Until the Snow Ends

Hey.  So I bet you think I quit blogging, just like everyone else on the internet except Ryan .  And you're mostly right!  The thing is, after 7 years of doing poorly in a variety of unique ways, I've pretty much covered every angle on "so I went out and rode bikes and it didn't go so well."  And that, unfortunately, is all I've been up to since we last talked. It all started when I legitimately didn't suck  at the Fat Tire Classic.  Golly gosh, I thought, this whole more-volume riding lifestyle is working!  I might actually be fit, or something! Obviously this meant that riding even more would make me EVEN faster.  So I did.  I won't regale you with the tales of how high my volume was, because then you'll realize that "high volume" for me is the same as "normal riding week" for most people, or a "bad weather recovery week in late December" for Uri. Anyway I thought these actions might make me kind of fast at Wee...

 Another one from the "I banged this out for Team Slack" files.   Eastern Grind (Williston VT) is a cool XC mtb race so I wrote about it. Eastern Grind Race Report Ok this course rules, it's has enough climbing to whoop your ass but half of it is actually super fast flowy stuff so you think you're riding like really fast, at least until you realize that every time you see Harry he is a little further ahead so actually everyone is riding super fast.  But anyway it's good, you should have been here unless you were  @Harry Gordenstein  and  @Luke Plummer  because they WERE here. There was no pro field, just "expert open men" so all the super fast guys ended up in our category (boo) but that meant we had 24 dudes (yay!).  The start was FAST because of aforementioned pro dudes and I did a shit ton of work just to end up in... last place after 90 seconds.  I talked about how we were going unsustainably hard and the guy in front of me agreed....

The Eastern Grind was awesome.  After the first two Kenda Cups were blazing-fast, drafting pedal contests (note:  not a complaint), it rained the night before the Grind and turned an already somewhat technical course into a GNARFEST. But the weather was terrible (50 with intermittent rain) and the weather was terrible last year, too, and it was far from Boston (like 3 hours) so tons of people skipped it.  Because "people" don't always like the things I like.  Ugh.  People. The race was promoted by the Bicycle Express team, a bunch of wicked fast guys and girls from Vermont (note:  probably redundant) and they had built a special A/B line coming down from the high point of the course.  Lea Davison tweeted that it was "a legit World Cup A-line" and she knows about these things so the #hype was strong.  And then it rained, and I hadn't preridden said A-line, but I knew I had to ride the A-line because I have a reputation to uphold.  So I was...

You can tell I drank coffee before I wrote this, because I used half as many commas as I should've.  I'm not fixing it. I have a problem.  I really like the Glocester Grind.  It's rocky-rooty-technical, like get-off-your-bike-and-run-hard in places, and that's when it's NOT raining.  It rained the night before.  Holy crap this was going to be awesome!  Bike racing!! Despite a competing MTB race on the same day (do we really have to have this problem every season, guys?), we still rallied a 19-rider elite field and a disturbing lack of SCRUBS in it.  Will Crissman, Jeff Landfried and I discussed the lack of scrubs on the start line, and drew the unfortunate conclusion that anytime you can't figure out who the scrubs are, that means you're one of them. Then the race started and I never saw like, uh, half the field again.  Like I was saying. Will and I had talked about how we were going to be chill, though, and how pedaling hard to get a good...

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 it was my turn to tackle to legendary Gap Ride . After a sleepless and apprehensive night, Linnea and I were on the road at 5 AM from Boston to meet my dad in Rochester for an 8 AM departure. Thanks to the miracle of the human body, the fact that I got like 3 hours of sleep Saturday night held off on kicking my ass until Monday morning. We rolled out at 8:15 and hit the first gap, Brandon Gap. 8 miles at 4.5% sounds really easy, but of course the first 3 miles are really like 2%, so you get some nice 8/9% stuff near the top. Cresting the top at 9 miles (124 to go!) was really easy. I didn't even touch my 38x27 the whole way up. One gap down, five to go. This ride is no problem! After Brandon Gap the road heads up the valley for 10 or 15 miles, winding along Lake Dunmore and generally being quite scenic. Just before the turn to Middlebury gap, however, there's a section of Rt 7 you have to ride that's very unprotected from the wind, just open fields. On...

