Ronde Ohop

Sunday this weekend brought the second Ronde Ohop outside of Eatonville, WA. Its a fun mix of road circuit racing with a bit of trail riding mixed in. Makes it a bit more exciting for the neutral team.

My Subaru even got a makeover for the event. You can't have a good follow car without good decals. This one even went on mostly straight.

 

Joe was kind enough to join me bright and early on Sunday. Here getting a last minute lean in before we get to driving.

 

Geared up and ready for the first race. As always: a view from the back seat.

And all the way in the distance you can see the pelaton. I swear at some point I'll get a better version of this picture, but I swear it looks really cool in person.

Officially today Joe and I are FSA Neutral mechanics. It's very nice of them to allow us to get out and support a lot of local races.

After being in the follow car for the longer road portion we hit the partial off road section. This is one of two wheel pits, in this case at the exit of the woods. Lots of business here.

 

So much business in fact that we ran out of wheels during the last race. Ran out! 22 wheels changes total including three riders who were on complete replacement wheel sets and two who flatted three times. This is the virtual yard sale we had after the last race trying to get the neutral wheels back. Thankfully they were all accounted for.

 

Thats all for now. I'll be headed to Masters Road Nationals in Bend, OR in a couple of weeks so stay tuned for pics of that. Unless something else exciting crosses my path before then.

 

Masters Track State Championships

This past Saturday I got a chance to do some work out at the Marymore Velodrome. It was a very exciting opportunity and my first day as a neutral track mechanic. Luckily for me track bikes are pretty simple machines and track racers seem to show up well prepared and ready to race.

 

This meant that my day looked a lot like this. Sitting under my tent, waiting for something to do. But there was lemonade and shade. I couldn't complain too much.

 

Getting the podiums ready for the day. Turns out with multiple races, two genders, and several different age groups there were a lot of metals to give out.

I enjoy having the helper dog feature of this blog. On this particular day Max, Tre's dog, hung out in the tent for a bit while Tre was getting things set up. Still though, no thumbs = not too much help.

And even when there isn't much to do, there is still a lot to watch. In this cast one of the men's kerin qualifiers.

When the wind blows, things get interesting. While it does kill the view the angled tent does endow a certain amount of confidence that the tent will remain. Once the work day picks up, it's best to not spend your time chasing a tent around the infield.

Last shot of the day: the future of track racing. Not yet on track bikes but learning a lot of valuable lessons about rules of the track. Many of the kids stayed later to cheer their parents to victory.

 

 

San Diego

I'm not in San Diego for work. But at the same time, there seem to be bikes here, so pictures may appear here that are slightly different than the norm.

This one actually looks weirdly similar to some others. Nice TT bikes, nice wheels, wait...am I at a bike race?

 

Ah, no I'm not. This is apparently one of the rental bikes available on Coronado Island. Recycled cycles customers have it good.

The T shirt reads, "I [heart] boys with accents". I only wish I'd gotten a better picture.

 

More news as it comes.

 

Cross season is apparently here

Now that life has returned to relative normality, in my case being back at the bike shop, I was expecting to settle down, work on some 90's mountain bikes and go swimming. What I had not expected was that I would be gluing cross tubulars and building race ready cross bikes my first week back. But summer is fun time as well, so we decided to make sure the cross bikes are indeed race ready: