Until the Snow Ends

 It's been a long time since I wrote anything here about bike racing, but I had a really fun time racing my bike up in Vermont this weekend and I wrote up a pretty wordy account of it on B2C2 Slack.  Figured I'd archive it here in case anyone still reads blogs and/or ever uses Google to find out if this race is awesome (it is). -------------------- So I showed up the night before at Harry's dope campsite at Smuggler's Notch pretty hungry.  No worries though because I can just eat one of my clif bars before I go to sleep right?  Haha wait, I go to hit the Mint Clif Bar and Harry is like "aren't those caffeinated??" OOPS.  So we got to choose between sleep and calories and we chose sleep.  But I woke up starving, ate an absurd amount of breakfast, ate another clif bar before the race, ate all 4 gels in my pockets during the race, and still was barely not bonking by the end of it. Anyway the race started with a silly paved prologue lap that did absolutely not

[This isn't really a blog post so much as me entertaining myself with an honest marketing pitch for a product I believe is ridiculously and unsustainably underpriced] So it's been 8 months since Outside bought BikeReg and the rest of the world and I've basically spent my entire time since then working on I N T E G R A T I O N S which has been a long and sometimes annoying journey because gluing together formerly disparate systems is never as simple as it seems like it should be. However, last week we were finally able to launch the Outside+ member benefits on BikeReg, and this week there's a sale on Outside+ membership, so I'm gonna give you a sales pitch I actually believe in (not because they put me up to it) because it's honestly stupid how good the deal is right now. You pay: $50 You get: $30 off your next entry on BikeReg $30 in free service fees in the next year on BikeReg Trailforks premium ($35/year value) Gaia Premium ($40/year I think? i dunno) Two bo

Boy, what a great reason to write my first blog post in 8 months. I have been traveling in Spain and just got back to America (current status:  self-quarantined for 14 days and/or forever) as we grapple with the reality of what is happening, and more importantly, what is going to happen.  Being in Recently In Europe (tm) and Extremely Online (tm), I've realized that my awareness of the coming impact of COVID-19 is different than a lot of Americans, and this morning while not-sleeping due to jet lag I realized that the people I needed to share this with the most were my parents. Since then I've showed it to a few friends who were also in the position of worrying that their boomer-generation parents have yet to realize how acute the risk is to them, and someone joked that this is how I get back into blogging.  SO HERE YOU GO, JOHNNY. Please feel free to send this to your older loved ones who you suspect are dangerously behind the information curve.  You might want to take o

So, I haven't blogged in fifteen months, because like I said last time , after 12 years in the game I'm pretty much out of novel experiences in cycling.  But good news!  We had a NOVEL EXPERIENCE this past weekend! The B2C2 squad was dialed  at the Lime Rock GP, we had our best rider up the road in a 3-man break, and I was moving up on the last lap with our best sprinter in tow, so we were totally winning  the field sprint.  Then I was on the ground with a thru axle skewer in my leg.  Wait, what? Here are the actual riding actions that led to the crash . So as this guy in front of me goes down, I have nowhere to go but to bail off my bike and land on his, with my knee folded against his front fork.  Imagine if you were trail running and suddenly tripped on a tall rock, and you just fell onto the ground knee-first.  That's what happened.  Except that my knee hit his fork, and his fork had a very pointy thru axle lever at the end of it, and I put all my weight into the

I get asked a few times a year about registration trends, but people mostly just want to see "that graph that shows everyone registers at the last minute."  Instead of digging up the powerpoint it was in and forwarding it to someone, I'm posting it HERE so I can never have to search for that file again. Of the registrations that are received in the final month leading up to an event: 66% come in the final week that reg is open. 48% come in the final 3 days that reg is open. 25% come in the final day that reg is open.

After twelve years of bike racing, it's increasingly rare that I run into an experience that's novel enough I feel compelled to write about it (what's up, blog that hasn't been touched in six months!).  But, much to my surprise, fresh amateur bike racing experiences still DO exist in my life!  And I had one this weekend. I headed down to the UConn Mansfield Madness criterium with no less than five teammates in the Men's 3/4 race, which was already a pretty fresh experience, since usually the B2C2 road squad can be counted on one hand with enough extra fingers to hold a wine glass (except that one time !).  As is traditional, we had already gotten our money's worth via several hours of circular prerace discussion about RACE TACTICS by the time the whistle blew, even though THE TACTICS basically boiled down to "get in a break with Matt Shaffer." Shaffer is one of those guys who is briefly passing through the cat 3 field on his way to cat 1.  He's