.

My hope is we can all get along on our local roads in the coming new year, and that no one is hurt, or even worse killed. I also hope more drivers find their way to a bicycle. It's a great way to see our community.

Baptism, Part 2

2007-12-09T11:56:00.000-05:00

(Editor's Note: Part 1 was published on this blog yesterday, Dec. 8th)

It was almost first light---Steve and me, fall 1970, "Road's End", Buxton, North Carolina---one eight of a mile south of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. "Road's End" was our name for a parking lot behind a huge oceanfront dune. A state highway sign had given us the name. It said: "Road Ends 3/10 mile".

This was one of our favorite spots featuring a great sandbar. The sandbar was fed by the erosion of the huge dune before it during the winter. You got there by turning left off Route 12 at the entrance to the National Seashore at Cape Point. You followed the road around a lily pad-covered freshwater pond to an intersection of two-lane paved roads: left went to the lighthouse and keeper's quarters, right to the campground, straight led to Road's End.

There was a slow-moving tropical storm several hundred miles offshore---an east coast wave machine. We thought it would be pretty big so we wanted to get there and get out before everybody else. We had no idea what was waiting over the dune.

It could be heard long before it could be seen. We climbed over the dune and looked at it, spread before us, vast and deafening. It was huge by anyone's standards---even the surf flicks. We felt small. We were eighteen years apiece. One guy was already out, a mere dot on the outside, maybe three sandbars out or more. Sunlight was fingering through the clouds lying heavy on the horizon. These were the biggest real waves we had ever seen. Nothing before was even close.

We waxed our boards. My heart beats were so close and fast it felt like there was a humming motor in my chest. The rich, pungent smell of salt air and sea life alive and formerly living laid heavy in the mist sprayed into the air by the surf. It gave us some comfort as it always did. We were already trained to associate that smell with the pure joy of wave riding.

There was no hesitation whether to go out. Our moment was here. We did have to time our sprints through the shorebreak (the waves breaking right on the beach) in order to get off the beach. It was quite large, 5-7 feet, thick overhead, and seemed to suck all the water off the beach as it reeled back and up before slamming the wet sand before it. I watched and waited and watched and waited some more. Then in an instant went straight out from where we were. Steve walked about 200 yards to the south where he thought he could paddle out faster in a rip (riptide). I always admired his independent way of taking on a good challenge. Surely we had one now. I also always coveted Steve's longer arms for better paddling. Steve stood about 6'2" and 160 pounds. I was smaller, about 5'11" and 145 pounds.

Rips are out-flowing channels of water whose flow seaward from inside the surf near the beach often cause a kind of slot in the waves where the waves aren't breaking as large or often. They can be easier places to paddle out, but can be fickle and sometimes undependable. They can also be a swimmer's nightmare, but for a surfer trying to get over the sandbar to the lineup, a best friend. At this time we were surfing before the widespread use of the surf leash. So having no leashes, we were surfers until we lost our boards when it became necessary to be a swimmer. We kept our eyes on surface conditions so that we would know where the riptides were at all times.

Riptides are caused by large waves carrying lots of water across the sandbars at low tide. The extra large amount of water floods in against the beach, forms a current between the sandbar and the beach, and flows parallel to the beach until it finds a deeper cut or a gap in the sandbars which let it back out to sea. In the meantime, more large waves ram even more water over the bars behind it.

Sometimes waves will cross the bar and crash face-to-face against waves rebounding off the beach causing backwash. A real wildcard situation if you are riding a wave in and your wave collides with a backwash wave. Surfers usually go airborne when that happens. Most of the time it's great fun to get tossed up and off a wave face like this. You really must give yourself up to the circumstances, I suppose. The ocean's a good teacher that way.

My board was a 7-2 (7'2" long) scarlet red Harbour, 19" wide, shaped by Randy Rarick---and of course, a single fin. We had no surf leashes, as I noted earlier, and would count on our ability to swim or our buddy if we were separated from our boards and in trouble.

To paddle out through large waves with boards like these, when confronted with a wave about to break on you or a rolling wall of whitewater about 5 to 6 feet thick, you grab your board's rails tightly and roll over upside down. This was called "turning turtle" during this era. Your board would now be bottom up at or near the water's surface, you beneath it, underwater waiting (not long) for the impact. When your beating was over (we'll talk more about the beating later), you would roll over almost weightless in bubbling whitewater afterwash, dragging you back toward the beach, and continue paddling in a sprint over the sandbar where the waves are breaking---the "impact zone". If your timing is unlucky, you can be pinned down over the bar while being hammered repeatedly by all the waves in the set. At the end of this punishment you are often just outside the shorebreak where you began.

Waves or ground swells, coming from a far off source like a tropical depression, storm, or hurricane (the best wave makers on our coast), travel to the beach in sets of waves of 3-4-5 or more, each with a signature amount of time between waves, time between sets, and size. How close the tropical system is to the beach, how fast it is moving, how low its atmospheric pressure is, and which direction it is moving, influence the wave quality followed by local influences at the beach itself, for instance wind speed and direction and, of course, the tide.

East coast surfers, like all surfers. know there are a multitude of conditions which must align before the surf gets really good. The hardcore surfers are always watching the weather forecasts, especially the marine wind forecasts and tides, and checking the actual conditions at the beach regularly during the day they expect the swell to hit. The anticipation in the surf community with the approach of one of these storms offshore is difficult to accurately capture in print. Anyone with work obligations is killing themselves to get things in place so they can surf when the swell hits. The excitement explodes when swells line up, stacked to the horizon, pressing toward an offshore wind.

Okay. We're paddling out.

When paddling out in surf like this, there is usually a relatively calmer area between the shore break and the waves breaking over the first sandbar. The first real proof of close proximity to the impact zone are rolling walls of foaming whitewater which come one after the other almost appearing to be stacked up in layers. As you get into the thick of this you instinctively paddle harder and faster, arm muscles burning, shoulders, back, and down to your toes, all lit up. Paddle, paddle, turn turtle, flip back over---paddle, paddle, paddle, turn turtle, flip back over, again and again, and again until you reach the point of futility and total muscle exhaustion. You always hope to make it through the exact place where the monsters slam the surface water over the sandbar without taking direct hits. Sometimes you're unlucky. Direct hits are punishing to the body and psyche. They break surfboards. Most surfers who have surfed in fairly large waves or larger, have depressions in their boards where their fingertips have crushed into the fiberglass when gripping their boards tightly while paddling out.

Eventually we both made it outside to the relative safety just beyond the place where the most waves seemed to be breaking over the second or third sandbar out. We were hundreds of yards apart by the time we got outside. The other guy we had seen in the water alone was farther out than us. It wasn't clear why he was so far outside. We three were the only ones out.

When the surf is this big, 15-foot wave faces and up, it is especially eerie to the average surfer to sit alone outside picking and choosing the right wave to ride. We didn't think so at the time, but we were average surfers I suppose. It's the sport itself that has a way of making you feel special as athletes and sportsmen.

It's extra difficult to position yourself near the breaking peak of a large wave (the optimum place to take off) when it breaks over a sand bottom because the bottom gets so stirred up as to become semi-liquid a few feet or more from the bottom, with huge quantities of sand suspended in the ocean water. This often makes the shape of the breaking waves less defined and consistent, and more or less uniform than the preceding wave. The peak shifts along the wave face until the wave breaks, unlike waves breaking over rock or reef in other parts of the world. Here waves break a lot closer to the same place time and again.

