Until the Snow Ends

We're officially on lap three of my post-collegiate mountain bike race career now, in that this past weekend's Fat Tire Classic was the first race I've done twice before . Three seasons of this nonsense means I'm probably "experienced" enough that any future gains in speed will be fitness-related, and I can't count on the rookie learning curve making me faster each week. Stupid mental errors are definitely not going to happen anymore. Definintely. Of course the first race I hit three times is one of my least favorites, the Fat Tire Classic is a cross race masquerading as a mountain bike race, except each year it gets a little more technical. In fact at this point it's now a mountain bike pretending to be a cross race that's masquerading as a mountain bike race, which is more layers of indirection than I can handle. I read Thom's squawking about running his Bontrager XR1's for the course and the "huge advantage" they would br

The hubub of Battenkill was enough to drown out a small piece of big news -- Tyler Hamilton's retirement from cycling due to a second positive doping test. The rumors that he tested positive at or before ToC turned out to be true after all, and the immediate reaction was exactly what you'd expect: what an asshole. Of course, it's more complicated than that . This time around, he admitted his guilt and claimed the banned steriod (DHEA) he tested positive for came from his anti-depression medication, that he knowingly took this winter. In his words: "What I did was wrong and yes, I did know it [DHEA] was on the list of banned substances. I also knew that USADA could have shown up any day and at any time to test me. But, I was going through a very rough moment and I was desperate. I heard about it and I thought I would try it out as an act of desperation" Backing up his story is this quote from cyclingnews : "There is no scientific evidence or basis for t

If you can watch this end-to-end without swearing out loud, you're a better man than I. Update : This one is also ridiculous.

Updated: Added two more . Updated: And another two more . Updated: Added six more, albeit at one url So, I really want to RACE MORE BIKES. So bad I started poking around the internet to see if there were any road races (!!) that I could do next Sunday. Luckily, the only one I found was at Myles Standish State Forest (but moved to the Charge Pond training series circuit), which sounded boring enough to dissuade me from registering. Faced with two whole weeks of emptiness looming, I did the next best thing to planning future races -- rehashing past races. Using the internet, because that's what it's there for. I'll assume that you're here for the same reason, so you might actually appreciate wading into the upcoming sea of links. Everyone on the planet writes a blog now (and I thought I was late to the bandwagon back in '07!) so there's tons of Hopbrook race reports out there, which is pretty sweet, because I don't remember having much post-MTB-race rea

The first real XC mountain bike race of the year has some kind of stupid allure that gets everyone pumped up, so pumped up that they can't even think straight, certainly not straight enough to realize they're about to race a frigid mudfest. Somewhere around 400 people showed up the the Root 66 series opener down at Hopbrook, and all of them left with a bag of destroyed clothes and a near case of hypothermia. It didn't start raining until we parked the car; then it didn't stop until we started driving home. But hey, it's April, LET'S RACE BIKES!! The course was the same as last year, bit of pavement, lots of doubletrack/1.5 track jeep road, with a fair number of short singletrack sections connecting it all. As all of New England racing was brimming with enthusiasm, the 19-29 Expert class drew nearly 20 guys, starting behind a 25-rider pro field led by your friendly local road pro . There were over twenty guys in the 40+ race, including most of the A Master

You can tell it's been too long since I raced (21 days) because I made another website just so I'd have something to write about here, aside what I had for breakfast (coffee, souls) of course, because who doesn't love a good blog entry about oatmeal? Obviously, with three weeks off from the pack-up-and-leave routine and several months off from the this-is-what-I-need-to-bring-for-a-bike-race drill, things were bound to be a little rough. I successfully conjured up a race-able bike (my brake caliper didn't fall off until afterward, and I didn't flat, unlike about... 10% of the field) and a kit marginally related to my new team (IBC Elite MTB Team, it's like the old team except I have to ride faster or they kick me off), everything was going so well until I made the mistake of reaching into my car for my cell phone, with my clothing bag on my shoulder. We were taking Thom 's car, not mine, and I had to go back in to get directions, but it didn't matter -

So I was like "hey, the problem with my life is that I don't have enough websites to worry about." And then Ryan was all like, "Hey, you should make a roadresults website." And I was like, "dude, I don't even race on the road, except for that one time we don't talk about." And he was like, "yeah, BUT THINK OF THE BABES ." So I was like " OH CRAP! BABES! " and then we made road-results.com . It turns out that by "babes" he meant "masters cyclists," but in his defense, you can barely tell the difference on the internet. [If you like made-up stats then you'll love the "off the back," "off the front," "field sprint wins," "teammate wins" stuff we did. There's more team-based stuff in the works, so soon, McKittrick will rate us favorably]