Until the Snow Ends

I'm not sure what's crazier, that extreme pogo exists , or that it's totally awesome . The last 20 seconds of this video are just amazing. For the curious, I made it 57 miles last night and only drank 4 bottles.

I'm still riding 50 miles tonight. Beats the hell out of sitting around a 90 degree apartment. Look for my dried-up corpse somewhere out here .

Today I "raced" at Putney. It went very... slowly. I started a little fast. Then my back started to hurt a lot. Then I got a cramp in my stomach. Then my hamstrings started to hurt because my back was pulling on them. Then I got chills from dehydration. Then I got off my bike to try to stretch. This is what I look like when I realize someone is taking a picture of me having a horrible race: Linnea endoed, hyperextended her knee, and then rode 4 laps. She has far more legitimate reasons for not riding fast than I did. Alex had a much better race than either of us. Here she is, expressing her joy. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

BikeSnobNYC is looking past the fixie fad, er, trend, and suggesting cyclocross bikes might be the next cool thing to ride around town on. I've always known I was a trend setter. In case you're wondering, this was just an excuse to link to their entertaining blog .

Riding for fun is kind of strange to me. I'm not very good at it -- I tend to stop too soon, so it's not much of a workout. I guess that's why it's "for fun." Saturday Linnea and I "rode" the Mt Snow XC course, which turned out to suck mightily. I'll be interested to see how much they improve it for nationals -- yes, I know mountain biking is supposed to be hard, but no one not named Hans Rey can ride straight up a washed out stream bed, which is what some of the climbs seemed to be. I would suggest that these guys try installing something called a "water bar" so they wouldn't have to "rebuild" their "trails" every summer. The downhills really weren't much better, terribly eroded and also virtually unridden this year. The 1000 feet of climbing, per lap, was about as bad as you might expect. In summary, I'd say the course has a miserable skulls-to-beers ratio... say 4 skulls to 1 beer or so. Which...

Compared to lots of things I write here this post is pretty much about nothing, which is to say it's not a race report. This weekend the Root 66 schedule is open, thank god, so I actually have a chance to do some training/resting my knee. Unfortunately these things seem to the exact opposite, and since Linnea and I are heading to Mt. Snow I guess my knee won't catch a break. We're going to preride the obscenely hard course that experts do 5 laps of at Nationals in July. It's going to be like a 3 hour race, which is good. Also, you may recall I tore my derailler apart last weeekend, and since I don't believe in expensive equipment I got a $49 dollar replacement SRAM X-7. I was feeling pretty good about the dollar-to-derailleur ratio on that purchase until I found out one of my coworkers bought a $48 bike from Walmart. Did you even realize that bikes could be bought, brand new, for $48? I didn't. You can get an entire "Roadmaster Mt Fury" for t...

You know what really doesn't suit me? Long mountain bike races. I just don't have the training volume for this stuff, and I'm not going to acquire it anytime soon. Not when I get out of work at 6, and not when I don't do long rides on weekends because I have to go "race" long mountain bike races. So I was a little concerned that the Holiday Farm race was a "longer than usual" XC race. But it turns out that I had completely better things to worry about, such as... A port-a-potty line long enough it was faster for me to drive to a convenience store instead of waiting ... which meant that I had: absolutely no warm-up ... But that's ok because: I only had 2 gels for 3 hours Mountain bike racing, hell yeah! The course was 8 miles, 80% singletrack, lots of climbing, fair amount of mud. 3 laps for experts. I figured that I was going to be 2.5-3 hours, so why should I warm up? I don't really warm up for ski marathons. Well, a mountain bike rac...

I think I'm drifting into a level of stat-nerdery that even the type of people who look at crossresults.com in the summer might not appreciate. But I did it anyway. Based on my own arbitrary system my scalp was worth 370 points at the end of last year, which is better than gewilli (425), josh (556) and zank (407) but worse than ryank (284), TP&HASS (295), and feltslave (346). Phew, with that much linking and name-dropping I'm sure to get someone to pay attention, right? Even if I am just making up stats now. The reason I'm inside writing php on a lovely Saturday (just kidding, it's raining) is that I crushed my calf riding at the fells last night. I was testing out my new Reba Race (which I installed myself and had to resist blogging about, since no one cares except me) and I fell/dismounted clumsily, which wasn't so bad except that one of my legs came flying up for some reason and smacked my seatpost directly at the thickest part of my calf. This...

Or, "This Expert Thing is No Joke," by Colin. I got my Expert career started down in Andover, CT this weekend. Linnea and I rolled up with 2.5 hours to go before the start, but after finding out experts were riding 5 laps we decided to skip preriding in exchange for a trip to subway and a bike shop to get a chainring bolt, because when you're riding 5 laps of a course described as "fast and dry" you'll obviously learn it while you ride, right? And if the expert race is lengthened because the course is fast, that's basically synonymous with easy , right? Right. So I rolled up to my first expert race ever having seen a few hundred yards of the course, with lots of air in the suspension, because it was sooooo fast. It turns out that the only part of the course I'd see was actually the smoothest and flattest section out there. The course was only 4 miles of pure climbing and descending up and down a hillside. I would describe it as "world cup...