Race Report

On May 2, 8:46*pm, Bob Schwartz
wrote:

But it's been an eventful year and sometimes courage shows up
in ways that aren't very obvious.

Bob Schwartz

Fred Bob,

That was a good story. It wasn't always easy to read.
I can only try to imagine how much less easy it was to live.
Thanks for writing it.

Even though we are a bunch of unfeeling robot monsters
around here with little to offer in the way of support I would
rather hear these things than not know.

Best of luck to you and your daughter.

Ben

Fredmaster of Brainerd wrote:
Even though we are a bunch of unfeeling robot monsters
around here with little to offer in the way of support I would
rather hear these things than not know.

One of Frederika Walker's fb friends described us as "mean spirited name
calling old grumps". Hey I'm not that old.

Bob Schwartz wrote:
There is a local time trial that has been part of my early
season program for many years. 16 miles, gentle rollers,
always windy. When my daughter was 7 it became her first
non-kids race. We have an mtb tandem that dates to the
1980s. It's a real beast but it was fairly simple to adapt
it to a stokid, all it took was a pair of crank shorteners.
We didn't produce a great time, but she had fun.

We rode the tandem for many years, but a couple of years
ago she decided she wanted to ride solo. One of those land-
marks of parenting. I rode my race and then turned around
to reverse the course back to her. I remember finding her
at the half way point. She rode it in, and was very pleased
with her age category winning time. Even though she was the
only one entered in it.

Last year she had a new road bike, and was discovering the
fun and efficiency of narrow tires on pavement. She came
into the race with pretty good form. She had had a decent
ski season. She was in the middle of the Middle School
results at the state championships, better at freestyle
than diagonal stride. She won her division at the Rib Lake
(I am not making this up) Hinder Binder, so named because
of it's date just before the American Birkebeiner.

The time trial's traditional date was in late April. Looking
back that would have been the time we first went to the
clinic to get the swelling in her neck looked at. They ran
some tests that didn't show anything. The swelling was her
lymphatic system, but that by itself didn't mean anything.

This year we were back on the tandem. She hasn't ridden on
her own since June of last year. Her balance isn't that
good and her leg strength is still coming back. So we've
been riding the tandem. A couple of days ago I asked if she
wanted to do the race. We've been doing it for years, she
wanted to go. She hasn't ridden since June. There are things
that you might think are obvious, but they didn't figure
it out until they pulled out a lymph node and looked at it.
By then she was showing some fatigue. Not obviously, but I
noticed. We would ride trails and I suspected her energy
was dropping.

She's lost a lot of weight in the last year. Steroids will
do that. Not all steroids make you bigger. Cortico steroids
have the opposite effect, they break down muscles and make
you smaller. So she's smaller this year, and has lost a lot
of muscle mass. She tells me she doesn't really care about
our time.

It's windy. It's always windy at this race. We start with a
head wind and it's slow going. We make the first turn and at
about the 5 mile mark she asks me if we can coast on the
downhills. "My butt hurts" is what she tells me.

This is no idle complaint. Like I said, she's lost a lot of
muscle mass. One of the jokes we tell is that her gluteous
maximus is now a minimus. As a practical matter this means
she doesn't sit on a bicycle the same way she used to. Like
years ago with the crank shorteners I've adapted the bike.
Bumps are a very real problem, and I added a shock fork and
a gel seat cover. The bike is old enough that it has a 1 inch
steerer, and the fork could have only happened through ebay.
It helps some, but it isn't made for a tandem. So it doesn't
have a lot of travel left, especially once the fat guy gets
on the front. But it helps some. The gel seat cover helps
more.

But even so it isn't enough and I coast on the downhills.

Eventually we hit the tail wind and I alternate between
winding it up and coasting. Because of the tail wind there
are spots where we can coast downhill and not lose so much
speed. At one point I ask her how her butt is doing, there's
nothing we can do about it is what she tells me. There are
many times when I've wished I could suffer through whatever
she was suffering through and save her the discomfort. It
doesn't work that way though. But today I can do what I can
to make the finish line happen faster.

