I’m done announcing for the year (despite Colin deciding to put on another race):
Anyway here’s the playlists from races this year, sorted in some fashion.
Continue reading 2022 Race PlaylistsI’m done announcing for the year (despite Colin deciding to put on another race):
Anyway here’s the playlists from races this year, sorted in some fashion.
Continue reading 2022 Race PlaylistsThe title is a good summary of how I and (probably?) lots of other people feel about Twitter and Musk in the last month or so. This passage from Casey Newton on Platformer pushed me over the edge:
Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish.
Twitter has long existed in the fuzzy boundary between terrible and good, and that definition is largely dependent on who you were and how you used it. Being a straight white guy looking for cycling content and dumb jokes I generally had it pretty good. Even when Trump was active on there, it was still on the “good” side of that boundary for me. Platform leadership was questionable in a libertarian sense, but weren’t actively being assholes.
For me it feels different now, the passage above made me think about how gross it is. I was still engaged with the platform because I’ve been on it for so long (almost 14 years? yikes) and have had a lot of great fun on it, but nothing is forever and sometimes the places you like get gross and shitty and eventually you stop going there.
I was watching this 190E Evo II on BaT because I wanted to see what sort of insane money it would go for and so that I could have knowledge of what the market value of this rather rare car is if I should stumble upon it for sale in a used car lot for a great bargain.
Anywho it went for $301,000.
In times like this I like looking at the buy history of the winner on BaT. In the last 368 days they have spent $1,798,00 on fancy cars – including two twin-turbo Z32s.
Anyway I don’t have anything else to say other than “look at this person with lots of money and probably a well-secured garage”
This is a good remix of an already great song.
Here’s a link to it in case Spotify decides to nuke it: https://open.spotify.com/track/4H3B6pMKmoB7S7vH2j2Llp?si=y8MGEkM_RRiRp7YUfkN1yw
And in case that link dies, the name of the song is “Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It – Sem Thomasson Remix”, by Stars, so that maybe in five years when I come across this post again I can attempt to listen to it on whatever platform I’m giving money to for the right to listen to (not own) music.
PLEASE NOTE that I had to type the song title out because when I viewed the details in Spotify, it did not allow me to select the text.
If you can’t tell, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that everything digital can easily go up in a puff of smoke from a botched server migration (or whatever it was that really happened…blaming something on a “botched server migration”? Sounds more like “Can we turn off the infrastructure that handles this crap please because we don’t want to pay someone to manage it”). Oh, and in case that link dies here’s a goddamn PDF of the story. Yes I am an archivist now.
slamthatstem posted this bike a few days ago. Upon seeing it I went off about how wonderful and perfect and correct (RIP Tati) this bike is.
This bike is owned by @ic.smith22. I don’t know the full story of where this bike came from, though looking through his Instagram you can see that he rode this for a while in it’s original – the year 2002 – state. I haven’t gone through his Instagram much prior to writing this because I do not want to destroy the narrative around this bike that I have created in my mind.
Like reading a poem or piece of fiction, you don’t necessarily know exactly what the author intended. What you take out of the piece is influenced strongly by what you bring into it. So everyone will have a different reading of the same collection of words.
Alright. It is currently 2018. Just for context of the world in which this frame was built (and it can be seen on page 37 of this catalog). It was released alongside this machine:
Which is 26″ full-suspension city bike, with v-brakes, HeadShock Headshok, factory fenders, rear panniers, a triple and a front light? Well okay.
Cannondale’s 2002 line up also included a road bike with front suspension (Headshok, natch), a mere 15 years before the gravel boom:
I could spend an absurd amount of time writing about this catalog itself.
This bike was born into a world of HeadShocks and triples. It watched it’s compatriots die off or be turned into weird single speeds. It saw the change to 10 and 11 speed, electronic shifting, wireless shifting. The rise of cheap power meters, tubeless clinchers, road disc, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
Anyway. This R900 is perfect because it correctly applies upgrades where they are most effective, upon a skeleton that needs little improvement.
From a racing standpoint, your best investment is in good wheels (idk I’m sure I read that somewhere, fuck you, this is my website, I’ll say what I want). CHECK. Baller tubulars. Aero. Light. Tubulars. Gumwalls. Might explode if he hits a curb, who knows, but he’ll be going fast as hell until then.
Then there’s the crank upgrade. Would have been perfect+ if it was 105…but Ultegra is good enough. Would not have been perfect if it was Dura-Ace. No way. Ideally we’ll see this crank with off-color replacement 105-level rings next year. Because mismatching is #zef.