We were nervous. There were few waves breaking consistently and ridable. The ocean was steel gray seeming to cast a sinister snarl, threatening these boys now in its grip. Steve had broken his nose after turning turtle under a huge wave and getting smacked by his board.

We could see a number of people gathered on the beach. A few were park rangers we discovered later. We didn't know it at the time, but a newlywed couple from Pennsylvania had drowned earlier at the lighthouse and the rangers weren't letting anyone else into the water, including other surfers. I guess they were mostly watching us and we weren't much to watch because we were already plotting our escape back to the beach.

Steve took off on his first big wave, a huge right. It was about 7-9 feet overhead and nasty as I watched him disappear out of sight as he dropped in. He made the drop, rode to the wave shoulder, kicked out, turned quickly around and paddled for his life back out of the impact zone over the sandbar. I picked out another big right, made a big drop in a crouch, made a conservative bottom turn, streaked down the line, and kicked up, up the wave face and out. The speed of it all was incomprehensible. I wasn't sure whether I was going to make it back out unpunished, but was just brushed by the whitewater of a few large ones on the way back outside.

We looked at each other and it was clear that the joy wasn't with us in these conditions. This swell was out of control. Many waves were unmake-able, meaning you really couldn't ride the wave face without having it break on you or ahead of you. In either case, the ride was shortened in these conditions and the risk of a catastrophic wipeout and swim to the beach were great. Surfers call these "closeout" conditions. The looming question now became: how are we going to get back to the beach through the shorebreak?

Now, paddling to the beach through the shorebreak racing to the beach from behind you is even more tricky than charging out through it from the beach. Sometimes, most of the time when it's big, you must sit just outside the breaking waves and wait for enough of a lull to get far enough toward the beach to get your feet down on the sand. You lift your board up above the water, shoulder high at your side, and slog/sprint to dry sand.

We did make it safely back to the beach. We met at the base of the big dune where we had begun, laid our boards down, and looked back at what we had just left behind. As I remember, there wasn't much heroic proclaiming or verbalizing about what this meant for us in terms of our surfing resumes.

I'm sure every surfer has a feeling of gratification at having faced his first huge swell, and answered the call. This first big swell had left its stamp on us. It was our baptism. I knew I had come closer than ever to realizing my physical limits. I suppose that is what some young men must need to know about themselves. I was one I now knew.

Big Waves, Part 1

2007-12-08T18:00:00.000-05:00

Every surfer dreams of riding the big wave. I mean the really big wave. Now when we talk about big waves, we're seeing big wave surfers travel the world to challenge breaks like Teahupoo (Tahiti), Maverick's (Half Moon Bay, northern California), Todos Santos (Mexico), Jaws (Maui), and now, Surfer Magazine reports, Shipstern's Bluff, Ours, and Cyclops (all in Australia). Technology in marine weather forecasting, marine geology, and oceanography have now combined to predict the best time to be at a particular break any place in the world to catch epic conditions. Although sometimes still an email or phone call from an observant friend will do.

When surfers of this caliber take on waves like this, today it can easily be captured on film or DVD like no other era prior to this one. A big wave surfer's fantasies and nightmares can be laid before him and the world to see.

The known big-wave world we saw in the 196o's surf flicks featured Greg Noll, George Downing, Buzzy Trent, and Woody Brown riding monster swells in Hawaii at Makaha, Sunset Beach, and of course Waimea Bay on the north shore of Oahu.

These guys were taking off on racing mountains of seawater thrust at immovable reefs which in turn, tossed these 25'+ mountains and their riders toward the sky as the wave took form. Wipeouts were disastrous. We'd see a rider taking off on the wave's peak in a low crouch, gripping his board's rails (edges) trying to make the drop. Huge winds scouring up the wave face would lift his surfboard's nose into mid-air, heaving him up at first, then dumping him down the wave face and launching the board into a vertical spin some fifteen feet above the wave. We'd sit there aghast seeing ourselves on those waves.

We thought this was how we would learn how crazy it could be in big waves. You see we memorized these sensational wipeouts. We knew them well through the safety of the camera lens.

We did not yet know however the reality, that instant when a surfer gets one of three things at the point of takeoff in big surf: attempting the terrible drop and taking off down the wave face; pulling back behind the peak fast and hard enough so as not to be pulled over the "falls"; or being pulled over the "falls" to be pile-driven to the bottom by tons of water, hoping he gathered enough air to stay conscious until able to swim to the surface. At this point he must swim to the beach with other monsters bearing down from behind.

Was all this punishment worth it? If the thrill of riding smaller waves was any measure, without a doubt, we would find the worth. We all hoped our day would come. We did believe it would. Could we measure up? Everything we intended to do in the water until then was to ready us for our baptism.

Here on the East coast we saw the surf stars from Hawaii and California on surf flicks at special showings in the theaters of Virginia Beach in the 1960's. We strode into the theater with our buddies feeling like we were the core surfers on our piece of the coast---special---the real guys. We weren't I'm sure, but we felt that way and it felt good.

We'd look around the theater to see who was there. Were there any local big names like Bob Holland, of Smith and Holland Surf Shop, or Bob White, of Wave Riding Vehicles fame? There weren't many other names we knew for this was close to the birth of surfing and surf culture on our coast. In fact I was positive we wouldn't be surfing after say, age 30 because we didn't know hardly anyone older than us who surfed, except maybe Holland and White, but they owned surfing-related businesses.

I sat in the wash beside my best friend, Steve, at Croatan Beach south of Rudee Inlet in the late fall, 1969. I was seventeen. We were taking a break from surfing clean, but small waves. Steve and I shared the dream of riding big waves at exotic locations. We were the "Endless Summer" generation of surfers as well and Bud Brown's film was woven neatly into our dreams. This vision of traveling the world surfing seemed possible for us.

I carved the number "30" in the sand between us as the shallow wash receded. Steve asked, "What's that?" I told him that's about how old we'll be when we probably won't be able to surf anymore. The wash ran over the 30 and left two seventeen-year-olds sinking into the wash sand and thinking.

Could this be true? We didn't really know anyone much older than us who surfed, so maybe this theory held some truth. Maybe we would change that, but we never verbalized it. You have to understand how deep this subject ran in us and the urgency it bred. Yeah, we were boys worried about life as men with full time office jobs and Vietnam and riots off in the distance and our beloved sport even farther away.

The After Swell Hangover, The Winter Cometh

2007-12-04T22:30:00.000-05:00

Real winter for us loams just ahead. It's the first week of December when we typically get our first shock of cold weather here on the Outer Banks. For some our cold is not your cold, but ours is simply our very own reality---our cold. It's just as cold to us as yours is cold to you no matter the temperature, wind, and humidity. Right now high 30's to low 40's at night, north winds around 20+ mph, and ocean water temperature now plowing down into the mid and then low 50's. Winter of '05 boasted the coldest winter ocean temps I could remember in many years, reaching down to a shocking 36 degrees.

Wetsuit design and materials have never been better though and let the brave-hearted surf right through our winters nowadays. This is a far cry from my first attempt at surfing in winter water in a wetsuit.

