Until the Snow Ends

I write this having just left a John Hodgman show early.  He made a lot of jokes about being old and irrelevant, which as someone who used to blog hit perhaps closer to home than I would have liked.  After thirty minutes of wishing for the show to end, I realized that as an adult I am in control of my own destiny at all times, even when there's an implied social contract that wants to suggest otherwise.  So here we are! Now that the days have gotten short, like every other pro desk jockey, amateur bike racer, I've totally quit training, unless you call a 90 minute mountain bike ride in the dark "training."  While trying to figure out if I had any kind of plan for maintaining respectability up until NBX (Nationals?  HAHAHAH), I decided that racing double weekends is really the only thing I can trust to help me hold some semblance of fitness.  Working long hours and drinking beers might be making me  fatigued , but it's not making me tired, you k...

 Day 1 After coming to Northampton for the past six years, I finally got something other than a bone-dry grass crit.  A light rain started around 11 and carried most of the way through the elite women's race.  I'm not gonna call it perfect  conditions (it was a little sticky by the end.  wah.)  but it was basically as good as things get for me.  Slippery and fast. Just like every other cat 2, I drew a crappy start spot, and it didn't really matter as much as I wish it did.  I stood in line on the pro-only section with a bunch of dudes for a bit, and then when it was my turn to run around the tree I fell on my face and made everyone stop. After that, though, things were very shreddy.  For some reason much of the scrub zone had tunnel vision for the greasy, muddy line through the apex of every corner, which was not at all the fastest way to go around corners.  I definitely set a record for "most people passed on the outside" o...