And so it begins...

Not only did I ride my bike yesterday merely for the sake of doing so, but today is the day that this blog gets launched fo' real. If you were one of the lucky few to have been given a sneak preview of the site, you've heard the history, ranting, and promises of real content about mountain bike racing for about a week and a half (if not, read the previous three posts). Now you get to hear the plan:

As was previously mentioned, Eric and I are training to race a to-be-determined ultra-endurance mountain bike stage race next summer. After much deliberation, it has come down to three races, two countries and one mountain range. The Rockies are the destination, and the options are (in no particular order):

1. TransRockies Challenge (CAN): 550km, 17,623m of vertical gain. Known for it's mind-blowing brutality (and pretty decent singletrack). This option is probably the best suited to our strengths, as about half the distance is made up of fast miles that favor time trialists and roadies, but I've already done it three times...

2. BC Bike Race (CAN): 531km, 1100m of vertical gain (estimated). Known for it's totally mind-blowing singletrack. Popular sentiment suggests that BC Bike is better riding than TR (read: more awesome singletrack), but a higher decree of technical difficulty will be less suited to our collective strengths.

3. The Breck-Epic (USA): A totally unknown new race for 2009, being organized by Mike McCormack of the Rocky Mountain Championship Series around Breckenridge, CO. If you click on the link to the site at the time of this posting, it's probably not even up yet. Normally, I'd toss this one for still being a wild-card going into the planning period, but Mike has an ace up his sleeve. He's running a blogger grant contest whereby four individuals will be selected to blog about their experience in the Breck-Epic, and will get their race expenses covered to do so. Entrants to the contest will have their applications posted on the Breck-Epic website and the public will vote for their favorites. The four applications with the most votes by January 3 will be selected as the bloggers for the race. In case you haven't noticed, this is a blog, and at least one of us is a broke-ass graduate student... We'll let you know when our App. is available for voting.

Over the next two months we'll be watching our vote-count on the Breck-Epic site and the Canadian dollar, which is currently at 1 U.S. dollar = 1.22319969 Canadian dollars, and by the first week in January we'll pull the trigger on one of the three events. In the meantime we will be posting about our training, techie bike stuff, etc.

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