I was sixteen in high school around 1968 in Virginia Beach. I had a friend who knew someone who had a wetsuit. So we visited to see if that guy would loan it to me. I tried it on and it seemed to fit well enough. The loan was on. My best friend Steve Hudkins had come up with one as well so we were set. We just needed worthy conditions.

It was February, it was snowing, and we knew there was a swell associated with the snow storm. We went directly to Croatan, a home break on the south side of Rudee Inlet. The sand bottom formed a simulated beach break there beside the rock jetty. It was our kind of wave.

The wetsuit I struggled into was 1/4" thick "sharkskin", a diver's suit. The wetsuit arms were so rigid, that they would hold my arms inside them out at 45-degree angles from my sides if I relaxed. There were thick boots. I felt very special and very rigged up. Gloves? No, but I had solved that with my Mom's Playtex dishwashing gloves taped at the wrists with black electrical tape. No hood, but I was ready.

We paddled out, just the two of us, in snow-glassy 4-5 foot faces, mostly lefts. Everything felt heavy and slow, because it was. I took off on my first wave, a left. I have no memory of riding the wave, just wiping out, struggling underwater to find the surface and feeling water so cold I lost orientation as to which way was up. No, I mean really lost my way! I swam hard to the surface and kept swimming about to burst holding my breath. I knew I was about to bust through the surface any second. And then the top of my head butted hard against the sand bottom.

When something like this happens---you can't see cause of the cold, you can't breathe cause of the cold water, and you lose your inner compass cause of the cold---there is a dialogue that starts up in your head between you and your soul. "Am I about to die?" asks your soul. Your answer is surprisingly cogent, articulate, logical, but at the same time completely panicked about the possibilty of dying because you were stupid or dying as pitiful testament to Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. This is the adrenaline talking. Nonetheless the inner voices agree this is not the way you envisioned going out. So you get into the "do-whatever-it-takes" mode. You turn 180 degrees, push hard off the bottom and find your pathetic way out of the mess you're in.

Needless to say, I waited many years for wetsuit design and material technology to reach a point of safe functionality. And because I was becoming a young man, I walked out of the water that day with my immortality still intact (I had conquered) so that I could find myself in similar predicaments surfing in the 40 years to come.

The Day After the 2007 Thanksgiving Day Swell

2007-11-23T20:38:00.000-05:00

I awoke this morning knowing the end had really come. I was bone weary. I could feel the new cold air radiating around my piling supported house from inside its walls. The north wind was slashing through the pine trees outside. I knew what the ocean looked like in these conditions: raggy, pushed over fluid humps passing by the sand beach, racing south. The air temperature had plunged to around 40 degrees last night. The reality of the coming winter was in my face.

Yesterday was the triumphant 3rd day of the 2007 Thanksgiving swell that will not be soon lost to memory by any surfer on this part of the coast. Yesterday morning I raised from deep sleep ready to take a risk---a slow breakfast and prep for the day's waves. The cold front, I knew, was on it's way. But I wanted to surf both sides of low tide, with low tide being around noon. So I had a little waiting to do. I also knew I wouldn't last but so long out there, so my timing was critical. As a long-time east coast surfer, I knew I was risking ruination by the inevitable wind switch to north, but I took my time anyhow.

When I arrived at the beach access, there were places to park. I was surprised. When I climbed over the dune boardwalk, there were way fewer surfers in the water than yesterday. I guessed that it was less crowded because it was, after all, Thanksgiving and I suppose some guys were just too dog-tired to paddle back out again. I understood. As I have noted, we don't have larger swells like this stay around this long very often.

My guess is the typical east coast surfer would surf the first two days until crippled by the shock of such good waves for so long under such perfect conditions. This swell had a re-vitalizing effect though on many. It produced a symphony of wave and human energy until all was spent. It's demise marked a season's end in a way, and the beginning of new hope in us all for another opportunity just like it somewhere out in the future.

The wind was now a staked-out southwester about 15-25 mph. Small boat wake sized side-shore wavelets rolled across the face of each ridge of surf pushing across the bars. This surf was so fast and would curl up tight in the shallows over the sandbars inside. Big swift "C"-shaped faces offered a way long, liquid wave playground to every rider. Guys were paddling in multiple directions toward the next place their peak would emerge, others sitting waiting patiently, recovering from the hold-down on the inside. All trying to stay lined up on a particular oceanfront house where they had seen the last big set break. The next peak was their's.

I recognized the familiar slender silhouette of my almost 18 year-old son, Jack, as I squinted into the sun to the south. He said he had been out a little farther south for about 30 minutes. I watched him take off on a few long backside lefts which carried him way inside each wave. Finally he had had enough of fighting his way back out I suppose. I saw him trudging up the sand dune to the beach access stairs and then on to the parking area.

I saw so many great rides these three days by so many people I know or at least am acquaintances with. There was so much pure joy all around. A day of Thanksgiving to be sure. I left this day however, reassured this all can and will happen once again. I'll be sure to let you know.

The 2007 Thanksgiving Day Swell

2007-11-21T21:25:00.000-05:00

Today was the second day of the second consecutive year of the timely arrival of a Thanksgiving ground swell. Yesterday I surfed with only two other locals, both goofy-footers like myself: Phillip Stafford and Jerry Slayton. We were on a break in Nags Head. The sandbars there have been rearranged by the current and swell caused by the passing of Hurricane Noel. We adapted. The waves were shoulder high to about 1-2' overhead. The lefts were fine and why you would find 3 goofy-footers converging on the same end of this singular sandbar. Water temperature was around 58 degrees. I wore a 3-2 full suit with boots and was completely comfortable for the 2+ hours I was out.

Today I chose the social cauldron at one of my favorite Nags Head breaks and surfed with many friends, their sons, acquaintances, and assorted iconic local surf figures. Even Delbert was there, apparently abandoning his beloved First Street, evidence that the sandbar there may be less than satisfactory now since the passing of Noel.

Everybody was in a great mood. The surf was a rare 1-3' overhead with offshore SW breeze around 10 mph. The air temperature even pushed the mid seventies.

The lines just kept coming to the beach. The lefts were insane. At mid-tide coming in, there was a huge peak busting pretty far outside, fairly mellow though, not breaking top-to-bottom, but a very long right.

Two straight days of overhead swell with offshore wind is rare on this coast. Everybody was surfing till they needed to be dragged out face down on the sand. I savored every wave as if it was life itself ebbing away. You just don't know when you'll see these conditions again.

I look forward to Thanksgiving Day, tomorrow. The same conditions are forecast. A cold front, one of many to come, is forecast to blow in late tomorrow sometime. The wind will clock around to north and this beautiful, beautiful swell will melt like so many before it, into a raggy, side-shore chop. The ocean will transform itself once again as it will our focus.

Since Hurricane Noel and Why We Must Keep Wearing Leashes in Town

2007-11-16T21:53:00.000-05:00

Much has streamed by the coast since we last talked, after Hurricane Noel's passing. Yeah, we got great waves the following Sunday and Monday. I had the most fun Monday morning surfing with old buddies, some whom I only see when I surf and only when I'm at certain sandbars. I like to visit different breaks from Kitty Hawk to Pea Island when there's a swell. I can see the locals I've surfed with here since 1975 and make sure I get to surf with them once in a while if I move around to various breaks during the year. Some of them are more habitual about where they like to surf than I am. So, for me, it's like dropping in at their home to visit from time to time.

