Until the Snow Ends

This weekend the Root 66 mountain bike series picked up again, this time up in Vermont. There were two races on the schedule, a short track Saturday and an XC Sunday. For some reason, everyone other than me doesn't want to race short tracks, so Saturday was like 40 people total. And that might be high. You might think short track is like cross, but you'd be wrong. For one thing, this short track course was 3 minutes long. Seriously. And the only flat section was the start/finish. It was basically a two minute climb and a one minute descent. The climb was no joke, either -- if you put this thing in a cross race, there'd be a line of sniffling roadies a mile long crying about how "that hill is too big for a cross race." Also, it was only 20 minutes + 3 laps, instead of 45 minutes, which allowed for even more efficient suffering. Anyway, there's not very much to say. I beat like 7 other guys (one of whom was even in my category) to win the sport race. ...

New title bar. Now I know why everyone else just sticks with the default.

A random video from the blogosphere featuring Kraftwerk's classic techno song "Tour de France" and, of course, Le Tour. You know it's a well done video because it's hard to imagine the song without it. Even if you don't like classic techno you might appreciate the production and imagery. But you know what? If you don't like classic techno, never read this blog again, dammit!

The title says it all. Props to gewilli for being the first to alert me to this. Doesn't this conflict with Gloucester though?

Everyone who reads this probably knows how ridiculous the Landis hearing has gotten , and I have nothing to add to that. But what about this? You'd think with all that going down Oscar Pereiro might be lovin' life, but actually, he's busy telling people he'll quit cycling before he'll give DNA . So what's more likely -- Oscar is taking a stand for innocent cyclists everywhere and has nothing to hide, but would give up his sport for his principles, or he realized that giving DNA will end his career anyway, so he might as well take a stand instead of leaving the sport disgraced? Occam's Razor says Pereiro's just as doped as the rest of them.

One thing about mountain bike races -- you get some interesting race names. And I'm still not sure how to pronounce "Brialee." Brialee is actually the name of a camping resort in northeast Connecticut. It has a lake, a pool, a ton of campers, and a lot of hick-types sitting in lawn chairs next to their campers, wondering what the hell 270 lycra-wearing, gel-eating, camelback-slurping bike yuppies are doing tooling around their campground. But I'm sure I can equal the derision they were sending my way -- since Brialee is basically a sea of immobilized campers, a glorified trailer park with a nice location. Apparently a significant number of people who own campers don't actually want the mobility associated with them, so they park it permanently at Brialee and build a deck attached to their camper. I could go on for a while about what sucks about this, but let me just say that my idea of a getaway is not sitting in my folding chair in front of my camper, with ...

Sometimes, you might want to race your bike, but instead you have to go up to Maine and tend to goats. These things happen. It turned out to be worth the trip for two reasons -- first, I forgot how much I enjoy the simple pleasure of cursing at obstinate animals, and second, I was still tired on Saturday from doing hill repeats with Ann Hansgate thursday. Gee Colin, why did you put a results link on Ann's name? That's not a blog. Well, go to that page and search for her name and you'll see why it took my three days to recover from riding Eastern Ave. with her. If you don't believe me, here's another . Also, I upped the bike nerdom another notch (surely we're nearing 11 by now) with the head to head page on crossresults.com . Linked is a comparison of me against some other Cat 4 all-stars/blog readers. This definitely proves... something. Other than that I have too much time on my hands, I mean.