Until the Snow Ends

There was a time in my life in which I hated this race, because it had DOUBLETRACK and ZERO ROCKS, and gosh darnit, I'm a mountain biker, and those things are neither FUN nor HARD. Then I started racing UCI cyclocross, and now I'm like, two hours of sprinting out of corners and up punchy climbs, without a single spot to recover?  SIGN ME UP!  THIS IS THE BEST MOUNTAIN BIKE RACE EVER! It's also the only mountain bike race that's so fast, you have to make actual decisions like "should I bridge to that group to try to get some draft, or ride my own pace in the wind?"   I averaged just about 13 mph for 2 hours... which is probably the only time all year I ride a mountain bike race faster for 26 miles than a world class marathon runner could. Oh wow. Guys, marathon runners are insanely fast. Onto the racing. I was still putting my bottles out in the feed zone when I heard them announced "1 minute to go," because apparently having a watch or a ...

After last year's debacle , I obviously needed to come back to Myles Standish and set things right.  The full road, non-selective course, downhill sprint, and small cat 3 field were just too much fun. I can only assume that my blog from last year is the reason that the cat 3 field DOUBLED in size this year to a robust 40 dudes (ok, 39 dudes and a chick ), because everyone wanted some of that FULL ROAD ACTION.  Most excitingly, no less than seven of my Back Bay  (p/b Boloco ) teammates signed up with me. Now, with great power comes great responsibility.  We had 8 racers in a 40-rider field, that's twenty-freakin-percent, if you don't get some stuff done with those kinds of numbers then the internet will come a-heckling, dontcha know.  (See:  Green Line Velo, Blue Hills 2011)  As such there was extensive pre-race listserve discussion about how to effectively race our bikes, and of course as a ragged band of cat 3s we didn't really know what to do exc...

Hey!  Remember when I used to blog?  Heck, remember when we used to blog ?  Yeah, those were the days.  But I figure if Ryan Kelly is going to keep up appearances then I should as well. For the first time EVER I took this winter off from ski racing (mainly cuz the Birkie kicked my ass , so I took my ball and went home), and thus there was NOTHING TO BLOG ABOUT.  Literally nothing, unless you count mediocre tele skiing. In DEFINITELY RELATED news I somehow managed to get excited for Hopbrook for like the fifth year in a row, even those Hopbrook is a weak course that never changes and only gets away with this mediocrity due to its early April start date.  Dude, bikes! No less than THIRTY other "Pro/1" (mostly 1) dudes agreed with my level of stoke, and thus we managed to have a rare mountain bike race start with FOUR rows of guys in it.  Obviously I was in the fourth row, because mountain bike races are long and going hard early is a good way to g...