Until the Snow Ends

Ah, late March, that beautiful time of year when it's 40, rained all week, and getting up at 5:45 to drive almost 2 hours each way to do a 30 minute race seems like great idea . I love the King of Burlingame TT, but I can never tell if I love it only because it's the first race of the year and it's only 30 minutes long. You know what you don't need base miles for? 30 minute TTs. You know what I don't do too much of? Base miles. Inconsistent blogger and consistent teammate Kevin weaseled his way into the carpool and did his best to bring it down in flames by being woken by his own doorbell at 6:15 AM. Shockingly, he was not sleeping in a chamois, nor had he packed anything the night before, so we burned almost an entire Burlingame TT of time while he figured out which way was up. Finally we got on the highway, got the Fit up to 75 (no small feat with bikes on the roof) and blitzed south. As usual it was cold and wet, so I wasn't too sad about missing valua...

Hey Internet! Remember me? That guy that used to blog about races? No? Well anyway, a rainy March, combined with the insecurity caused by every single cyclist I know bragging about how much they were riding, led to me pulling the plug on the nordic season a bit early this year, which was hell on the blog. Usually I get to smugly race all through March, while everyone else whines about how bad the weather is for their 22 hour training weeks in Boston. But not this year... the weather's been warm, so no one's complaining, they're just out training, and I'm just sitting here freaking out about how they're all gonna drop me once we put numbers on. So I did a bunch of riding (panic-training, really), but no one wants to hear about that, so the blogfront was quiet. Thank god for Rosey stepping up and organizing a non-race race this past weekend, giving the New England blogosphere something to squawk about. After most cyclists had gone 3 months without racing, the ...

After a few dry runs at Weston, I ended up gluing a cheap fisheye lens to my Flip Mino to drastically widen the field of view. This helped make the image a lot stabler, albeit at the cost of some blurriness around the edges. That's what you get when you buy $20 lenses, I guess. Big thanks to Dave Chiu for the idea. I eventually got about 45 minutes of video from the race, but since long distance nordic skiing is a fundamentally boring sport to watch (unless it's the front of the Vasaloppet ), I edited it down to 6 minutes with music and captions. Starring Cary Fridrich as "chatty guy." Birkie Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo .

Being an insufferable racerhead has some benefits. Let's say you skied terribly on Saturday, and almost decided to bag the rest of the ski season, and not race a bike until April 10th. That would be a rough 6 weeks, wouldn't it, with "I skied the worst race of my life in the biggest race of the country" as a sendoff to your 2010 nordic season? But wait! Why not take one more shot at ski racing, when there's 20 minutes of pain just down the street every Tuesday night? The pro thing to do would obviously have been a proper rest week, but I decided to mortgage my recovery a bit in exchange for a bit of sanity. It didn't help that (pro skier) Alex was talking trash after beating me by 22 minutes in Wisconsin, and made it known that this would be her lone Tuesday night appearance. I figured the standard for hanging up the skis would be "can't beat Alex in a 7k," and headed off to see if I should continue my season. It hasn't been below freez...

I've been squawking about the Birkie for the last two months here. It's the biggest ski race in North America and the automatic focal point on my season, since it's the only ski race I'm paying $600 (airfare,lodging,entry) to do. After all the anticipation, did it live up to the hype? Let's find out! Unless you're a big-time skier, skilled sweet-talker, or someone who did a qualifying race, your first Birkie involves a wave 10 start. I met none of the above criteria wave 10 it is! Wave 10 is the last group of skiers to hit the course, about 2 hours after the elite wave goes off. Joining me in this inevitable mess was Cary. Starting about 7000 people ahead of us were most of our travel companions, John, Nick, Aaron, and " pro skier Alex Jospe ." Aaron is a Birkie vet so we got some good intel from him. The first race is actually to the front of the staging area, so when wave 9 starts (ten minutes before wave 10) you're in position to sprint...