Until the Snow Ends

11:58 am:  SO HYPED This was it, the final year of the 24 Hours of Great Glen.  I remember my dad doing this race the first time it happened, when I was 14, in 1996.  There were 22 teams.  There was a hurricane.  The stopped racing in the middle of the night because the camping area was flooding. How they decided to run the event for a second year after THAT, I will never know. When I heard that The Greatest Mountain Bike Event Of All Time was ending, my first reaction was "hmm, maybe I should promote a 24 hour race," and then I started thinking about it and OH MY GOD is that an obscene amount of work.  I got promoter anxiety just THINKING about the number of moving parts that go into a well-produced 24 hour race.  It makes every race I have ever put on look like child's play. So, Great Glen folks, thanks for sacrificing your sanity and stress levels for two decades.  You've given thousands of mountain bikers a uniquely awesome e...

This is a hard post to write because every time I go to embed the highlight video I end up watching it. It makes our race look really good. Thom (with a cameo from Colt) did amazing work. Did you watch it yet? It will get you way more stoked than this blog post. Do it now! Anyway.  If I start writing some words the video will scroll up in the blogger box and then I'll stop looking at the thumbnail of Tom Sampson shredding and I can probably focus. Words. Words, Colin. Okay. As is standard  for a Weasel Productions, LLC* event, we had to change the venue well after registration was open.  There were some DCR shenanigans at Foxboro, and we've been kind of building a relationship with the Diamond Hill people for a while now, so instead of trying to beg/bribe/steal our way back into the DCR's good graces we decided to check in with the Town of Cumberland, and just like last December they were totally easy to work with and BOOM, race saved.  We did it w...

This past weekend turned out to be the great New England Bikeschedulepocalypse with no less than six opportunities on Sunday to pay someone money in exchange for a curated cycling experience. Purgatory Road Race , Sutton, MA. Domnarski Farm , USAC MTB, Ware MA. The Pinnacle , EFTA MTB, Newport, NH. Raid Rockingham , Gravel Grinder, Rockingham NH. Bearscat 50 , MTB, the most northern point in New Jersey. Wilmington-Whiteface 100k , MTB, some silly doubletrack long distance MTB race that people go to because it's a Leadville qualifier, which is silly because Leadville is also a silly doubletrack race, and now it's also a completely sold-out for-profit enterprise that exists to make money off people who measure their experiences by name recognition instead of event quality, and yeah I probably should have stopped a few sentences ago, but wait this is just one giant run-on sentence so yeah I have a pretty cynical view of Leadville, maybe I'm wrong. Also one of these ra...

I haven't written anything here in three months, which is what happens when you're starting your 10th (yeah, 10!) season of bike racing AND you get injured in the offseason.  I don't want to really get into it, but it's just say that my decision to ride through knee pain for four hours on one day (I was on a vacation!) earned me 10 weeks completely on the sidelines.  It was a very bad trade.  Don't be like me.  It also meant I did nothing worth writing about. But here we are, I've been back on the bike for eight weeks now and it's time for the yearly hundred miler!  This time around it was "only" a ten hour drive from home, which meant a whole bunch of my hundred-miler-virgin friends were coming.  Most notably, we got Pete Bradshaw to come out of retirement for it.  It was his eighth ride of the year.  He finished in ten hours.  He's a bad man. But hey, let's talk about meeeee and my experience!  The Mohican course is front-loaded w...

Yesterday's post  touched very briefly on a subject that many New Englanders have the luxury of ignoring:  USA Cycling's 2015 change to cyclocross nationals qualification criteria. As of 2015, to race the elite race at nationals you needed either (1) at least one UCI point or (2) to be in the top 90 of the ProCX calendar.  The ProCX calendar is "all the UCI races in the USA" but with points going deeper than 10 (I think 20 or 25). But either way, if you didn't go to UCI races, you didn't race nationals.  Period.  And going to UCI races is a lot easier in the northeast than anywhere else in the country: There's so many UCI races within 90 minutes of Boston (10), you can't even see them all on the map! Meanwhile, if you were ANYWHERE on the west coast, you get exactly two qualification chances:  CXLA or Waves for Water, and those could both be a pretty epic drive for you.  (If you're fast enough to get points at CrossVegas, you...

You know it's gonna be a nerdy post when the title is that dense. I've spent the last month trying to pretend that I'm not delaying recovery from this IT band injury by cross-country skiing on the weekends, but it's time to face the facts, if it hurts I shouldn't be doing it, period.  So this weekend instead of exercise I'm looking at databases!  Wheeeee! Paul Boudreau emailed me about two months ago, asking for some information on how a UCI 'cross race going from a C2 to a C1 affects the quality of the field.  Obviously it was a tough enough question that I ignored him for a good long while, but I finally got going on it yesterday, and here's the results. For those not in the know, there are two tiers of UCI permit that a cyclocross race can have:  C2 or C1  (or World Cup, but those don't exist stateside... yet).  The practical differences between the two are in the prize list and UCI points awarded:  -- a C2 pays the men a total of  €15...

Best of Chainstay Cam: 2014 from colin reuter on Vimeo . I had done a best-of video twice before (see Best of Seat Cam 2009 and Best of Seat Cam 2008 ), back when I was riding around with a Flip Mino jury-rigged to my bike.  A lot has changed since then, as Flip went out of business and every yahoo in the world has a GoPro now.  The general novelty of "it's a camera!  on a bike!" is no longer all you need to capture the cycling world's attention. (Seriously look at how terrible this video I made six years ago is, and it went viral anyway) Anyway, editing 20 hours of race footage into a few minutes is a lot of work, and trying to make it look good enough you're proud of it is even more work, which is probably why I hadn't done this in five years.  But now that it's done I'm like, "I should do that every year."  So maybe I will! The music is " Wolfmother - Woman (MSTRKRFT Remix) ."  Searching the internet for ...