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!

100 Times Faster Than Me

Bacon Egg And Cheese on a Boston Cream Donut Challenge Total = $10.69

Thanks to Charlie for the sixty-nine cents.

See, now if you donate, as an added perk, I will link to your blog and you will experience "the Big Bikes bump." How do you think Fat Cyclist, Bike Snob, Perez Hilton, The Huffington Post, and Dicky got their starts? — The Big Bikes bump, that's how. Somehow since I initially gave Fat Cyclist that bump he has increased his traffic to 100 times that of Big Bikes.

If blogging were a race I would be a HUGE loser. When it comes to mountain bike racing, even the very best riders in the country are only about twice as fast as me. Just twice as fast. If I were a fisty-fighting-wrasslin' type guy, that would be like me taking on a 340 lb. dude (that's right, I weighed in at a solid 170 lbs. today...and we haven't even hit Thanksgiving and Christmas yet). But if Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski were 100 times faster than me...I'd probably quit this sport and take up competitive eating.

Just like an NPR fund drive, the sooner you go click that donate button (sidebar, upper right) the sooner I shut up about The Bacon Egg and Cheese on a Boston Cream Challenge. Shut up about how I'm going to make a helmet cam video of the ordering process and then subtitle it.


Sponsor Thank you: GARY FISHER.

I honestly believe Fisher had the 29er geometry thing worked and dialed out before anyone, and they continue to produce the best handling 29ers on the market. The release of the Superfly Single-Speed frameset in 2010 is HUGE. I don't know how many people asked me about where they could get a Superfly SS. I had to tell them that I wasn't special, that my shop sent me to Trek World so I was lucky enough to get offered a deal on a bike which didn't exist. I had been drooling over Jesse's bike for a year. It was literally a dream come true. There might not be luck in bike racing, but there's definitely luck in bike-getting. Things are moving forward with Fisher going into 2010 and I'm looking forward to spending another season atop a carbon fiber-gleaming-black-death-machine. Thanks Fisher!


In Ice Weasels news. We're up to 52 Pre-registered riders. This is a problem, I'm beginning to get worried about all that FREE BEER Harpoon is donating. So stop telling people how fun this event was last year or we might not have enough FREE BEER to go around. What? I'm not advertising that we've got FREE BEER. I'm telling people NOT to come and drink all the FREE BEER. How the hell could you possibly describe that as advertising?

Bryan, Kevin (the guy who needs to update his damn blog and tell us how he went about killing it at the Lowell Cross race Saturday), and I were down in Wrentham today, doing a little prep with help form Christy and Chris from White Barn Farm. We put a bench cut in where last year we had a bumpy, precipitous drop. We put a BERM in where once there was only a pile of uninteresting dirt. There will be a few less twisty turns this year (we had a few to spare) and some more straightaway (but not too much). Ultimately, no matter what we do, the race will be 90% more horrible and you should skip it and let me, Colin, and Kevin sit around drinking all the FREE BEER by ourselves while watching a live Webcast of Cross Nats.

And now...Ice Weasels Course Prep photos.

Or what? You'll release the dogs?
Or the bees?
Or the dogs with bees in their mouth
and when they bark they shoot bees at you?

-Homer

Bees. We have added Africanized Killer Bees to the course. You'll be OK, just don't cause any vibration around their hive. Or breath loudly. Or sweat. They love sweat. They want to lick it up...then sting you to death when they are finished.

And we added a bench cut descent to cut down on injury and death. We have to make sure you're nice and safe...so the bees can get you. We have a deal with the bees. It's us or you.



Bryan packed some stuff down with the big-ass heavy roller. Kevin and the dog with the bees in its mouth survey their work. Farm Bike Yeah! And Farm Bike takes the plunge.

Chris moves some leaves to make for more course options. Bryan and Kevin gesticulate wildly and make chimpanzee noises at Chris (somehow he deciphered their gibberish and sculpted a great berm with the tractor). Me and Kevin fine-tune the BERM. Bryan takes a run at the berm well on a big farm bike YA!