Until the Snow Ends

 The new blogging model of "write it up for team slack and then also post it here" is working!  We've got more content! Did the thing where you pay the pro photographer for a picture of you lookin cool I did Woodstock last year and it was super fun.  I tried to bully Kevin  and Desen  into joining me and Harry on this year's adventure but they had (kind of) legit excuses.  Hopefully after you all read about how much fun Harry on had on his XC bike you be inspired to check out the joy of XCDURO next year with us!! Last year I rode all the stages blind, this year I prerode 4/5 stages, but last year I finished better (by % beat) in my field so either preriding doesn't actually help at all, or everyone is getting faster.  Honestly I think it might be the latter, I think I have gotten a bit better at descending in the last decade but it feels like the overall level of racer has come WAY up.  Or maybe I'm not getting better, my bike is getting bett...

 Another one from the "I banged this out for Team Slack" files.   Eastern Grind (Williston VT) is a cool XC mtb race so I wrote about it. Eastern Grind Race Report Ok this course rules, it's has enough climbing to whoop your ass but half of it is actually super fast flowy stuff so you think you're riding like really fast, at least until you realize that every time you see Harry he is a little further ahead so actually everyone is riding super fast.  But anyway it's good, you should have been here unless you were  @Harry Gordenstein  and  @Luke Plummer  because they WERE here. There was no pro field, just "expert open men" so all the super fast guys ended up in our category (boo) but that meant we had 24 dudes (yay!).  The start was FAST because of aforementioned pro dudes and I did a shit ton of work just to end up in... last place after 90 seconds.  I talked about how we were going unsustainably hard and the guy in front of me agreed....

Sometimes I write race reports for B2C2 Slack that are long enough and fun enough I decide to archive them here.  This is one of those.   Woodstock Enduro Race Report I am trying to race at least one enduro per year to keep my bike racing experiences DIVERSE. After doing an XC ride at Woodstock a few years back I knew the trails were steep and fun, so I was easily convinced to register for Woodstock when Alex Jospe applied the "gonna race my first enduro, you should come" peer pressure.  Stoke was HIGH but much to my chagrin  @Harry Gordenstein  and  @Kevin Langer  had legit reasons to not join me on the B2C2 Enduro Squad.  I ended up riding with some women I know from the XC ski scene who were doing their first enduro on XC bikes, and one of them was even on an Intense Sniper so she was like a less hairy Harry which made me feel very comfortable. I did not preride the course for the first time ever so I was curious to see how racing blind would f...

 It's been a long time since I wrote anything here about bike racing, but I had a really fun time racing my bike up in Vermont this weekend and I wrote up a pretty wordy account of it on B2C2 Slack.  Figured I'd archive it here in case anyone still reads blogs and/or ever uses Google to find out if this race is awesome (it is). -------------------- So I showed up the night before at Harry's dope campsite at Smuggler's Notch pretty hungry.  No worries though because I can just eat one of my clif bars before I go to sleep right?  Haha wait, I go to hit the Mint Clif Bar and Harry is like "aren't those caffeinated??" OOPS.  So we got to choose between sleep and calories and we chose sleep.  But I woke up starving, ate an absurd amount of breakfast, ate another clif bar before the race, ate all 4 gels in my pockets during the race, and still was barely not bonking by the end of it. Anyway the race started with a silly paved prologue lap that did absolutely not...

[This isn't really a blog post so much as me entertaining myself with an honest marketing pitch for a product I believe is ridiculously and unsustainably underpriced] So it's been 8 months since Outside bought BikeReg and the rest of the world and I've basically spent my entire time since then working on I N T E G R A T I O N S which has been a long and sometimes annoying journey because gluing together formerly disparate systems is never as simple as it seems like it should be. However, last week we were finally able to launch the Outside+ member benefits on BikeReg, and this week there's a sale on Outside+ membership, so I'm gonna give you a sales pitch I actually believe in (not because they put me up to it) because it's honestly stupid how good the deal is right now. You pay: $50 You get: $30 off your next entry on BikeReg $30 in free service fees in the next year on BikeReg Trailforks premium ($35/year value) Gaia Premium ($40/year I think? i dunno) Two bo...

Boy, what a great reason to write my first blog post in 8 months. I have been traveling in Spain and just got back to America (current status:  self-quarantined for 14 days and/or forever) as we grapple with the reality of what is happening, and more importantly, what is going to happen.  Being in Recently In Europe (tm) and Extremely Online (tm), I've realized that my awareness of the coming impact of COVID-19 is different than a lot of Americans, and this morning while not-sleeping due to jet lag I realized that the people I needed to share this with the most were my parents. Since then I've showed it to a few friends who were also in the position of worrying that their boomer-generation parents have yet to realize how acute the risk is to them, and someone joked that this is how I get back into blogging.  SO HERE YOU GO, JOHNNY. Please feel free to send this to your older loved ones who you suspect are dangerously behind the information curve.  You might wan...