Goodbye 2006

No I am not going by some ancient orthodox calendar and thus celebrating the New Year early... Yesterday was my LAST RACE of 2006! The series ender for the Bay Area Super Prestige Cyclocross series. After the race a couple of weeks ago, I subjected my poor readers to a veritable novel of a race report ("and then I ate a Gu, and a couple pedal strokes later there was this root, but I avoided it by blah blah blah"). This time I will spare you... Briefly: there was sand, there was sun, but no bikini temperatures. There was beer and barbecuing (of which I could not partake since the women were the last race of the day and by the time we were done, everyone was done with being there), there were few barriers but endless relentless serpentines over roots, divets, sand, and rocks, there was joking, cheering, feeding, and some very unattractive drooling on my part after each massive running effort, if you don't believe me YOU try picking up my leaden cyclocross machine! Best of all, there were many many friends to cheer me on to a respectable 2nd place finish, 3rd overall. Thank you. I love the support, the passion, the joking, the athleticism, and the wonderful bike-nerdiness of the NorCal Cyclocross community. It's so uplifting for such a humbling sport.

Thank you so much to everyone who made this cyclocross season my favourite race season yet, if you can count 5 races as a season. I feel like my supporters and friends are too many to mention, plus I don't want this post to turn into an acceptance speech for the Best Sound Editing In A Live Action Short Foreign Film Oscar... but a special thanks goes out to Travis and the entire Freewheel team. I had a blast and can't wait to do it again! Here I am with Travis after my win at Golden Gate Park:


OK I hope that counts as brief. See you all next year as I attack (perhaps literally?) the A's with glee. In the meantime, I'm about to renew my bestfriend-ship with my road bike. Next bike race: some undetermined weekend in February...