Until the Snow Ends

The last post contained one huge error -- I didn't mention my choice host housing courtesy of Day 1 B Men's winner and all around nice guy Brian L . Yeah, that's right, I'm calling it host housing because it's a lot more pro than "staying with a friend." We had a nice floor spot on a thick carpet, in a room with its own thermostat . You might think I'm joking, but that's the perfect set up for me to get some damn sleep. Temperature control trumps bed any day. Rested and refreshed we headed back for day two, which was a whopping 8 degrees warmer than day one. The course was the same except for one added runup and the whole thing was run backwards -- I gotta to say, this was a great way to make a course feel totally different with minimal work. The new course had anywhere from 2-4 dismounts depending on how well you could crank super-steep uphills, so it was more "crossy" (day 1 had but one dismount) and also more painful. By the l...

I pretended the whole race the people cheering for Colin were yelling at me.

You can only count on three things in life: death, taxes, and the Canton Cup being windy. At least this year it was warm and windy. Instead of hypothermia, I finished the race with a pounding headache. Said headache was temporarily improved by drinking the only liquid available at the finish...beer. Said headache has returned, as I type this. I am generally not super-excited about Canton, what with the mile of pavement and all, but this edition of Canton had me STOKED because I was running dual Flip cams for the first time. That's right, nearly a pound of camera was attached to my bike, thanks to man hands Jerry . With both forward and rear views, I was sure to capture at least one amusing incident. Two Cameras! Sore back! [ uri ] I got to the race four hours early (IBC co-promotes it, so I was volunteering) and of course, with that kind of buffer I was bound to be the last guy to the start line. I squeezed in ahead of Thom "hipster costume" Parsons on the thi...

Dammit! The Original

After Night Weasels I was a wreck. We shot for the moon and pretty much made it, but being a first-time thing it was way stressful. Chip's blog entry about dropping out the Cat 3 race to do Cat 4 awards is a good example of how strung out we were. When I went to bed at 2am that night, I made a rare good decision: I was skipping Providence Day 1, which was just over 48 hours away. I also decided not to register for Providence Day 2 until the day of the race, just in case my legs continued to be MIA on Sunday. This was of course stupid, because after spending all of Saturday AT THE RACES my brain was 110% into racing Sunday, legs or no. So I had a back row start, but oooh boy was I excited. I did the ole "back up 10 extra feet" and hit it with a rolling start trick, and it worked pretty well. A surprisingly number of guys sat down after 10 seconds, so I also went ripping past them. It was actually a bit too good, because I got into the thick of traffic by th...

DAMN. IT. The history .