One thing I’ve learned about getting older is that everything reminds you of something you used to do but don’t anymore, and when it comes to triggering the hay fever of nostalgia, fall is a big one for me:
As the leaves change color and pile up on the ground, and as a chill creeps into the air, not only do I remember my school days and the eternal state of simmering anxiety in which I existed due to my boundless capacity for procrastination, but I also remember cyclocross:
[Aging Fred clad in sausage casing desperately trying to sterilize self.]
From the early 2000s to around the time I became a father I used to spend an inordinate amount of time in the fall doing cyclocross and sucking very badly at it. The above photo would have been from the short-lived cyclocross race on Staten Island, which had a singlespeed field, and in the spirit of irreverence I seem to be attempting an impression of a mating frog. Most races were quite a bit farther away than Staten Island–Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware–and as much as I enjoyed cyclocross, as an exceptionally lousy racer and a new father I could no longer excuse the extremely poor driving-to-riding ratio the discipline entailed.
Yet to this day, just as fall makes me feel like I should be working on some paper that was due 35 years ago, it also makes me feel like I should be getting my bike ready for a weekend of driving and getting lapped.
One of the big races in the region used to take place in Southampton, on the east end of Long Island, and the promoter, Myles Romanow, always made sure it was exciting. For example, in addition to drawing the top riders in the US, there was the year Erwin Vervecken came to race:
And for at least two years, if you won a raffle, Richard Sachs would make you a bike:
Organizers have also put together a few surprises for the racers this weekend. Among those surprises include a raffle with a highly sought-after grand prize.For the second year in a row, Artisan frame builder and CX padre’ Richard Sachs is offering a custom CX team frameset to the winner of the raffle this weekend. Sachs frames are THE drool-inducing, sought-after objects of lust and desire on the east coast. Rightfully so, what with the 8 year long wait list and no new orders being taken. But worry not! buy some raffle tickets and get a chance to mount and dismount in style as your slovenly brethren muck around on department store bikes. and don’t worry, you wont have to wait 8 years to get the bike if you win (but no whining about how long its taking- if you know anything about these frames you know they’re worth the wait).
Now, as I say, while I really enjoyed cyclocross, I was also exceptionally bad at it. I don’t know if I was bad because I didn’t prepare, or I didn’t prepare because I was bad, but either way, I approached cyclocross much as I had approached school–that is to say, lazily. I’d get to a race with barely enough time to pre-ride the course once, and I didn’t really have to worry about tire choice because I used the same clincher tires for everything.
This was in stark contrast to my friend Chris, who had been racing cyclocross for a long time, and was the person responsible for getting my teammates and me interested in it in the first place. Chris stockpiled all his vacation days for cyclocross season so he could bookend the weekends with days off. Each and every week, he’d load up the Toyota Tacoma he barely drove the rest of the year with his race bike and his pit bike and his trainer and his tool kit and every possible tire and clothing permutation for the infinite variety of weather and course conditions you’re likely to encounter on the East Coast during the fall and winter, and he’d compete in both the Mid Atlantic and New England cyclocross series (serieses?), which might involve driving from Maryland to Maine and racing both places in a single weekend, setting up the pit and pre-riding and dialing in his tire pressure and everything else that actual cyclocross racing entails:
Mounting a full bore cyclocross campaign like this takes a formidable level of commitment, especially when you live in an apartment in Queens.
Anyway, as I say, for a couple years at the Southampton race there was a raffle for a Richard Sachs bike–not one they already had or something like that, but one he’d make just for you. This was a big deal. It was the cycling equivalent of, I dunno, Bob Dylan recording a song for you, except I imagine Richard Sachs gets better and better at what he does as time goes on whereas it’s probably the opposite with Bob Dylan. (Oh great, some Dylan fan is probably offended now. Look, don’t overthink it, I was just casting around for living legends, I’m not an expert on the Zimmerman oeuvre. I’d have said it’s the equivalent of Frank Gehry building you a house but I know even less about him than I do about Dylan. Maybe he’s one of those weirdos who puts the toilets in the middle of the living room or something, what do I know?) The point is, maybe it was the universe rewarding Chris for his extreme dedication to cyclocross, but one of those years he won the Richard Sachs.
And here it is:
When Chris died in June it fell to me to deal with all this cycling stuff, the bulk of which I’ve donated, or else sold and donated the proceeds. But not this one. It’s too special. I haven’t posted any photos of it because it’s still his bike to me so it felt personal and therefore weird, but it’s now getting to the point where it feels weird not to post photos of it because this is a bike blog, and what kind of bike blogger has a Richard Sachs in his possession and doesn’t post pictures of it? Frankly you should be really annoyed with me. I mean all this time I could have been showing you lug porn and instead I’m taking pictures of the bottom of my own shoe:
I’ll spare you any lame attempts to render its ride quality in prose, other than to say it’s very very good. As I alluded to in an earlier post, it’s hard to ride a bike from someone this famous and not think about who made it, plus it’s even harder to ride this particular bike and not think about how I came to have it. Just as I felt weird posting about the bike, I also felt weird about riding it. But there was also never any question about that, since it seems to me that the worst thing you could possibly do to a bike like this would be to not ride it.
