The following is a glossary of terms used in the DSG 09 Race Report:
1.glud \ˈgləd\ Mud with a sticky, slippery, clay-like consistency. Globs onto everything and weighs stuff down. Glues itself to your body and your bike. Very slippery and squishy to ride over.
2. crud \ˈcrəd\ Mud similar to glud, but slightly dryer and more prone to packing up on your tires. Usually contains grass which it cleverly deploys into your derailleur. Somehow even heavier than glud.
3. gloop \ˈglüp\ Mud that is runny and wet, like diarrhea. Lighter in color than glud or crud, gloop is light enough to fly in the air and coat your face.
The race started in the Le Mans style, meaning we had to run for about 50 yards to our bikes. About 2 minutes before the gun was fired, a thunderstorm started. We ran through heavy rains to get to our bikes, and Aaron and I had great starting position. I couldn’t see where the rest of FM was. We both aggressively passed people along the first stretch of single-track, knowing instinctively that the trail was going to get wrecked in the wake of the first riders. It was single file into the forest, and gloop was flying off the wheel in front of me, spattering my face. I abandoned the glasses about 3 minutes in, so as to experience the gloop-spattering more directly. Riders ahead were not even attempting many of the climbs, so I climbed around them (10 pedal strokes yielded about 5 feet of progress). Some climbs could not be ridden. Below my feet the glud was beginning to form, and without spikes it was very tough going. I had a lot of fun on this lap: slipping and sliding, soaked and smeared, we raced together with thunder and lightning cracking nearby. I watched a handful of racers take a bail-out trail about 2 miles in, complaining of dangerous lighting. Right, go stand under your canopy, it should be safe there…
I finished my first lap in 1.5 hrs, sending Nico out and rushing back to our tent so I could diagnose my severely impaired vision. Gloop was packed into my eyes and I felt like I had cataracts – a condition I never recovered from the entire race. I put on a dry kit, ate some sushi, refilled my bottle, and rushed back to the start.
Aaron was already waiting patiently for his brobot, Austin Crenshaw. The rain had stopped, the sun was out, and as we could see from the racers slowly trickling in, the dreaded glud was forming.
Crud and Glud glomm'd onto the front wheel.
Racers were coming off the wrong side of the trail, apparently abandoning their efforts. Those who chose to complete their laps pushed or carried their bikes across the finish line, glud packed onto their bikes in horrendous formations. Nicoletti finished his lap after 2 hours of riding, ahead of Austin Crenshaw, and the huge grin on his face meant no need to hold congress: its time to head back out.
What followed was what I would call “an ordeal”. Very little of the trail was ridable any more. Racers were streaming off the trail, some trying to convince me not to go out. I saw abandoned bikes on the trail, caked in glud. I attempted to ride some sections, but mostly carried my bike, now weighing over 50 lbs. Jeremiah Bishop called it Vietnam on wheels. I wasn't really on my wheels... There were several chances to bail out – fire roads that went down the mountain straight back to the field. I knew that logic and reason could soon get the better of me, so I turned them off and lurched on like a zombie.
This isn't me, but the guy on the left is demonstrating my technique.
After what must have been 3 hours of hiking, pushing, dragging, and lugging, I came to a small ravine with a rider apparently stuck at the bottom. I summoned all of my energy and ran down, in, and somehow, using my momentum, up the other side. I reached back and grabbed the other rider’s bike and pulled him out with it. We both continued on, no energy to discuss the absurdity. The last remaining stretch of trail was all crud – you couldn’t push your bike 6 feet before it became so packed with crud that it wouldn’t move. I probably spent an hour and a half on the last mile.
Emily out on the trail. She clearly enjoys this kind of shit.
I rode across the finish line with a lap time of 4.5 hrs, which incredibly put us in second place in the standings. I didn’t have the heart to tell Nicoletti not to go back out there – he just looked so damn excited. He abandoned his mission after 3 hours of slogging, when he learned that no one was chasing him and there was no one to chase.
We ended up in 2nd place in our category with just 3 laps completed. The Brobots Aaron and Crenshaw secured 3rd place, also with 3 laps. Congratulations to the Starbrite Carwash duo, who somehow completed 4 laps.
All photos found here: http://www.cyclingdirt.org/photos/album_assoc/207328
and here: http://picasaweb.google.com/ldunwoody/DirtSweatAndGears?feat=directlink#
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the first photo is a compelling argument for a camelback.
also: is emily an amputée?
nay
the left arm was holding the chainstay.
wish I could find a photo of me on my attempt at a second lap, which I did on a Surly CrossCheck with drops and a 42x18 gear. my race report will be magnificent if/when I get my shit together to write it.
brutal
and gnarly. way to go.
also
fancy! you put an accent mark on amputee!
whew
Yeah, not much to add to Kurt's story. I rode the first lap and it wasn't too bad until the final mile. Lap time was in the hour and a half range shortly behind Aaron, Kurt and Xtopher. Gabe went out for the second lap and it took him 4.5+ hours. We called it a day.