We have a great surf community on the Outer Banks. It represents a healthy cross section of our local population and has since around 1976. That was the first time I could remember looking around the room at a public hearing considering the imposition of regulated surfing hours and restricted areas to surf here in Kill Devil Hills (KDH). It was to be modeled after Virginia Beach's laws, a city where I had grown up and had my taste of what it's like to sit on the beach and have to watch perfect small waves peel without surfers on them. The only place you could surf between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. was beside the Steel Pier at Rudee Inlet. There were so many surfers and people posing as surfers, you could've walked from board to board. It was ridiculous and no way to surf!

At the time (1976) in KDH there had been a hell of a swell in September and a bunch of locals, me included, descended on 2nd Street, which was one of the three best sandbars north of Oregon Inlet. Planter's Bank (near the original Gray's Department Store) and Domes (the geodesic domes comprising Robert Benson's home) in South Nags Head were the other two. People parked anywhere they could. Seems some parked in the right-of-way on the west side of the beach road and down 2nd Street boxing in the home of a current KDH commissioner. Apparently he didn't like this.

So word soon flew around town that KDH was considering restrictive surfing laws. Word also flew around that local surfers need to somehow organize. I knew this would be a monumental effort, cause most of us were living here to avoid organizations, restrictions, lifestyle congestion, and for this era, any semblance of conventional conformity. I suppose we were being motivated to a type of civic action, many for the first time.

This was the first time I could look around that public hearing room and see just who the surfing community was on this part of the Outer Banks. There were carpenters, waiters, as they were called then, masons, shop owners, club owners, musicians, pharmacists, mechanics, fishermen, and writers. There was Skip Jones, Robbie Snyder, Monty Leavel, Doug Miller, Dave Menaker, who didn't really surf but owned Soundside Folk and Ale House where we all watered down, listened to live music, and met to plan for the public hearings; also Bill Longworth, Brian Caton, Stuart "Panda" Taylor,and my brothers, Jamey and Craig Saunders. (If I left anyone out please let me hear from you.)

Many of us spoke directly to a local government for the first time. I was nervous but I was truly motivated as were many of my friends. The town commissioners listened to us. A deal was proposed: we would wear surf leashes from that day on all the time when surfing in the town. This deal eventually became law for KDH and all the towns. But we could still surf whenever and wherever we wanted. I'd say the surfing community gained it's identity here when this happened. I felt like I now had a place I could call home.

My wife and I have raised three children in KDH one mile from the high tide line. One was born in our home and can't imagine leaving the ocean to go to college, but I'm sure he'll learn how.

I still cringe when I see overly-tattooed young shredders shed their leashes in the towns. I remember the deal that was made back then. I pray they don't lose their boards and injure a tourist or child. Our freedom to ride waves hangs in the balance and in their hands.

Waiting for Noel's Legacy

2007-11-03T15:36:00.000-04:00

Hurricane Noel has now raced off to the northeast of us toward Nova Scotia. I checked the surf this morning around 7:20 and the surf conditions were intense and heavy. The First Street beach access was edged with fairly deep beach sand and plenty of sargassum from the very early morning's high tide. The wind was offshore, northwest about 30 knots with higher gusts. The breaking waves were at least double overhead and with smoking crests shredded by the torching wind. The north current was clawing the beach and dunes re-built after Hurricane Isabel 3 years ago. All I could think about was how good the surf was gonna be tomorrow. The offshore wind was forecast to subside and stay offshore. It would take until tomorrow for the surf to clean up and line up nice, and we even might have some leftovers on Monday.

I just returned from a 25-mile tempo ride. I stopped at what's left of Kitty Hawk Pier to check the surf on the way home, back down the Beach Road. The pier was chopped off by Hurricane Isabel leaving only the pier house and a stub of the original pier. Since then the Hilton Garden Inn, chocked full of tourists, sits where families and surfers and fishermen used to park their vehicles to use the beaches nearby and the pier. I understand the economic forces at work here, but it's sad to see a sign standing at the pier ramp which warns "for use of hotel guests only". Many a local child learned to surf or fish there including my son whom I saw get his first true tube ride there when he was 11-years old.

The surf there this afternoon was quite heavy busting hard on the sand dunes around the foot of the pier ramp and tearing away at the foot of the dune a little more with each successive wave. The outside sets were monstrous forcing the pier pilings to tremble and vibrate like guitar strings as they filed to the beach.

Tomorrow should be the day and tomorrow afternoon the time.

Blog Gap and The Tour de 'Peake

2007-10-30T20:18:00.000-04:00

October 30, 2007

Greetings, it's been awhile blogettes and other blogees. My first bike racing season ended in mid-August. The season overall was extremely grueling, sometimes difficult to raise killer instincts in order to compete, and physically painful---I loved it! The moment-to-moment thrills were endless. I made new friends and, I suppose, opponents in the races which had many of the same riders from the Tidewater, Virginia area, my former stomping grounds and place where I grew up. I was always inspired by the riders on our team as they competed.

The day following my infamous cheeseburger-toting Tour de Port, I raced in the Tour de 'Peake in Chesapeake, Va. There were around 35 Cat 5 riders like myself. Two riders from my club, Ricky D. and Michael B. were with me. Again we lined up, me first, wheel on the start line, Ricky on my rear wheel, Michael on his. I noticed two riders lined up together on the far right, Cory and A.J. They were from different teams but I knew they were among the strongest I could pick out, and having them together on the start line told me something was up. Cory was on the line followed by A.J., and then A.J.'s whole team stretched out behind him.

I had no idea exactly what I was going to do but I sensed something was about to go bang over there on the outside. The race started. I let the riders to my right, also on the starting line, go forward creating a gap giving me a lane over to the right where Cory and A.J. launched away. I shot the gap, broke into A.J.'s team's line and accelerated like a crazy person to catch A.J.'s wheel. We had about 100 yards to the first lefthand turn (90 degrees, 2 lanes wide). We came out of the turn way fast in a streaking paceline! I had no idea at this point who was behind me or where my teammates were. I glanced down at my computer---30 then 31 mph! "Oh my god, we're in a break," I thought. "I hope other riders are hooked on to help keep this pace. I'll never last the whole race if it's just the three of us. Is the main field still attached to us?"

All I could do was stay tucked down out of the wind, drafting in A.J.'s slipstream as I watched Cory come off the front, slide down along our left side and to the rear of the paceline with it's unknown number of riders. A.J. leading, I would have to take my turn working at the front next. He peeled away on the back stretch right before the turn into the finishing straight. I led us back across the start/finishing line and could hear the race commentator say something about Kitty Hawk Cycling Club in the break.

We again rounded the first 90-degree corner, went about 300 yards and I slid off the front and began dropping back along the paceline's side. I counted riders anxiously as I progressed toward the sanctuary of the rear, where other riders were enjoying the labors of the riders leading them.

Ricky, my teammate, had made the break and was safely working in about the sixth position back. There were a total of 8 of us. Before the end of the race one rider would drop out of our lead group. The main field was quite distant behind us and no threat, the break distance having been created. Our group settled into a 27-29 mph tempo, which functioned well with the number we had and as long as everyone cooperated and took their turn working at the front.

