SSCXWC 2012
Update: Race info coming soon.
It seems that we’ve got an increasing number of folks showing up to this site on a daily basis via google searches for SSCXWC 2012 or Single Speed Cyclocross World Championship because of a post I wrote last fall after the Hodala crew had just returned from San Francisco.
Well, as all of you have probably noticed, there’s no new content which isn’t all that strange because no one has any info on SSCXWC 2012. At all. At this point we’re all just assuming that it’ll happen sometime before January 1st in the vicinity of Santa Cruz, CA.
There’s a blog that hasn’t been updated since early April. (Weirdly enough they never approve any comments to the one post that is up.)
There’s a slightly cryptic listing on the Northern California Nevada Cycling Association calendar for December 1 and December 2 with Murphy Mack listed as the promoter and no other information.
And that’s it.
So what are we to do? Here in the NW, ‘cross season starts this upcoming weekend and every promoter has had their calendar online since June. If we’re going to keep SSCXWC going long enough to take it to the east coast – not to mention give the promoters in CA an incredible amount of money – we’ve gotta book flights and hotels/houses, make plans, disappoint family members that we’ll (once again) be going to race and get drunk with our friends instead of making the trek home for the holidays. I mean, what the fuck? This race is a national event that traditionally takes place between the beginning of October and the end of November, right? Aren’t we kind of cutting it close here? Am I being impatient? Seattle announced the date for SSCXWC 2010 in fucking April.
So what do we do? I guess nothing. They’ll announce the date super fucking late and we’ll all spend much more money on flights and hotels that we would’ve if Santa Cruz had their shit together and we’ll go and have a good time and drink beers and celebrate our weird little corner of the cycling world in spite of the fact that the promoters maybe sorta kinda selfishly kept the event for themselves instead of letting Philly take it at the SSCXWC 2011 afterparty when no one from Santa Cruz even showed up to claim the event. But I’m not bitter about it.
Fuck it. We’ll probably see you all at some as yet to be determined date in California. If not… Philly 2013.
9 to 5 and Wizard Staffs Across the Universe
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
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.
Cheers,
Ketchup
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!
And proud we are of all of them…
Thanks to everyone who came out to the Ides of March this weekend. I can honestly say that all of you who stayed home because of the snow missed out. As I was cursing to myself and praying to… i guess myself… while I was finalizing the course that morning I thought that none of you fools would ever leave your house to race 25 miles around town and climb what easily ended up bring 300+ stairs.
You’re all winners. Doubly so considering that 70% of the field cut the course and the actual “winner” is still sorta up for debate. Bart came into the finish first, but skipped the most fun part of the course coming down Cheasty after taking some bad routing advice from Dirty Randy. Joe was the first in to have ridden all – or most of – the course, but he’s pretty shifty and there’s just no way we could let him win. All he got was some public shaming and a t-shirt with his face on it.
Then came along our perpetual winners – Brian and Craig. Congrats to them.
Afterwards some of us went out to a teammate’s irish-y, punk(?), sea shanty, whatever show (They sound like the Pogues with a fiddle and banjo). A few drinks and shots later and I’ve got this at 2am.
FML.
For the suckers who missed out this weekend, the green arrows and shamrocks will most likely still be around for a few weeks. Start at the stairs at the bottom of Holgate and follow them from there. Here’s a map. The only instructions you’ll really need are:
1. If you can see a trail beside the road, you’re probably supposed to be on it.
2. When you get to the outdoor fireplace/chimney, go back down the stairs.
3. When in doubt, climb up the road instead of coasting down it
4. The course ends at the top of the Collonade.
Have fun.
Breakin’ Hearts and looking in the mirror
This weekend had a very Narcissus and Echo feel to it. Step into the Wayback Machine with me and let’s take a trip back to Sunday.
While USA Cyling may not condone it…
USA Cycling Rule 1A33 – The cyclo-cross season begins September 1st of one year and ends on the last day of February of the following year.
…we tend to enjoy getting rad all year round. This past weekend was the second race in the Frost Club series – a special couples-themed Valentine’s relay/madison-style cross race for all of you lovers out there.
The HeartBraker began with a 3-legged Le Mans start…
Now that I look at the photo, does anyone else see that Myers and F-Joe aren’t connected while they’re stepping over that barrier? I feel like this should be added to CXMagazine’s Readers Choice awards for “biggest controversy” after Rapha not getting tattoos at SSCXWC and SF basically keeping the race instead of sending it to Philly (No, we’re not over either of those things.)
… Where were we? … Oh, 3-legged Le Mans. Partners grabbed their bike and had to trade off 3 minute-ish hot laps around a surprisingly hard course and pass off the bike that they were sharing.
Half of the reason we decided on this format was to see whose bike Tyler and Trista would ride. They chose hers:
After 12 laps, each rider on the top 3 teams had to slam a beer before their final laps.
Myers and F-Joe ended up running away with the race, which is a little less surprising now that there’s evidence that they were cheating from the start line.
Fortunately, there’s another race coming up for the rest of us to try and steal their glory. The Ides of March will be a ‘cross alleycat on March 17th. Show up to Schooner Exact around noon. There’ll be more info coming soon so keep an eye out here or over at Red Lantern Races.
Bring some money with you as well because you’re going to want one of the new Frost Club shirts.
All of the proceeds from these races and the t-shirts goes to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society so just buy one already. If you want one and can’t make it out to the race just email me and we’ll figure it out – hodalacx [at] gmail [dot] com .
After drinking beer and riding bikes, it certainly seems like our favorite thing to do is make videos of ourselves drinking beer and riding bikes. Fortunately, it seems like Cleveland has had some extra time on his hands recently and made these for your enjoyment.
Here’s a little ditty about Dirty Randy.
Hodala One Point One: Dirty Randy from Ryan Richardson on Vimeo.
And a video about our scantily clad time in SF for SSCXWC.
SSCXWC: Hodala Sparkle Party from Ryan Richardson on Vimeo.
Just in case you aren’t quite tired of all of this navel gazing, Pat Kehoe produced a rad little video portrait of our own Craig Etheridge.
Craig Etheridge from Circadian Pictures on Vimeo.
That kid is going to take over the world some day.
Alright, folks. That’s all that I’ve got in me today. Put your ‘cross bikes back together and come get rad with us in March. Hope to see you then.