If you have been reading this site long, you will know that I have a bias towards road riding and racing. This is partly due to the focus we’ve had on urban cycling and getting more people out of cars and on bikes. It is also based on how I got back onto a bike after over a decade off the bike. It’s finally time to find my dirty side. In a new weekly series, I will share my experience converting to knobby tires as I race a cyclocross season leading up to my first true off-road race, the Sabertooth division of the Natural Caverns Duathlon in November.

When I was a teenager, my father decided to make RAGBRAI our family trip. Having only a casual relationship with cycling up to that point, riding nearly 600 miles across Iowa over seven days ended up putting me off cycling for a while. I spent most of my teens and 20s staying as far away from exercise as possible… and my waistline showed. After reaching my heaviest weight at 250, I had to decide whether I was resigned to the big and tall section at stores or was I going to do something about it. It did something about it by purchasing a hybrid bike and riding weekly with the Austin Cycling Association. Within 12 months, I had lost 50 pounds, acquired a road bike, and started racing triathlons.

Training for triathlon races soon dominated my free time. When you do three sports in one race, you need to train in each sport, and fitting in swim, bike, and run sessions can be a lot, especially once you start racing longer distances. After completing a Half Ironman (1.2 mile swim/56 mile bike/13 mile run), I decided to scale back a bit and race so called “short course”, which is still 1500 meters of swimming, 25 miles cycling, and a 10 K run. I set my sights on qualifying for the National Age Group Triathlon and put in 5 months of serious training to get there. Lo and behold I qualified which lead to another 4 months of training for the National race in Portland. By fall 2008, I was seriously burned out. All that training plus a new bike business had taken its toll. Since then, I have only raced one short duathlon and a few cyclocross races, all of which I did zero training for. I’ve also added back a few too many LBs for my liking.

During this all my previous racing, I never got into off road. I guess I just loved the high speed I could reach on my road and tri bikes. Try as I might though, I just have not been able to get psyched up by road riding again. Over the last few weeks, I put my cyclocross tires on my Sam Houston and started riding trails just to mix things up. After about 20 minutes, I started finding my two wheel bliss again. I think I’m on to something.

While triathlon has been out for a while, I’ve been looking at duathlons (run/bike/run events) quite a bit to get the racing bug back. I ran a marathon last year and have been running consistently, and the duathlon allows me some multisport racing without as much time commitment. After looking at the very cool sounding Natural Caverns Du (how many races start in a frickin’ cave?), I noticed they have an off road version. This sounds like a lot more fun than doing my old aero TT setup on pavement. And just to keep things more interesting, I am going to attempt to race myself into shape by adding the Dirt Derby and TXBRA cyclocross season races into my training.

Over the next two and a half months, I’ll share with you my conversion from pavement to dirt including training planning, nutrition, equipment choices, and race reports. If you are a dyed in the wool roadie, maybe I’ll inspire you to try something new. If you are a dirt lovin’ knobby rider, I hope my experience entertains you. Either way, enjoy the ride.

Upcoming articles in the From pavement to dirt series:

- The Training Plan

- Race Report: Natural Caverns Duathlon