Which, obviously, brings us to the shifters and drivetrain in general. Because ooooooh hell yes. Nine speed rear derailleur. Appears to be a 105 right shifter and rear mech…which may very well be the original parts. Holy crap. The left shifter looks like modern 6800 R8000 (to match the crank), and from this angle (and from my logic) there is probably a reach difference that is throwing off his shoulders. But it’s fine, with the money he saved by not buying a new rear derailleur he can go to a chiropractor.
And these shifters are bolted to a 3T stem that is GLORIOUSLY SLAMMED.
IT IS PERFECTLY SLAMMED.
Oh and there’s a new fork (probably because the old one disintegrated because it was sixteen years old and made with 2002 technology carbon technology) and 6800 brakes because 2002 105 brakes felt like ass (which I can infer because I had 2002 Dura-Ace brakes and they sucked compared to modern ones).
This is all built upon a frame that technically Mario Cipollini sprinted on. Maybe he had some fancier one with bigger tubing – but this is aluminum, after all, so there wasn’t some specific fiber layup because it is a made from a pile of metal from Alcoa. And if it’s good enough for Cipo, it is good enough for you.
I love this bike. It says to me that the person racing it is not hung up on having the newest shit. They know that it’s a lot cheaper to save weight by not drinking beer than buying fancy gear. And I’m going to guess that they spend the winter training outside (but I am totally projecting my cycling ideal upon this person here, maybe they are in love with Zwift and hate having their toes freeze).
Anyway, solid taste all around with this bike. Best of luck racing it, and enjoy the cost savings of buying nine speed chains.
Sometimes you have a toddler, and you and the place that provided you with a cushy desk job have a disagreement about what is a “fair market salary”, and then your life becomes somewhat chaotic and the decadent exhaustion of a six hour road ride gets archived into the memory bank alongside the ability to drink three 40s in a night and still be functional the next day.
At this point it is wise to say fuck it to the never-stopping time furnace that is required to support the glorious experience of being moderately competitive in Pro/1/2 bicycle racing in New England, and it is time to murder your old gods for the new god of RUNNING.
Here is my Strava Social Fitness And Future Advertisement Ejaculating And Current Time Algorithming Network history for the last few weeks.
Yes there is a lot of running there. Or, at least, way more running than riding.
I have been dabbling off and on with running for the last (how old is my kid?)…almost four years.
I didn’t really run on a somewhat regular basis until we escaped the meth-addled snapping turtle infested money pit of a farmhouse in Atkinson for an 1100 square foot ranch in Exeter. But, even when I was not doing it consistently, it was a nice way to quell the anger that my soul generates on a daily basis in a much more efficient fashion than my old method – riding a bicycle for two hours while screaming at people driving cars that cost more than $80k.
Unresolved anger and class warfare aside, once I started running on a regular basis, it was terrible, unenjoyable, and continued to be so for a long time.
When I am running, I feel like the output of an under-powered video card rendering of a mech. I am the personification of a Large Adult Son, lumbering through the world, sweating out meat and Cabot cheddar as I frighten the students of a prestigious prep school.
I’ve been running three times a week (or so) since January of this year, and as I said, dabbled a bit for the years prior, but have only really started thinking about it in any sort of serious fashion (while running like a meat-fueled mecha) since the end of August.
But after three months or so of thinking of exercise only as a way to keep my cardiovascular system from disintegrating, running has become slightly less terrible.
Don’t get me wrong, those runs leading up to the point of the terribleness decreasing were real shit. In 2015 I was running a bit, and one day I ran a few miles, and pulled something in my legs, and then I couldn’t…do stuff. Like ride a bike. Or pull up on my legs? It was weird. I went to PT. I had to stretch. I had psoas issues. It was “great”. So that was fun. But, in late 2016 when I started again, I started very slow. Like a mile. And then as I got into 2017 I started building up, slowly, from there.
But now, I actually look forward to running. I am less concerned about ripping some muscle to shreds (though I am still very careful). I can actually see improvements!
Improvements aren’t really a thing that is going to happen for me in cycling ever again. I’m basically tweeting like Uncle Rico about rides from 2012/2013. But running! I have so much GROWTH OPPORTUNITY (that is “business speak” for “I totally suck at it”). I’m a pile of fucking garbage at running! But if I can figure out how to make my arms not fly around like a pterodactyl, or what to do with my giant feet, or how to manage my asthma, I could improve on a monthly basis.
