Let's go club racin'

My first exposure to racing was in the valleys of the Victorian alps. Club races run by Team Mount Beauty and the Alpine Cycling Club, through the kind of bracing air that keeps a 14 year old boy from wanting to get out of the car until it's a choice between staying warm or starting cold. The memories are visceral – decaying eucalypt bark smell, A-graders pouring into singletrack as if through an invisible funnel, impossibly fast. Huge start-line nerves catalyzed into a battery-acid taste and the kind of scary-good thrill that's enough to predispose a youngster to a lifetime of scar collecting and velo-financial ruin. And always afterward – religiously – the high speed aero tuck down the road back into town. It was careless, hands-free fun, faces blush with cold wind and spent effort tumbling into the warmth of the bakery, drawn by the smell of home made treats.

My ambition in those races grew from not taking the DFL crown (beat the kid who had a mid-race asthma attack), to stepping up to B grade, to not taking DFL in B grade to trying to win pizza vouchers and tubes. I learned, under the mentorship of an ex-roadie Canadian, to lust after things that whirred and flashed through the forest on two wheels.

Twenty-six years later, more or less to the month last Sunday, I toed the line and botched the start of the GMBC's winter series first round. Drove into singletrack with stupidfun abandon, cartwheeled my rainbow-socked self over a stump and into the dirt and got up smiling. Lit fires in my quads and got served on the downs by opponents I thought had been safely put away during technical climbs.



Club racing is good racing. It's good for riders and good for the sport. It's full of kids and dogs and post-race pisstaking, sponsors whose names aren't just on flags but whose staff are in the rego tent, coffee wagons and cold autumn air.

I'm making a point this year, returning to racing with a parenthetical "Senior" against my name on the place sheet and a two-foot-nothing companion to educate, to hit up the club races; to end up in towns and to scuff a few small-town bakery floors with cleated soles.

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In the comments:
What are your formative racing memories?
What makes club racing better? What makes it crap?