Until the Snow Ends

Hey! So I turned 30 and rode bikes with some people. Then we drank alcohol and ate chips. THEN I WOKE UP BONKING. Then I raced Grafton Ponds and it didn't work at all! I tried to stay in the race for "High Cascades 100 training" but my growing level of ravenous hunger and increasing saddle sore discomfort made the training dubious at best. So I quit. Then Thom put a camera in my face. Watch more videos on Big Bikes Media & cyclingdirt The course was actually really good, especially if you had the legs to get off your damn saddle for the lumpy sections. Which of course I did not. Next year!

I signed up for the High Cascades 100 a long time ago, because bad ideas are better when you're financially invested. The winning time there last year was 8.5 hours, so I figure I will be riding over 10 hours in Bend on July 21st. Obviously, then, I needed to do the Pat's Peak 6 Hour race as preparation, to confirm my theory that racing a mountain bike for over 3 hours is horrible, and that I am going to hate everything about cycling well before the hundredth mile of High Cascades. The remarkable thing about the race was how I *never* rode very hard, and yet after 4 hours of riding NOT HARD I felt TERRIBLE. Lap one was chill, lap two was chill, lap three was chill, lap four was EXTRA CHILL and yet by lap five my whole body ached. What? Meanwhile, some totally predictable things (Cary starting faster than me, holding a threatening gap, and then breaking his bike) and totally unpredictable (Pete Smith and THE WILCOX suffering) had happened, and somehow I rode into th...

If you like maps and mountain bikes and Earl's trails , throw me a freakin' bone and VOTE FOR ME in this freakin' contest. When I saw that my friend Alex mention a " new orienteering map " for Earl's trails, I got EXCITED, because I love maps and I love Earl's trails. Like many MTB trail networks, it is somewhere between hard and impossible to find a decent map of the area, although of course "everyone" knows their way around the place. I had been steadily trying to consolidate my growing pile of GPS tracks from there into something useful, because maps excite me, and disseminating information does too. But it wasn't going very well, and anyway, having some orienteers do the hard work for you is MUCH better. So, I got Alex to send me the map, traced it in Paint.NET to distill it down to the MTB-relevant data (um, orienteering maps have a lot of information on them), and discovered that I have no idea what half of these trail na...

I went up to Coyote Hill for the Greater Vermont Fresh-Cut Singletrack National Championships this weekend.  My race experience was quite unremarkable, because I paced myself really conservatively, which is to say, went out the back in the first 60 seconds of the race. I did eventually ride back into the middle of the pack (finishing 9th/19, although 5 dudes DNF'ed) but there was not much hanging out to be had. However, on lap two, my roommate and general life nemesis Cary Fridrich was about 15 seconds up the trail when he broke his derailleur and ended his race. Afterward, he told people "I broke my bike with, like, a giant log" and they were like, "uh huh, sure you did." Luckily his faithful videographer was there to back up his claim: Also, now I know that "drunk Colin" and "mid-race Colin on 0.5x speed" are actually the same person. RABEND-IT. In totally unrelated news, my brother nominated me in this contest to win a free tri...

I am so stoked that Weeping Willow is turning into the MTB version of the Gloucester GP. We're now in year three and it SOLD! OUT! several weeks in advance, making it the only MTB race this side of the Vermont 50 to do so. That might say more about the lack of "landmark" quality MTB races we have, but in any case: the people have spoken, and the people think Willowdale is the new hotness. 29 elite dudes preregistered, and some more managed to get in with secret-race-day-even-though-the-race-is-full reg, so it was LEGIT. As such, I relegated myself to the back row, because I wanted nothing to do with legitimacy on a 85-degree, 2.5 hour race day. The race started and I got the reverse holeshot. 2 minutes into the race I started to fear I was missing something, and started freaking out trying to move up. I was somewhat stymied by the traffic situation, and kinda just bounced around like a cat on the wrong side of a door. Which I suppose is why I need to keep get...

After hitting Hopbrook on a grand total of two weeks of training (and getting my doors predictably blown off), I was STOKED to go to Fat Tire on FIVE WEEKS of training.  With a 150% increase in training volume, I knew I would be 150% faster and win the race by 20 or 30 minutes. Especially because it was forecast to rain, which meant that the ludicrously-fast-and-easy Fat Tire course might just require a little bit of bike driving this year.  And I am the only person on the planet who excels at technical courses, so yeah, 20 or 30 minute victory, easy. Fat Tire always pulls a good turnout and this year was no exception, despite the 50-degree rain.  28 guys in the Pro/1 race, and a holeshot that turned left into singletrack after 20 seconds -- so of course, I lined up at the back.  And then spent a lot of time in the first minute having a squeal-your-brakes party with everyone else who didn't start like Durrin. Eventually we strung out and started going fast, ...

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 ...