There was a 7 month period where she hit the emergency room
a whole bunch of times, and maybe 2 of those 7 months were
spent in the hospital. A lot of the time there isn't a hell
of a lot you can do except drive her to the ER and be the
information portal about all the **** that is going on with
her and who they need to consult with at Mayo about it. I
remember when she had been in the hospital for two weeks and
they suggested a transfer to Mayo because her immune system
had flatlined and they suspected some stuff that I googled
and thought, holy ****. So in a sense it felt comforting in
this case to be able to do something involving intense
physical effort that would help.

When we finish I know she wants off the bike right away, so
I drop her off at the registration area. I'm thinking she'll
head inside where the tables and chairs are, but she ambles
over to a patch of grass and that's where she lands. I head over
to the car and load everything up. When I get back she hasn't
moved. I grab her under her armpits and heave and she is able
to head inside where the food is. She says we need to go out
later and look for her butt, she thinks it fell off.

We are the only tandem entered so we win our division. She
has some peculiarities to her gait and as she walks up to get
her award the presenter asks if her legs are sore. It isn't
really the time to explain about neurological side effects
from the treatment, so she just nods yes, sore legs. Her hair
started growing back and while it is still quite short it is
long enough to pass as something intentional. This race is
full of people we see once a year so most don't see anything
amiss. Just short hair and sore legs.

But it's been an eventful year and sometimes courage shows up
in ways that aren't very obvious.

Bob Schwartz


Very moving, and courageous--both of you. As someone with a 13-year
old daughter, I can only imagine myself in your place. My thoughts and
prayers for a complete recovery.

Steve

"Betty Munro" wrote in message
...
Fredmaster of Brainerd wrote:
Even though we are a bunch of unfeeling robot monsters
around here with little to offer in the way of support I would
rather hear these things than not know.

One of Frederika Walker's fb friends described us as "mean spirited name
calling old grumps". Hey I'm not that old.


Dumbass -

Which friend was that?

thanks,

Grump. presented by Mean Spirited.

In article ,
Bob Schwartz wrote:

Best wishes.

--
Michael Press

Even jackasses like me appreciate a good story about love, courage and
acceptance of those things that are out of each of ours control and
then laughing in their face and telling them '**** you, I win, I
ride'

Nice RBR post Bob

Bob Schwartz wrote in
:

snip

Will Robert be working up the power output numbers for you?

--
Bill Fred
Somebody had to give an rbr response

Fredmaster of Brainerd wrote:
Even though we are a bunch of unfeeling robot monsters
around here with little to offer in the way of support I would
rather hear these things than not know.

Betty Munro wrote:
One of Frederika Walker's fb friends described us as "mean spirited
name calling old grumps". Hey I'm not that old.

F. Kurgan Gringioni wrote:
Which friend was that?

thanks,

Grump. presented by Mean Spirited.

No one I recognize as posting he
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=100000379061306

Betty Munro wrote:
No one I recognize as posting he

Hey dumbass, keep it separate.

On 5/2/2010 10:46 PM, Bob Schwartz wrote:
There is a local time trial that has been part of my early
season program for many years. 16 miles, gentle rollers,
always windy. When my daughter was 7 it became her first
non-kids race. We have an mtb tandem that dates to the
1980s. It's a real beast but it was fairly simple to adapt
it to a stokid, all it took was a pair of crank shorteners.
We didn't produce a great time, but she had fun.

We rode the tandem for many years, but a couple of years
ago she decided she wanted to ride solo. One of those land-
marks of parenting. I rode my race and then turned around
to reverse the course back to her. I remember finding her
at the half way point. She rode it in, and was very pleased
with her age category winning time. Even though she was the
only one entered in it.

Last year she had a new road bike, and was discovering the
fun and efficiency of narrow tires on pavement. She came
into the race with pretty good form. She had had a decent
ski season. She was in the middle of the Middle School
results at the state championships, better at freestyle
than diagonal stride. She won her division at the Rib Lake
(I am not making this up) Hinder Binder, so named because
of it's date just before the American Birkebeiner.

