With the click of a mouse yesterday - or, more accurately, with some frantic tapping on my phone - the 2013 season suddenly snapped into focus. As we sat eating noodles-to-die-for at Gene's Chinese Flatbread Cafe after a foggy spin out to Chelmsford, Pamela reminded me that registration for the Dirty Kanza 200 had opened that morning. Matt Roy, The Wilcox and I had tossed around the idea of participating this year, but we hadn't fully committed to it yet. I knew that registration had filled in 2-1/2 hours last year, so a combination of noodles and mention of registration caused a sudden adrenaline spike. To make matters straightforward, Matt and David were in Madison, Wisconsin, supporting Mo in the Nation Cyclocross Championships (where she finished 7th - way to go, Mo!). There followed some frantic texting and frenzied attempts to break my own Bikereg and Paypal passwords (not having logged in to either account on my phone before). Gene & Co. were kind enough to not kick us out into the chilly fog while all this was going on and (not so) soon, the deed was done!
2012 was an amazing year for me on the bike. Due to a lack of any type of weather that would normally pass for winter in New England, I logged a lot of early season bike miles, and then just kept going. A Strava climbing challenge in March and April saw me accumulating some big climbing numbers, and well... I kept going with that too. By the end of the year, I'd clocked up over 18,000 miles and over a million feet of climbing. My only resolution for 2013 is to do less! This should actually be an easy resolution to keep! Check back in January 2014 to see if I did!
But it wasn't numbers that made my year on bikes an amazing one. It was the new and old friends that I rode with, the cool places that I explored and the spectacular scenery that I encountered along the way. The lack of a proper day job and a very understanding spouse, Fear Rothar, made it possible for me to do a lot of exploring by bike last year. Using a cool tool, created by Jonathan O'Keeffe, I was able to overlay all my rides for the year on a single map. While I did ride back and forth to Ride Studio Cafe enough for Google Now to decide that I work there, I also managed to cover a lot of other ground in eastern Massachusetts last year.
We coordinated with the great folks at Ride Studio Cafe this year to put together a series of rides, based from the Studio, for the Rapha Festive 500. This was actually my selfish way of ensuring that I would have some company as I tried to complete the challenge. And it worked. We had fabulous turnouts for most of the rides, with everyone else showing better judgement than me on the cold rainy day. It was really nice to see such large turnouts, despite the seasonable weather this year. Last year, we suffered a snow drought and while we had some very cold rides, we didn't have any good epic snowy photos. I wanted to get a few snowy shots for this year, and routed a few of the rides by ice rinks, so we could at least get "Zamboni snow" shots if we again failed to get any natural snow. But that proved completely unnecessary. We had snow on the ground Christmas morning and got quite a bit more more as the week wore on.
