Until the Snow Ends

I started experimenting with running the bar cam in mountain bike races.  Not sure how I feel about it yet.  There's lots of action, but it requires a lot of editing to pull together, unlike cross where you can just show lap one and it's wheel-to-wheel madness.  But hey, here's some stuff!  Highlights include Dan Ward hitting a tree around 3:15,  Will vs a Rock Garden at 4:20 (heh heh) and me smashing my knee/cursing loudly at 4:40.

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...

Note:  this is the same report I posted on the Back Bay Team Blog , except with 2 pictures added.  When I do road stuff with the team I tend to post there first.  So you should put that in your RSS feed. One of my favorite things about road racing is how much time everyone spends talking about team tactics, just to have them all go directly out the window as soon as the race starts. Take, for example, my internet friend Mr Steve Hopengarten , who went on a mountain bike ride with me a week ago and told me all about how Green Line Velo was going to be all over the Blue Hills Cat 3 field, and how victory was inevitable. After the ride, this trash talk continued onto the internet.   @shopengarten had already made it clear that he was not personally going to win the race , but one of his teammates surely would .  And since cycling is a team sport, that would in turn make him a better human than I, regardless of our own personal placings. In response to thi...

I started my mountain bike season a good 3-4 weeks later than usual this year, for reasons that I no longer remember. I was lax as usual about getting on the trainer in March and ended with about 15 hours total on the bike until recently -- so then I crash-trained a 15-hour week ending with Paris-Ancaster . Since I passed 1200 people in the race, clearly I must be in shape. Clearly. But then I had to actually race my "peers" down at Massasoit, and the truth came out. As you might've noticed it was 40 and raining (or snowing, depending on where in Massachusetts you were) on Saturday. A mountain bike race was actually the only way I was going to get any training in whatsoever, because you can't possibly ride for fun in that weather, and racing on the road would be insane (right, Quabbin participants??). So it's all good. Bike racing!!! Due to the pouring rain at the start, we had a no-warmup truce going and thus everyone was equally stone cold when the w...

This looks exactly how it felt.

It's pretty well established that I can't say no to a goodbad idea, so when Myerspace asked me if I wanted to make a 9-hour drive to Hamilton, Ontario for a 60k mtb/cross bike race it was really just a formality.  GET IN THE VAN.  Dave Chiu joined me as the other half of "Adam's entourage" and we headed west at 85 mph to take on 1500 Canadians in the legendary Paris to Ancaster bike race. Let me skip all the setup and take you right to the part where my day got interesting. Two minutes to the start.  I'm third row out of 500 people in wave 1.  It's 39 degrees out with wind gusting to 40mph.   I have carbon tubulars.  I'm so excited I can't even tell how cold I am.  I do the typical, neurotic pre-race air pressure check and HOLY CRAP MY FRONT TIRE IS SOFT. I must've picked up a thorn on the warmup.  Did I mention I'm on a tubular, so I can't just put a tube in?  It's going to be ok though, Adam has spare wheels in the car.  ...