I started experimenting with running the bar cam in mountain bike races.  Not sure how I feel about it yet.  There's lots of action, but it requires a lot of editing to pull together, unlike cross where you can just show lap one and it's wheel-to-wheel madness.  But hey, here's some stuff!  Highlights include Dan Ward hitting a tree around 3:15,  Will vs a Rock Garden at 4:20 (heh heh) and me smashing my knee/cursing loudly at 4:40.

Hey!  Let's go ride some bikes. This spring I got elected to be on the NEBRA Board.  NEBRA is a bunch of people who donate their time to making N ew E ngland B ike R acing bett A r.    And one of my jobs as a NEBRA board member (other than sending emails... oh god so many emails) was coming up with the route for the NEBRA August Adventure , because I am a map dork who lives in the Pioneer Valley and that's where we're doing this thing. The reason we're doing a gravel adventure ride is because (1) we like riding bikes, duh and (2) we're trying to raise some money for the bett A rment  of New England cycling via grants for stuff like race motos, official training, junior development, and other stuff that makes your life as a bike racer qualitatively bettAr. wait a minute, I have to race against juniors. but motos are the only reason we could do a Greenfield Crit at all...ok yup this makes my life better THIS IS NOT WELLS AVE So what are you doing on ...

This weekend served up a fair bit of controversy in the New England mountain bike world, but it's the same old things we've been squawking about for years: why do EFTA and Root66 schedule events on the same day, and should we really race in this much mud? The former is infuriating. We had 125 people at Moody Park and 200 at Putney; the venues are 40 miles apart. Combine 'em and we could've had a 300+ rider turnout at a non-Massachusetts venue, aka a RARE OCCURRENCE. Instead we get two small races. I'd love to know why no one will run a MTB race on Saturday -- seems to work fine for road and cross. The latter? Eh, I'm still not sure. If you reschedule/cancel cuz of mud, you pretty much threw away any and all profitability you had. If you skip muddy races (as a racer), you don't get to race and the trails get trashed anyway.. and now the promoter has $30 less money to try to fix it with. So I keep racing in the mud, but I don't ride for fun...

If Ascutney was a small 3/4 race, Putney was a large one -- over 40 people were on the line, including some big names like all of Team Zanc, Rosey, and Jon Awerbuch (who is somehow still a cat 3 despite 5 Verge top 10's ). It was pretty obvious that this race was going to be a real throwdown, instead of the faux-throwdown (don't you just hate those?) like yesterday. Everyone should know the Putney course, but if you don't, the important feature ended up being the last 2 minutes of the lap -- a steady, gradually uphill grind into the wind, first on a slippery cornfield and then a dirt road, culminating in the mother of all runups, the kind that is so steep you have to fight to run instead of walk. After that, 100 yards to the finish. The headwind section meant that groups were going to form, and getting left out alone was going to very bad unless you were one of those guys whose fitness dwarfed their technical skills. The start was on a nice wide dirt road so we only went ...

While the rest of the blog-reading world was at Sucker Brook getting their cross season started, I was up at Mt Snow getting my MTB season ended by an event that's so tough, they spell classic with a K. Hard. core. The "Klassic" was a reprise of the MTB Nationals course, with a few changes. First off, the opening dirt road climb was replaced by a climb up an intermediate ski trail that put your nose on your handlebars and your heart in your mouth about 3 minutes into the race. It was so steep that guys in my class were walking it on lap *one.* Later on we skipped a woods section up by the snowmaking pond with another face-to-stem fireroad climb that was almost as steep, looser, and came at the end of nearly 20 minutes of climbing. So that didn't exactly make things easier. And the descents? My god, Mt Snow has a unique way to make trails hard -- ride the crap out of them with hardly any maintenance for years. The downhills were horribly worn out boulder and root...