Until the Snow Ends

This looks exactly how it felt.

I am not cool enough to go to Vegas, but Linnea is. I gave her the camera, with instructions to generate me some non-embarrassing blog content, since all I have is videos of me getting dropped by Cary. This is her contribution: Cross Vegas Elite Women Lap 1 from colin reuter on Vimeo . I stayed up until 1:30 AM watching the live/broken video feed from cyclingdirt . One of the highlights was her coming up over the barriers, getting cheered on by Richard Fries, and then botching a remount with the camera focused on her. I asked about it and got this response: "I was like, "oh god there's a crazy person on the wrong side of the barriers" and got distracted." In case you forgot, Linnea rides for Embrocation Cycling Journal , which is a true cycling brand, not like my thing , which is mainly a website with a server that catches fire on Mondays. I will go fight a fire now, enjoy the video. No, I don't know where you're staging at Gloucester yet...

Not a typo. A "Camn" is just a cam that looks damnnnnn good. Green Mountain Cyclocross Day 2 Bar Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . Lap highlights: * Josh Lehmann arms hitting my brake hoods as he tries to avoid the scorer's table in the start * A Keough crashing on the down/up and trying to go upstream with his bike to get out of the fray * Greg Whitney getting cleaned out by an unknown Canadian on a 180 * Riding the rideup in traffic * Slamming the door on someone (Matt Green maybe?) who tried to dive bomb me on the descent after the rideup.

While I was off promoting a silly race, Linnea went out west to kick ass and take names in a very non-silly race. I sent my bar cam along so I could vicariously experience her race. It ended up being a total, catastrophic debacle -- broke her skinsuit zipper before the start, missed her callup trying to fix it, bad start, and then, just when she put it together enough to start moving up -- BAM, rolled tubular FAR from the pit. Game over. It sucked a lot, but there are two important things to remember here: 1) it was her first of many elite nationals. She is so pissed now that she will crush everyone next season, me included. 2) AT LEAST SHE GOT SOME CAM FOOTAGE! Priorities, people! Enjoy:

NBX GP of Cross Day 2 Bar Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . I have a dream of getting around to the race report, but the weasel consumes all this week.

Baystate Cyclocross Day 1 Bar Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . The only casualty from putting $10k of bikes on Cary's trunk and driving 70mph into a 40mph headwind was that I lost the nut that locks my rear camera in place. So no picture-in-picture this weekend. Adam Snyder lamented the lack of seat cam when he lined up behind me, but then he rode two laps directly in front of me to get plenty of camera time. He rode the horse jump on camera twice, and it's so smooth/subtle you can barely see it if you don't know to look for it. Nice. I also accidentally left some blank titles in the video, because iMovie and I had some philosophical differences about how user interfaces should work (Hint: two mouse buttons). Yeah, that's it. But that's another discussion, for another blog...

Don't tell anyone, but I'm going to this party purely to see what Dave does when he's not beating me on a bike... cuz, you know, I've never seen that before. I think I finally maxed out the internet in my life. I've had a half-edited picture-in-picture Northampton video sitting here for a week now. I didn't get around to seat-camming Mercer Day 2 until Thursday night because I was busy with results/shirts/blogs/fantasy nordic. This is not a "pity me and my million web projects" blog post... I just want you to understand. I wanted to make videos, really I did. Anyway. This one is pretty nice visually. No commentary this time around, but it's got two classic techno tracks, a great crash (9:00), high quality, and picture-in-picture. Fullscreen it for the full experience... maybe not if you're watching at work. I had to use IMovie for this one to do the P-in-P, and I gotta say, Apple tries really hard to make stuff simple and intuitive in ...

Sadly I've had a ton of issues editing video from my rear cam (it's HD, MP4, Widescreen) so I gave up on picture-in-picture for this week. I was able to render it but it has no sound; anyway, I'll put it on vimeo in a bit, and you can play them at the same time in two broswers or something. The rear footage wasn't too good, anyway. I tried to make it up to you with a commentary-laden video of lap one. Canton Cup Lap 1 from colin reuter on Vimeo . Canton Cup Seat Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . If you sync these up it might be pretty cool. The seat cam starts about a second before the bar cam, so hit play on it first. Final note: Put the seat cam on the HD setting, and watch at the 1 min mark. Look at Wilcox's Edge wheels spinning. IT'S BEAUTIFUL!!

Jerry has been doing good work up in his crazy Vermont enclave. As the seatcam's #1 fanboy he took it upon himself to fashion a proper handlebar mount to increase the footage that can be captured. I picked up a second flip cam with the hopes of being the king of dual-cam dorks, but it was too muddy to actually run the rear one. Here we have lap one, in all its jerkiness. The camera mount is rock solid, make no mistake, but when you're riding in 4 inches of quagmire you tend to make a lot and handlebar movement. So the camera is all over the place, especially on the gnarly downhill that half the field crashed on. Downeast Cyclocross Day 2 Lap 1 from colin reuter on Vimeo . When you're done watching this, you should really check out Kirt Fitzpatrick's bar cam from the same day, since he was leading the race and whatnot. He's using a GoPro wideangle camera, which does an amazing job of reducing the bar shaking with the angle. Plus the fisheye makes him look...

