Until the Snow Ends

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

I did this race last year and got my butt handed to me on 3 out of 4 stages.  But it was so fun!  I don't know why!  So I came back.  I dunno.  It's different and hard and great and beautiful and expensive and hard. Did I mention it's hard? So yeah. Stage 1:  TT Last year I got crushed in the TT, but I set a power record for 18 minutes, so it still made me feel good because 'cross season is just around the corner and I feel like setting power records on the cusp of cross season is a good thing. (I can't tell you how low this number is because you'll laugh at me) So the goal this year was to set a power record again.  And I met my goal! But, I only beat 4 out of 67 people because TT's are dumb and other people are good pedaling and being aerodynamic. The Official B2C2 General Classification Threat (tm) started 60 seconds behind me and caught me about 12 minutes in.  I did not provide a draft as I am a SPORTSMAN not a cheater (yeah L

Like most hypercompetitive amateur athletes, my first reaction to having an injury under control is to start operating like the injury never happened.  So with my IT band finally allowing me to ride 2 hours more or less unencumbered, we're healed!  Time to train ("train") for 2 weeks and then go race four crits in four days! Last year B2C2  sent a small squad of racers to the Intelligentsia Cup in Chicago, and they came back with glowing reviews, so the Cup had been on my mind as a recovery goal ever since I started having to cross races off my season back in April.  Christin has recently caught the crit bug, so when she was like "this is random, but do you want to go do this race series in Chicago I heard about?" I was like WHY YES IN FACT I DO! So we descended upon Preston's parents house with the fury of collegiate bike racers and they didn't kick us out after the first day. (Actually I was only there for the last 4 days, so maybe they did get