Until the Snow Ends

 The new blogging model of "write it up for team slack and then also post it here" is working!  We've got more content! Did the thing where you pay the pro photographer for a picture of you lookin cool I did Woodstock last year and it was super fun.  I tried to bully Kevin  and Desen  into joining me and Harry on this year's adventure but they had (kind of) legit excuses.  Hopefully after you all read about how much fun Harry on had on his XC bike you be inspired to check out the joy of XCDURO next year with us!! Last year I rode all the stages blind, this year I prerode 4/5 stages, but last year I finished better (by % beat) in my field so either preriding doesn't actually help at all, or everyone is getting faster.  Honestly I think it might be the latter, I think I have gotten a bit better at descending in the last decade but it feels like the overall level of racer has come WAY up.  Or maybe I'm not getting better, my bike is getting bett...

 Another one from the "I banged this out for Team Slack" files.   Eastern Grind (Williston VT) is a cool XC mtb race so I wrote about it. Eastern Grind Race Report Ok this course rules, it's has enough climbing to whoop your ass but half of it is actually super fast flowy stuff so you think you're riding like really fast, at least until you realize that every time you see Harry he is a little further ahead so actually everyone is riding super fast.  But anyway it's good, you should have been here unless you were  @Harry Gordenstein  and  @Luke Plummer  because they WERE here. There was no pro field, just "expert open men" so all the super fast guys ended up in our category (boo) but that meant we had 24 dudes (yay!).  The start was FAST because of aforementioned pro dudes and I did a shit ton of work just to end up in... last place after 90 seconds.  I talked about how we were going unsustainably hard and the guy in front of me agreed....