Until the Snow Ends

Hey, blog, remember me? That guy who used to write stuff on you? Yeahhh. I'm back! You still love me, right? Right?? It's Gloucester week. Gloucester is staging by crossresults.com points. It's the most awesome legitimization of the last three years of my work I could ever ask for. It's also completely terrifying . There is no way, with 1600 racers, that everything will go perfectly. Someone, somewhere, will end up staging further back than they think they should be. Just as long as they don't know where I live... The awesome thing is that that's not even the craziest thing I'm pulling together this week. We're doing this little race you might have heard of next Wednesday and holy crap, it's out of control. Baker of Hearts is on the staff so I am perpetually inundated with an inbox of "enthusiasm." No, Chip, we cannot give everyone who registers a puppy. Stop asking. Seriously though, this thing would never happen wi...

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...

Race reports! Do we still do these, internet? Or do we just update our Facebook status and be done with it? God, I hope not. Anyway, Day 1 in Vermont was yet another iteration of the long-gradual-climbing course they like to run up there. It is not "real cross" IMO, but of course, it is a "bike race" and therefore one should shut up and race it. The 2-minute power section from before the start line to the top of the hill, though? Gross. Same with the climb from the barriers to the top of the BMX track, although you could at least argue that cleaning the BMX track takes skill. I remember thinking 20 seconds into the holeshot, "oh, this is going fine" right before getting bottled up dead center of the pack and having 10 guys pass me. Whoops. It was ok, though, because when we hit the first turn that required braking, two guys crashed on the inside and the crash spilled out until it was tape-to-tape, slowing a ton of people. I snuck by like a ta...

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.

It was only a matter of time. My plan of "do as much stuff as you can before you die" has finally backfired and now I have TOO MUCH STUFF TO DO. The blog is now far enough down the todo list that I can barely do it justice, but with cross season coming up I'm hoping for a resurgence starting next week. For now, let's catch up. I'm writing this from the Sun Valley airport as I prepare to miss a connection in Salt Lake City. I'm in Sun Valley because my brother is out here (I've done this before ) and I had this funny idea that a bunch of endurance rides at altitude were gonna somehow save my cross season. Am I right? Probably not, but I'm not even sure it needs saving. Talk to me after Gloucester. But let's back up. I did the Treasure Valley Rally a few weeks back, and didn't write it up. GOSH, I WONDER WHY?? TVR is the hardest mountain bike course I've raced this year, possibly ever. It's as technical as the Gloucester ...

I did not race my bike this weekend.  It was a combination of post- 24HOGG um depression and lack of appealing options .  This lead to some incredibly productive downtime, some of which even happened without the aid of caffeine.  Check it out. I made the crossresults.com team site .  Did I mention that I started a team?  I think so.  So far they are a beautiful army of misfit cyclist who heed my beck and call.  This past weekend they kicked off the season and did hilariously poorly .  I already love them.  Except for Kevin. The crossresults.com kits came in this week and they look fabulous.  One thing I forgot to mention last time I was gushing about them, these aren't the team kits so much as the website kits.  The team will be racing in skinsuits with a different but equally sexy color scheme.  If you were avoiding purchase of one of these because you didn't want to own the kit of team you don't race for... fear not....

The 24 hours of Great Glen is pretty much the highlight of my summer mountain bike season. It's not so much a race as an experience ... as most normal races don't involve days off work, night rides, light warrantees, loss of sleep before the race, loss of sleep during the race, loss of wakefulness after the race, and a total inability to get of your own way for the next 3 days. Yeah, it's Thursday and I'm just getting around to the blog. Hey. At least I'm doing it at all . So this year I finally got on a proper bikin' team , and lo and behold I have 3 teammates who ride mountain bikes fast, sometimes faster than me. A 24 hour pro team was a given, the only question was how much ass we were going to kick. Right? Well, I like uncontested victories as much as the next guy, but Adam St G must not, since he had the audacity to register a 2nd pro team. Didn't he get the memo, only one pro team allowed? We scouted their roster and it seemed like we...