Really dissapointed because it had the potential to be an epic weekend. Had the course remained like the pre-ride conditions on Friday it would have been great. I will be watching the weather very closely before I register again for this event.
Eric Nicoletti
Just before his final attempt:
That lens makes Eric's
That lens makes Eric's shoulders look monolithic.
clarity!
Man I wish I'd had your definitions of glud, crud and goop before I wrote my report.
edit: here's the link
I am curious
to find out what happened to the bikes, mechanically, after all that.
similarly
what do y'all do with the chains? hose 'em off and call it good? soak in degreaser and relube? replace?
all of the above
I replaced my chain a week before DSG, after my muddy race at 6 Hours of Yargo (which had thunderstorms and what, after DSG, I now refer to as "regular mud"). The chain had been new at the beginning of April but was rusted and trashed with grit. I'm gonna soak it and keep it as a backup.
Since I intelligently borrowed someone's bike for my second lap I think I'll be able to keep running this current chain for a while. I may replace it before my 100 mile race May 30, along with my rear der pulleys.
My headset was also trashed after Yargo and I threw a Cane Creek 110 on the bike the day before DSG. Check headsets, hubs, and BBs everyone...
the aftermath
Need a new chain (got twisted somehow) and new shifter cables and housing (mud got pulled inside). Probably need new disc brake pads too - they go down quick in these conditions. It could have been worse - lots of people ruined their derailleurs or derailleur hangers.
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this is where donald posts the rohloff diagram.
don't give up on the pads!
if they're sintered metal (like most stock pads are) you can take a blowtorch to them and burn all the crap out. my pads have gotten contaminated a million times with oil and a blowtorch plus a little rubbing alcohol to clean off the crud works wonders..
Pads that work are worth hanging on to, cause bedding them in sucks and takes forever, especially after spending last weekend falling on my ass because my new pads wouldn't bed in.
that looks painful
So do you leave the pads in the brake and take the brake off of the bike?
Will you show me how to do it?
sure
you want to take the pads out of the brake. i've only ever used avid bb7s, and those pads are just held in with a retaining spring - very easy to remove. i think most other brakes are similar.
and i could show you how to do it, sure. i'm not entirely sure about this, but i think an alternative to the blowtorch is either baking them, or putting them on the stove burner. just something hot enough to burn off whatever is contaminating them. that's really only necessary for when oil contaminates the pads, and if you're running cable discs or hydraulic discs that aren't leaking, as emily said, a general cleaning will do a hell of a lot and might be all you need.
cool
I'll take them out and clean em up real good. There shouldn't be any oil in there.... just glud.
baking
I've tried baking. No good. But as you said, that's just for oil.
if you don't have a blowtorch
you can make brake pads last longer just by taking them out and cleaning all the grime out of them really well.
also: I looked at some of the other photos in that album and holy shit durkie! Nice work out there man.
hah
that gives me way too much credit. it started pouring rain within 3 minutes of that picture being taken, and the comp was held in a giant river bed so every rock became slick as once it got wet. that photo series is missing about 2 dozen pictures of me falling off rocks and falling in to more pools of oil-covered water with dead fish floating in them.
yeah!
that looks awesome. especially if you go backwards clicking really fast.
aftermath update
got in there real close last night. Turns out I just needed to remove one link from the chain. Only had to replace one derailleur cable / housing. And the brake pads needed to be cleaned (rubbing alcohol) but still have several more rides left in them.
I took a short ride last night
I took a short ride last night and it's running pretty rough. I spent about an hour with a good hose after the race, but the shifting and braking is all mucky.
I'm thinking replace chain, and clean/lube the hell out of the derailleurs. I may need to replace the cables too, maybe just relube. I won't really know until I get in there and right now i really don't want to look at that bike. maybe when the bruises on my shoulders go away.
I've never serviced disk brakes before, just adjusted new ones on new bikes, but I'm pretty sure I need new pads too. Also need new cleats for my shoes, but those were pretty worn already. All in all this was a very expensive race.
and the pedals
I hear Crank Bros makes a rebuild kit... or I may be able to just regrease them. Anybody done that?
Nothing that a little WD-40
Nothing that a little WD-40 won't fix. Seriously, you might have better luck if you put lubricants in there in lieu of H20.
is glud a lubricant?
I found a link to a really anal dude's site with step-by-step regreasing instructions
just regrease them
follow these instructions
http://pedaldamnit.blogspot.com/2007/05/crank-brothers-eggbeater-servici...
that's probably all your pedals need. I do it after every two or three races, since every race I do seems to be muddy these days.