I stayed in the rotation behind A.J.'s rear wheel. Several laps in I knew we were pressing the fitness level of this group as riders would immediately come off the front when it became their turn, or if they were the second rider, stay on the leader's wheel when he came off the front skipping their turn altogether. The cooperation among the riders began to stress, tension and even anger crossed riders' faces as they were pushed more quickly to the point. One paceline became two almost competing lines.

Grudgingly, riders fell back together realizing a group tantrum was only going to empower the riders following us in the main field, and maybe have them bridge up to us. So the unspoken decision being clearly, and convincingly concluded, we fell back upon our group fate to help each other to the bell lap where the gloves would come off and our primal, solo efforts would overtake all else as the only thing in the world that mattered.

I remember the bell ringing as we passed the reviewing stand. A.J. was at the line's head, me huddled on his rear wheel, other riders in the break behind us. A.J. rides for the Fat Frogs Racing Team out of Va. Beach. He is a big, powerful rider, maybe around 6'-2" and 240 pounds with one large eyeball tattoed on the back of each of his calves. I had noticed these and his raw power in time trials earlier in the season. He is a superb time trialist.

As we pushed hard around the back stretch still holding our paceline, I leaned forward and urged A.J. to push harder saying,"let's time trial 'em A.J." Meaning let's ride faster to keep the other riders back while trying to break any of the riders who may be suffering. Easy for me to say when I'm hiding behind his wheel out of the wind right? He answered back to me,"it's too far to the line yet Skip." So we kept up the pace pushing 30 mph again. I found out later, my teammate was on my wheel also enjoying his protected position.

The last 90-degree turn before the finish line was about 1000 yards from the line. Out of the turn we held our positions and stayed on our saddles for about 50 yards and then the race exploded. We all shifted to a higher gear, stood up, broke out of the line all at once groping for an open path to the finish. The sprint was on! Bike frames creaked and cogs and sprockets clacked and clicked. A.J. slowly pulled away from me. Ricky launched out from behind my rear wheel, streaking by me and then A.J.

I poured every cell of strength I could gather down through the pedals, the drive train and to the very rubber tire face engaging the road surface. I crossed the finish line at 33 mph having been passed by one rider on the left, one on the right, and finishing fifth. I had partially dislocated a rib during this race I guess during one of the big efforts. Didn't realize it until the adrenaline faded later. Ricky reached an impressive 37 mph as he took first place, A.J. in second.

I finished my first racing season with a seventh place at the Chesapeake Criterium and a DNF at the Statesville (N.C.) Criterium. Training time has been filled since then with surfing and tempo rides. Won't begin focused race training again until mid-November. Hope to blog you again soon. Let me hear from you sometime.

Preparing for a Bike Race-Tour De 'Port

2007-07-22T17:49:00.001-04:00

Do not ever eat a cheeseburger before a bike race unless you intend not to be in the race. Yes, I made that mistake even recently. I carried an undigested cheeseburger with me across the finish line of a race that should have been much easier on me and was virtually crippled by it. That's one of the many reasons I'm a Category 5 racer. They may even have demoted me to Category 6A or B (this category does not exist) as punishment.

Real cyclists/athletes, and even me, have preparation that goes on all year leading to the racing season and which occurs during the hours preceding the race of the day. Last weekend I attempted 2 criteriums on consecutive days for the first time, the Tour De 'Port (Portsmouth) on Saturday, and the Tour De 'Peake (Chesapeake) on Sunday. Wasn't sure how much recovery I would need for a race the following day, but I wanted to test my fitness and see.

Oh yea, the cheeseburger---I ate it 2-1/2 hours before my start time at 'Port. That's plenty of time to digest it right? Ha! No!

When I arrive at a criterium, the first thing I want to do is register and get my bib. This is the number I'll wear during the race. Usually, like the other racers, I end up parking in an outlying parking lot or a parking garage. In Portsmouth, it was a parking garage on the perimeter of the race course and the TODI Music and Sidewalk Festival. I rode my bike over to the registration table and signed in and got my number.

There was a guy next door who was offering computer chips at no charge that we could mount on our chain stays. With them he could track our specific bikes through the race course and give the race officials our split times, average times,
and fastest laps, and verification of finishing order I suppose. About now everybody's feeling real special. Faster would've been better.

Two Cat 4 riders, Robert and Mark and one of the Cat 5 riders from our club, Mike B. are in the parking garage inside the race course perimeter. Ricky D. and I, both Cat 5's, are together in the other garage. Ricky and his friend Megan, arrive and Ricky registers. My cheeseburger and I return to our garage to warm up.

There is a race in progress led by two motorcycle cops every lap and we must carefully cross the course after the racers pass us. There is a bandstand with live music. Families walk the sidewalks along the race course, racers and their friends watch the race and mill nervously around. Most try to stand in shade to watch the race as it's low 90's and high humidity. Teams and clubs are grouped together along the course. Sidewalk cafe-goers are feasting in the heat planted at tables under trees along the way, some 50 yards upstream of the finish line.

Preparation: Warm-up is absolutely essential for me. I prefer a stationary trainer at the tailgate of my pickup. A cold Gatoraid beside me, a towel draped over my handlebars, an ipod with Jeff Beck's "You Had it Coming" screaming me out of my comfort zone. The stationary trainer is best for me for warming up in strange places because I can control the warm up tempo and how constant and steady it is. They say a long warmup is best for short, fast races, and shorter warmups are often best for long races, like road races maybe longer than 40 miles. The thinking on this seems to be that longer races usually begin slower and that warmup can take place largely during the first part of the race. Only the individual rider can decide what works best for him.

My warmup starts very slow and builds to the point where I'm doing one or two sprint intervals at the end. I'm trying to warn my body of what's about to happen to it.

I finish the warmup. I put things back in my truck, take my bike out of the trainer, fold the trainer, lay it in the truck bed, close the tailgate and rear window, lock it up. I'm concentrating real hard on all the little details now. My tires are pumped up rock hard just under 120 psi, the way I like to ride them. I have one gel and my glasses in my jersey pocket. I'll eat the gel at the starting line so it'll get in me during the race. The glasses are there so that I can inspect my bike closely after a crash. That way I'll know whether it can be ridden or not immediately, or whether an adjustment on the spot will do the job or not. The details have to be right. The tiniest thing missing or not right when your physical limits are being exposed can be excruciating.

To say an amateur racer has a special bond with their bike when they must count on it in a race would be an immense understatement. I am this way. I don't have an extra bike following me through a race or on the sideline of a criterium that I can snatch on the moment of mechanical breakdown or crash. It is just this one. It is everything.

The Category 4 race is right before our Cat 5 race today. I show at the sidewalk beside the course, stand near the finish line in time to see the last few laps.

The bell rings indicating the final lap. Minutes later I see riders rounding the monument at the end of the street, the setup for the sprint to the finish line. I squint into the sun, recognizing the body language of one of two riders who appear to be on the front. They're closer now. Is it Robert? No. Yes! He's hammering off the front, set up perfectly for the win. As he streaks toward the finish the peloton pour around the corner behind him chewing up the distance between them and to the finish beyond me. Other riders rocket up the edges of the course. A few pass my teammate right before the line. He finishes strong in sixth.