So, wait, why am I writing this blog post?
Oh yeah, okay, so it is getting to be the DARKNESS SEASON and cycle-cross racing is ending and more of my friends keep having kids and GUYS LET ME TELL YOU give this running thing a chance. Yes those first several (dozen) runs are real terrible. But if you Strava that shit you’ll see that you are improving. And isn’t it nice to be getting better at something for the first time in years? No? That’s just me? Huh okay, fuck you guys.
Here is a quick list of Pros and Cons
PROS | CONS |
Quick! Good workout in like 30 minutes. Low equipment costs. Easy to do while traveling. If you have a dog you can run with your dog and make your dog tired. JOGGING STROLLERS. People I know keep getting hit by cars while riding a bike. In the winter it doesn’t take 20 minutes to get dressed to run. In the winter you don’t have to worry about salt ruining your equipment. If you race cross it could be helpful. It is good prep for having to carry your child across whatever burned out hellscape we will face in the next few years. The tempo of “You Can’t Kill Me” (and thus “Amazing Grace”) fits well with my usual running pace. YMMV. |
Holy shit bike riding is so much more fun. Sometimes it jostles out a too-robust fart. It sucks for a while. You might pull a thing and then not be able to pick up your kid. |
Okay, this has been a blog post about running. I want to race my bike, but I also don’t want to get DROPPED, and that requires more preparation than I have time for.
Meg Curry tweeted to me (“at replied to me”? “said to me on Twitter”? Yeah. Said to me on Twitter.) that someone in Gloucester asked her how Drew and I can talk for basically 20 hours over the course of a weekend (I would link to her tweet but I can’t find it). Or maybe she texted me? Maybe I dreamt it? If I dreamt it, I don’t want to get too introspective about what that means.
Anyway, I’m sure they (if they are actually real people) didn’t say “How is it possible that your friends Drew and Ryan have the stamina to speak for twenty hours over the course of a weekend?”, it was probably more along the lines of “MEG. WHO THE FUCK WERE THOSE ASSHOLES WHO WOULD NOT SHUT UP ALL WEEKEND??? GOOD GOD.”
Timothy Johnson also joined us on the microphone, but was talking more in the 2-3 hour per day range, the rest of the time he was getting Drew and I coffee (j/k, he didn’t even though I SPECIFICALLY told Paul that Tim needed to be our coffee runner), so I do not know if he was called out by the Gloucester locals.
Magical stamina or no, it’s talkin’ bout a bike race, which is pretty fun when it comes down to it. The real work is in walking around all friggin day, and by Sunday people may have seen me struggling to lift my legs over the course tape as every tendon in the bottom half of my body was as supple as beef jerky. I still do not understand how standing and moving around for ten hours can wreck my body like that. I used to work at a moving company, have worked in retail, and have even started running with some amount of focus this year, and I was still destroyed by the rocky, dusty hell-scape of Stage Fort Park (© ULTRApaully, 2017). But I am also 32 years old now, which means that maybe my body is going to start falling apart (yes, friends of mine who are older than I am, I know you want me to shut up).
I also wonder how Thom Parsons is able to move after this weekend, dude was running around WAY MORE than Drew and I were. And now, tonight, he’s at another race. Maybe he’s training to be an MMA fighter (KIMBO SLICE JOKE SORTA BABY #insidebloggingjoke)? Good way to go about it, honestly.
I think I have complained about this leg wreckage before. Also 2/3 of the posts on this site in the last 366 days have been about New England’s little slice of cyclocross glory. Maybe that will change, maybe that won’t, who fucking knows.
Maybe blogging isn’t dead, because looking at Twitter with any sort of regularity makes me want to tear my skin off and light something on fire, so yeah that’s a great platform for me to spend my time on. Real healthy.
What was I talking about?
Oh my legs felt like shit.
Anyway the racing was great, you can read about it anywhere, also the playlists are on Facebook if you came here looking for them. I don’t have a Facebook account so every time I go to that website it blasts me with reminders to sign up and give them my information so they can sell it to advertisers. BUT TOO BAD FACEBOOK, I ALREADY GIVE MY INFORMATION TO OTHER ADVERTISING NETWORKS! But yeah the playlists are on there, they are good, I spent way too much time on them.
