Lifestyle | Belgium Knee Warmers

Service Course

Posted by Radio Freddy, November 17, 2008 | Lifestyle | PRO Style

A typical PRO road team requires a lot of stuff, from bikes and wheels to kits and food. A well-funded team receives this by the truckload early in the season: shelves stocked, bikes built, tires glued, and kits disseminated. For the entire season, inventories of gear are kept in some nondescript, bunker-like warehouse on the edge of town. This is known as the Service Course.

When the team travels to races, the trip begins by backing trucks and team cars up to the Service Course to load up gear before rolling out in search of a victory. When in the field, team trucks and buses serve as the rolling Service Course and small parts, pressure washers, vices, grinding wheels, spare parts, spare frames, and spare kits all have a home in the organized and spotless rolling team shop.

But what about the small time team, or the independent rider? Anyone who has ever traveled to a race or even traveled to merely ride knows that the rental car and the hotel room are the Service Course. If hotel management ever knew just how resourceful bike racers are, they would ban us like pets and rock stars.

I have built bikes, rebuilt BBs, mixed bottles, glued tubulars, done laundry, cooked for a crew of 10, and hosted post-race parties all from the confines of team HQ – the hotel.

The hotel room is your sanctuary, your temple for the pre-race prep. Ride the rollers, hang your freshly washed kits in the window, and wash the nasty bike that just endured a warm-up of torrential rain and toothpaste-thick mud. Wheels off, bike on the fork tips, shower on: done… then try to get the big chunks to go down the drain. Gear bags and travel cases stack up in the room’s corners like freight containers at port; horizontal surfaces become home to the grocery and messenger bags containing the personal items that help us adhere to the pre-race rituals, attempting to bring the comfort that comes from routine.

Like many of you, I seek out the extended stay types with a fridge, microwave, stove, and often, a common living room area with a couch. The added space is always in-demand and offering up the couch helps out a mate and can offset the travel expenses.

Having a PRO bus and support staff would be ideal, but for those of us who live the dream at our own expense, the hotel room is our beacon in foreign cities and a warm embrace during the cold cyclocross months.

Jose Alcala – Neutral Race Support

They say a rolling stone gathers no moss. In this case, a road-hardened, neutral support mechanic is tough to catch at idle.

We have seen Jose at the races, exchanged greetings with him, and even passed his caravan on remote stretches of America’s highways, but we’ve never had the chance to actually sit and have a conversation with him. If Jose wasn’t setting up or tearing down at an event, he was bustling to switch a wheel, pulling Gs on a race course in the NRS Volvo, or making last minute tweaks to a competitor’s ailing machine. BKW cornered race mechanic Jose Alcala a few weeks ago while he prepared the neutral race support (NRS) machines for the 2008 season. Although his hands never stopped turning wrenches, we managed to talk for a bit with Jose and learn more about what life on the road is like for he and the team at Specialized Event Management, LLC.

Jose has made his living in the bike world for the past 16 years. Beginning his tenure working for Competition Bike and Sport in Larchmont, New York (a shop that no longer exists). It was here that the fire was kindled and, like many of us, Jose was unable to shake the habit. Jose’s years as a mechanic range from long hours in a shop to long hours on the road. During the years on the road, Jose has worked with the best of the best: 7 years with Campagnolo/Saeco, 2 with Lampre/Caffita, and 1 year with Saunier/Duval.

Jose’s career didn’t always center on the mechanical aspects. He was head coach for New York’s Century Road Club, and during his years on the East Coast, Jose met fellow NRS mechanics, Hank Williams and Butch Balzano. Jose credits Hank with providing him with an early introduction to the ways of PRO wrenching and Butch with getting him out of the shops and on to the road.

Jose continues to work with Butch as part of Specialized Event Management, LLC, a company hired to provide rider support at races and to groups and industry events. Specialized Event Management relies on key sponsors to bring their resources to over 200 events annually. Sponsorship for 2008 comes in the form of vehicles from Volvo Motor Cars, frames and forks from Orbea, and rubber from the folks at Michelin.

A side note on Butch: Butch has been a neutral support mechanic for 20+ years and, to his credit, 20 of those years were spent delivering reliable service on race day to the competitors at Fitchburg-Longsjo Classic. Butch has really poured himself into these events as a true labor of love. In the early years, resources were thinner than they are today, Butch drove his own car, lent his own wheels and bikes and, got by with a little love from Campy in the form of a discount. Despite the high hurdles, Butch kept at it. The cycling world is truly blessed to have people like Butch who keep the flame lit.

Jose and company spend a lot of time on the road, roughly 290 days per year. Like all professions, work becomes a stream of familiar faces and Jose is careful to also keep in mind that his profession is unique in that he sees his clients when they are highly stressed and many are facing the day for which they have spent months training. With this consideration, Jose is careful to treat his clients with respect, remembering to simply be nice and do his job well. Jose laid it out very succinctly: he says his job is “a marketing job with a small dose of mechanics thrown in.” For Jose, his presentations aren’t done in a board room but rather in parking lots, expos, and road courses.

BKW: What items make life on the road tolerable, what can you not be without?

Jose: The Volvo, wheel sets, SRAM components, coffee, and good music.

