“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” – Ron Swanson
We’ve decided to brush the dust off a classic Seattle event (in our minds), put a CX twist on it and whole-ass an event this Sunday. Is it a race? Is it a ride? Hell if we know. All I know is we put the idea together over a beer and it sounded awesome. So we waited a couple days, had some more beers while discussing it some more and it STILL sounded awesome. And then we went on a scouting ride, drank a few beers and put together a route that had us hurting but feeling pretty good that we had crammed as much shit into a sandwich as possible.
What do you need to know?
We’re going to start at the South East Corner of Genesee Park at 11 am Sunday, April 1st. Rolling out at 1130 after grabbing names, giving some instructions and collecting $10 to go on the ride. Why $10? Because we have expenses and shit! That’s why.
We recommend gears. Lots of them. But you be you and feel free to bring a SS, Fixed, unicycle (FPDX) and heckle the shit out of us for putting on a non-SS friendly event. (Put on your own event and you can make the rules.)
We also recommend larger than 25c tires. Please refer to the above but substitute tire sizes for bikes.
We’ll be ending at the Slowboat where we might have prizes. We’ll probably have Hodala Merch for sell. We’re trying to get a beer special. We’ll definitely be watching Flanders.
I can hear you now…’this is pretty last minute and seems like a pretty shoddy event’. And I’ll remind you that this is a Hodala event and we “Never half-ass two things. We whole-ass one thing.”
Here are the words we put together about the Woodland Park race. You can read about it here or take a look at All Hail The Black Market or CX Magazine for their personally edited versions :
It’s been randomly known in some circles that Hodala is a team that was built without giving a shift. Part of this is due to the nature of the Single Speeder and the culture that has helped cultivate this mentality. The other part can be attributed to the amazing people who repeatedly host events and tolerate us year after year. Case in Point, the fine people at MFG Cyclocross here in Seattle who have often turned a blind eye, or merely crossed their arms and shook their head back and forth like a disappointed parent when our “soup kitchen” of a trailer shows up.
With no intent on traveling to #sscxwc in Italy (you’re welcome EU) we turned our full attention to the crown jewel of Seattle CX….Woodland Park. In years past we’ve hosted luau’s, beach parties, a disco, 80’s metal fest and have often created a winter wonderland at what has been dubbed “Hodala Corner”. This year’s plan was a little more ambitious…make a ‘long cut’ with a giant slip-n-slide and a foam pit. We figured it would take 30+ pallets, some plywood, a big roll of visqueen, over a dozen bottles of dish soap, 3 kegs of tasty beer and a leaf blower. No problem. Right?
Disclaimer, this is not legal in most forms of racing and I’m sure would be punishable at an OBRA race with a DQ and forfeiture of all Rapha apparel. We did not alter the course in any way (we merely created an ‘option’) and we got permission from MFG in the form of a subtle ‘don’t make a mess’ response.
To be totally honest we had NO idea about what everyone would think of it and were hopeful that people would partake in the little bit of fun we were trying to create. By the end of the day we were beyond stoked with the number of people who ‘opted in’ for the shenanigans and completely blown away when the leaders of the Pro ½’s race (Steve Fisher, Spencer Paxson, Russell Stevenson and Kaler Marshall with the overall series title on the line) came to an accord and giggled their way down the ‘illegal’ course option covered in Hodala foam. Like finding the true meaning of Christmas, I guess it really is possible to race a bike and have some fun.
I’m sure there are some people out there who will find some kind of fault in what we did and maybe claim that these kinds of antics are ruining cross. To which my only reply is to crack a beer and salute them in their pursuit of outstanding results in their athletic endeavors. Meanwhile, we’ll just place another 6-pack in the pit area and continue to spread our own kinda racing around.
That’s a wrap on the 2017 CX Season. Time to put the Hobago back into storage and start planning shit for CX Nationals that will be in our backyard in 2 years.
This is one of those posts that could easily turn into an Illiad of writing. Instead, I’ll try and cut it down to a palatable amount of words fitting for a 140 character society.
The first prints received from KCE
#KCE is a little-known celebrity in the cycling industry. Going back 5+ years random people involved in the trade began receiving envelopes with pieces of bicycle-themed art in them with the only a PO box and KCE in the in return address. These little Random Acts of Art (or Awesome) became a massive ‘thank you’ to many of us who were lucky enough to receive them. It’s widely known that working in the ‘industry’ is one of pure passion…because it is a thankless, time consuming, low paying job that gets ripped apart daily by arm-chair-comment-trolling-I-can-do-better a-holes that have no idea what it actually involved in getting a bike from concept to consumer…and when these envelopes showed up in our mailboxes, it was a moment of pure excitement to see what new rendering we had received.
When KCE approached us about doing a piece, everything quickly went to the Schwinn Exerciser bike we perched atop a pile of wood chips at SSCXWCXPDX. It was an easy choice to represent Hodala and all of our years involved in SSCXWC as it made the cover of ROAD magazines FINAL publication in a grand send-off as it goes to the EU this year.
Hate to see you go….
We (honestly) do not deserve something as rad as this…but we are extremely excited to share it with all of you. Only 50 of these have been handmade…and we’ve already grabbed a few for ourselves…and once they’re gone, they’re gone forever.