So here are some things that I thoroughly enjoyed from where I was standing at the Craft GP Glocuester brought to you by Ipswich Ale (Swing by the Craft tent on your way to the beer tent, you can get base layers, jerseys, and vests for only $20! Jackets, bib shorts and tights are just $40!).
I fucking love announcing this race and seeing all of my friends and looking at the ocean and drinking coffee and destroying my body while running around and talking about bike racing and playing music and answering questions that spectators have and randomly interviewing people I am standing next to.
I was thinking that I should share the pictures I took of bike racing from 2003 – 2007 (aka, college). So here they are, on Dropbox. Download them if you’d like, but I plan on keeping them here for the foreseeable future.
I think they are organized by filename, which is not at all by date – if someone can tell me how to sort a Dropbox folder by file create date, that would be great. Though ONLY EARLY 2000’s ECCC KIDS can figure out what the races are without some kind of date stamp.
Things in this album:
There are photos that have been removed. Those are secret photos.
Hope you enjoy. Tell your friends, or don’t.
I once again announced Gloucester, it was really great, and it was once again dry.
The @gpgloucester is smoother, faster and greener than it's ever been!
lol jk its still a mean-ass pile of dust and rocks deal with it
— Paully B (@ULTRAPaully) October 14, 2016
(This tweet is too perfect, so I am not going to bother attempting to make a better joke than it, and yes I am leading off my blog post with a tweet someone else made)
You can read about what happened in the races elsewhere on the internet, and honestly my brain has like three hours of rotating memory for these things so, sorry, I can’t tell you anything other than “Curtis White is very good, so are Ellen Noble and Helen Wyman and I was sad that Ellen didn’t race on day two also Dylan had a fantastic start on day two”.
Okay those were several things.
The courses were very similar to last year, with the exception of the ATOMIC CAFE COFFEE ZONE being right in front of the ANNOUNCING ZONE so naturally I had at least six espressos each day. Also the beer tent was closer.
Frankie Andreu (of “actual day job talking about bikes” and “former director of Rock Racing” fame) was the other half of the announcing crew, and as he is not from New England I got to inform him of things like the Facconezone and the Scrubzone and various other zones that are native to NECX.
I ALSO PLAYED A BUNCH OF MUSIC which is really why you are here.
I make a few specific playlists for big events like this, depending on the promoter’s tastes, who is in the field (yeah I wouldn’t ordinarily play “Kings of Metal” at a bike race, but if Mike Wissell is racing, then I am), what people on Twitter have asked for and taking into the account the venue/crowd (White Park and families vs. Night Weasels and a full beer garden).
The 45+ lists are what I played last year (LAZY RYAN! BAD RYAN!), but I think they are pretty great and only got played once, so I put them on there again. I guess now I’ll have to change it up for 2017…damnit. the 45+ race is Paul’s race, so you’ll see that influence (pandering?) in there.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me waxing poetic about music released in 1994. The 35+ guys would have been in their formative years in 1994, so I thought “hey maybe that will be a fun thing to do.” Note that the 35+ race is also the Junior Men’ race, so…yeah they might have been less impressed with the inspiration here.
For the UCI races, I put in some stuff that I thought would be good to race bikes to.
Then there’s the “General” playlist, which is just over nine hours of stuff that I’ve liked or found in the last year. Spotify is great for this – it makes discovering music and exploring similar artists/sounds so easy. I just save tracks, and when it’s playlist building time, I go through what I’ve liked in the last few months (along with what people say they want to hear) and start going from there. This was partially played at Night Weasels, too.
So if you’re at any of the other events I’m doing this year – Orchard Cross and Ice Weasels (does that even have a date or venue yet?) – you’ll probably hear a lot of these tracks – just a heads up!
Yeah, I don’t do this shit very often, so people who are good at it probably know these things. But I took a screen recording of a tool I developed and was sending it out in an email blast – so, going to be viewed on iPhones, iPads, and Windows 7 laptops.
I first exported it as .m4v (from Quicktime), which did not work on Windows. I asked some of my internet friends for tips:
Then I started playing around in HandBrake to see what would work.
Exporting to the Devices->Universal preset got video working, but not audio. HandBrake defaults to two AAC audio tracks, and I figured that might be the issue with the (who knows how up-to-date) Windows 7 laptops some of my colleagues are using.
So I added an MP3 track and an AAC track:
Please note that I do not actually know what the hell I am doing, I just made some educated guesses at things I thought might work. And maybe they’ll work for you? Who knows.