Until the Snow Ends

The Darkhorse 40 sits atop my "New England Mountain Bike Races I Care About" list alongside The Pinnacle .  The difference between The Pinnacle and Darkhorse, though, is that EVERYONE knows how rad DH40 is.  This year's race sold out in March, about 2 weeks after registration opened, capped at 400 racers.  We can't be more than a few years away from a Vermont 50 style "full in 20 minutes" registration situation here. This time around I made sure to get Christin involved, because I knew her love of DA BIG RING and DA NOT CLIMBING would mesh perfectly with DA HORSE. The beauty of non-sanctioned MTB racing is simpler categories, so for men we had:  Elite, Singlespeed, Sport, and Master.  Thus!  Fifty or more "elite" men lined up at 8:50.  The promoter was ready to rock and told us we had "three minutes," which led to the field freaking out, because apparently everyone had a friend who wasn't lined up yet!  (Start time was "9...

For reasons I have previously mentioned on video, the East Coast Hundred Miler Scene was unacceptable to me due to its usage of a horrible thing called "doubletrack" for race terrain. But, the stupid part of me (my brain) still wanted to do a hundred-miler. Combine that with some well-timed peer pressure from my brother, and I ended up at the High Cascades 100 in Bend, Oregon, on the 15th day of a MTB vacation with Christin. Some people might tell you that riding your bike for 3-4 hours a day, every day, for two weeks straight, is not a good prep for a hundred mile race. Well, those people are FUN KILLERS. We rolled out in the near-dark at 5:30 AM on pavement. Five miles of pavement! Wasn't I just crowing about all the singletrack on this race? The pavement rollout was exciting for two things. You know how mountain bikers have a rep of not knowing how to ride in a pack? And how it's 5:30 in the morning? And they have hydraulic brakes that could probably...

It used to be that I did better at Hopbrook every year, but now that I'm in the twilight of my career (was that a joke?  I'm not sure either) I seem to always find myself behind the fitness curve come April.  This year's mild winter was especially bad for that, as I spent most of March trying to get healthy and patch my ego back together after the Birkie .  Meanwhile, everyone else was out DRILLING IT.  So I figured I would just go ahead and avoid Hopbrook, and buy 3 more weeks of secret training before I had to face the Pro/1 music. BUT THEN I REMEMBERED BIKES ARE TOTALLY SWEET!  Hmm. Christin was planning on skipping Hopbrook so I was like, yo, that's cool, I don't want to go either.  But then she was like, "wanna go race Hopbrook?" and my heart did a little flip and I was like YESYESYESYESYESBIKES, so I guess I really did want to go. No amount of wanting to ride fast will make you ride fast (well, ride fast for 2 hours...), so I knew it would be b...

The 24 Hours of Great Glen is a special race for me, because it's the perfect blend of stupidawesomesilly that gets me excited any time of the year. In the last 8 years, I've raced it 6 times and crewed it once. I have also been on the second place team for two years in a row now. Which is annoying, to say the least. This year there were terrifying rumors of a super-pro-team showing up and crushing us... but sadly they turned out to be false. The alleged super-pro roster was actually so terrifying that it probably wouldn't have even been a race... but now we'll never know. ANYWAY. We were the only pro team there, so my standard prerace anxiety was focused on the incredible shame we would feel if THE PRO TEAM got beat by any other team. That's pretty much as #notpro as it gets, right? I have actually been feeling straight-up terrible since the Beverly Crit , but I was so JACKED UP to race the bikes that I almost convinced Mike to let me do the Le Mans...

That's right, baby, we run our race reports on exact;y one week delay around here.  All part of the plan to fuzz my memories of an event hard enough that I can conjure up some false memories far more exciting than what really happened. Plus, this whole living-out-of-a-suitcase thing for half of every week doesn't leave me with the ample blogging time I used to have.  Just sayin'. ANYWAYZ, the DARKHORSE is one of my only must-do summer mtb races (along with the 24 hours of Great Glen , even though I have never finished without a mechanical. Something about 40 miles of big-ring singletrack just speaks to me in a way that 50 miles of doubletrack climbing doesn't... To make things interesting/take the pressure off I did the Gran Fundo on Saturday, which was the exact same 60 miles of FUN as last year. Chill factor was high, and I finished hours behind the "lead group." So far, so good, and I was up and on the road at 5:30 AM from Northampton for th...

