Cafayate bike race–Carrera de los Pioneros

The start/finish arch

Kristen on the podium

Our first bike race in Argentina was such an experience that I wrote an article about it, potentially to be distributed (or published) in the NYC cycling community:

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I moved to New York in 2005 alongside several friends from college. By 2009, most of them were gone, and I was living alone. A co-worker was a road racer, and he suggested I buy a bike. A few months later, I was on NYVelocity and had a whole new group of friends. Not that this is a secret, but cycling (in particular the insanity that is known as bike racing) is a fantastic way to meet people. Wherever you go, there are surely cyclists, wishing they had someone to train with.

History repeats itself. Which is how I ended up on a street corner at 8:30am, on a Sunday, in rural Northwestern Argentina, trying to find the 1^st Annual Desafio de los Pioneros 60km mountain bike race.

Let me back up. I’m currently taking a year off from work, traveling around the world with my wife Kristen. For the past few months, we’ve been living in rural Cafayate, Argentina, trying to learn Spanish. Aside from our Spanish teacher, we didn’t have too many ‘local’ friends in town. But we had mountain bikes. Pretty decent ones, actually. We’d tool around trying to find whatever local trails and rides we could, with mixed success. Then one day our Spanish teacher told us he’d met a guy at the gym who was organizing a mountain bike race in town 3 weeks from now. There would be a preview ride of the course this Sunday – would we like to join?

I thought I was done bike racing in 2011. I love riding, but I also run and swim and hike now, too. But the draw was too much – when else would I have the chance to compete in a rural Argentine bike race?

So I went to the preview ride. It turned to be just me and one other guy. And the course was . . . unexpected. For a town that’s in the front ranges of the Andes, the course was dead flat, a circuit on the valley bottom. And it was half on asphalt roads, half on rough dirt farming roads (way rougher and sandier than Battenkill) – sort of like a road race that required a mountain bike. And so I learned that there are two types of mountain bike races in Argentina – Rural Bike (XR), and Cross Country (XC). This course was thoroughly Rural Bike. In any event, the other guy (Nicolas) and I chatted in Spanish for the full couple hours it took to ride the course. Now, my Spanish is pretty good. But it’s often hard to have substantive conversations with locals since I talk somewhat slowly and use odd words. But Nicolas had nowhere to go. He was stuck talking to me for 2 hours. Luckily, he was a tolerant guy, and we had a great time chatting.

And so it began – Nicolas and his buddies would be our first real local friends. He invited me to join him and a couple other guys for some weekday trail rides. And maybe some long weekend rides into the mountains. He assured me: “no somos locos. Pero nos gusta mountain bike.”

3 weeks of training does not prepare you to race bikes. I did my best to simulate an abbreviated cycle - training 6 days a week, stepping up from endurance to tempo to sub-threshold training, long rides with Nicolas on the weekends. I lost 5 pounds and my legs got significantly bigger (it’s funny how fast your body remembers), but I wasn’t really there. And what’s more, I had no idea how good everyone else was going to be.

The day of the race came. Nicolas had told me to be at registration at 8:30am, since the race was set to start at 9:30am. When Kristen and I showed up, there was nobody there. And I realized I had mis-translated. Nicolas had meant Argentine 8:30, which is sometime between 9:15 and 9:30.

As other racers began streaming in, I got to size up the field. I had been curious about this – in the middle of nowhere, were the guys on $10k bikes going to come out of the woodwork? It turned out that nope, they weren’t. A few guys from nearby Salta were riding imported Cannondales and Giants, but for the most part the racers had a mosaic of locally made frames of all ages and states of repair (I was riding a locally-bought Zenith Astra). This would be truly interesting – in the States, I had always assumed that the strongest guys could have won on just about any bike, but now I was going to see firsthand if that was true.

Kristen and I seemed to be local curiosities – two Americans wearing slick-looking custom kits, come here to race in the middle of nowhere. One guy asked me if I was a pro. I had to explain that no, the sponsor listed on my shirt was in fact a food truck that serves Belgian waffles. Which was difficult, because they have neither food trucks nor waffles in Argentina. He asked me if it was like McDonald’s but on the street. I said no, it was more like the guy on Rivadavia street in town who makes chicken in his old oil drum grill on Saturdays, except if he served pancakes with peanut butter on them. I think I made myself understood.

