Until the Snow Ends

Ok, so I was originally going to act like this past Tuesday's Weston Race never happened, mainly because I thought following up a whiny Stowe Derby post with a whiny Tuesday night post would out me as a guy who is kind of whiny. Which, of course, I am, but I put a fair amount of effort into hiding it. But then Cary called me out in the comments and if there's anything I can't get enough of it's being heckled on the internet, so here we go. The whiny preface is that Tuesday after being sick for two weeks, Tuesday was day #4 of "getting on it," so I had done like, a lot of manly working out 'n stuff the past couple of days, and didn't sleep much because of the Stowe Derby travel debacle, and waaaah , you know? I got on the sweet fixie to ride home at 5pm and my legs were like, "just so you know, don't expect much." But you never know, right? Sometimes you feel flat but go fast, sometimes you feel great until the race starts, sometimes...

If you read last year's missive, you should know that I have a raging love-hate relationship with the Stowe Derby, because it comes this close to completely ruining the most awesome 5k in cross country skiing (the first descent) with the worst 14k in cross country skiing (everything after that). Be warned that this year's experience did nothing to change my feelings, and I will nevertheless be back next year. Curse you, adrenaline rush! This year's Derby took place in optimal conditions for descending, steady snow showers all week, and more snow on the morning of the race. Sure, 600 nordic skiers throwing 'em sideways will still scrape that down to ice in no time, but at least the berms were a little softer than usual. My plan to become an e-celebrity was to run a rearward facing boot cam, since doing that off my seatpost during cross season nearly doubled this blog's traffic. After several bad ideas about how to construct this, Linnea came up with the idea o...

Stowe Derby Boot Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . I only have time to put the boot cam video up for now. Expect a race report late Tuesday night. There's a stretch in the middle where no one is behind me, and thus the view isn't so interesting, but I overtook another guy near the bottom.

Most of the cycling blogger community will tell you that every motorist in Boston is an incompetent clown who is going to accidentally kill you while talking on a cell phone, and if he somehow notices you before impact he'll probably decided to hit you anyway, because he hates cyclists. Most of the driving community will tell you that cyclists are road-hogging, lawbreaking, inconsiderate douchebags that hold up traffic just long enough to get stuck at a light, which they then blow, so they can hold up the same line of traffic on the next straightaway while riding down the center of the lane, and if you ever pointed this fact out to them they'd key your car and block you anyway, because they hate drivers. The reality of the situation, of course, is that most people aren't total dicks, and non-dickery is still normal enough in our day-to-day lives that you don't notice people just being "normal." It's not the 100 cars you pass without incident on your commu...

This was originally going to be one of those really short race reports where I say something pithy like "Racing when you're sick = FAIL," but due to the therapeutic effects of the season's first Otis Ride on Monday, my outlook has improved enough to be willing to talk about the debacle I called a "race performance" on Sunday. The disclaimer is that I've been sick for a while. Twelve days, not that I'm counting, but hey I managed to perform decently at a Randonee and also have a respectable Tuesday night so I thought I'd take the illness-denial lifestyle north for the Flying Moose. Plus, it's my dad's race, and I was signed up as results guru because that's my schtick . So, off in the car, sans Linnea for once because she's Mrs. Pro Cyclist these days. Instead my college buddy Aaron "not suitable for minors" Duphily came along, I picked him up in Auburn and we spent a solid sixty minutes hypothesizing what the kliste...

Boston's finally back to its normal temperatures, so you know what that means -- Tuesday Night Icy Granular Ski Criterium! No more of this powder business, no more using my hated cold skate skis, time to break out the Madshus aquatreads and fly! I was still sore from Sunday and nursing a lingering head cold, but the draw of Weston was just too strong, so much for "don't race when you're tired and sick." Last time I was way too casual off the line, today was different, I flipped out like a ninja from the first skate stride, passed the row in front of me and fought my way into the train in 5th position as we headed out into the flats right behind Andy. So far, so good. I ended up averaging 27 kph for the race, we were well over 30 kph on the flats at the start. While there was plenty of draft to be had, putting the power down on ice at that speed was difficult. As a result, Bret Bedard didn't pull his usual disappearing act, he went out fast but we all tr...

This Sunday the winter hunt for blog-worthy activities got taken to a whole new level with the Mad River Randonee Race . My buddy Justin (a veteran of many a western randonee race) was all like, "hey, want to do this hardcore rando race at Mad River?" and last time I did a crazy race with him and Linnea it was the Gunstock Winter Tri , which turned out just fine, plus I had new-used telemark gear to break in, so I was wicked into it . It should be noted that prior to Gunstock, the other "bizarre winter event" Justin, Linnea and I did was the Jay Winter Challenge , which was effing brutal. If I didn't have the memory of a goldfish I might have been able to use this to realize how hard this randonee business is. It might be hard, but there were still around a hundred people gathered at Mad River Glen for the start. Seriously, a hundred people thought this was a good idea. I was comforted by the size of the crowd; if I die in the woods, there will at least be ...

...18% service charges. One of these days, BikeReg. One of these days... In other news, King of Burlingame is open, if you'd like to commit to getting your act together two months in advance. Update! : Bikereg says this is an error due to how the promoter set up the event, where the license fee is being treated as a second race instead of added fee on the first race. They gave me back $1.25 and changed the event setup, raising my total monetary gains from 2 years of blogging to $1.25. And also indicating that they listen to their customers/angsty bloggers, which is awesome. I still get worked up about paying a surcharge sometimes, but dear god, they suck so much less than active.com!

After two straight weeks of Tuesday night no-shows it was time to get back to my pole-stomping ways out at Weston. The remarkably good winter continued and we got 3-5 inches of snow during the day, but of course this made for interesting commuting and racing. The drive out wasn't dangerous, although what little faith I had in Bostonians' ability to drive in snow was ruined by a herd of 30 cars, having a contest on Route 2 to see who could be the most terrified of passing a salt truck. As a native Mainer -- who would pass a plow truck, on a double yellow line, in 8 inches of snow, in a rear-wheel drive pickup, with nothing in the bed, with a logging truck oncoming, uphill, to school (both ways) -- I was disgusted. The next outlet for my misanthropy was Weston , who was presently addressing the new snow situation by driving their snowcat around at top speed with the tiller depth set on "oil well." This had the predicable result of turning 3 inches of soft new snow in...

A rare open weekend on the winter calendar (or any calendar of mine) led to some actual halfway legitimate training! Well... legitimate by my standards. No powermeters or heart rate monitors were checked; no intervals were timed; no max heart rates were achieved. So I guess it was actually "unstructured overdistance" and the best Joe Friel would let me call it is "transition." Damn. And this post started out so promising, too. Anyway. 7 hours of low intensity sounds like something a coach might prescribe to someone, at some point, so I'm gonna say it was exactly what I needed, at this point, and move on with it. Saturday was an amazing snow ride in the Fells with Linnea , Kate and Sara . I've espoused the joy of snow riding enough here that I'll skip the introduction and cut straight to the Goldilocks -- the snow wasn't too hard, it wasn't too soft, it was juuuuust right. And just like Goldilocks, we were trespassing* -- since the Fell...