Friday, April 9, 2010

Battenkill or Bust


It would figure that after lots of procrastination, you'd get two posts in one day. See Drumroll's post below. Sorry for the lack of posts. The good news is that I've been riding my bike a lot. At least a lot relative to the time of year. I've been riding it so much that racing Battenkill seemed like a good idea. I raced a couple of the Johnny Cake's in Albany and having survived all of the crashes in Race 1 and all of the hills in Race 3, I figured why not take my early season form to Battenkill.

I've never been in racing shape in early April, so this is all new to me. Having spoken to a handful of people that have raced Battenkill, here's what I've learned so far:

If you race CX, you should be all set running standard road tires and the race shouldn't be any worse than the local Hollenbeck race. If you don't race CX, this race is epic, and you should buy a special set of 700x25 or 28 tires with special liners, a one "off" Cervelo frame with special extended fork tabs that will allow for extra tire and mud clearance, double wrap bar tape, box section rims, a second seat post collar, and military issue MRE's in case you get dropped mid race. As a CX racer, I'm going with my S1, 700x23 Conti 4000's and PowerTap so I can remember the fun watt by watt at a later date.

I'll let you know how it works out. I've included a picture of my bike in a pathetic attempt to recreate a "pre classic" bike profile that you'd see in Cycling News or VeloNews. We'll see if I end up stuck in a sand pit or double flatting on a decent after taking the advice of the local CX'ers.

By the way, sorry the picture is so blurry. Bigfoot took the picture with his camera phone.

2 comments:

Drummroll said...

prelim reports from Battenkill saying Skinny kicked azz

Skinny Phil said...

Kicked azz might be overstating things slightly, but if Skinny Phil from 2008 or 2009 was in the race, I would have kicked his azz!