Until the Snow Ends

Round two of the datamining series was delayed by the decision the tile my shower. Much like bike racing, tiling a shower is a surprisingly long exercise in frustration that leaves you mildly satisfied when the dust clears. But I digress. One stat I missed from last time was "biggest overall race day." You won't be surprised to see the race series at the top of the chart... Largest Race Days Rank Date Race Total Racers 1 10/03/2010 Cross Crusade: Alpenrose Dairy 1482 2 10/16/2011 Cross Crusade #3 1476 3 10/02/2011 Cross Crusade #1 1466 4 10/04/2009 Cross Crusade #1 1434 5 10/24/2010 Cross Crusade: Portland International Raceway 1323 28 11/13/2011 MFG #6 Woodland Park 888 31 10/01/2011 Great Brewers Gran Prix of Gloucester Day 1 828 Turns out you have to go all the way down to 28th to find a non-Cross Crusade race on the list, and 31st to find a non-Pacific Northwest race. They basically do Gloucester EVERY WEEKEND in Portland. On the flip side, here...

As crossresults.com starts its seventh season, with a results database now tipping the scales at 478,000 results, I thought it would be fun to do some proper data mining while we're all STOKED and just waiting for the season to start. Meg Curry, the Gloucester sponsorship coordinator, asked me if the sold-out Gloucester women's 3/4 field was the biggest women's field in US CX history, so let's start there. Sadly, it's not. The field limit at Gloucester was 125, but that was shared with the Cub Junior field -- and on Day 1 of the Gloucester GP the 3/4 Women's field recorded 103 finishers. That's impressive, but not quite big enough to take top honors -- in 2010, Cross Crusade: Alpenrose Dairy logged 106 Beginner Women to take the crown of "biggest women's category ever." Coming in 3rd? The 2009 National Championships Elite Race, with 102 racers -- the biggest elite race in the database. The full list of the top women's fields: Larg...

The Darkhorse 40 sits atop my "New England Mountain Bike Races I Care About" list alongside The Pinnacle .  The difference between The Pinnacle and Darkhorse, though, is that EVERYONE knows how rad DH40 is.  This year's race sold out in March, about 2 weeks after registration opened, capped at 400 racers.  We can't be more than a few years away from a Vermont 50 style "full in 20 minutes" registration situation here. This time around I made sure to get Christin involved, because I knew her love of DA BIG RING and DA NOT CLIMBING would mesh perfectly with DA HORSE. The beauty of non-sanctioned MTB racing is simpler categories, so for men we had:  Elite, Singlespeed, Sport, and Master.  Thus!  Fifty or more "elite" men lined up at 8:50.  The promoter was ready to rock and told us we had "three minutes," which led to the field freaking out, because apparently everyone had a friend who wasn't lined up yet!  (Start time was "9...