When you see a teammate finish like that, setting himself up so perfectly for a win, and you are at the start of your race with the same jersey, I must say it is a sure motivator. We have a moment to take a lap around the course while the Cat 4 riders recover. We come back around and stop, me with my front wheel squarely on the line. Ricky lines up on my wheel with Mike on his the way we usually start.

By this point in the season there are riders we know from the other clubs. I mean we know the ones to keep an eye on---the strong ones who will put the hammer down and are capable of winning. One such team has lined up on the outside. Their big time trialist will be marked closely. It seems I'm taking an adrenaline drip into my bloodstream by now. It's about nothing but the moment from here until the last pulse of energy drains away over the line at the finish.

As crits go, this one was relatively easy. Ricky and I rode as part of the front 10 riders the whole race. I didn't want to fight off attacks by solo riders racing up from behind (as did most of us), attempting to break away from the main field. It was too damn hot! So when we saw them coming up the outside from behind, me or someone else would yell "break" and the whole front group would stand up on pedals and surge as the lone rider or two would go by, gaining only about 15-20 yards on us before we would easily break them, and pull them humbly back into our scolding ranks.

The cheeseburger and I were hanging tough. I was seeing visions and even hearing it suggest once that we should abandon the race. Just where I want to be: me and my secret cheeseburger watching others finish the race. We finally heard the bell ring. Last lap now!

We approached the monument run-up to the finish line and the inevitable surge by the peloton. We wrapped the last corner fast. The cheeseburger and I couldn't muster much of a sprint. But Ricky was off the front giving it to them. He crossed first completely alone crushing the nearest rider with the bike lengths between them.

The cheeseburger and I finished 17th of 35 riders that day. It will be the only time I ever carry one through a bike race again.

Update From the Coast

2007-07-08T17:35:00.000-04:00

It's been quite awhile since my last post. I've had a busy Spring between my family, my work, cycle racing, and some surf. At this point in this, my first racing season, I have competed in 4 individual time trials and 4 criteriums. My results in terms of wins and placings are nothing much, but being there has been phenomenal and a privilege. I told one of my brothers I just don't know how we let this sport get past us with as much time as we spent on bikes on roads and trails when we were kids.

The 2007 Tour De France began yesterday with a Prologue Time Trial in London. I always look forward with huge anticipation to this Grand Tour. I realize it carries much baggage these days as do virtually all professional sports. But I still enjoy witnessing the enormity of effort by the riders, the team tactics and the incredible suffering it demands to win stages and finally win the overall race. After competing on a bicycle these past few races, I have some slight idea of what's going on as I watch one of the most nuanced sports I've ever been a part of, and one that is really not that fan friendly as far as watching live races, except maybe criteriums and track races. In the end though, I'd much prefer to race with amateurs than watch the pros. The amateurs, I'm sure, still hold the torch.

I'll check in again soon. Next weekend I'm in two crits: the Tour De 'Port and the Tour De 'Peake.

My First Crit

2007-03-19T21:07:00.001-04:00

"Crit" is road cyclist-speak for criterium, a circuit race around a city block or two, usually involving a pack of riders. In this case 46 racers elbow-to-elbow, wheel-to-wheel, and horrifyingly sometimes pedal to spokes---high intensity, hard skids and slamdowns on asphalt, breath-stealing sprints out of corners. See in your mind a school of fish darting 90 degrees on an instant, synchronized, and mostly maintaining their positions relative to each other. When positions are not held, bad things can happen.

My mentors had coached me to try to stay in the front to avoid accidents, avoid passing on the inside (but not always), hold your line through the curves, protect your front wheel from contact, protect yourself from the wind especially earlier in the race to preserve your strength, and don't look back even if there is a crash. You see, I would witness a criterium for the first time from inside the race itself. Even I wasn't sure this was such a good idea. But the knucklehead in me kept saying, go ahead---do it, do it.

I was in the Category 3 race for Cat 5 men, Juniors and Women. This is really a race for novices although some of the racers had raced years before, as had a few of my friends from our cycling club. I felt I represented the Gilligans and Kramers who wanted to bike race.

Chip and Michael, two local bike shop owners from our beach towns, were in this race as well. It felt great having friends in the mix around me.

I had warmed up on a trainer for about 20 minutes, getting myself nice and slathered up. Then I transitioned over to the course, a block in the Greenbrier Industrial Park of Chesapeake, Va., a .6 mile loop. We would do 15 miles---25 laps. There was a start/finish line halfway down a straightaway with a 20 knot wind seeming to blow right down it in the clockwise direction of the race. (Funny thing about a race around a four sided city block: once the race begins, there seems to be a headwind on three sides. I couldn't understand it.)

The race name was Snowball Criterium #2. Snowball #1 had been postponed from February to April 29th due to impending foul weather which actually broke bad that day. All racers gathered with their bikes at the ready in mass before the starting line about 8-10 abreast, around 6 or 7 rows deep. There actually was a clean excitement in the air of perking endorphins and hope. I was positioned front and center at the starting line. My friends' advice like a mantra repeated in my subconscious, "stay near the front and avoid trouble".

When the promoter finished addressing us, we thanked him and his club for putting on a training race of this sort by applauding as a group. I liked that. Then to my shock, he casually stepped back to the curb saying,"Okay go ahead and start." That was the official, formal start to my first crit. I thought he was joking.

When I noticed the front wheels around me rolling forward, I suddenly realized, he wasn't joking---this was the starter's gun so-to-speak. I jolted into a sprint expecting everybody to pack around me on both sides, and 25 yards out in the front, by myself, I realized I was entering the first curve alone working into one of the three sides torched by headwind. Now what? No one was near me. So I broke the first rule and looked back. I figured,"Why not?" no one's in front of me so there's nothing to collide with. My glance back produced a snapshot of the peloton stretched into single file up to my rear wheel, every rider with teeth clenched readying to devour me it seemed. I steadied into a tempo cadence around 24 mph and happily let them by me on both sides as we finished the first lap so that I could find protection from wind and for the small traces left of my dignity.

I was soon engulfed in hunched over racers astride their beloved machines, spokes shredding the air into a million slices, wind jetting over my ears. This was a real race and it was intoxicating, a streaming, constant focus on nothing but this fast moment!

There was talking between riders. Teammates to each other, some urging others to hold their line in the curves. One big rider beside me reached out to my left forearm warning me to take it easy or I would blow myself up too soon before the finish. Timely advice. I was amazed at the courtesy and manner of this group of competitors. I expected a more cutthroat atmosphere, but astoundingly got the opposite. I relaxed and started concentrating on my position and whether I liked the tempo the position gave me. When I got boxed in, the pace usually slowed more than I liked. It was then I noticed the attacks would begin on both sides of the peloton, riders streaking forward along the edges of the course. So I would dig myself out of the middle and go around. The race was separating the slower riders from the stronger riders. Laps followed laps. We now were lapping riders and since they were much slower, represented dangers for the swiftly moving larger group approaching them from behind.

Racing through the curves with other riders close at hand was an exceptional thrill. As my bike rose upright out of each curve I would climb up on the pedals for the inevitable acceleration. The rear wheel bounced as I powered the pedals into the straight.

