Until the Snow Ends

Dude! I figured out a way to be more efficient with blogging. Just have WICKED BAD races on the weekend and then you have nothing to write about! BAM, done! Sterling Day 1 was one of those. I should probably confirm with crossresults, but I feel like I've NEVER had a good race at Sterling Day 1 in my life, because it's a windy power course and I'm a soft man. Soooo... I rode around deep in the scrub zone, and when I bobbled twice and got dropped by the last group on the course, it mentally broke me and I packed it the eff in. WAH. The good thing about that kind of lameness is having to live with your own cranky and regretful self for 24 hours, which meant when we were huddling for warmth before the race on Sunday I had a SIGNIFICANT motivation advantage over my peers. Aaaand Day 2 had turns. Like, back-to-back turns! Mandatory recovery turns! So then you could go haaaaaaaaahd when you got outta there!  The random staging gods smiled upon me and I drew lit...

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...

For reasons I have previously mentioned on video, the East Coast Hundred Miler Scene was unacceptable to me due to its usage of a horrible thing called "doubletrack" for race terrain. But, the stupid part of me (my brain) still wanted to do a hundred-miler. Combine that with some well-timed peer pressure from my brother, and I ended up at the High Cascades 100 in Bend, Oregon, on the 15th day of a MTB vacation with Christin. Some people might tell you that riding your bike for 3-4 hours a day, every day, for two weeks straight, is not a good prep for a hundred mile race. Well, those people are FUN KILLERS. We rolled out in the near-dark at 5:30 AM on pavement. Five miles of pavement! Wasn't I just crowing about all the singletrack on this race? The pavement rollout was exciting for two things. You know how mountain bikers have a rep of not knowing how to ride in a pack? And how it's 5:30 in the morning? And they have hydraulic brakes that could probably...

I never even meant to do this race.  After Hopbrook, I was all like "alrighty, let's get down to business and train well for 3 weeks in the hope of being less embarrassing at the Fat Tire Classic."  And I did!  You could tentatively call what I started doing a "block," if you were one of those people. Obviously that lasted until I realized that there was a bike race I could fit into my schedule, because playing bikes is way awesomer than training bikes. Especially when it's a mere 25 mile road race with 20 cat 3s in it.  None of this riding-in-the-pack for hours BS, this was going to be an hour of action!  Or something.  Anyway, it seemed fun.  So off I went, with Steve , RMM and geewhits as gas money.  On the way down, RMM regaled us with tales of getting Curley'ed  in a past edition of this race, and filling our heads with lies like "the break will go on the first lap, so you have to cover everything."  As you might ...

It used to be that I did better at Hopbrook every year, but now that I'm in the twilight of my career (was that a joke?  I'm not sure either) I seem to always find myself behind the fitness curve come April.  This year's mild winter was especially bad for that, as I spent most of March trying to get healthy and patch my ego back together after the Birkie .  Meanwhile, everyone else was out DRILLING IT.  So I figured I would just go ahead and avoid Hopbrook, and buy 3 more weeks of secret training before I had to face the Pro/1 music. BUT THEN I REMEMBERED BIKES ARE TOTALLY SWEET!  Hmm. Christin was planning on skipping Hopbrook so I was like, yo, that's cool, I don't want to go either.  But then she was like, "wanna go race Hopbrook?" and my heart did a little flip and I was like YESYESYESYESYESBIKES, so I guess I really did want to go. No amount of wanting to ride fast will make you ride fast (well, ride fast for 2 hours...), so I knew it would be b...

Want more factual, less-seizure-prone Birkie vids?  Check out 2010  and 2011 . So, last year , I showed up to the Birkie with super-questionable fitness having barely ski raced all year.  I ended up having the best race of my life and qualifying for the elite wave in 2012, reminding me for the hundredth time that predicting and controlling one's fitness is way, way harder than it seems. The obvious next step was to ski EVEN LESS and race EVEN LESS this year.  I got back from 'cross nationals in mid-january, looked at the calendar, and realized that I had 6 weeks to the Birkie.  Five years ago, I would've said there was no hope to get 50k fitness in 40 days, but now I know that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.  Let's do this! ...and six weeks later, I was in line at the airport with 10 ski days under my belt, with Cary and Lauren, who were on similar training plans -- and we suddenly had a problem even bigger than limited time on snow. Our plane tickets were bo...

Last year's weird winter of training made for such a good result at the Birkie that the only logical progression was to get even weirder THIS winter... by getting on xc skis a grand total of four times in January.  I mean, I still have 26 days until I have to line up against people who get paid to ski race at the biggest race in North America , so I don't see how this could be a problem.  Not like my ego is fragile enough that I could already be losing sleep over getting dropped out the back of the elite wave 5k into the race, no, not at all... ANYWAY the first step to True Nordic Fitness (tm) is throwing down on Tuesday nights at Weston, for 15 minutes of PAIN on a magical mixture of SLUSH and ICE.  The daytime high was a mere 42, aka "normal Boston winter," aka "one of the colder days we've had this year," so the conditions were relatively good... wet enough to not be piles of granular sugar on top of ice, but cold enough to not be puddles of slush....

In 2010, Nationals were in Bend, and I had three great reasons not to go: 1) Bend is a plane flight away, and I hate flying with bikes and renting cars and all that crap. 2) My racing age was 29, so the only race I could do at Nats was the Elite Men's race. 3) Nationals was on the same day as THE BEST RACE IN THE WORLD . Well, wouldn't you know it, all three of these reasons were off the table for the 2011/12 season, so I made the decision waaaay back in September to drive to Nationals in Madison in January, because it would be crazy hardcore snow/ice cross and that sounded RAD. Through twitter chatter, and Meg/Steve being way too excited, I ended up heading out a week early to race the Chicago Cross Cup New Year's Resolution UCI races before Nats... giving me a four-race cx road trip in January! Awesome? The tardiness of this blog entry should probably tell you how fast I rode, but that's not to say there was nothing to talk about. CCC NYR Day 1 One thing...

