Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Surf City film

Putting together a cyclocross video was sorta fun the first time, so when I felt no inclination to actually race this past Sunday, it was pretty easy to fall back on Plan B and wander around, camera in-hand, to see what I could film. Did I miss stuff? Heck yeah, like the hecklers on the runup and the entire elite men's race, but one man can only do so much.



Love it? Hate it? It may not be "hardcore"; instead, it seems sorta like a promo video. Probably someone else would make different edits given the footage I have.

I did learn:
--Do not mess with your iPhoto folders when using iMovie--my first draft was all for nought when I tried importing some pictures and messed up the file structure.
--No matter how cool a song seems at first, after listening to dozens of bits and pieces of it for a few hours, it gets old.
--The dismount at the front of the cluster at about 1.42 is nifty, and smoothly executed. Had he been practicing foot-over-top-tube?
--Youtube compression plays hell with video resolution. I don't know if uploading a more detailed (and larger) file would help. The audio seems all right, at least.
--Without me publicizing a darn thing, in the 30 minutes since uploading the video to the time I'm now typing this, it has 5 views. Ah, the randomness of the internet...

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Pink

I tried to get some clips and photos at the Surf City race today, and we'll see if I can cobble together some of the footage; but the only photo that I can tell turned out in full, unretouched, uncropped glory is the following, which perhaps does capture some of the spirit of the event. (Click on it for full-size...)

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Training plan of champions

Took a week off to sit in a car, drive to Vegas and back, and hike around the mountaintops.

Did one 'cross race (CXSR #1), more than adequate to blow my engine and render me hopelessly incapable of following up in the singlespeed race (didn't stop me from trying for a while--it was free, after all--and hurtin' some of the soft tissue...).

Flew to Ottawa for a long weekend and Canadian Thanksgiving--including massive amounts of dessert (why have just one?):



So, my last three weeks or so have not been a paragon of cyclocross preparation. With Pilarcitos #1 at McLaren Park looming this Sunday, the holy c#$@ instinct to actually do some prep kicked in this morning. 20 minutes of hill intervals were enough to make my legs rubbery and leave me feeling vaguely nauseous once off the bike--those are good signs, right?