The the Hell is Team Food Baby

A long time ago in a city far away when really all I did was mountain bike ride I was told about this thing called Cyclocross.  You race on a course and do as many laps as you can in the time allotted.  I had dabbled in mountain bike racing and found it exhausting and not really all that much fun.  I moved away and quickly forgot about this Cyclocross thing.

Many years later I moved to Oregon and this thing called Cyclocross popped up again.  I had gotten into road riding a bit more and thought riding a road bike in mud and muck during the off season might be sort of fun.  Each year just before Cycle Oregon I would say, I am going to race Cross this year.  Then promptly get sick after Cycle Oregon and then forget about Cross seeing how it started raining and was cold and dark and who wanted to ride a bike in the cold and dark and rain after being sick.  Not I.

Then in 2009 I finished Cycle Oregon and found to my surprise I was not sick.  Now for three years I had been saying, I am going to race Cross this year only to back out because I was “sick” or some lame excuse.  This year I had no excuse so what was I going to do.  Like all of us bit with the cycling bug it was simple – I needed a new bike!  Off I went to ebay and bought the first cross bike I could find that was less than $500 and would fit me.

I ended up with a Surly CrossCheck that was a Frankenstein bike if there ever was one.  A girl from Rutgers had used it to race on her college team (Sorta makes me wonder if she is still racing now).  I got the bike on a Monday, took it to Bike Gallery on Tuesday, asked if they could put it together and look it over for any problems.  They said sure it will be ready by Friday.  Well that was no good as I wanted to race on Wednesday at Blind Date at the Dairy they of course said “we will see what we can do”.  Wednesday afternoon I get a call your bike is ready so I zip off to Bike Gallery to pick it up, head home and put my pedals on, and ride up the street for a test ride.  Now I have short legs – freakishly short legs – and I could not get the seat down low enough so out came the hack saw.  I cut about 3 inches of the carbon seat tube – dropped in the post and off I headed to the race venue.  In less than two hours I had ridden the bike up and down the street, registered for my first race, did a lap around the parking lot, staged, and was off on my first ever Cyclocross race.  It was a blast!!!

So where did Team Food Baby come from?

That first year when I saw the results many racers had a “Team” and I thought I should have a team.  After a race weekend my girlfriend and I sat around trying to come up with team names.  There were many creative ones out there:

  • Team Beer
  • Ten Guys Named Alex
  • Filth and Fury
  • Muffin Top
  • Team Lazy Tarantulas
  • Team S+M
  • Gentle Lovers
  • and my favorite – Gründelbrüisers

We had recently watched the movie Juno and she mentions being pregnant, her friend asks, are you sure it isn’t a food baby.  That totally cracked me up.  Being only half serious about this racing thing and being sufficiently endowed in the belly area Team Food Baby was born.

I did not know there were actual real teams and rules about creating a team so I just filled out the forms with my Team Food Baby name.  Now it is saved in the OBRA results database with my name. I though I might as well register the domain name and so here we are years later on TeamFoodBaby.com where the motto is:

Just don’t come in last!