As we passed the start/finish line each lap, a tripod-mounted stand would indicate the number of laps left. I tried not to look at it as I raced seeing it only as a mental distraction to the immediate action around me, which was plenty.

As we rounded the first 90 degree corner, about the 8th or 9th lap, the close order intensity was finally too much for the Cat 5 riders. Red cones marked the left boundary of the lane we were to remain in after cornering on this side of the course. Nearest the corner, the cones gave us a wider lane as they were placed partially into the adjacent turn lane. About 30 yards down the street, the cones abruptly went from the middle of the adjacent lane back to the single lane width. Here is where the first crash occurred.

The big guy who had warned me to slow down earlier in the race was right beside me on the left. Another rider had gotten caught beside the wider cones near the corner and suddenly found himself outside the cones where they transitioned back to single lane width. He forced his way into the side of the peloton here jamming his rear derailleur into my neighbor's front spokes. Spokes blew out, his front wheel tacoed, and he instantly slammed down on his left side skidding as riders rode around and over him. I heard it but couldn't look down or back because of the reaction shuddering through the riders close around me. The rest of us kept on with the race.
To my shock, the crashed rider was walking with his bike over his shoulder seeming to be in okay enough condition when we came back around on the next lap.

The peloton seemed elastic as the pace quickened, elongating after the corner accelerations and compacting toward the corners somewhat. About lap 15 I believe, on the approach to the last turn before the straight to the finish line I was in the front group on the outside of about six or seven riders. I noticed a rider moving off the front. I wanted to get on his wheel. This, I thought, was my chance to move up so I began moving up the ranks on the outside, first beside Chip to my right, then almost astride the boy rider whose wheel he followed. About then, Chip pulled out of the slipstream of that rider's wheel and crept up between him and me. About 3 feet separated the boy rider from me, with Chip's front wheel moving up between us now in my peripheral vision. We were very close to the sweeping righthand turn to the start/finish line.

With a sudden abruptness completely inexplicable, the boy rider jerked his bike a few feet to the left jamming his left pedal fully into Chip's front wheel and spokes. The front wheel of the perfect, immaculate Independent Fabricators bike I had carefully lifted into my minivan only this morning exploded crushing Chip to the pavement beside and then instantly behind me. The boy rider recoiled to the right from the impact, then just as abruptly, veered hard and full to the left toward me, driving me off the course into the driveway of a parking lot. I worried about my friend on the pavement behind me as he and his new bike were run over by the following riders.

When I cleared the rear wheel of the boy rider, I now looked 40 yards up the course at the rear of the peloton. I was alone in the wind again in the blink of an eye, but in hottest pursuit. Would I have the strength to catch up?

As we entered the last two laps I was somewhere in the main field again still fighting my way back into it, hiding behind other riders momentarily for rest along the way. I had spotted Chip walking with his bike earlier and now had only the race on my mind again. The peloton had stretched out again, the pace really jetting up into the last lap. As we approached that same last sweeping turn before the finish I set my sights on a rider about 20 yards out in my front, got up on the pedals and accelerated hard to my target---gaining, gaining, gaining. He looked back and saw my attack and he was now up and responding picking up speed. Every cell in my body pushed toward this one goal: to overtake this one rider before the line.

I was beside him, lunged to the line. My first crit was done. I let go, relaxed, and dropped my head down resting my neck and watched the asphalt pass below my frame. That last rider was the number ten finisher. I was eleventh of 46. Michael, who had raced a smart, safe race, finished seventh with a great ride.

This would throw a new light on my training and club rides. The only thing that would make this more fun is if other riders from our club would race with us. I am hopeful.
Dismal Dash Time Trial is next.

The Weekend's Club Ride

2007-03-05T20:24:00.000-05:00

Our club rides seem to get better and better. Saturday nine of us did the Southern Shores---Woods Road---Bay Drive---Wright Memorial loop. We began as usual at the Marketplace at 9:30 a.m. in a chatty double paceline. The weather teased us with warm air and at once we all knew we had a chance to steal one from the heart of the winter. I hadn't thought much about it ahead of time, but one rider on a fixed gear bike had even anticipated a frisky tempo and so, changed his front sprocket for a larger one to give him a higher gear.

The pace picked up on Dogwood as we melted into a single paceline working at about 22 mph. Riders were taking pulls of around one minute as we approached the 158 Bypass light beside Kitty Hawk Elementary School. As we crossed the Bypass to the north end of Woods Road the tempo slid up to 23-24 mph with riders still taking 45 second to one minute pulls giving others a rest in the slipstream. By Kitty Hawk Village Road we were touching around 26 mph and working well together.

We toned it down as we transitioned from Moor Shores Road at the edge of Kitty Hawk Bay to Windgrass Court making our way up the hill to Bay Drive. Here we had the full effect of a 15 knot cross tailwind. This is where we sometimes break apart with some riders attacking and others chasing, and still others restraining themselves wisely out of deference to where they are personally with their own training season. Bay Drive turns into Canal Drive and crosses First Street where we relax back into a double paceline all the way to the monument.

This day we skipped hammering the monument hard as we usually have done wrapping only a few laps, and went over to the front parking lot of the First Flight High School to practice riding through the round-about and parking lot as a group in preparation for the criteriums coming up for some of us this month.

On Sunday only four of us chose to ride north to Corolla. A galling northwest wind was torched up well over 20 knots. This is the kind of coastal wind which makes you feel you are being steadily pushed into the asphalt as you drive into the teeth of the beast. It was Robert, Flo, Mark, and myself. Among this small group is a fairly divergent spectrum of conditioning. Robert and Flo are at the top end of this fitness spectrum, Mark at the other end for the time being as he was sitting on not having ridden enough lately due to illness. We were stoked he was with us. We all know this is one sure way to bring yourself back up to speed and Mark looked deadset in getting back to form directly.

We maintained a steady 20-21 mph for almost the entire 23 miles. This was an improvement for me over the 18.5 mph on the same route in the identical wind conditions two weeks before. Surely this was due to the teaming with stronger riders as I'm sure Robert and Flo were capping their effort somewhat in order to hold our little group together. As I told them, it was great fun being along. It's extremely gratifying to work that hard and even suffer with a group having the same goal.

I've heard this noted as something typically Anglo-Saxon---where the individuals involved in a group effort are more inclined to find reward in subordinating their personal goals to the goals of their team. I've read about this dynamic in reference to around-the-world sailboat racers where romantic/Latin cultures produce sailors who excel more in solo sailing races versus the more team or group successful Germans, Scandinavians, English, and Americans. Yes, I have an Anglo-Saxon ancestry and Norman further back. I guess I'm a soul in conflict at times. I'm sure my friends know this.

The road to Corolla was flat with a few long curves and unrelenting wind. I call the wind here the "mountains of the Outer Banks" to cyclists. I suppose like riding in the real mountains, a cyclist must experience our winds to really know what I mean. A rider is so exposed here to the fetch (open expanses over bodies of water where coastal winds gather much speed), there often is no place to hide.

