Until the Snow Ends

For the record, this was Christin's idea. After a successful High Cascades  last year, I wanted to share the joy* of riding a hundred miles on a mountain bike with her, and due to everyone I know getting married this August we couldn't go back to HC 100.  So she found  Wildnerness 101 , and that was that.  At no point, I swear, did I say "Wilderness will be fun" or "I've heard great things about Wildnerness." The nice thing about doing a hundred miler within driving distance of home is ACTUALLY KNOWING PEOPLE at the race.   The downside there, of course, is that when your two teammates (Hughes and Brian) drop you on the first climb, you KNOW WHO THEY ARE and it's annoying and makes you immediately question the wisdom of sticking to the "slow start" plan. The first climb, like every climb at Wilderness 101, is long and on gravel.  In this case, 20 minutes and 1000 vertical feet, but who's counting  Strava-ing?  The difference is th...

I have been emailing with Thom Parsons  about putting on a mountain bike race for what seems like my entire life.  Certainly for as long in my life as I can remember, which is like four or five years.  IN ANY CASE, after years of dreaming about it, we finally did it. The stumbling block was always finding a venue.  I am not a good venue finder.  In the growing list of Weasel Productions (tm), I still have never been the person who made first contact with a landowner.  I am the registration guy, the staging guy, the results guy, the volunteer guy, and the guy who sends rude emails to his co-promoters. So that's how we ended up Foxboro.  It's in Thom's backyard (sound familiar?), and the DCR lets freakin' motorbikes race there, so there was some kind of precedent for this sort of madness.  Parsons weird personal magnetism was enough to get the DCR guy's approval (but then he retired... and his replacement was equally powerless to resist) and tha...

For the six-plus years of this blog's existence, I've liked to assume that I am "bad" at bike racing and that I write about how much I "sucked" and it's "funny."  While this may be true in the grand scheme of things (don't look me for at a ProXCT anytime soon), if there's anything I've learned in the last month it's that "sucking" is not funny at all, and not something I want to write about. And that is why, when I dropped out of The Pinnacle after only a lap, with a bike that was 100% FUNCTIONAL, I did not blog about it.  Calamity is funny.  Massively unperforming your own, previously-reachable expectations, by a margin so great you wonder if you had a lung amputated?  Not funny. However, I thought the Stewart Six-Pack would be a good place to rally.  Flat, fast trails, for six hours?  While my XC results have been abysmal, my ride-all-day results have been SOLID this year.  If you need someone to be your ride bro...