Mansfield Hollow 1/2/3 Lap 1-2 from colin reuter on Vimeo . With Linnea out of town bagging UCI points in Toronto, and no Verge results duties, I had more time than usual on Sunday night. So I put together a seat cam with music and commentary. I'd like to think it's better than the raw ones, although it sure took a lot longer. There's also some bonus footage from me stacking it really hard on the barriers, and lapping Gewilli . Clip out fail from colin reuter on Vimeo .

Sometimes, being a bike racing superfan is a good thing. For example, I don't really burn out, even though I race for 11.5 months of the year, and I can entertain myself pretty much indefinitely at any race venue just because... dude, bikes. But sometimes being a superfan can burn you. It's a long story, but I ended up going down to Providence at stupid o'clock with Chip even though my race wasn't until 3 pm. I was kitted up and riding the course at 9:15, while TJ and everyone else who was going to beat beat me were probably still lying in bed. What can I say, I was at a bike race, I was excited! I got to show Chip the "pro pin" (I learned it from Josh Jamner) and a host of other "pro" tricks. I think I have a future in coaching masters on race day details. Common sense masquerading as coaching! I could totally do this. Actually, is that any different from any other coaching? I chased Chip around the course during his race telling him he lo...

Monday morning means seat cams ! Even if you never watch these, you should watch the first 30 seconds of this one. Providence Day 2 Seat Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . Bonus humor at 12:00 when Manny sees the lap cards. "SIX?!" My thoughts exactly. Pete Rubijono and Manny Goguen are the main protagonists of this one. Pete Smith makes an appearance at the end.

Two more laps with the seat cam. Corey Lowe, Wayne Bray, Aroussen Laflamme and Todd Wheelden are the main protagonists on our merry quest not to get lapped. I decided to add some pithy commentary to a few portions of the video... mainly making excuses for why I'm off the bike and blaming other people. It feels good, you should try it! Gloucester Day 2 Lap 2/3 Seat Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo .

Way too busy to write anything about another incredible weekend of cross, but I do have some seat cam up: GP Gloucester Day 2 Lap 1 Seat Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . More to come.

Catamount Cyclocross Day 1 Lap 1 from colin reuter on Vimeo . Day 1 I staged crazy-far up the grid. So far up I was in front of Justin Lindine for a few seconds, check it out! Anyway, this is the final run of the older, shakier seat cam. If you're desperate for footage on a Friday (or Monday), it oughta do the trick.

Alrighty, so we're doing these in reverse chronological order because I have much less to say about the second race, but much more awesome seat cam footage ready to go, thanks to Jerry's ability to bang out workshopy stuff the way I bang out websites. The new extra-steady seat cam is much improved. Check it out! All credit goes to Jerry, I just whined about my "cross gut" while he welded stuff. Catamount Cyclocross Day 2 Lap 1 from colin reuter on Vimeo . As for the actual race, I had high hopes for slick carnage while listening to the rain overnight, but the course was disappointingly tacky by the time Elite Men hit the course at 3pm. The corners were kind of tricky but the defining feature was straight, bumpy false-flat climbs. Last year I complained about this and then went out and got 2nd place anyway. Yeah, well, this year I have a UCI License, and thus I'm back to whining about power sections, and unlike last year it's for good reason. I was loo...

Cross season is over! Here's my attempt at getting the holeshot on the rest of the blogosphere, in terms of season retrospectives. Best of Seat Cam Edit 3 from colin reuter on Vimeo . Music: Justice - Genesis

After a brutal day of running through deep mud at 60 degree temps, mother nature decided to up the ante for day 2. Post-race, a line of severe thunderstorms came through, re-saturating the course and destroying what little course tape hadn't already been ridden through. And then the temperature dropped twenty degrees. Sunday morning's temperature hovered around 45, with wind gusting to 30 mph -- the most significant change to the course conditions was that warm, sloppy mud had been replaced by cold, sloppy mud. The course was effectively the same, except it had been shortened further, leaving "only" four length running sections. Actually, if you ran down the hills (which was becoming more and more popular), you could join some of the running sections together... so maybe it only had two running sections! Yay! As you might imagine my motivation and core temperature were pretty low, and based on the number of people preriding (zero) I'd say my feelings were rep...

I actually can't put up the middle of the race (lap 3-5) until next week because I hit the vimeo upload limit. Whoops. Northampton Seat Cam 2/3 Men Laps 1-3 from colin reuter on Vimeo . Lap 3 contains my awesome barrier pirouette that Richard Fries severely understated as a "bobble." What happened is that I flipped the bike out to the side and hooked the front wheel on the wrong side of a stake, and had to spin 360 degrees while running to get it out. Northampton Cyclocross 2/3 Men Laps 6&7 from colin reuter on Vimeo . Lap 6 has Pat Goguen's barrier crash and Jon Bernhard's derailleur explosion (guess I was wrong about that breaking up the group!), Lap 7 has Ryan Rumsey's barrier crash and the final sprint, complete with me being a drama queen afterward. Both barrier crashes only have the audio and aftermath visible. Race report revision: I watched the full video and the group splintered when a Verge guy (Sean Mannion I think?) had to put a foot do...

The seat cam jinx continues. I'll elaborate later, but other than a taco'ed front tubular (it really sucks to be my mechanic ) everyone and everything was ok. MRC Cross Race Seat Cam -- Crashing Out from colin reuter on Vimeo .