ROAD
May 2006

Tales of the Cat.: Cameron Fox

By Andrew John Ignatius Vontz

Cameron Fox jumped from Cat. 5 to Cat. 2 in his first year of racing with the help of his coach, David Brinton, www.ridingtowin.com. A competitive swimmer for ten years, Fox, 24, is now in his third season and races as a Cat. 2  for Encino Velo in Los Angeles while attending Cal State Northridge full time where he is a graduate student in clinical sports psychology. Fox spent the early part of his season traveling almost every weekend to try to score points towards a Cat. 1 upgrade. Ultimately, he hopes to sign a contract with a pro team. Here Fox recounts a memorable trip to the McLane Pacific NRC race weekend, a 35-lap crit on Saturday and a 96-mile road race on Sunday.
 
I got my registration in for the road race in on time but because I’m back in school and broke as a joke, I didn’t register for the crit which I planned on racing. On Saturday, i.e. race day, the team leaves LA at 4:30 in the morning and jams up to Merced a few hours away. We stop in El Bano, oh wait, Las Banos, whatever it’s called, at some dive restaurant for breakfast. The breakfast special is $3 and it’s 3 pancakes and 2 eggs and it’s awesome. The only problem is that my feet stuck to the floor and when I went in the bathroom there was a coat hangar hanging on the wall. So we didn’t know this place was a diner and an abortion clinic or if they’d tried to unclog the toilet with it. We check into the hotel at 10 a.m. You save a little bit of money when you get up early and drive up on race day because you just have to pay for one night at the hotel.
 
We get to the race and roll to registration, get squared away, pay $40 for a 35-lap crit. I warm up and my legs are feeling pretty spry. I do a couple of jumps and I’m putting out 1400 or 1500 watts of power. I think things are looking good. I line up in the second row and look around and soak up the atmosphere. It’s an okay place to start but the first lap is a hot lap and everyone swarms from the sides and clogs up the middle as we go into the first turn, a nasty chicane, at 25 miles per hour. I am 35 or 40 riders back and it’s not the place I want to be. I want to be in the first fifteen or so riders. I figure I have 30 laps or so to move up, so I start slowly picking my way through the pack and moving up. Eight laps into the race we’re going into the first left hand turn after the chicane and I see this guy go down about four riders in front of me. In two seconds that seemed like an eternity I try to find a hole to dive into and there’s nothing. My only choice is to bunnyhop the guy. Right as I get my front wheel off the ground his bike comes up and his top tube hits square with me wheel. All I can think is, oh god this is going to hurt. The next thing I know I’m lying on my back gushing blood from my shoulder and forearm. My left brake hood is pointed in, but otherwise my bike is okay. The other guy’s not so lucky. His top tube is snapped in half and the impact broke the downtube out of the bottom bracket. That’s how hard I hit this guy. I didn’t slide. I didn’t bounce. I went straight into the pavement.
 
There’s a beer garden and street fair in the center of the course, so I get on my bike and start riding through there to get to the neutral service pit. I’m yelling at people to get out of my way when I see Erik Saunders sitting there with one of his teammates in the middle of the fair and he says, “Cameron, you pussy, get back in there!” I go to neutral service and open up the quick release on my front brake. My Shimano wheels are fine, just a little bit out of true. That’s pretty good for t-boning a guy at 35 miles per hour.

Neutral service pushes me in from the back of the pack. My legs feel great. One of the guys from team La Grange says, hey I saw you go down. I’ll help pull you up to the back as best I can. He pulls me about halfway up and then says, I’m spent, good luck.
 
I make my way forward in the pack and then three or four laps later, another guy loses it in the chicane and takes me literally all the way to the curb. I don’t go down but I end up hitting him and stopping then have to go around him and chase. At this point I’m so frustrated I say, you know what, that’s it. I’m done. It’s not my day and I’ve got the road race tomorrow.

I go to medical control and get cleaned up, spin out my legs and go back to the hotel. There are three guys in my room—me, Trevor and Nick who is sleeping on the floor. It’s the bike racer’s code: If someone needs a place to crash you offer up the floor of your room.
 
I got up the next day for the road race after sleeping about an hour and a half total. During the night, every time I rolled over on my left shoulder, it would be a jolt of pain so bad that it would wake me up. As the night went on it got worse and worse after all the adrenaline left my body. I woke up the next morning and tried to draw in a deep breath and every single rib in my back hurt like it was the most miserable thing on earth. I figured, well, I already paid for the road race—might as well give it a shot.

We get up to the start line and it’s 30 miles an hour from the gun, drilling it two abreast. I’m riding with the first twenty guys and trying to get into the breaks. Nine or ten guys get away and every time I pull on the bars my back goes into spasms. I figure I’ll sit in and try to save my legs and block out the pain and if it comes down to a sprint, I’ll go for it at the end. It kills to take a deep breath but my legs feel good. The gap to the break keeps going up and up and up. The entire first half of the 96-mile race is 30 miles an hour into a crosswind single file in the gutter. All you can focus on is the wheel in front of you. I feel so bad that I hit a point where I can’t take it anymore. I think, you know what, I can rest a few days and race next weekend. Enough is enough. My body needs to rest. 75 miles was enough for me at that point. The nine-man break lasted 93 miles. That’s the way the cookie crumbled that day. Sometimes it’s your day and sometimes it’s not.
 
The next weekend I did a 100-mile road race in Fresno. When I got done I couldn’t even take off my shoes. Ten days after my crash I found out I have a small hairline fracture on the tip of my L-5 vertebrae. That was the last straw my back could take. But that wasn’t the main problem with my back. The doctor discovered I have a minor case of scoliosis and my right hip is 5 centimeters lower than my left hip and is outwardly rotated five to ten degrees. The hip problem stems from a hard crash on the velodrome at nationals last year.  The scoliosis is from years of beating myself up in training for swimming and cycling. I need to get it taken care of and then I hope to come back better than I have been in years. But let this be a lesson—don’t do a 100-mile road race when you have a fracture in your spine.