Gratuitous Bike Love Post

Fresh brass ferrules and new cables and housing. Every time I swap out the old stuff I remember again just how luscious new cables feel. Do yourself a favor: buy Kris a pizza and watch him as he soops up your rig after hours, just like I did. Not only will you enjoy witnessing a master mechanic at work, but you'll also benefit from the buttery feel of a clean-shifting machine, AND you'll take a nice cut into Kris' precious sleep time which will make him ornery and weak, and I'll be able to beat him even more often.
The finishing touch: a BKW sticker from the man himself, Radio Freddy. I got to meet him when he stopped by Above Category during the Tour of California. It was a pleasure to put a face behind all the sweet photography and video clips on the bkw site. Can't wait for the coming onslaught of Spring Classics coverage...!

Snelling Road Race

Saturday was Snelling. Usually there's wind and rain, which splits up the field. Saturday there was no wind and no rain. Turner got himself involved in every promising move of the day but they all got reeled in. I launched with 11 miles to go, but got reeled in. The race ended in a bunch sprint. The finish stretch features a 90 degree turn covered in sand 300 meters to go. Turner and I decided to keep our skin on and stayed out of the mix. It was a fast race; 86 miles in 2 hours 50 minutes.Guess which one of us tried to get in more breaks...

Pine Flat Road Race, Cherry Pie results

Last weekend Kris Lunning made the long pilgrimage to the most deceptively named race of the year--Pine Flat--and duked it out for a 3rd place finish. Says Kris "it was pretty mellow, everyone worked together in a pace line for the first part. Then we got to the climb and it picked up. Then we went through the valley. That is NOT a short valley, like you and Chad said, by the way. It's long and I kept thinking I'd taken a wrong turn. Then we went up a little rise and I looked around and I was off the front, so I gunned it, and on the last steep climb to the finish two little tiny guys passed me with 200 meters to go. So I got third."

Good pictures are here.

In other news, results are in from the slugfest called Cherry Pie:

Kris Lunning: 18th place
Chris Turner: 24th place

field size +/- 120 riders.

See you at Snelling on the 21st!

Cherry Pie Crit

acr's Kris Lunning, Chris Turner, and Shaun Harless took to the mean office-park streets of Napa for the Cherry Pie Crit on Sunday, February 8th, 2009. The field was deep for this much-anticipated season opener. Jesse Moore and Nate English stuck a 2-man break, and the field sprint was nuts, disrupted by the standard bell-lap crash. Good photos are *here* and a savvy video is *here*. Results are still forthcoming, but it looks like out of 120 Lunner and Turner were both handily in the top 30.



(Photos are from here)

Team Camp Wrap-up

After months of waiting another season is upon us. Above Category Racing will be at Cherry Pie Crit in Napa on the 8th, followed by Pine Flat Road Race on the 15th, and Snelling Road Race on the 21st. These races represent gritty NorCal racing at its finest. A stacked field and family-friendly viewing at Cherry Pie give way to rural battered roads, open-hearted full throttle racing, and cold sweat reality checks at some of VeloPromo's finest as adrenaline and prayers pepper these season openers where we'll see who's done his homework in the off-season. With nothing on the line but glory, the prespring campaign offers some of the purest soul searching racing on the calendar.

As Machiavelli says: "Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared." Here's to utter destruction.

Team Camp, day 3

More ideal scenery and good clear skies made for a beautiful final day of team camp. Johnson rides down a lane near the Sonoma-Marin County line.
View from our room at the Inn.
Sunday morning depart. We were joined by Paul for the trip back.
When we got back to Mill Valley Chad treated us all to Cici's gelato. After three days of annihilating each other, it was the perfect dessert.

Sunday's ride: 4 hours, 80 miles, 3,200 kJoules.