Big Bikes

Berms, Barriers, and Beer -
The Ice Weasels Cometh

Where to start. Aside from a couple small snags, The Ice Weasels Cometh Part II went off without a hitch, maybe with even less hitches than last year. Things looked dicey on Friday with the amount of snow we had on the course, but due to some hard work by our volunteers, it came together. I'm going to put my thanks up front, if I forgot to thank you and you were an instrumental part of making this event awesome, it is not because I am not thankful to you; it is because I am an idiot.

Big thanks go out to:
My co-promoters Colin and Kevin. I joked during the event that none of the three of us knew everything about what was going on during the event. Like a well-organized terrorist cell, we each held crucial bits of knowledge, but if we were to be tortured and interrogated our torturers/interrogators would never get the whole story. It was just like that.

Thanks to Mike Rowell, Dave Wilcox, Bryan Philbrook and Mike Zanconato for all the course work. And special thanks to MVP of course construction: Chris from White Barn Farm who, with some deft tractor work, turned a rutted out, icy nightmare into a smooth run-in to our berm.

The Berm graffiti was, of course, inspired by Thomas Needham's video (see below).

Our sponsors: International Bicycle Center, Crossresults, Harpoon , Bell Lap Coaching, and Cycleops (and Jon Lewis from Cycelops). Sweet merch was given out courtesy of IBC. Results were posted in a timely fashion by Crossresults. Two kegs of free Harpoon beer were tapped and emptied by 12:30. Bell Lap provided coaching gift certificates as prizes. And Jon Lewis had a huge Cycleops trainer warm-up station in the barn.

My family: My grandmother, Mary Alice Raymond for letting us wreck her yard. My cousin Christy and partner Chris who run White Barn Farm and let us run over their gardens. My wife Miriam, my sister Julie, my mom, and cousin Hannah for dealing with food.

Race announcer Paul Nixon donated and set up a pro-style PA system so we could have tunes and commentary during the event (thanks to Steven Hopengarten for stepping up to the mic and filling my dead air).

And of course thanks to all the folks that came out to watch and race and support. Shout out to Cambridge Bikes, Seaside Cycles, NEBC, Hup United, and all the other bad ass Cyclocross crews that brought the ruckus to the event.

I think I need to do some processing. At the moment I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, too overwhelmed to weave this into anything like story. For now I leave you with photos and captions, more to come later.



I'm still reeling with laughter over this video Thomas Needham did to promote the event. It was more funny to me than the very funny "Hipsters Discussing Cyclocross" Xtranormal vid.

There was some magnificent meat being grilled just upwind from the PA area. Thanks to the grillin' dudes who shared some of this stuff with me.

Uri warms up at Jon Lewis' Cycleops trainer station

Heading down in the butt-ass early AM. I got to go through the tunnel twice because I forgot the damn registration forms. I sat in a northbound traffic jam on 93 for twenty minutes...at 6:15 on a Saturday morning.

Parking lot capacity had me sweating. Luckily Alex jospe and boyfriend Ed kept it under control.

Leah Papas Barnes went down in her second race of the day (she won the women's single speed race). Colavita rider Chris Raymond was on hand with the EMT skills. She had us worried there for a minute, but being the super-trooper that she is, she was up and walking (hobbling) around drinking beer in no time.

I joked that "the guy on the Pugsley was going to win." Then he did, handily. Arnold Roest and Alec Petro from Team Psycho won the 4 and 3 races respectively on their mountain bikes. Sick!