The time trial's traditional date was in late April. Looking
back that would have been the time we first went to the
clinic to get the swelling in her neck looked at. They ran
some tests that didn't show anything. The swelling was her
lymphatic system, but that by itself didn't mean anything.

This year we were back on the tandem. She hasn't ridden on
her own since June of last year. Her balance isn't that
good and her leg strength is still coming back. So we've
been riding the tandem. A couple of days ago I asked if she
wanted to do the race. We've been doing it for years, she
wanted to go. She hasn't ridden since June. There are things
that you might think are obvious, but they didn't figure
it out until they pulled out a lymph node and looked at it.
By then she was showing some fatigue. Not obviously, but I
noticed. We would ride trails and I suspected her energy
was dropping.

She's lost a lot of weight in the last year. Steroids will
do that. Not all steroids make you bigger. Cortico steroids
have the opposite effect, they break down muscles and make
you smaller. So she's smaller this year, and has lost a lot
of muscle mass. She tells me she doesn't really care about
our time.

It's windy. It's always windy at this race. We start with a
head wind and it's slow going. We make the first turn and at
about the 5 mile mark she asks me if we can coast on the
downhills. "My butt hurts" is what she tells me.

This is no idle complaint. Like I said, she's lost a lot of
muscle mass. One of the jokes we tell is that her gluteous
maximus is now a minimus. As a practical matter this means
she doesn't sit on a bicycle the same way she used to. Like
years ago with the crank shorteners I've adapted the bike.
Bumps are a very real problem, and I added a shock fork and
a gel seat cover. The bike is old enough that it has a 1 inch
steerer, and the fork could have only happened through ebay.
It helps some, but it isn't made for a tandem. So it doesn't
have a lot of travel left, especially once the fat guy gets
on the front. But it helps some. The gel seat cover helps
more.

But even so it isn't enough and I coast on the downhills.

Eventually we hit the tail wind and I alternate between
winding it up and coasting. Because of the tail wind there
are spots where we can coast downhill and not lose so much
speed. At one point I ask her how her butt is doing, there's
nothing we can do about it is what she tells me. There are
many times when I've wished I could suffer through whatever
she was suffering through and save her the discomfort. It
doesn't work that way though. But today I can do what I can
to make the finish line happen faster.

There was a 7 month period where she hit the emergency room
a whole bunch of times, and maybe 2 of those 7 months were
spent in the hospital. A lot of the time there isn't a hell
of a lot you can do except drive her to the ER and be the
information portal about all the **** that is going on with
her and who they need to consult with at Mayo about it. I
remember when she had been in the hospital for two weeks and
they suggested a transfer to Mayo because her immune system
had flatlined and they suspected some stuff that I googled
and thought, holy ****. So in a sense it felt comforting in
this case to be able to do something involving intense
physical effort that would help.

When we finish I know she wants off the bike right away, so
I drop her off at the registration area. I'm thinking she'll
head inside where the tables and chairs are, but she ambles
over to a patch of grass and that's where she lands. I head over
to the car and load everything up. When I get back she hasn't
moved. I grab her under her armpits and heave and she is able
to head inside where the food is. She says we need to go out
later and look for her butt, she thinks it fell off.

We are the only tandem entered so we win our division. She
has some peculiarities to her gait and as she walks up to get
her award the presenter asks if her legs are sore. It isn't
really the time to explain about neurological side effects
from the treatment, so she just nods yes, sore legs. Her hair
started growing back and while it is still quite short it is
long enough to pass as something intentional. This race is
full of people we see once a year so most don't see anything
amiss. Just short hair and sore legs.

But it's been an eventful year and sometimes courage shows up
in ways that aren't very obvious.

Bob Schwartz


Another race report.

We went for a ski about this time three years ago. She had been
doing short races for middle schoolers all season so she didn't
have a lot of experience with longer distances. This day we wound
up skiing for a couple of hours, and covered a lot of ground.

We live not far from the site of the North American Birkebeiner.
This is a massive 50km ski marathon with a half distance option
called the Korteloppet. It's the ski equivalent of a fred ride.
This year they capped registrations at 9400 total. You've got to
be pretty fast to win, but most of the entrants are ski freds.

