I raced the final of our local series today. There is a spot prize at the end and you get to win a custom bike frame built by local, Anders Waiker of Crucial Custom cycles. Its just a side gig for him. The B grade is anything goes and for the first time ever Anders smoked me, todat on his 36er. I forget how tall he is. Maybe 6’ 5". It looked totally normal on him when he rolled me half way in. Hes just done the tour divide grand depart at touring pace. He reckoned the loneliness of it was the hardest part. Anyway, got some pix of his bike today, wondered why he seemed to have really short 105 cranks on. Toe overlap I guess. I dont imagine his feet are small.
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That’s rad
But is like “so you’re really tall but you’ve always wanted to have the same bike fitting issues as someone who’s 5’2"”.
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That’s about as wet as I recall NZ being. All the time.
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Ha ha. It was shithouse. Wasnt anywhere firm on the course at all. Who knows if my BB will survive.
Im packing up the Mongoose for Ash. Torn between a shitty BTwin cycles basic soft bag that will pack into a backpack, and my proper Evoc one. I guess my main worry is jumping on the train with it. I feel like the soft bag will take less room, and I wont have to lug it back when I return.
Got horrible challenge tires mounted and crossified my bike. A teammate had a 2x4 we used to complete our practice barriers so we made a 30 second loop and did lots of barrier practice.
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HY cross is here
WTH it’s so early in the year and it’s gonna be 80 later today.
HY I race at 10am.
Not going to double up and do single speed today (a long with cat 4). The races are 5 hours apart and no one from my team will be around to hang out with.
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i ended up with a stupid family conflict for the first race which should have been today. luckily in two weeks we have Rochester Cross which is such a good course
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Course was very hard. Lots of punch climbs. Two long sections of sand with washed out sections in the middle that you had to slow roll through or jump over.
Got lapped in a cat 4 race for the first time. Didn’t feel good. But I’m glad to be back racing again and looking forward to courses that I like better.
WTH my name wasn’t on the list of finishers.
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what z fuck just happened to me. first big race cat 3 in years, after years of local stuff on singlespeed. I’ve been training, but i guess not hard enough? 31/39 but got lapped by the first half dozen guys in the race in a 45 minute race. does not feel good.
back at it tomorrow where my goal is to suck less and not get lapped.
i refuse to downgrade to cat 4 and race (and lose) against middle schoolers so i guess this is just how my life is now?
either I suck badly or the level is way higher in East Coast cross than it was ten years ago… my theory is that the “just out here for fun” people switched to gravel so now the only people racing cross are all the roadie actually fast people? that’s my justification for being bad
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In the pnw the “just put for fun” folks are either in 4s or they say they’re just out for fun but actually train instead andake the 3s hella fast.
I doubled up (mostly) today. 29 out of 45 in cat 4 and I bailed on the SS race after discovering my headset was loose. Check the lap times I had and found that the laps I did on my single speed were faster than the corresponding laps on the geared bike. Didn’t expect that.
this a factor—the fast guys 10 years ago were 30 year olds, now the fast guys are kids who got into cross when they were younger and have been training at a high level for a number of years already
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Feeling crappy with a runny nose and sneezing. Somehow this is standard for me on the day after a race. No idea why
it’s probably the dust (if it’s dusty).
i gotta downgrade to cat 4. DFL today (among actual finishers) in cat 3. this includes losing by a wide margin to the 11/12 year old national champion.
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It’s not really cyclocross unless you get beat by a middle schooler.
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Lots were supposed to arrive on Thursday but didn’t. So I raced in a non-team kit for one of the few times since 2010.
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In the last few races, my lap times on the geared bike have been with 10-20 seconds of my single speed. I feel like that means I’m doing something wrong when racing the geared bike.
How different are the lap times of the winners of the geared and SS races?
Very roughly, that’s about 300’ distance difference per lap? That seems pretty significant when added up over a few laps (four, five?).