The blue Park grease is fine.
The rebuild kit is probably overkill unless your pedals are pretty old or you fucked up one of the seals.
my bike seems ok at first
my bike seems ok at first glance, even the brake pads seem ok. i'll know more after a real ride on it this weekend. i stayed out of most of the bad stuff though because i did the first lap.
My Race Report
I needed a little time to recover before I could write a race report for Dirt Sweat and Gears-- recover physically, mentally, and mechanically. That race was hard on body, mind, and drivetrain. Damn.
I was entered in the coed duo class with Christopher “X” Rampton as my race partner. X and I had both been slackers in the days leading up to the race and a lot of race-prep-type conversations had been left til the last minute. I was coming from Columbia via Athens, and he was coming from Atlanta, so we didn’t even connect the night before. We figured it would all work out ok as long as we just rode our bikes fast enough. X decided to take the first lap.
A minute before the start of the race the thunderstorm started. The lap times were supposed to be a little over an hour, and the rain only slowed people down a small amount. X came into the start-finish with a decent time and I went out for my first lap. The downpour was tapering off, but what had been your average wet trails were starting to set up into a form of mud I had never seen before.
It was advanced mud. It was supermud. It was mud from the future that had come back in time to kill us all. Riding fast quickly turned into riding slow, which became bike pushing. Even bike pushing became impossible as the mud got worse. The only rideable sections were a few hills that were steep enough to drain well, and even there it was slow going. Really slow. It was simply not a bike race any more, if you define a bike race as “riding bikes fast.”
The only way to finish the lap was to clean as much mud as possible off the bike, shoulder it, and walk. I tried to place it on my own personal spectrum of unpleasant experiences and decided it ranked just below the time I had food poisoning on a Taipei-to-San Francisco flight. In hindsight I have scaled back this ranking, since food poisoning lasts longer and is not undertaken voluntarily. My lap ended up being 3.5 hours long, with only 2 miles of the 12 mile loop actually ridden. I was talking with someone else racing duo as we trudged along, and we debated whether to tell our race partners to go out for another lap or bag the race. But there was no way I wasn’t going to let X experience the supermud!
Finally made it back and tagged X, who took off. I went back to my gear to start getting ready for another lap. I hadn’t even gotten my bike under the hose when I happened upon X, who I had thought was about 30 minutes into his own muddy hell. He’d gotten a taste of the mud and very intelligently decided it was too stupid. A couple other teams in our category were in the same position. I had race brain, and decided that if my bike could be fixed I would go out for another lap and see if we could still get on the podium—I’d come all this way for a bike race and dammit I wanted a race. I was having front brake problems and I couldn’t clip in to my left pedal. The Terrapin Racing Team pit crew graciously fixed my cleat, while I fixed my brake, dug mud out of the drivetrain, hosed everything down, shoveled in some food, and changed kits. Time was ticking away, though, and it was starting to seem like a losing battle.
As I was going back to the start-finish, I ran into Dan from Eastside Cycles in Nashville. He had a singlespeed cyclocross bike with him, and said I could borrow it if I wanted. Helllll yeah! This race just got fun again!! It wasn’t going to get me onto the podium, but getting out there and riding that course on a CX bike sounded like it would be a blast. The mud was absurd anyway, why not just see what could happen. The skinny tires could cut through the deep mud and shed it better, and the entire bike was way lighter to carry. Nice. A Surly Crosscheck with a Cars-R-Coffins sticker on the top tube that matched the Cars-R-Coffins jersey I was wearing. It was meant to be. Swapped pedals and I was gone.
The flat sections in the beginning were real crossy, and I was riding great though the gear was a little tall for conditions… 42x18. Whoa. Most of the singletrack was crazy deep mud, unrideable even on the CX. But anything that was a little sloped was totally rideable with the skinnys. The mud slowed the bike down enough that it didn’t matter that the rim brakes were non-functional. The funnest part of my race was riding in the drops, pedaling down sweet muddy descents on the backside of the course. I actually started enjoying myself. And also wishing for cyclocross season.
I could definitely finish the lap on a cyclocross bike, and could definitely do it before the cutoff, but I hadn’t brought any lights. I got about 2 or 3 miles from the end of the lap and had to bag it because it was just too damn dark in the woods. I made it back to the start-finish and immediately drained a beer. Then another beer. I’d been on the course for 7.5 hours total and only completed one lap.
Super extra props to Dan, who is an awesome guy who let me borrow his bike!! Not only did I borrow it, I completely forgot to wash the fifty pounds of mud off it afterwards. I definitely owe him a new chain, possibly a bottom bracket, and most definitely some beers next time I am in Nashy.
And next year I will be back, and I will bring my cyclocross bike, and I will be finishing a lap on it. You heard it here first.