Hodala Hill print. Click the link below for the details
(if you live in the Seattle area and will be seeing Hodala at the remaining CX races, enter SOUTHPARK for hand delivery at a race…just swing by the Hobago to claim your goods and a beer)
The last couple of weekends have been a whirlwind of activity for the Hodala crew. A couple of weekends ago, a bunch of us split up into three teams for GoMeansGo’s Nine to Five scavenger hunt.
It all started out with a double rainbow
Seriously. Double fucking rainbow.
and then there was a bunch of scavenger hunting before this happened:
and then there were some bars and more scavengering and then 6 am breakfast greyhounds at the 5 Point.
Everything else is sort of a blur of frantically collecting a ton of random objects that I still need to clean out of my messenger bag. Greg has a nice wrap-up of the event over at GoMeansGo. It looks like Randy & Joe took 5th, Marcy’s team was maybe 10th 4th, and Nate and I ended up something like 18th. I’m assuming that Joe got 100 extra points or so for that photo above.
For people who are awake around 5 am everyday it was surprisingly easy to stay up all night as long as we kept moving and we only really ran out of steam when we sat down in bars for awhile. The vintage 4Loko that we drank around 2:30am probably helped a bit. I’m hoping that we’ll get more of the team out for this event next year. Ryan and Greg at GoMeansGo put on a really great race.
This past weekend was, of course, Wizard Staffs Across the Universe.
The day started out being shitty and rainy, but if we let the weather stop us from getting drunk then the terrorists have truly won. Fortunately, RaleighUSA fully supports all of Hodala’s activities and we had some tents to keep us dry.
Meanwhile in the Dirty South (Tacoma), Myers apparently thought it was a good idea to add an element of danger into Wizard Staffing – welding.
Those Churchkey’s might kinda taste like crap, but you can’t argue with a steel can.
Up in Seattle we kept drinking
and drinking
until we all decided to take our hard-earned wizard status on a walkabout to the nearby PRIDE celebration where some Canadians in tutus did body shots off of F-Joe
and DR managed to take his underwear off in the middle of the bar for them without getting 86’ed. It was truly a miracle of drunken assholery.
There’ll be a video and more photos up as soon as Sally can get though the nearly 10 hours of video that we shot on Saturday.
We did manage to add a new wrinkle to the fine art of Wizard Staffing – the “lips on staff tip.” Basically, you can tip another drinkers staff up with your own wizard staff and they’ve gotta keep drinking for as long as you do, but you must have your lips on your staff in order to force someone else to keep drinking. So here are the current Hodala rules for Wizard Staff day:
1. You aren’t a wizard until your staff is as tall as you are (I’m 15 beers tall).
2. You must have your lips on your wizard staff in order to force a person to keep drinking when tipping their staff.
3. You need a lot more duct tape than you think you do. Go buy some more.
After a day of letting our livers rest a few of us went to scout a new ‘cross club course and alter a few of the ones from last year. We’ve got the courses mostly set and the beer sponsorships nailed down, so dust off your ‘cross bikes; the 2012 Cross Club season kicks off a week from today. If you aren’t currently on the list and want to do some less-than-legal ‘cross racing in public parks every Tuesday night, sign up for the email updates.
That’s all for now. Keep an eye out for the WSAtU video and we’ll see you next Tuesday.
Things have been all over the place since you last saw content on this here blog, but ‘cross season (or at least ‘cross club season) is almost here and the Hodala crew will start ramping up the shenanigans for what will surely be another successful season of drinking and racing. In the meantime I’ll catch you up on what we’ve been doing this “spring.” There have been a couple of birthday rides that I would’ve written about but they were so epic I would’ve had to change the color scheme of this site to pink and black and convert all of the photos to greyscale, one of the Hodala ladies completed a half ironman and we’ve had to provisionally revoke her membership until her bike handling skills return, Craig and Joe crashed out of the 24 hours of Spokane after 11 hours of being in 1st place, Greg found out the hard way that road racing blows, and we even managed to pick up a new team member if we can find a kit that’ll fit over his beard when he gets back from Alaska later this summer.
Hey, did anyone else see that Santa Cruz quietly put up a website and then did absolutely nothing? It seems like it is the same folks behind SSCXWC SF (sorta fishy huh?) so I’m not expecting a whole lot in the way of advanced notice for this thing. Fuck it, we’ll still go down there to ruin the race for everyone and make sure that Philly takes this thing to the East Coast for 2013.
Speaking of people who are really good at throwing races (which is sorta the opposite of what I was doing just a second ago) MFG has announced that Starcrossed is being moved to Oct. 6th and will not be an Enduro event. So that’s relatively exciting.
Enough of this catsup-ing. This coming weekend is GoMeansGo’s 9 to 5 – where we’ll be drinking beer and riding bikes very late at night –
followed by next weekend’s International Wizard Staff Day – where we’ll start getting drunk very early in the morning with pretty much no bike riding at all.
We’ll try to document these as much as we’re able but I’m not sure that either riding bikes in the dark or sitting in a backyard taping beer cans together are conducive to it. Stay tuned!