Hey, you know what? If you don't finish bike races, you don't have much to blog about! And lately, I have been disturbingly good at not finishing bike races. But anyway, I did stuff in July, seriously. Check it out: HRRT Freedom Fest 3 Hour Race This was the ONLY bike racing option in all of the Northeast on July 4th weekend, because apparently promoters think everyone is on vacation and not feeling racey, and would rather compete with each other on the same date than run a race on the holiday weekend. So... I went out to Schenectady with Official Lady Friend (tm) Christin, and we did a 3 hour race with a grand total of 30 starters. You might think that with only 30 humans on bikes present, I'd have a shot at being the fastest one there, but you'd be wrong -- Scott Levreault from Joe's Garage was there, and he can BRING IT (on a rigid singlespeed), much to my chagrin. The trails were fun, and super tight, and twisty, and then it started raining like t...

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...

Last year I reunited my love affair with the Pinnacle , and I've been telling everyone who asks me about MTB racing that this is THE RACE to do if you like your courses LEGIT, but in a fun way. Not LEGIT in an evil way (looking at you, Coyote Hill ). This year the promoters moved the Sport race to 9:30 AM, instead of with the expert/elite fields -- which was a good idea. Although giving them only 2 hours to finish the course before getting RUN OVER by the elites was not as good. And me getting up at 6:30 to get my soon-to-not-be-Sport carpooler (ahem) to the venue was a throwback to the old days of Cat 4 cross at 6am wakeups! Good thing bike racing is super awesome so I was bouncing off the walls at 6:29AM anyway. I need to find a way to convince myself I'm going to a bike race on WEEKDAYS. I used my extra bonus time at the race venue to HANG OUT with the Boston bike scene. And definitely not to warm up. Because warming up for a race that climbs 700 feet in the...

I tried so hard not to do this race. First I tried the simple tactic of saying "after three straight weekend of racing, I'm taking one off." Didn't work. Everyone else was going. What if I miss something? Attempt #2: I think I'll replace the (totally frozen) headset bearings on my janky Top Fuel on Thursday night. Pop the old ones out, put the new ones in, five minute job... unless you "pop" the lower bearing cartridge out by giving it a gentle tap with a screwdriver that breaks its rusted outer layer off, leaving it wedged/fused in your carbon headtube. Then you would have a problem on your hands. I thought this would be enough to keep me from racing, but I had to make a small effort to fix it on Friday...so I took it to JRA... and ended up walking out of there with a 20-lb Felt 29er "just to try for the weekend" Let's not talk about how much the price was, or how I'm totally going to end up buying it. (Sidenote: Brian M...

I think this might now be the only race I have done every single season I've raced mountain bikes. For serious, check it out: 2007 , 2008 , 2009 , 2010 . It's that good. Wait, is it good? I'm not sure any more. It's all singletrack, but it's lumpy and fresh cut and generally a mess. The FLOW is few and far between. But hey, it's a legit test of mountain biking ability (damn!) so put let's put some numbers on and ride until we're praying for death. Yeah! I got there Saturday night with my friend Christin, and right before we went out for a lap the MAN IN CHARGE, Tom Masterson, drove up and told us all about the new course. Which, of course, had been cut the day before. And didn't have bridges yet. Or had even been weedwhacked. But that's okay, cuz he still had 15 hours to finish building it. That's how they roll in Vermont. The big change was that the dirt road climb had been taken out and replaced with even more lumpy singlet...

I did this one last year and it was so awesome that I told all my MTB-owning-but-never-racing friends that this was THE RACE for them to do in 2011. Seriously, I got the "what MTB races should I check out?" question from a multitude of sources this offseason, and I told EVERYONE about THE WILLOW. ...and then they changed the course to have tons of doubletrack. Doh! But the non-doubletrack sections were still dope enough for me to forgive them. But not enough to keep me from registering my preference for the 2010 course over 2011 on the internet! ANYWAY. Twenty guys showed up to race DA BIKES in the elite class (and 440 people total!) and just like last week there was a woeful shortage of scrubs. Mike Wissell made an early bid for "scrub" status by somehow finding an off-camber on the doubletrack start and nearly crashing on it, but then he chased back onto my wheel (which was nearly the last wheel) as we hit the singletrack. And immediately... some d...

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...