How not to treat your bicycle and a belated race report

So Redcoat called me last week. "Got bad news, buddy. I broke my frame."

I was just waiting for the just riding along story, but instead, he said, "I threw it off a cliff, basically".

Amazingly, RC survived pretty much unscathed, but the bike landed HARD on a sharp rock, directly on the left seatstay (observe the carnage). He had to remove his rear brake caliper just to roll home, because it was shoved into the spokes.

So I spent Thursday doing emergency surgery and replacing the stay, the bridges, and the disc tab, because he's racing Angel Fire this weekend. Next time, drop the bastard on the *right* side, dude! Amazingly, the frame was still in perfect alignment (once I cut out the bent stay) and the repair went nice and smoothly. RC will be out $120, but that's chump change compared to being out a whole frame. Gotta love trustworthy, repairable steel!

In other news, the first Boulder short track rack of the year went off on Wednesday. I thought perhaps my best-ever hillclimbing fitness would transfer over in some way to this flat/sprinting race, but I was sadly mistaken. At the start, as usual, I managed to get boxed in and be about 25th (there were 40 or so dudes in the A/pro race) to the first corner. Whereupon somebody went OTB right in front of me. Lovely.

After managing to A) stay on my bike and B) not give the guy a chainring tattoo on his face, I started the chasing. The endless chasing. The lap was well under 2:30 (yes, that's 2 minutes, 30 seconds) and we were going 35 minutes or something, so I knew it would be a struggle not to get lapped by Colin Cares, Brian Fuentes, Colby Pierce, or one of the other really fast pro dudes in attendance.

Long story short, I picked off 15 or so people, didn't get lapped, and managed to finish just behind local fast short track guy Ward Baker. I was pretty pleased with that. Fuentes rode a great race and lost a sprint with Colin by half a wheel, and Miguel and Nick played around on totally inappropriate bikes (a 5" travel FS rig and a singlespeed with 'cross tires!) but did just fine.

In the ladies race, the field was HUGE - probably 20 gals. Good to see! Sarah was our lone representative and managed to basically miss the start, but recovered to beat 7 or 8 people, in her first race of the year. She also avoided being lapped by the super fast pro chicks, which was her goal. Nice work! I'm not sure how Taryn's race in the women's B category went (she took all the pictures, btw) but a good time was had by all.