The full length race has an age restriction so youth skiers do the
Korte. There is a group that offers scholarships to youth skiers
to pay for their first Korteloppet. Three years ago I was thinking
that my kid might be getting to the point where she could manage
the distance. I asked her if she wanted to do it, she said it
sounded like fun. I penciled it in for the following February.

That was three years ago. Two years she wasn't skiing. Last year
she was still recovering, regaining fitness and neurological
function. Last fall I asked if she wanted to do the Korteloppet.
She said it sounded like fun.

I'll tell you how they manage over 9000 race starts, they do it
in waves of several hundred skiers at a time at 5 minute intervals.
And while the awards are fatty master friendly, the race itself is
seeded strictly on performance. If you are a new racer you start
in one of the late waves. The waves before you are loaded with
people of modest accomplishment that from what I could tell on the
downhills can't be bothered to properly prepare their skis. One of
my waxing clients weighs less than 90 lbs and when she tells me she
was smoking people on downhills I know that there are a lot of
people with painfully slow skis. But after all, it's a fred race.

The last two waves are where the new entrants are. It's a strange
mix of people doing it for the accomplishment and rail thin high
school kids rocketing through the geezerheads and freds in the
late performance-based waves. That's where my kid and I are. I sent
in her scholarship entry first, and didn't get mine in until later.
So we're not in the same wave, she's in wave 9, I'm in the ending
wave 10.

I watch her start, I have no clue where she is. It's total chaos
as the gun sounds and hundreds of skiers launch.

I'm not completely convinced she is up to the distance. She did
an 8K race the weekend before, I asked her if she was up to doing
that three times. The answer wasn't full of confidence. There
aren't any flats here.

http://birkieguide.com/trail-charts/

But she is gone and I head to the start area.

The groomed trail is a superhighway at the start. Much like the
Tour the Birkie burns a lot of gas and diesel. It takes a lot of
Pisten Bully time to groom a lane 30ft wide. My reward for trying
to see my kid start is a spot near the rear. So when the gun goes
off I see the rail thin kids zoom off while I start working my
way up to the front.

While the guy that wrote the Birkie Guide describes the course as
hilly, the opening Powerline section is a steady climb. And it's
groomed as wide as a highway which makes it easy to pass and there
are a ton pf people to pass. It isn't very long before I start
seeing the tail end of the 9th wave. My plan is to catch up to my
kid and ski the race with her. The first feed station is at the
end of the Powerlines and I blow through to take advantage of an
opportunity to quickly pass a ton of people. Our youth team had a
bunch of kids in wave 9 and as I ski I scan the hats, looking
for team members. My kid is wearing an old Motorola team jersey
because it has pockets. I'm also wearing a cycling jersey. If you
carry your own food you aren't dependent on the feed stations.

The trail gains approximately 300ft over 5km in this section which
is not exactly fatty friendly. The rail thin kids are out of sight
for me but about this time I start passing people that started 20
minutes ahead.

At 9K the Korteloppet and Birkebeiner trails split. The Korte
follows trails back to the start, the Birkie continues on to
Hayward. The Korte doesn't have the landmarks that the Birkie does
No road crossings, no Bitch Hill. No hills populated by drunk
snowmobilers hurling abuse. None of that fun stuff.

The Korte trails narrow at this point, and the remainder of the
race consists of the fredtastic task of weaving through hundreds of
people with dog slow skis. I keep an eye out for my kid, still can't
find her.

Eventually someone tells us that we are approaching the last hill
before the finish. It feels good to be done.

Eventually I figure out that I had passed my kid at one of the feed
stations that I had blown through. With thousands of people on the
trail and many of them milling about at each feed station this is
easier to do than I thought.

In the end I think this is a good thing for both of us. It was good
for both of us to see that she could do just fine on her own. She's
regaining her strength, and just like three years ago she can manage
the distance.

As we talk after the race she says that some day she wants to go all
the way to Hayward, all 50km. After what she's been through in the
last three years I wouldn't put anything past her.

Bob Schwartz