We just had a pre-season CX race yesterday. I was curious to see if the fitness I got from bikepacking/hikabiking at very slow km/h would manifest itself in any kind of form. It didn’t. Plus the course was so dry the off camber grassy sections were incredibly slick and I went down hard on at least 3 occasions, one of them while riding uphill. I didn’t even notice my saddle til I stopped, and only noticed my rear dangler was all to shit with a couple Of laps to go. This is probably why I was derailing on the front any time I accidentally back-pedalled. Looks like the derailler is good, the tail hook lengthener is good, but expensive OPEN hanger is rooted.
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Keeping the faith in any form earns kudos these days. Bravo.
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oh shit
I didn’t do the CX today. My mojo has gone, but this character won A grade against some legit fast people. Maybe it was a skills course. Maybe he’s got lungs too.
Looks like he’s also grabbing podiums in xc.
Definitely in Enduro. Seems he borrowed a CX bike from Bretto from Chainslapmag. Glad I didn’t subject my OPEN to that one. Will see if I can throw together a shitter bike for the next one.
Did my first official race of the season today, cos, last week I realized that I was old enough to race the nationals, in 3 weeks time, at the bottom of my age group, in fact because the CX season is in Jan ( in Europe) I will be 2 years older than my real age, which is bizzare. Anyway, came second in B grade on a course that had only about 50 metres max where you could put the power down. Will have to ride A in the next race if I am not to be called a burglar. My parts-bin Giant CRX hybrid with drops on went really well, the only issue was with my Powertap hub which went into HOST mode for some reason on the startline. Must be water somewhere it shouldn’t be. The A race was won by another kid with seriously mad skills. I don’t know where they are coming from. Someone must have lent him a CX bike. Check this out.
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I could do this on a cross bike
The flying part, I mean.
Not the landing part
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We had the CX nats today. Did my usual roman candle but came away with a 3rd in my AG. Pretty happy considering I only started training about 4 weeks ago. A very frosty start to the day. More of a fitness course than a skills course. No action pix at this point. The course was based on a speedway with a pretty cool flyover. Too busy talking crap to take many photos.
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have 2 sets of deadender tub wheels to glue. I was originally gonna do a set of file treads and either grifo/mxp or baby limus/pdx on the other, but I think I am leaning more towards a file tread rear and grifo front and then the other set will be baby limus/pdx
Bike24 has both Challenge and FMB for around the same price as what I can get Donnelly for. But I kinda like that they are tubeless so that I can plug them, if necessary. But not gumwall and won’t be nearly as nice riding of a tire.
how often do you need limus tires where you live? i don’t actually know what your courses are like over there, but i get the impression that a dedicated set of files would be more useful.
Baby limus is like the pdx, kind of a more aggressive all rounder.
Welp, one of our venues fell through 4 weeks before first race of our series. We’re in a mad dash to find a replacement.
City here has decided to go from charging $100/day to $100/hour for permits in the parks that have been host to Cx racing for years.
Damn y’all good luck.
We have one park in town that we have been charged by the hour in the past and this year we are not hosting there. Costs are over 2x the most expensive park we use. I tried to negotiate because I feel like one of the charges was for use of “walking paths” when we use maybe 100-150ft of concrete and being mostly in the grass made no sense, as it was the bulk of the expense. Hourly rate for using the gazebo we do registration and everything in? No issue from me. I think we paid something like $2100 for use of that park in 2019. We don’t have much revenue coming in from sponsorships coz world reason, so I can’t justify it without being able to know we are gong to get 100+ individual registrations.
Venues that make money by hosting people gathered in groups are in a serious way right now.
Sent an email about a prospective park with the city councilman we’ve worked with in the past CC’d and he replied that he wants to see it happen and asking the person from the parks department to see what we can do.
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Did my first race today!!! Got dead last in my category but met my goals of not hurting myself, successful cool kid dismounts, and having fun.
I did the beginner women on my single speed and probably would have come in mid-pack but I got distracted by attractive men offering hand ups. 
I ended up getting lapped twice by the leaders (cat 1 & 2) which was fine. I was tired.
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