I've figured out the progession, now, every year Ice Weasels gets bigger, and every year I ride slower. This year, there was almost no point to lining up -- I was on 5 hours sleep, sick, and barely ate all morning. Luckily there's more to bike racing than what place you finish in -- like the fact that this year's course was AWESOME. I really didn't care how I did, I just wanted to do some hot laps. Kevin is part badger and had dug out an entirely new back section; we had a new tree section; we had hoppable barriers; and we had as much flow as you can possibly squeeze out of the house section without killing your lap length. The flyover allowed for the figure-eight course layout, which means tons of HEY BUDDY sections. Hell yes! So much fun! Seconds before this photo I told Sally I was putting her in the tape As predicted, I didn't have any legs, so I hunted down a few (illegal) beer feeds, cornered as hard as I dared, messed with as many other...

I have never been so pleasantly surprised by a race course in my life as I was at NBX Day 1. I prerode, and it was basically the fastest, easiest cross course in the history of bikes.  As someone who needs accelerations and technical sections to be respectable in the elite race, this sent me into immediate WHINE MODE. It also sent me into find-a-file-tread mode, because if there aren't any damn corners on the course then I have no intention of having any traction. So in between whining about how it was a stupid power course and I was going to get crushed and this is lame, bike racing shouldn't have that much pedaling... I got some file treads from Matt Myette.   Which was cool. Then I spent the rest of my warmup complaining about the course anyway.  Just to open the lungs, dontcha know. The Day 1 start is the weirdest holeshot in all of cross, because we ride literally a quarter mile straightaway before the first turn.  Everyone accelerates to 28 mph...and then....

So, the plus side of having a terrible weekend of racing at Sterling is that I don't really want to write about it, so I can roll back the clock to TEN WHOLE DAYS AGO and talk about the most epic cyclocross grudge match in the world, instead. Quick Sterling recap -- Day one was one of those days where you ride around and think about how NEXT YEAR I'M GONNA TRAIN BETTER.  My legs were flatter than Iowa.  Cary smashed me in our Cross Clash , and with two laps to go Richard Bardwell and JP T-R  attacked me so hard I thought about downgrading to Cat 3.  I beat all of five people. Day two was totally different, the course was technical and I felt great!  So of course I had a SRAM shifter malfunction on lap three, disengaging the cable and leaving me with a 34x13 singlespeed.  For the first time in my life I threw my bike in disgust. (I already talked to SRAM about it, and it turns out there was some kind of defect in the shifter they sent me, as it has a g...

I think my GoPro is starting to show its age.  Today's course was super fun, the racing was great, the field was large, and I wanted SOOOO BAD to make a sweet video of it. And then... on the start line... ye olde bar cam inexplicably keeps turning off instead of recording DAT FOOTAGE.  Nooooo! Anyway.  Text it is! People kept calling the VeloCross course "mountain bikey," but I like to think it was "euro."  Steep drops, sharp ups, velodrome section, whoops, and not much grass?  EUROPE.  Or as close as we get in New England. We staged by crossresults.com points (gosh, what an awesome website!) and I got #9, which shows you how leeeeegit this race was.  Eight guys in one place who are better than me on a bike, that's preposterous! Because the course was fun I may have preridden my face off and felt very not-snappy on the start line.  Which is not a good feeling, especially when Anthony Clark is next to you.  The gun went off and I chi...

Dammit!  I posted this video to vimeo on Monday and then totally forgot to give it any kind of race report justice or bloggage.  GO GO GO! So for the first time in my life I had Veteran's Day off (thanks Steve ) and there was a HOLIDAY BIKE RACE to attend.  Awesome!  The fact that it was 90 minutes away and the 1/2/3 race started at 10am was but a minor hurdle... until I set my alarm for 5:45.  What am I, a Cat 4? I met up with Jeff Elie in Medford and we rocked down to the cape to resume our mediocre elite rider vs elite mediocre rider battle from Canton .  The course was jungle cross at it's "best," super short laps, tons of effective singletrack, weirdly tight 180s -- basically Ice Weasels 1.0 -- but it doesn't matter because TWENTY FIVE dudes are here at 10am to race bikes on a FRIDAY! The race itself was pretty straightforward, as jungle-cross basically turns into a time trial for an hour.  Mark the Shark was going super slow on lap one so...

Traditionally, CSI is where I save my cyclocross season, because it's a crazy-fast grass crit that lets wheelsucking sprinters like myself ride waaaay over their heads.  Despite this year's October snowpocalypse, Look Park melted in the nick of time and we got the file-tread conditions I was praying for.  The true professionals were in Cincinnati, but everyone who MATTERED (aka my cat 2 scrub brethren!) were present.  Let's do this! BIKE RACIIIIIIIIIIING I drew a sweet fourth-row start and lined up behind FREAK OUT  on the outside.  There's basically only two ways this could go:  either he freaks out and we get a great start, or he freaks out and I end up in a crash. The gun went off and we freaked out on the outside line into a top-15 start! Any time you find yourself coasting in a bike race next to Justin Lindine, things are going well.  Unless he is lapping you. Unfortunately when we hit the first turn, everyone dive bombed it and got...