They had insisted I race in the ‘elite’ category, which was a bit scary. There is no Cat 1/2/3/4 in Argentina. There are only Elite, Masters 30+, and Masters 40+ (plus a handful of other categories like Veteranos, women, first-timers, children, etc.). Apparently if you’re under 30, you’re assumed to be mighty, which sadly I am not.

The start area was surprisingly typical. There was an announcer on the mic (doing his best Latin football voice, rolling his rr’s as hard as possible), and terrible dance music playing (in Spanish, though with several well-placed English vulgarities). The pre-race announcement included such instructions as “beware of donkeys and horses in the road”, and “the pace vehicles will do their best to clear stray dogs out of the way, but be careful anyhow”. I don’t recall having to sign a pre-race waiver of liability.

Kristen had ridden to the start with me to watch the race. She hasn’t been riding much as she’s had some back issues that sometimes flare up on the mountain bike. She noticed there were no other women in the race and started to get antsy. I told her it was a bad idea, but she registered. We’re married now, I guess this is how it goes. The crowd loved her – she got the biggest cheer out of anyone at the start when the names of the participants were announced. Apparently women’s cycling isn’t terribly popular out here in the docks.

The race format was mass-start. All entrants from all categories rolled out at the same time. We were neutral for the first 1k or so, until we were out of town. At that point, all hell broke loose. The guys in the back started to swarm, and the guys at the front attacked. We were still on a paved road. Imagine the frenzied start of a road race where someone attacks from the gun, except the 5s are mixed in with the 2s, everyone is on mountain bikes, and there is no yellow line rule.

I stayed near the front as best I could. My front wheel was bumped several times, as the attacks and surges at the front began to wear out the weaker rides, who began to swerve. Several times a small group broke off the front. Each time, I joined up and tried to convince my fellow break-mates to rotate, or at least organize, but they didn’t seem to understand. The 3 or 4 guys who had attacked were sitting up. I figured they were mountain bikers and simply didn’t know how to race on the road. But after about 20k, it became clear that what was going on. The 3 or 4 strong guys who had initiated all the breaks started to survey our latest small group. We had a significant gap on the main group behind. Apparently the strong guys liked what they saw (which was the rest of us panting), and they took off. They had been attacking to tire us out! I didn’t see them until after the finish.

By the time we had reached 25k (on bumpy dirt ‘ripio’ roads now), I was beginning to get dropped from the chase group. The surges had burned up many of my matches, and the pace of the group was too much given my little training. I was in no-man’s land for a long while. I got passed by the Masters 30+ group, and was finally able to hold pace with one of their stragglers.

He dragged me for the next 15 or 20k, and dropped me on the final sandy section (which was actually a riverbed). I had decided to keep my tires pumped way up (40psi), since the race was 50% on asphalt, and as such had zero traction in the sand. I had to run through it, and then did an awkwardly out of practice cross re-mount, which turned out to be crotch destroying as well.

Once we hit the asphalt, I was in my element. I got into a tuck and time trialed (well, limped actually) in to the finish, passing several guys along the way. Who even knows how far back I finished, and who even cares.

My friend Nicolas ended up 2^nd in Masters 40+, and Kristen of course won the women’s category as she was the only entrant. For that, she was given a humongous trophy, which was cool because she made me carry it back home and everyone in town thought I had won it.

As a final point, I’d like to note the infrastructure of the race. Each field had a pace moto (I know because I got passed by 2), and there were at least a couple other motos with passengers videotaping the action (they seemed to be particularly interested when Kristen bonked yet refused a ride to the finish). There were several neutral feed stations handing out water and oranges (which were a nice thought but impossible to eat while riding at full blast on a dirt road). It was honestly as well organized as any race I’ve been to, which I suppose should come as no surprise given that the rural culture is such that friends will drop by and work a few hours in a buddy’s shop or store, no questions asked. Some guy at the side of the road offered Kristen a croissant at one point because she looked tired. It seemed like the whole town was pitching in.

And the finish was no exception. The wife of a racer had cooked up two giant vats of delicious corn stew (called “locro”), which was served to all race participants (and seemingly to anyone who happened to be standing around near there). It was a real rural Argentine ending to my first rural Argentine bike race (of which there should be more, as I was ambushed at the finish by other race organizers asking me to come ride in their races.