Until the Snow Ends

Best of Chainstay Cam: 2014 from colin reuter on Vimeo . I had done a best-of video twice before (see Best of Seat Cam 2009 and Best of Seat Cam 2008 ), back when I was riding around with a Flip Mino jury-rigged to my bike.  A lot has changed since then, as Flip went out of business and every yahoo in the world has a GoPro now.  The general novelty of "it's a camera!  on a bike!" is no longer all you need to capture the cycling world's attention. (Seriously look at how terrible this video I made six years ago is, and it went viral anyway) Anyway, editing 20 hours of race footage into a few minutes is a lot of work, and trying to make it look good enough you're proud of it is even more work, which is probably why I hadn't done this in five years.  But now that it's done I'm like, "I should do that every year."  So maybe I will! The music is " Wolfmother - Woman (MSTRKRFT Remix) ."  Searching the internet for ...

Well, THAT was a pretty viral 24 hours. I want to address, correct, and elaborate on a few things that have come to light since my piece on how the Junior Girls were treated as US Nationals  was posted yesterday. First, I've talked to Pete Webber, who is on the USAC Cross Commission, and worked on the course at Nationals.  Pete also coaches a large number of juniors, both male and female, in Boulder.  From my conversation with him, it was clear to me that Pete absolutely wants the best experience for juniors of both genders in cyclocross, and has put more work into that almost anyone around here, including myself. Pete wanted to outline a few points in USAC's defense for the events on Monday -- 1) Because the course had reached ~15 minute lap times for junior girls, it makes getting race distances correct very difficult.  Ordinarily there are "shortcut" options in the course that can be used to affect lap length, but these were off the table Monday because th...

Note:  if you're a USA Cycling representative or Austin 2015 representative, and want to add a comment, rebuttal, fact, or perspective to this discussion, feel free to email me at colin.reuter@gmail.com and I'll post it here verbatim.  I fully accept that I wasn't there and don't know every issue that may have contributed to the decisions that were made.  There may be an explanation for these events that I am not aware of, and if so, I would love to hear it. Important Facts Update and Hyperbole Correction - The Junior Girls 15-16 race was supposed to be 30 minutes long, so the 7 girls who made it 2 laps were not "pulled" from the race, they were removed from the course after the finished their race.  Without firsthand testimony it's impossible to know how clear they were on their race duration being 2 laps shorter than the boys race happening simultaneously -- based on Turner Ramsey's quote to Cyclocross Magazine, it was certainly not a straightforwa...

In 2008 I put on my first bike race and talked about how much more work it was than I thought and how it was awesome . In 2009 I wrote about how I thought the second year would be easier but it wasn't . In 2010, we added a flyover, I lost the numbers, it got bigger, and it was even more work . In 2011 we built a bunch of new sections and I was so exhausted it " almost wasn't worth lining up ." In 2012 we bought a flyover, spent a whole day cutting a new trail, and dropped USAC sanctioning.   I was so tired I got lapped in the race . In 2013, we LOST THE VENUE 3 weeks before the race and basically all of New England helped me put a race together.  I was so cracked by race day, I didn't even race . If programmers are good at pattern recognition, then how come I didn't see 2014 coming? We set a new bar for insanity that I hope I will finally fail to clear in 2015:  with less than 48 hours until the start of the event, we lost the venue. A midwee...

Look at this, three blog posts in a week when I should instead be planning a bike race!  It's like 2009 over here! After Tuesday's post about 2014 UCI Race Lengths , and the conclusion "men's races have gotten noticeably longer even though the rules haven't changed," I was rightfully called out for not using 2013 race lengths as a control group. So, I started digging up that data, which got Matt interested again, which led to Matt making a really nice spreadsheet summarizing everything. Here is the "real" 2014 data, which is a bit different than what was tweeted.  The initial data came from "the UCI calendar as far as we knew it" and this data comes from "the UCI results that were reported to the UCI."   The women's race has been sub-40 five  times in 35 events (14%) and the men's race has been sub-60 seven times (20%). If we assume a women's race with a winning time of 39:XX is actually close enoug...

Baystate Cyclocross Day 1 Day 1 was as good as it gets for cyclocross.  High of 32, sun melting the snow, then the sun setting and elites racing on a freezing course that was changing every lap.  The ruts had been pliable during preride became icy channels of bike-eating death.  It was glorious. The video is quite good looking, in my opinion, you should watch it. The one time I tried to draft someone on a non-paved surface was also the one time I got eaten by a rut I didn't see and crashed.  On my way to the ground, a dude who was riding next to me and probably thought I was going to keep riding in a straight line plowed his front wheel into my bars, which snapped most of my brake lever off and sent him flying over the bars. Somehow my bike still shifted and sort of braked, even missing most of the brake lever, so we were still in business. Riding hard was a good way to crash while not actually going faster, so I focused on riding smooth and felt like th...

At Day 1 of Baystate Cyclocross last weekend, the elite women raced for only four laps, with the winner clocking a time of 34:47 (riding roughly 8:12 laps).  In years past, this would have been worthy of an eye-roll and nothing more -- a fifth lap would have put the winning time at 43:00, which is marginally closer to the specified race length, (3 minutes long instead of 5 minutes short). However, in 2014 the rules have changed, and in a step toward gender equality the UCI mandated that the women's race should be between 40 and 50 minutes. My friend Matt Roy (whose wife was third in the race) noted this on twitter: 34:47 for the women's finish today at @BayStateCX . Surely the officials are up to date on the 40-50 minute rule? #mathishard — Matt Roy (@mm_racing) November 30, 2014 ...which set off a fairly spirited debate about knowing the rules, why the rules are sometimes bent, and how much sexism is a part of any of this. Matt, being a scientist, went to the trouble...