Until the Snow Ends

I have been going to Green Mountain CX religiously every single year since 2008.  And I hate  it.   But it's the first UCI race of the year!  Any my love for trying not to get lapped exceed my hatred for pedaling uphill.  So away we go. This year was especially good because I got sick the week before and just barely got my bike built and tubulars glued by Saturday morning.  I felt like a sheep going to the slaughterhouse. But you know, low expectations are the key to happiness . GMCX Day 1:  If you'd done GMSR this would seem easy I drew a horrible starting spot, which was actually exactly what I wanted. (Quick aside, it's pretty cool that we had something like 30 starters in the UCI races at GMCX.  I remember back when there would be 30 guys and all you had do was not break your bike to get paid) So the race goes off and I am bottled up at the back with everyone else, but unlike guys with top-25 dreams, I don't waste any energy trying...

I am a traditional opponent of early-September cyclocross, but with my 29er frame broken there wasn't much to do except roll out to Quad Cross and eat dust. Due to an 11th-hour bike build (is there any other kind?), I didn't preregister, which was stupid because I ended up not finishing the build and just racing on last year's bike, proving that finishing the build was unnecessary and I could have saved myself $10 and about 30 start spots if I had just USED THE BIKEREG. Quad Cross Bar Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . The holeshot was 40 yards into a turn, then a turn, and then a lot more turns, so any first-minute heroics were ruled out for those of us on the back row.  Instead I tried to "stay calm" or whatever it is I would have told Christin to do, and move up when I could without getting into any crashes. This plan lasted for a solid two minutes, until we hit the dirt road on the backstretch and things opened up enough for me to get EXCITED.  And ...

I have never been as prepared for a race (or was it a "race"?) to go completely ice-world as I have this one. As someone who regularly loses sleep over race budgets, seeing this race EXIST AT ALL with 340 racers at an average entry fee of maybe  $10 each blew my mind.  Putting on a road race with a $3400 budget is basically impossible.... hell, by the time you pay for insurance, timing and portapotties for that many people, you might be already out of money. But you know, when you're so deep in the Kingdom the race course regularly has to turn away from the Canadian border, those might be your only expenses...and I'm not convinced we were actually insured.  And you know what?  It was AWESOME. The nice thing about $0-10 entries is the massive no-show rate reduced turnout to "only" a 220-rider neutral start, behind a pickup truck.  I established a position at the front well before we rolled anywhere, and missed the shenanigans you knew had to be happening ...

I'll admit it, I did some complaining on the internet about this one.  I'd like to say that it's 2013 and that's just how the world works now, but it doesn't hurt that I just put on a mountain bike race  so now I'm an expert in EVERYTHING. My chief complaint was with the distance (12 miles!) on a course that appeared to be over 50% grass.  Luckily, it turns out that the posted distance was wrong, and the race turned out to be over 15 miles.  And the half of the course that WASN'T grassy field was basically the funnest trail ever.  And it was super-punchy, and super-fast, and we were done in about an hour and fifteen minutes.  Some people might say "oh I don't want to drive that far to race seventy five minutes" and the proper response is I HOPE YOU DON'T RACE CYCLOCROSS, THEN. The whole thing was basically a super-fun cross race on mountain bikes.  Some people might not consider that a good thing, but I'll take it.  Heck, the whole ...

For the record, this was Christin's idea. After a successful High Cascades  last year, I wanted to share the joy* of riding a hundred miles on a mountain bike with her, and due to everyone I know getting married this August we couldn't go back to HC 100.  So she found  Wildnerness 101 , and that was that.  At no point, I swear, did I say "Wilderness will be fun" or "I've heard great things about Wildnerness." The nice thing about doing a hundred miler within driving distance of home is ACTUALLY KNOWING PEOPLE at the race.   The downside there, of course, is that when your two teammates (Hughes and Brian) drop you on the first climb, you KNOW WHO THEY ARE and it's annoying and makes you immediately question the wisdom of sticking to the "slow start" plan. The first climb, like every climb at Wilderness 101, is long and on gravel.  In this case, 20 minutes and 1000 vertical feet, but who's counting  Strava-ing?  The difference is th...

I have been emailing with Thom Parsons  about putting on a mountain bike race for what seems like my entire life.  Certainly for as long in my life as I can remember, which is like four or five years.  IN ANY CASE, after years of dreaming about it, we finally did it. The stumbling block was always finding a venue.  I am not a good venue finder.  In the growing list of Weasel Productions (tm), I still have never been the person who made first contact with a landowner.  I am the registration guy, the staging guy, the results guy, the volunteer guy, and the guy who sends rude emails to his co-promoters. So that's how we ended up Foxboro.  It's in Thom's backyard (sound familiar?), and the DCR lets freakin' motorbikes race there, so there was some kind of precedent for this sort of madness.  Parsons weird personal magnetism was enough to get the DCR guy's approval (but then he retired... and his replacement was equally powerless to resist) and tha...

For the six-plus years of this blog's existence, I've liked to assume that I am "bad" at bike racing and that I write about how much I "sucked" and it's "funny."  While this may be true in the grand scheme of things (don't look me for at a ProXCT anytime soon), if there's anything I've learned in the last month it's that "sucking" is not funny at all, and not something I want to write about. And that is why, when I dropped out of The Pinnacle after only a lap, with a bike that was 100% FUNCTIONAL, I did not blog about it.  Calamity is funny.  Massively unperforming your own, previously-reachable expectations, by a margin so great you wonder if you had a lung amputated?  Not funny. However, I thought the Stewart Six-Pack would be a good place to rally.  Flat, fast trails, for six hours?  While my XC results have been abysmal, my ride-all-day results have been SOLID this year.  If you need someone to be your ride bro...