Until the Snow Ends

The 24 Hours of Great Glen is a special race for me, because it's the perfect blend of stupidawesomesilly that gets me excited any time of the year. In the last 8 years, I've raced it 6 times and crewed it once. I have also been on the second place team for two years in a row now. Which is annoying, to say the least. This year there were terrifying rumors of a super-pro-team showing up and crushing us... but sadly they turned out to be false. The alleged super-pro roster was actually so terrifying that it probably wouldn't have even been a race... but now we'll never know. ANYWAY. We were the only pro team there, so my standard prerace anxiety was focused on the incredible shame we would feel if THE PRO TEAM got beat by any other team. That's pretty much as #notpro as it gets, right? I have actually been feeling straight-up terrible since the Beverly Crit , but I was so JACKED UP to race the bikes that I almost convinced Mike to let me do the Le Mans...

I did this race last year and it was tons of fun and I got third. Thus I was SUPERSTOKED to do it this year. In related news, last year I was a Cat 4 in the 4/5 race. This year I am a Cat 3 in the 1/2/3 race. This time around was a little...different. I don't really do anything above threshold until 'cross season (except for intervals... yeah, I'm gonna do some intervals soon, I swear) so my little mountain biker muscle cells were CONFUSED when the race started. SPRINT! TURN! Coast... coast... coastcoastcoast oh god why are we not pedaling? SPRINT! SPRINTSPRINTSPRINT sweet jesus why are we still accelerating?? Repeat that for 60 minutes and you have my view of the race. I got a SICK clip-in off the start with my new Speedplays, probably because they feel just like MTB pedals, and got right up into 20-25 wheel. Which seemed like a good place to be, except that we went LUDICROUS SPEED from the gun and we were single-file all the way back to 25th or whatever....

A week late, just like I promised! Actually there is no race report at all. It was pouring rain, I had no legs, and was on pace for three hours of racing. I recognized that flogging myself and my bike for 3 hours to get last place was not conducive to what I really care about (smashing Great Glen the following weekend), so I dropped out with zero remorse. Jay Mueller properly epic-ified my experience with this picture, which is really the reason I decided to post anything at all. "Heyyyyy, that sucked"

That's right, baby, we run our race reports on exact;y one week delay around here.  All part of the plan to fuzz my memories of an event hard enough that I can conjure up some false memories far more exciting than what really happened. Plus, this whole living-out-of-a-suitcase thing for half of every week doesn't leave me with the ample blogging time I used to have.  Just sayin'. ANYWAYZ, the DARKHORSE is one of my only must-do summer mtb races (along with the 24 hours of Great Glen , even though I have never finished without a mechanical. Something about 40 miles of big-ring singletrack just speaks to me in a way that 50 miles of doubletrack climbing doesn't... To make things interesting/take the pressure off I did the Gran Fundo on Saturday, which was the exact same 60 miles of FUN as last year. Chill factor was high, and I finished hours behind the "lead group." So far, so good, and I was up and on the road at 5:30 AM from Northampton for th...