Until the Snow Ends

Hey, you know what? If you don't finish bike races, you don't have much to blog about! And lately, I have been disturbingly good at not finishing bike races. But anyway, I did stuff in July, seriously. Check it out: HRRT Freedom Fest 3 Hour Race This was the ONLY bike racing option in all of the Northeast on July 4th weekend, because apparently promoters think everyone is on vacation and not feeling racey, and would rather compete with each other on the same date than run a race on the holiday weekend. So... I went out to Schenectady with Official Lady Friend (tm) Christin, and we did a 3 hour race with a grand total of 30 starters. You might think that with only 30 humans on bikes present, I'd have a shot at being the fastest one there, but you'd be wrong -- Scott Levreault from Joe's Garage was there, and he can BRING IT (on a rigid singlespeed), much to my chagrin. The trails were fun, and super tight, and twisty, and then it started raining like t...

This weekend served up a fair bit of controversy in the New England mountain bike world, but it's the same old things we've been squawking about for years: why do EFTA and Root66 schedule events on the same day, and should we really race in this much mud? The former is infuriating. We had 125 people at Moody Park and 200 at Putney; the venues are 40 miles apart. Combine 'em and we could've had a 300+ rider turnout at a non-Massachusetts venue, aka a RARE OCCURRENCE. Instead we get two small races. I'd love to know why no one will run a MTB race on Saturday -- seems to work fine for road and cross. The latter? Eh, I'm still not sure. If you reschedule/cancel cuz of mud, you pretty much threw away any and all profitability you had. If you skip muddy races (as a racer), you don't get to race and the trails get trashed anyway.. and now the promoter has $30 less money to try to fix it with. So I keep racing in the mud, but I don't ride for fun...