The wind can also carry huge amounts of blowing sand and salt virtually across the whole island. So if you want to ride on a day when the wind is blowing onshore (from the ocean), then you are smart to ride on the soundside of the island. The finicky and faint of heart from out of town won't even ride their perfectly polished expensive bikes here because of these conditions. Not that I blame them. Those who live here and want to ride watch the wind direction closely in order to avoid as much as possible these conditions. But in the end, if you are super picky about your equipment, you can't ride here at all.

Cyclists are finicky about their equipment the same way sailors are. In fact some are finicky about your equipment. They can't seem to help it. The only difference is in sailing, a sailor can get pretty decent performance out of his boat even in races, even if he may not be in excellent physical conditioning. Not so on a bike. I've read that performance on a bike is influenced about 80 per cent by the fitness level of the rider, 20 percent by the bike. Yet both sailors and cyclists are quite compulsive over small tweaks they may be able to put on their setups to improve performance ever so slightly. This has always fascinated me. Many riders I know also have extensive experience owning and sailing yachts, windsurfers, or kiteboards. It's not quite the same people doing all of these sports, but sometimes I wonder.

We reached the turn-around at Ocean Hill, took a two minute break to pull out the gels, bananas, and Powerbars and then launched downwind for the return ride. When a cyclist finally turns his back on the torturing wind and spins pedals with a body having no windload on it, the relief raises feelings of boundless strength. It seems you must be careful here not to jump up too hard into this euphoria and build speed up to a comfortable tempo your mind knows you can maintain all the way home. We found 24 mph right away. We crept up to twenty-six. South through Ocean Sands and into Pine Island holding 26, pushing twenty-seven. When it was my turn to pull the other riders at the front I could still feel the wind in my face, a combination of our exceeding the tailwind's speed and turbulence, I suppose caused by houses and the scrub trees---live and pin oaks to the west of Route Twelve.

We touched 28 mph at some point just before re-entering Dare County. I could feel my quadriceps straining and burning some. My energy reserve I knew was dwindling. My last pull was shortened and I had to get off the front or I would have to drop. As I dropped by Robert I let him know it was fine with me if he and Flo wanted to kick in the afterburners and fly. He said he just wanted to finish hard to the top of the upcoming hill (immediately north of the Town of Duck). I tucked into the slipstream of Flo's rear wheel and hung on feeling the relief of being off the front.

Our speed was increasing now. I glanced at my computer and we were steady at 29 miles per hour and creeping up. I was entranced by the sight of the hill our goal in the distance and the growing hollowness in my quads. Could I make it. I focused on the spinning, steady black tire 8 inches from my front wheel. I pumped at a mad rate. I was bound to push myself here. I peeked upward as we crested the hill revealing two more rises beyond. The pace I thought would drop off started picking up. I didn't need to blow myself up this early in the season so I dropped and watched Robert and Flo burn onward over the next two rises. I steadied up at 22 mph keeping my eye on those two now in Duck. I could tell they were slowing so that Mark and I could catch up.

Robert rode back to my home in Kill Devil Hills with me where he turned around and rode back to Southern Shores alone. I finished with 61 miles earned through the mountains of the Outer Banks. This is our cycling world.

Back From Snowball Criterium #1

2007-02-25T14:59:00.000-05:00

We just returned from the Snowball Criterium #1. The race wasn't held because of impending rain. Apparently the promoter wanted to be remembered for backing out of holding the event, instead of how they thought riders would feel if the event was held and they "had to ride" in the rain. I would only predict a break between the hardcore purest-type crit riders and the not-so-hardy other riders. I sense fear of injury lawsuits, but that's just me.

One of the guys I was with, who is experienced with this kind of road cycle racing, said he was shocked it would be postponed due to weather. According to him, a race like this is postponed or cancelled only due to unusually dangerous conditions, for instance sleet and ice on the road.

Anyhow, the four of us returned trying to get our psyches to relax having steeled ourselves for the race intensities into which we knew we were about to be immersed.
The re-scheduled race will be held at the same place in Chesapeake on Sunday, April 29th. I'll continue training, stay signed up for that crit, and look for time trials to enter.

For those of you who are not familiar with the different types of road cycle races, a criterium is an all-out road race on a closed circuit, usually around a few city blocks, anywhere from 15 to 25 miles long in total distance(ours would have been 15 miles). Riders, in this case fifty, make turns as sharp as 90-degrees, often making body contact with riders beside them, and sprinting out of the corners getting quickly back to race tempo. They are known for their speed,high intensity, and crashes. I am told criteriums are an American creation in road cycle racing. Sounds just like us doesn't it? Kind of like football or hockey at 25 to 30 miles-per-hour.

Will keep you posted on my first season of bike racing and offer more musings of a lifetime sports tourist.

Today's Ride

2007-02-18T21:53:00.000-05:00

Today we rode from Southern Shores to Ocean Hill into a 20+ knot northwest wind. From my home in Kill Devil Hills to Ocean Hill and back is 60 miles. It was fairly rough riding into a wind like that. The ride back however, was euphoric blazing along at 25-27 miles-per-hour. It's still base building time for me. I rode with two other club riders, one in his thirties and a new rider to our club, 21 years old and a former rider for the Ohio State Cycling team. His name is Rick. He is very strong.

Next week our club,GS Kitty Hawk/Kitty Hawk Cycling Club, will be represented for the first time in the Snowball Criterium #1 in Chesapeake, Virginia. Michael Gibson, Rick Devennish (the new rider), and myself will be in the C race as Category 5 racers. I have no delusions of grandeur for my own results never having even seen a criterium. I'll treat the race as a hard workout and an opportunity to learn. I look forward to it. I hope I can help our new cycling team have a rider win this event. Rick will have a reasonable chance to compete and it will be a thrill to see him race. I'll keep you posted on the race.

I still have about five more weeks of base building before readying myself for some spring time trials, where I have a higher comfort level. More later.

2007-02-06T21:00:00.000-05:00

Just watched Timmy Turner's surf film, Second Thoughts. Wanted to see if it would play on my notebook computer. It did thankfully. It's a film of three American surfers who travel to an island in Indonesia on the super cheap to find waves, camp out and surf.

They are dropped off on the island by locals who are asked to return for them in four weeks. Subsistence camping and epic barrels---rights and lefts---are the order of the film. Incredibly honest filming showing Timmy and his two buds deep in way overhead tubes as well as slam downs inside on the reef, stuff usually edited out or not shot by larger budget efforts. I'm impressed!

They filmed some of the best and clearest inside-the-barrel tail shots of surf boards tracking a wave face that I've ever seen: squash and round-pintails and their tail release tracks are there to view. After 42 years of surfing, I'm happy to see the spirit is still in good care and the pioneering for new waves continues. If you consider yourself a core surfer, you'll love Timmy's film.

It's real cold here now in the twenties with NW blowin' about 20 knots. Would love to travel to some warm waves now, but held back by obligations. Still dreaming about waves to come though, just around the corner here. Still road cycling and occasionally swimming indoors. Have entered my first criterium road race in Chesapeake February twenty-fifth. Should be interesting. More later.

First post, Feb. 11, 2007

2007-02-04T10:56:00.000-05:00

Is anyone out there? I am posting for the first time from Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. It's sunny here today, about 50 degrees F., west wind around 15 mph, no ocean swell, ocean water temperature 46 degrees F.---a good day for a long bike ride, say around 50 miles. Can't surf now. So why not?