Until the Snow Ends

I never even meant to do this race.  After Hopbrook, I was all like "alrighty, let's get down to business and train well for 3 weeks in the hope of being less embarrassing at the Fat Tire Classic."  And I did!  You could tentatively call what I started doing a "block," if you were one of those people. Obviously that lasted until I realized that there was a bike race I could fit into my schedule, because playing bikes is way awesomer than training bikes. Especially when it's a mere 25 mile road race with 20 cat 3s in it.  None of this riding-in-the-pack for hours BS, this was going to be an hour of action!  Or something.  Anyway, it seemed fun.  So off I went, with Steve , RMM and geewhits as gas money.  On the way down, RMM regaled us with tales of getting Curley'ed  in a past edition of this race, and filling our heads with lies like "the break will go on the first lap, so you have to cover everything."  As you might ...

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...

Want more factual, less-seizure-prone Birkie vids?  Check out 2010  and 2011 . So, last year , I showed up to the Birkie with super-questionable fitness having barely ski raced all year.  I ended up having the best race of my life and qualifying for the elite wave in 2012, reminding me for the hundredth time that predicting and controlling one's fitness is way, way harder than it seems. The obvious next step was to ski EVEN LESS and race EVEN LESS this year.  I got back from 'cross nationals in mid-january, looked at the calendar, and realized that I had 6 weeks to the Birkie.  Five years ago, I would've said there was no hope to get 50k fitness in 40 days, but now I know that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.  Let's do this! ...and six weeks later, I was in line at the airport with 10 ski days under my belt, with Cary and Lauren, who were on similar training plans -- and we suddenly had a problem even bigger than limited time on snow. Our plane tickets were bo...

Last year's weird winter of training made for such a good result at the Birkie that the only logical progression was to get even weirder THIS winter... by getting on xc skis a grand total of four times in January.  I mean, I still have 26 days until I have to line up against people who get paid to ski race at the biggest race in North America , so I don't see how this could be a problem.  Not like my ego is fragile enough that I could already be losing sleep over getting dropped out the back of the elite wave 5k into the race, no, not at all... ANYWAY the first step to True Nordic Fitness (tm) is throwing down on Tuesday nights at Weston, for 15 minutes of PAIN on a magical mixture of SLUSH and ICE.  The daytime high was a mere 42, aka "normal Boston winter," aka "one of the colder days we've had this year," so the conditions were relatively good... wet enough to not be piles of granular sugar on top of ice, but cold enough to not be puddles of slush....

In 2010, Nationals were in Bend, and I had three great reasons not to go: 1) Bend is a plane flight away, and I hate flying with bikes and renting cars and all that crap. 2) My racing age was 29, so the only race I could do at Nats was the Elite Men's race. 3) Nationals was on the same day as THE BEST RACE IN THE WORLD . Well, wouldn't you know it, all three of these reasons were off the table for the 2011/12 season, so I made the decision waaaay back in September to drive to Nationals in Madison in January, because it would be crazy hardcore snow/ice cross and that sounded RAD. Through twitter chatter, and Meg/Steve being way too excited, I ended up heading out a week early to race the Chicago Cross Cup New Year's Resolution UCI races before Nats... giving me a four-race cx road trip in January! Awesome? The tardiness of this blog entry should probably tell you how fast I rode, but that's not to say there was nothing to talk about. CCC NYR Day 1 One thing...

I've figured out the progession, now, every year Ice Weasels gets bigger, and every year I ride slower. This year, there was almost no point to lining up -- I was on 5 hours sleep, sick, and barely ate all morning. Luckily there's more to bike racing than what place you finish in -- like the fact that this year's course was AWESOME. I really didn't care how I did, I just wanted to do some hot laps. Kevin is part badger and had dug out an entirely new back section; we had a new tree section; we had hoppable barriers; and we had as much flow as you can possibly squeeze out of the house section without killing your lap length. The flyover allowed for the figure-eight course layout, which means tons of HEY BUDDY sections. Hell yes! So much fun! Seconds before this photo I told Sally I was putting her in the tape As predicted, I didn't have any legs, so I hunted down a few (illegal) beer feeds, cornered as hard as I dared, messed with as many other...

I have never been so pleasantly surprised by a race course in my life as I was at NBX Day 1. I prerode, and it was basically the fastest, easiest cross course in the history of bikes.  As someone who needs accelerations and technical sections to be respectable in the elite race, this sent me into immediate WHINE MODE. It also sent me into find-a-file-tread mode, because if there aren't any damn corners on the course then I have no intention of having any traction. So in between whining about how it was a stupid power course and I was going to get crushed and this is lame, bike racing shouldn't have that much pedaling... I got some file treads from Matt Myette.   Which was cool. Then I spent the rest of my warmup complaining about the course anyway.  Just to open the lungs, dontcha know. The Day 1 start is the weirdest holeshot in all of cross, because we ride literally a quarter mile straightaway before the first turn.  Everyone accelerates to 28 mph...and then....