Until the Snow Ends

I just had a Harpoon "Winter Warmer" holiday ale. It had a nice green label, and Harpoon has been good to me, so I didn't really look closely when I picked it off the shelf. Oops. Who the hell puts CINNAMON and NUTMEG in a beer? Do they get all their sales by accident?! ... The ski race this weekend is on ! I'm going to put hundreds of miles on the car, and drop tens of dollars from my wallet, just to get owned by tens of junior racers who have been doing nothing but rollerski and hill bound all fall. Whatever. When they beat me, I'll say to them, "Oh yeah? I bet you don't have a blog!" And I'll be right. Because they only have their little myspace pages. Punks.

So how about that climate change? Still don't believe it's happening? Of course, one warm cycle does not a climate change make. And as soon as we get one day that's like 15 degrees and windy, everyone will say "where's global warming now, huh?" Someday I will write something rational and well-researched about the problem here. But that day may be far away -- it's really depressing to write about, given that the only solution relies on selfless behavior on a global scale. Want to place bets on that happening? Yeah. I've been spending most of my free time lately on rollerskis. I've been speculating all fall about whether or not cross racing would prepare me for ski racing, and I answered that question with a resounding "no" last week. I did intervals with Alex Jospe (another cross racer, except she trains for skiing instead of training for cross) last week and I got girled, hard. Five times. It was not fun. My limbs did not func...

Here's an excellent picture I didn't take, borrowed from a random blog . Not a single one of these guys uses inline brake levers. But I love the damn things. What's the deal with that? Is there a clear disadvantage to them? Maybe this is like disc brakes, I couldn't think of a good reason not to use them on a cross bike except weight, and then someone said "wheel changes" to me. So does anyone know why all the good riders don't use inline brake levers? Maybe they go so fast, they can't take their hands off the hoods for stability reasons? I dunno.

If you rode U35 B Men, you're in this video. I didn't recognize many folks here, except for Thom Parsons and his amazing pink single speed (TPAHPSS as he has been called), who runs into the back of some NEBC rider. Some other guy ran below the tree carrying his bike (the tape allowed for that) to get around the pileup, which is why you hear some people yell "nice line."

This was going to be a totally awesome video of Ryan Trebon eating the field for lunch and winning the US National title. But then I taped over it the next day, before I could copy if off my camera, so now I have nothing but this little video of 196 B racers riding through the bowl and over the tree. Ordinarily this would be an impressive offering, but come on -- every other dude with a video camera there is going to have something intense footage of elite men to edit and put on the internet. AND THEN GET FAMOUS, AND HAVE LOTS OF E-FRIENDS. So that's a bummer, because I was pretty sure that a youtube video was my ticket to everlasting cross stardom. Oh well. If you're a 35+ B racer, you're in this video. Hope you aren't someone who got stuck in the pileup that made me say "awww yeah." One other thing -- that results website I was talking about is totally happening. I got set back about a week because the laptop I was developing on got stuck in my office ...

Here's my first attempt at making a race video. I'm not sure if I like the subtitles, but they seem necessary to tell the story. Otherwise it's just a bunch of pros riding. And the music is also a pretty weird selection. Any feedback on this is much appreciated!

Last race of the cross season for me! Unlike most of the east coast, I'm not racing at Nationals. $50 to ride in a 200-person B men's field? You've got to be kidding me. I'll be there to laugh at the carnage and yell at pros, though. My prerace warmup was, shall we say, suboptimal. The inital plan was to watch the first few laps of B women, yell at Linnea and my travelling companion Alex, and then hit the trainer and go race B men. That lasted about 2 minutes, because the first time Linnea rode by me she was yelling at me that the front brake was stuck on. Good thing we have a pit bike! Wait, we don't have a pit bike. So I run to the pit and she comes in. One look at it confirms that the problem I had earlier in the year is back -- the brake boss (I think that's the right word for it) is loose so one of the brakes is just being pulled onto the rim by the other brake. The only way to fix it is to take the brake completely off, tighten the post, and rea...

Read all about it here: Building Fills With Smoke, Trapping Office Workers From an email I just sent my folks: "No fire or smoke on the 11th floor when we started evacuating. Smoke got denser in the stairwell as we went down, until on the 5th floor people wouldn't go any further. So we end up running around the 5th floor for a bit, until someone finds a stairwell at the edge of the building that isn't smoky and tells us to go that way. Those neon "exit" signs, something you generally ignore, were VERY helpful. On the fifth floor, some people were hustling, but no one was panicking,surprisingly. It was quite smoky near the center but better near the edges of the building -- when someone told us to go to the stairs near the outside edge of the building, I just ran... everyone else was doing that half-run thing when you are in a hurry but want to maintain your dignity. Luckily I have none so I tore past lots of people was the first person to the outer stairwel...

I'm working on a new project. I went to USA Cycling to get my cat 3 upgrade and I noticed a section called "race history" for me. Of course it was empty, which was lame, because I have done quite a few races. And I've given promoters my USCF number, and I'm also the only person named Colin Reuter racing bikes in the US. So it shouldn't really be that hard to figure out my history. Basically the left column of bikereg.com contains my history. So it sucks that USA Cycling doesn't have some results database... But wait... I'm a programmer. A raging, nerd programmer. I think I created the phrase "results whore," or at least have had it applied to me more times than I can count. So I started dreaming about some kind of magical web crawler that would look at all the bike results on BikeReg, compile them into a database, and then give you all kind of sweet web-based functionality to browse and compare the data. The kind of thing you might ...

Hey, can't have good legs every day, right? The MRC course was pretty solid, especially given that they had only gotten the venue with about a weeks notice. It started with a brief dirt road section, then hooked right into a field for lots of twists and turns, then into the first set of barriers. After that came a extended wooded section with some puddles, and then back into the field for a long downhill with a sharp 180 at the bottom. This corner turned onto a dirt road and was hopelessly loose, and very difficult to ride cleanly or quickly. After that, climb up to and over a big granite rock that flatted a tire or five (silly people and their low tire pressure), then some zig zags in the field, a barrier-induced runup, and some more climbing before looping back to the start area and a massive log barrier that was rideable by a few. This was a cool event, mainly because a lot of the spectators/promoters were drinking steadily throughout. As a result, there were a variety of n...

Linnea is busy building a ghettocross bike with a few contributions from my parents house and my wallet. Here are some pics of the beast: The source material... only the best! New stem, drop bars, Ultegra brakes levers donated by my dad. Gee, that looks like a mountain bike with drop bars. Put some Schwalbe CX Pros on there... ...And it could be mistaken for a cross bike!