BKW: What gear will be packed into each of the 5 Volvo NRS vehicles for the 2008 season?

Jose: 5 Orbeas built with SRAM components, 25-30 pairs of Zipp wheels, a mix of 404s, 303s, CSCs, and 808s, tools, spares, 3 Silca pumps, 2 Ultimate work stands, an A-Frame Ultimate display rack, a smattering of components, 4 boxes of SRAM parts, 2 Force and Rival, 2 Red, chains, spokes, saddles and Michelin Tires.

BKW: What gear/tools are most critical to your day?

Jose: Yellow Snap-On #2 flathead screwdriver and my Chicago Case Tool Box in limited edition white.

BKW: What is the best part of your job?

Jose: Seeing familiar faces far from home and the ability to continue playing a key role in racing. Without question, I have the best seat in the house!

BKW: And the worst part of your job?

Jose: Sometimes the travel, there is an element of danger we always have to be aware of.

If your summer plans take you out to the races, make sure you drop by and say hello to Jose and his team. And if your plans include pinning a number on your jersey, then it is a must that you drop by and say hello to Jose and Co. Who knows, it may be you who needs the lightning quick wheel change.

The Specialized Event Management L.L.C team

Chad Contreras
Merlyn Townly
Chris Kreidl
Jeff “Jasper” Mattson
Butch Balzano
Jose Alcala

Jose Alcala by the numbers:

Years in industry: 16

Number of songs in iTunes: 4,000

Miles driven annually: 60,000

Total dollar value of bikes handled annually: $1.5 million

Number of events attended by NRS in 2008: 120 (200 when you count stage races)

Stand and Devour

Posted by Radio Freddy, October 23, 2008 | Bicycle Shops | Lifestyle

I can’t remember sitting down for more than a handful of lunchs in the 20 years I worked in a bike shop. The majority of lunches were consumed while lean against a counter. Lunch in the bike retail world is a phenomenon unto itself.

If business is slow, order lunch. This may be a question for lawmaker Murphy, but what is it with food and shopping algorithms? If lunch were a 12 noon thing, one could argue that people use their lunch to run errands. In a bike shop, there is no set lunch time. In the heat of the Saturday battle, lunch is an afterthought that presents itself long past noon, a fleeting memory like faces in a crowd. Hey, I recognize that rumble in my stomach. That shaky feeling in my hands. Oh yeah, my dear old friend lunch. Good to see you, old man.

Once the food has arrived, it sits in a box, cooling off, breaking down, and seeping its grease into the cardboard that houses the nourishment. There it will sit until it reaches room temperature and begins to congeal. At that point, five minutes will surface, enough time for three bites and a splash of beverage. If you’re lucky, you will repeat these actions until the indigestion sets in, and the tempo of the shop resumes its break-neck pace.

Whatever the meal, whatever the time of day, there’s a very good chance your meal will be consumed in a vertical position.

Bon appetite!

Limits

Posted by Radio Freddy, October 5, 2008 | Lifestyle | Padraig | Point of View

Don’t say that. Don’t wear that. Don’t drive like that. For most of our lives we’ve been taught to live within confines, not just accepting the rules, but very often anticipating them and adapting to them before stepping out of bounds. We frame it as what’s appropriate.

The limits we choose to respect define us as surely as the ones we don’t. We are loyal to friends and family. We follow traffic laws (most of them). We pay taxes (whatever the accountant deems necessary), and sometimes we attack even when we know we’re riding on borrowed legs.

Each ride we go on is defined in concrete terms. We have a finite number of red-line efforts. Our endurance is measured in a hard number of hours. We know how much we have to eat and drink each hour to stave off the bonk. We know how fast we are willing to go in a corner before we apply the brakes. It’s a peculiar calculus, where each variable affects every other variable for no ride comes with an unlimited budget.

Each of these dimensions taken individually doesn’t mean much. Taken together, they form a picture of a rider. From strength to staying power to metabolic rate and nerve, we can be certain we each ride or race with someone who knows our limits as well as we do.

These limitations not only define the sport, they dominate it. Every dimension of cycling has the potential to liberate as well as constrain. An 11-23 cassette gives us seemingly endless gear options, unless you’re not a PRO and find yourself in the Alps and then we all wish for more gears … or a rocket pack. Carbon fiber handlebars absorb vibration but if you crash, they are strictly single-use.

But training is a bit like digging for buried treasure. You never know what you might find. For weeks and even months, our progress can be predictable, sometime frustrating, but then we peak and suddenly there truly is a new you. You catch the competition off-guard. Your friends suggest you pee in the cup. But for you, the surprises are endless and the deepest efforts fun, even long after you pin the needle.

The mere concept of succeeding in competition, of winning a race is to believe in surpassing limits. And that’s the trick isn’t it? It’s un-training your mind to exploit that fitness to its fullest measure. How far from the line can you attack and hold it?

Each time we surpass an old limit we must reassess who we are as a rider. And the further we surpass those old limits, the greater the surprise. Who would have thought that after months and years of work, what we find at the end of a sprint is a person we barely know?

Image courtesy John Pierce, Photosport International.

Service Course

Jose Alcala – Neutral Race Support

Stand and Devour

Limits

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