Velocity Cycling Club is the group I ride with. There are a few clubs in the Edmonton area that I could have joined. I was going to join ERTC (Edmonton Road and Track Club) back in 2020 but doing things in groups wasn’t feasible that year. I ended up with VCC mostly because a couple of the older guys from their club were friendly at a few of my 2022 cyclocross races. Also, nice jerseys without extraneous advertising.

I’m riding my bike again. It’s been a few months off dealing with some other issues, but I’m making my legs go ‘round in circles again. The big difference compared with last winter is that I’m riding indoors.

I got a Wahoo smart trainer in fall when the cyclocross season was getting smoked out and it was dangerous to go outside and breathe heavily. It was heavily on sale because it isn’t a full-on smart trainer that replaces your rear wheel and has a computer out front built in. It’s the kind that rolls against your rear tire¹.

hello again #

I’m J Jack Unrau. I used to write on the internet some. I haven’t for several years. But the muscles should still work. I think.

The plan here is to fill in some gaps. I don’t believe I’ll be getting as library-ish as the old librarianaut blog ever was. There’ll be more about bikes than there ever used to be. I don’t think I’ll be writing too much about my kid, but we’ll see.

In my first cyclocross race I was riding around afterwards and hit a pothole in Strathcona Science Park whacking my right ankle on my pedal and gouging a chunk out of it.

Training for my 2023 cx season I slipped my right foot and gouged my ankle on my big ring. This one probably could have used stitches.

Half a week before entering the Hop n Hurl race I was cruising downhill to Capilano Park for some good cx practice. The offroad downhill goes into Rundle park and is called get ready to rundle on TrailForks. I was descending on the hoods, not in the drops and I guess my weight wasn’t far enough back so when I hit the hard rut and my front wheel turned I went over the bars. I didn’t hit my head but got my knees, hip, wrist and ribs.

“Embrace the suck”[^1]

As a cx rider this ethos means a lot. In cross you’re often racing in bad weather, cold weather, slippery weather. The courses are designed to make it hard for you to go quickly, not like a road bike race. All the twists and turns and lack of traction can make it so the fast people don’t get to use their speed, and craftiness, technique comes to the fore.

The Alberta Bicycle Association Cyclo-cross Cup begins this weekend with the Tubs on Tubs race and the Velocity CX and I am excited.

These races take place at Strathcona Science Park, which is a five minute ride from my house, so it’s my closest thing to a “home” race and where I do most of my ripping around on grass to practice ‘crossing. The other day I was out there and saw someone else also riding around on the grass and flagged her down. Turned out she was one of the race organizers planning out the course.

It is August and ‘Cross is Coming¹. I’m getting excited because cyclocross² is for whatever reason my favourite kind of bike racing.

I say “for whatever reason” because it doesn’t seem intuitive to me that this would be my favourite. I’m not a big powerful rider pushing massive watts. I fall over a lot riding around on rough terrain. I don’t like being cold and wet.

But yet, when I did my first cyclocross race I enjoyed it. I came back last year to do more. And even though I’m in the slowest category racing against kids and old guys, I really like it. I feel exhausted at the end of a race but I want to do it again.

I joined a cycling club in 2023 and we have a coach. I have never had a coach before. I haven’t ever really done sports so I don’t know what a coach is supposed to do. But Kevin seems earnest and nice and is trying so hard to be helpful.

Before this season’s first race he held a racers’ meeting to go over the course using veloviewer and to talk about tactics and what we should be doing before a race. I was at work that night, so I asked if he’d be able to record it and he did. He talked about wind directions and planning and prep and where to attack the group if we had the legs.

I rode cyclocross races in 2022 but they didn’t feel like cyclocross. They aren’t muddy and cold¹. Part of that was due to the boiling frog that we are as a planet but part of that is due to living in Edmonton, where we don’t really get shoulder seasons. The abrupt floompf of winter that happened on November 2 starts fatbike season, not a time for racing in mud, like in Europe (or even Victoria, which is where the Canadian nationals are going to be happening in November).

on agression #

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

On Photography - Susan Sontag

I take pictures of my kid every day almost. He’s young; this kind of behaviour is expected. I do it now because when he ages into being able to give consent he might not want me to. Will he see this as aggression? I do my best to not be controlling in how I steal pictures from people (inanimate objects are different, but not landscapes I realize), but will he resist my aggression, gentle as I try to make it?