ride joe ride

I’ve tried to start a race report which isn’t whiney three times or so, and it’s not working. So, since I have something else to say anyway, I’m just going to state some facts about the race at Northbrook yesterday. Above all, it was a freakin’ awesome course — utterly epic. My play-by-play recap of the course from last week makes me dizzy and confused so I’m going to skip the replay this week. Suffice it to say: totally epic. We finally got bona fide cross weather: my race started under a slate grey sky, 34F and spitting sleet. Again, epic. I made a really stupid mistake and I suffered both physically and performance-wise because of it. I wore glove liners (as opposed to, say, gloves) and by the middle of the race, I couldn’t shift without looking at my fingers. I was also hurting a whole lot, and not paying attention to my hup hup. In the last two laps, I kept shifting the wrong direction because of the way the SRAM shifters work (well that, and my dumbass decision not to dress properly), so I gave up shifting. After I finished, I went from whining about my hands (the warm up was even more excruciating) directly to “why the hell do I do this, I suck blah blah blah” Totally not pretty nor cool. I woke up this morning realizing that if it weren’t for the potential of the sport to occasionally bite back like this, I might as well be playing shuffle board (not that I have anything against shuffle board!). Yeah, cross rocks. I don’t want to think too much about the fact that only three races remain in the season.

In other me-centric cyclocross news, Al and I have decided to participate in NSIT’s always-fun Five Minute Film Festival in the oft-done but rarely done well genre of cx music video. Details on the competition are there (well last year’s details), but the bottom line is that a bunch of talented people submit snazzy movies which are judged and shown at the annual holidays party/film festival. Given that we’re not particularly talented film-wise, and ours will be of a bunch of sweaty people riding circles around a muddy goose-poop covered park dressed in spandex, we don’t expect to win anything. It will, however, be fun to open people’s eyes to the beauty that is cyclocross, and it’s an excuse to make a cross music video which isn’t set to AC/DC (why is it always AC/DC?). I think we shot enough usable footage yesterday, but if anyone out there also shot video and would like to help out, let me know. In it for you: free belgians and my undying gratitude. If I think we’re short video, we’ll try to shoot more next week (hope for similar weather, and everyone has to wear the same kit as this week okay?).

Here’s the kind of thing we have in mind.

(Over and out)

Edit: Looking at results I just realized that this was my 10th race! Wow, seems like a long, long time since Jackson Park.