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...

Round two of the datamining series was delayed by the decision the tile my shower. Much like bike racing, tiling a shower is a surprisingly long exercise in frustration that leaves you mildly satisfied when the dust clears. But I digress. One stat I missed from last time was "biggest overall race day." You won't be surprised to see the race series at the top of the chart... Largest Race Days Rank Date Race Total Racers 1 10/03/2010 Cross Crusade: Alpenrose Dairy 1482 2 10/16/2011 Cross Crusade #3 1476 3 10/02/2011 Cross Crusade #1 1466 4 10/04/2009 Cross Crusade #1 1434 5 10/24/2010 Cross Crusade: Portland International Raceway 1323 28 11/13/2011 MFG #6 Woodland Park 888 31 10/01/2011 Great Brewers Gran Prix of Gloucester Day 1 828 Turns out you have to go all the way down to 28th to find a non-Cross Crusade race on the list, and 31st to find a non-Pacific Northwest race. They basically do Gloucester EVERY WEEKEND in Portland. On the flip side, here...

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 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...

The Canton Cup highlights one of the things that makes 'cross so different from mountain bike racing:  it's one of the least interesting courses around, but as long as you can find a group of dudes to mix it up with it's a BLAST. If you get stuck time trialing around by yourself on the mostly-straight, minimally-technical, 9-minute laps, I'll forgive you for thinking that it sucks.  But 'cross was meant to be social, so an unselective course can still be totally awesome. See how I just said nice things about Canton even though I *hate* the course?  Coffee makes me so positive sometimes! This year's Canton was on SNOWPOCALYPSE EVE and every race on Sunday was cancelled.  The only chance to look for one's power animal was Canton... so when the weather turned from "45 and overcast" to "40 and effin pouring" two hours before the elite race there was nothing to do except take that lemon mother nature gave us and take a big old bite of it. ...

So apparently the price I pay for NOT racing Night Weasels (aka "how can a mountain be a BOG" Weasels ) is that the next time I did show up for a cross race in New England we would get the exact same conditions.  Minus the mountain.  But Day 1 at New Gloucester was all the derailleur-snapping goodness that Night Weasels was... maybe more.  Out of the 23 finishers in the 60-minute elite race, I think all of 3 did it without a pit bike. I, of course, begged/borrowed/stole Steve's bike to use as a pit bike and I was able to finish the race, although the one time I tried to go 2 laps without pitting it nearly exploded. Even worse, everyone behind me (and there were quite a few people behind me, no, really) didn't have a pit bike because they're a scrub like me.  So their bike broke and then quit.  And then when the results came out I was LAST.  Because JD doesn't list DNF's because he hates me. Last place was, in fact, good enough to be IN THE MONEY so ...

Every once in a while, I do something here that isn't a race report.  I've been meaning to get this one out for a while, now, because it's EARLY CROSS SEASON which means that all anyone ever talks about is how other people need to upgrade. Personally, I don't spend as much time worrying about sandbaggers as my twitter account might suggest.  Such is the advantage of racing in the only category you can't sandbag. I've been racing cross for six years now and one thing has never changed:  people act like the jump between categories is much larger than it is.  The standard refrain when someone upgrades to Cat 3 is "well, now it's time to get lapped!" and that is... um... not even remotely true.  If you're fast enough to get any kind of merit-based promotion out of Cat 4, then you're already riding at midpack Cat 3 speed. In fact, this is true for Cat 3->Cat 2 as well.  The only catch is that with Elite Men riding up to 10 laps, you can...

I have done exactly one non-UCI race this season, the Midnight Ride of Cyclocross, which had enough foreigners in it you'd have thought there were UCI points on the line.  So, a wise man might have taken advantage of the first non-UCI weekend in New England in the last month to stop  getting sand kicked in his face by the actual good bike racers out there, and instead return the sand-kicking favor to those uppity Cat 3's in a local 1/2/3. But I am not a wise man... I am a man who is woefully susceptible to peer pressure.   Fatmarc  started hassling me about attending Granogue back in August 2010.. and by the time 2011 rolled around, I was helpless to resist. So, off to the mid-Atlantic we go!  I had never raced there except for two exceedingly non-awesome USGP's back in the day, so I was interested to see what it would be like.  I had ridden my bike once in the last 12 days, so victory was inevitable. Then I got to the course. Fatmarc had set m...

I was totally shattered from a week of race promoting so I didn't race at all this weekend.  What's a guy to do?  Live vicariously through his girlfriend, of course! I put the GoPro on Christin's stem, but I neglected to notice that it had some kind of slippery varnish on it that my stem doesn't have... so after a lap, it slipped down and then she spent the rest of the race getting distracted by the $300 of electronics flopping around on her bars. Whoops. But LOOK AT THAT START!

I drew a back row start and passed like 40 guys in the first 2 minutes to get me into the "slighty over my head zone." Then I suffered like a dog to hang on... only to get lapped on the finish straight with one to go anyway. But so what, it was still awesome: He only heckles because he cares.