Last Friday I made it out to River Falls for the Icebox 240. It was advertised as groups of 4 somewhat randomly selected teams racing one at a time for 240 minutes. They changed it to 3 person teams and 9 laps. Each person having to do 3 laps. I liked this format better. Once we got everything sorted out and teams were drawn I was feeling pretty good about our teams chances of winning. We decided that we would do a 2-1-2-1-1-1-1 format so that our weakest rider would only have to do one lap at a time. It was a lemans start and I was 3rd into the woods out of 14. One guy flatted at the top and it wasn't long after that I passed the guy in front of me. I really put the hammer down after that and tried to create as much of a gap as possible. I finished my first lap and started on my second. I kept trying to gauge how far out in front I was, I think at one point it was about a minute (clearly not many of the very fast guys started the race). So the race goes on and on. We are doing well, at one point up 11 minutes overall. Our weak link was our third guy. He just didn't seem that into racing. He took off on the final lap with a 3 minute lead and I bet he didn't even make it up BFH before he got passed. We ended up in 4th place overall. It was kind of a let down since we were ahead the entire race. Oh well, 1-3 had to shotgun beers as their awards and it was too cold for me to even have enjoyed that. All in all it was a good night and I hope to be back again for next years.
It is getting too cold out for the standard biking gloves. The past two times my hands have frozen up pretty good. That is never a fun feeling. I am going to have to start wearing my fleece gloves until we stat getting lots of snow. I don't like the fleece ones because my hands get almost too warm, but I can deal with that. I am hoping for a mild winter so that I can get out a lot. Anything below 5-10 and it is too cold for me and just not worth it. People say it's all about what you wear, but there comes a point when you are either so bundled up you can't move or it's just too cold. Plus theirs nothing worse than suffering in the winter. I'll take all spring, summer, and fall have to offer, but I don't fuck around with winter.
