Until the Snow Ends

You know what? I should just rename this the "Racing Bikes with Kevin Sweeney" blog and be done with it. That's all I do here any more, I just put a number on and ride laps with K-Sweet . You would think we were teammates from the way we seem to end up riding a time trial together each week -- but of course, we'd have to have an actual team for that to be true. So I guess that just makes him my friend, or even more accurately, "guy whose air compressor I use." So yeah, despite a 26-rider elite field at the Weeping Willow I still managed to spend most of my race riding with Kevin. The race course was an 11-mile lap of pure awesomeness, fast zero-recovery singletrack with a few punchy climbs and a hundred logs to jump over, and a hundred trees to rip your shorts open on. At only 45 minutes from Boston, everybody showed up, and hopefully most of them had enough fun to consider driving a little further next time. But probably not. If there's anything...

I can't remember why I've never raced the Glocester Grind before -- it's a short drive, to a flat and technical course... so whatever I was doing for the last 3 seasons better have been good, because this is a great race. You can tell this is a good race because I'm humping my bike over a giant rock Well, it's a great race, except for the bathroom situation, which almost made me miss the start. You know what makes a great warmup? A ten minute line for the portapotty, that you get into 12 minutes prior to start. So I ended up on the start line ice cold, but with the best power-to-weight ratio possible. Obviously, this led to a classic reverse holeshot (seen here at 0:32), which is really not optimal on a technical but fast course like this. After a few minutes of fighting the urge to flip out as we repeatedly bottlenecked on turns in the woods, we got to the first true mudhole and traffic backed up on the semi-rideable line. The totally-disgusting-mud-that-might...

This weekend provided a rare springtime chance to fire up the ol' "it's all good if you don't suck on Sunday" maxim, so I jumped at the chance to race the Orchard Assault out in Amherst Sunday, instead of dwelling on the fact that I lasted all of six miles at Sterling the day before . The Orchard Assault is a small event in every sense of the word -- small venue, small course, small fields, and small organization. It's basically a bunch of college kids on top of a hill next to the dorms taking your money, and then sending you out to race a zillion times up and down said hill. Luckily, the singletrack is plentiful and fun, so nothing else really matters*. Depending on who you ask we had either 12 or 14 starters in the Pro/1 race, which is almost Root-66 numbers, so maybe I should take back my "small fields" comment. In any case, it was enough dudes that the 200-yard holeshot to the first singletrack kind of mattered. But I'm a big believer in t...

Alright, I'm gonna change things up and go with the insta-report. This one finished just over two hours ago. As you might've noticed from the lack of vacation reporting, the whole "wait a long time before you blog" thing doesn't work. Shocking, I know. So the Sterling Cat 4 field was full, but for some dumb reason I really wanted to do the race. Thus, when the forecast started calling for rain and thunder, I headed out to Sterling to take a number from one of the inevitable no shows. I also emailed Rosey and Mark about borrowing a HUP United jersey, so I could pretend that I wasn't a privateer. At least that way, only 95 guys would chase me instead of 99. Getting into the race was no problem, because it was raining, so I was psyched... until I realized I was about to do a rainy road race. I put on every piece of clothing I had and rolled out near the back, getting nice and cool during the neutral start. The plan was to get a look at the course on lap o...

We came to a super-tight downhill switchback. We all stopped. We pondered. I said, "I can totally ride this. Get the camera."

Oops! I did a race in California, and then segued it into a full-fledged vacation and totally forgot to write about it! I've been hanging out in San Jose and riding for a week now. Meanwhile, my websites went down (internet! noooo!) and I am too busy pedaling, eating and sleeping to fix it. Since Linnea got her PRO license we had to go to Sea Otter this year, because that's where PRO s go in April. Like salmon returning to the stream from which they were born, only with fewer spawning opportunities, if the sausagefest that is the expo area was any indictator. As I'm but a lowly Cat 1, I had to race Friday with the rest of the non- PRO folks, and instead of racing the new, absurd, 5k PRO course we were on the traditional (and also absurd) 19-mile course that they've been doing for years. And we were riding 2 laps of it. 38 miles? I haven't raced that far since the Darkhorse 40 ! No, wait, I DNF'ed the Darkhorse after 15 miles... so I haven't done...

Dudes! MTB race season is back! It's April, so everybody is absurdly pumped to race the same old Hopbrook course! Time to prove, yet again, that me riding fast in a 30 minute TT doesn't mean I will ride fast in a 2 hour mass start! This time around, the race conflicted with Battenkill, so it didn't draw 400+ racers, and everyone couldn't start asking, "omg, is mountain biking BACK!?" (No. It's April. This always happens.) But we still got 20 guys in Pro/1, so I would have a bunch of dudes to chase and pass when they broke their recently-put-together bikes...unless I was one of those dudes. Actually though, since I was on last year's race bike the odds of finishing were high... much higher than, say, Linnea's odds, after she, Kevin and I spent all of Friday night cobbling together something for her to race on. (Before I forget, she DNF'ed after a lap because her trashed middle ring couldn't hang onto the brand new chain we used. Oo...