jeffkao.net

I’m in South America until early December.
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My 2008 cyclocross season will be ending early this year when early next week I leave to go travel around Peru. So far my planning has consisted of:

1. Getting this Lonely Planet guide a couple months ago
2. Buying a plane ticket 2 days ago.

That is all.

Cale Wenthur on the run up

Team Polska fan lighting a surprise for their racers

Friday evening drove up to Milwaukee for Saturday’s race.  We went to Lakefront for an amazing fish fry (cod, french fries, & maple root beer), then to At Random for a Pink Squirrel ice cream drink.  It was great waking up at 9am for a wisconsin race instead of at 7am and driving up.  Sidebar: Cale & Katy’s bike room is incredible and so is their kitten Citizen Snips.

Team Polska’s course was incredible.  So much fun.  The night before I was concerned that riding a 44×18 was going to be too tough of a gear and I thought about borrowing at 21 tooth, but didn’t feel like the extra work.  In the end my gearing was perfect.  Riding fixed was a lot of fun.  Having one less pound to carry up the run up doesn’t sound like much, but the 4th time around I appreciated it.  The only sketchy part was trying to catch my pedals on the downhill that was also the only section I used my brake on.

Tomorrow is the next Chicago Cross Cup race in St. Charles.

Finally, decent weather for a ‘cross race!  The past two times have been way too hot, so it was nice to race in a long sleeve jersey.  For a change of pace I decided to race my fixed gear On-One instead of my 1×10 Waterford.  I hadn’t been feeling too great the last two races & it was fun trying something different.

Carpentersville is pretty much the perfect course to race fixed in that it is totally flat with barely anything technical at all.  The only real drawback was knowing I couldn’t get enough speed going into the sand to make it out.  In the end I only lost 2 places from last weekend.

The weather was somewhat overcast for picture taking so in a lot of my photos the sky is all blown out.  I think I managed to save a few by going to B&W & making some slight adjustments knowing the sky will just have to appear totally white.

A huge upgrade for me was purchasing Adobe Lightroom.  Processing photos got significantly easier & as proof you can see I’ve managed to go through 22 photos in a really short amount of time.  Also thanks to a plugin I can now post to flickr without any effort.

As usual I have many more photos on my flickr so be sure & check them out.  So far this season I’ve only been racing in Chicago, but next weekend I want to race in Wisconsin for the Halloween race.

- A picture I took is on VeloNews.com & CxMagazine.com which is very cool.  Click the thumbnail below to go to the page.  I knew that if I ever made it on to velonews it was not going to be for my prowess on the bike!

– Author Imelda & I used to be teammates on XXX Racing.  She’s on Kenda & I’m unattached.

– I spell my name with two “f’s.”  Just a typo, I’m not trying out a new name or anything.
– edit: 1 of 2 typos fixed!

- Ben Popper is in CXMagazine on a regular basis and in his case for his racing abilities (even though he is also a great photographer as well & has taught me a thing or two)

- This weekend is Carpentersville, IL and two great races in Wisconsin.  If this was two years ago I’d try and hit all three, but instead I’m just hitting up the ChiCrossCup.

I’ve never been good about writing race reports.  Mostly because I can never remember what actually happened.  Naz has a full report that features yours truly as a somewhat-supporting actor.  So here are a couple quick notes from Jackson Park:

- Sunday’s race was my first since last December’s Illinois State Championships.  I haven’t ridden my bike more than 10 – 15 miles in a day since this past May.  So whatever fitness I have is based purely on my ‘natural’ untrained abilities & the experience that comes from suffering through 3 years of racing.

- A few people asked me why I’m racing unattached this year.  No drama here, just I knew at the outset that I wasn’t going to be able to put any real focus on biking.  I felt like it would be unfair to knowingly participate in a team in a half hearted way, especially with so many people working really hard to achieve their goals.

- There are 22 races in Chicago & Wisconsin this year which is impressive to say the least.  A big thank you to all the organizers for putting it all together and I’m especially impressed that only a small handful of races conflict.  I’m not certain how many of the races I’ll be able to make.  It may be as few as 7 or as many as 15.  

- Even with the 4’s field has 100 some racers split into two fields.  At first it was a bit disconcerting starting in a pack of 60, but soon after it was pretty spread out.  To me the laps seemed a bit longer which probably helped.

- Greg & the guys/gals at XXX did a great job with the course.   The extra switchbacks & the “spiral of death” were nice additions that made the race much more fun & a little more Wisconsin-like than races like Carpentersville.

- The most surprising thing was all of the spectators.  I was really impressed.  Having people cheer for you really helps in forgetting how much pain your in.  Also a special shout out to Adam for the heckling.  My favorite part of cyclocross is heckling.

- Ed White took photos and here’s one of me.

In honor of the start of cyclocross season here’s a picture from last year.
This weekend is the Madison clinic.
- Madcross
- ChiCrossCup