Until the Snow Ends

Fresh off a ridiculous result, a great dinner, and no shower, I unstuck myself from my sleeping bag next to the race course to see a thick slime of fog and a light mist. The day was looking slippery, the course was supposed to be more technical, I had a front row callup, there were only 40 racers. That's about as good a shot at winning a Killer B race as I'll get all season. Let's do this thing. The preride showed that the course was a bit more technical, but even more painful than before. This time around the descent was straight down the fall line, so all your suffering on false-flats and log-runups was erased in a few seconds flying downhill. It was the epitome of "nowhere to rest." The combination of high aspirations and a serious bottleneck 60 seconds into the course made me decide on a plan that went against everything I stand for -- the reverse reverse-holeshot. I lined up one place uphill of yesterday's winner James Tosca on the front row, remem...

I had pegged this race to be the single most important race of the Verge series, way back in May. Why? Because a good result here would mean callup for Day 2, callups for Gloucester, a great result might event carry enough points through to get callups for the rest of the season -- never mind the fact that front-row starts from callups lead to more points which lead to more callups which lead to... well you get the drift. Needless to say I had worked myself pretty well into a panicked frenzy by Friday night for this one, that's the problem with realizing how important points are at the first race of the season, when it actually gets to be within 24 hours of start time you might be soil-your-pants nervous. Yeehaw. The turnout was surprisingly small given the enormous consequences, it was almost like most of the 2/3 "Amateur" men aren't hyper-serious raceaholics who would drive to Mars if they were giving Verge points. Losers. So, I was feeling good about my chanc...

Dammit! The Original

If only I trusted my own website .

I didn't race cross this last weekend. I went to the Kingdom. Same deal as last year , long rides with good people. I'd gush about it more, but it's already getting too popular. I think everyone in Quebec was there on Saturday -- I'd wager 200 people at least out on the trail, with 75% of the parlez-vousing some Francais . Luckily some other people out there generated some content, none better than the RBR'er known as "lithuania". Check out the photo sequence starting here of what happens when you drop a chain while sprinting on bumpy grass.

Coming off a 2+ hour mountain bike race I figured this one wasn't going to go very well, but I needed to get a race in before the Verge opener in Vermont in two weeks, as a bike build shakedown if nothing else. What's that?? Do I have a new bike?? Did I get new parts? Give in to consumerism ? Not really, but I did just switch my bike over from dual-ring road mode to single-ring cross mode, and bought some tubulars from CTodd , so yeah, some things could definitely benefit from race testing. The day was perfect for cross season, it was raining when I got up at 9, pouring when I got lost in Charleston picked up Cary at 11:30, and not raining at when we arrived in Amesbury. All the glory of a slicked-up course without having to stand around in the rain, it doesn't get much better than that. I got some quick heckle-time in on the fence rideup using my favorite RyanK line, "let's see some waaaaaaaatts!" Linnea at the fence rideup -- plenty of 3/4 Men didn...

If you had my hand strength you'd climb on top of cars to loosen bike racks, too. It seems like it's been a long season, but I've only done 16 mountain bike races this year. That's not that many, right? Considering how much time I've spent trying to make my bike(s) work, it feels more like 50. And this last one was no exception -- I had to fix a tubeless tire (or ride a tubed backup) and resurrect my front shifting (or ignore it and try to fix it with my barrel adjuster/limit screws on site). Yeah, I should have finished the work-on-your bike season strong, but I took the easy way out and all those things in parenthesis above...happened. It was especially stupid because after last week I was nursing a 7 point lead over Sean in the race for Root 66 first-loser status. Domnarski Farm had 3000 feet of climbing in 20 miles and he underweighs me by 15 lbs (yeah, you think I'm skinny, huh? you should meet this guy) so functioning equipment would have been a good...

Wow, starting another blog entry and my first thought was to mention that my job is killing my blogging career lately. Thank god cross season is just around the corner, two race reports a week will keep me focused on what's important, blogging at work! Like right now, for example, I would totally get fired for this except it's 10 PM. Oh yeah, I'm stickin it to the man all right. So this weekend we got some tropical storm remnants on Saturday, some wicked downpours here and there, and next thing I know certain unnamed potential carpoolers are whining to me on the gmail about not wanting to ride a mudfest. I protested that the brunt of the rain was going north of Boston, and Wompy doesn't really get that muddy anyway (how can a rock turn into mud? it can't!), but it didn't work, some people can actually walk away from a chance to race bikes and not feel bad about it. Weird. Even Boston's fastest woman was trying to kill my buzz as we watched the solid ...