Any race where you are drenched to the bone just riding to the start line is going to be a good one. On apocalyptic streets littered with dead umbrellas, and hidden pot holes 35 racers crazy fuckers, showed up to do battle with mother nature and each other, all for the glory of celebrating PI day. I am not sure I have ridden in worse weather, driving rain, fierce wind, road slop being thrown into your face from the fenderless bike in front of you, ass hole drivers, and to top it all off at one checkpoint we all got hit in the face with a shaving cream pies. (barbosol burns the eyes!)

You might be tempted to use words like “epic”, “awesome”, “torrential”, “stupid” and you would be right to succumb to that temptation. This race was all of those and more, I nearly met my end several times, and my back wheel not looks slightly less than round. In a sadistic turn of events the 15 mile course took us over the Charles not once by twice. I nearly lost my shit going over the Mass Ave bridge just from the wind. Slippery expansion joints, metal plates, slick road paint, and hidden pot holes (pot holes completely under water) were plentiful.

Don't worry she is ok, and also got second place ladies...tough as nails.

There were many crashes, some grizzly, but everyone made it through more or less safe and sound. I was in the front pack most of the race but got lost near the end in china town, nearly taco’d my back wheel on a HUUUUUGE pot hole, lost my blinky and ended up in 6th place.

By the end of the race all of our manifests looked like wet confetti, many people were shaking with the early stages of hypothermia, and a lot of people looked like drowned rats, but everyone even the people bleeding had pretty big smiles on their faces. The after party was held in a quarter inch of water as 40+ drenched biker showed up looking for beers, and warm clothes.

This was by far one of the shittiest, windiest, nastiest, wettest races I have ever had the pleasure of being a part of, not since the 90+ degree Katamari Kat have I suffered like this. Numb fingers, raw faces, drenched toes, all of it seemed to float away (pun intended) as the fun of the race swept over everyone. At points I could barely concentrate on anything but the guy in front of me, or trying to blink enough to get the rain out of my eyes. At one point I even had sand under my upper lip thrown up from a puddle. This race was a sloppy mess, in every sense of the word. As my friend Tammy put it “cheers to anyone who can handle the cold, wet, horizontal 55MPH windy fucktard of a storm outside.”

As fun as it was next time maybe we can schedule some sunshine!

More pictures from Karol’s awesome photo shoot.

So I wasn’t really sure how this race was going to go. My expectations were that it would involve carrying stuff, perhaps even a lot of stuff. With that in mind I emptied my bag of all but the essentials, threw in a couple old tubes to use as tie downs, and even went so far as to attach a rack to the back of my bike. I was so not prepared for the epic amount of sheer awesome this race would turn into.

Let me say that again…EPIC. I know that people on the internet like to use terms like epic and awesome casually, but boy howdy this was a fantastic race.

Just ridding over to the starting point I was a dripping sweaty mess, it was about 90 degrees outside with about the same humidity, riding was more akin to swimming through hot water covered in a wool blanket. Before the race started I stopped at a gas station, got two frozen snickers bar ice cream things, and a giant Gatorade, the ice cream didn’t make it past the end of the parking lot, and the Gatorade disappeared shortly after…it was hot.

I got to the starting point early, and was disappointed to see so few actual racers (mostly check point workers), but that soon changed as I sat under a tree and though cool thoughts about 50 other racers showed up! A fantastic turnout for such a geeky themed alleycat, on such a devils nut sack kind of day.

Once everyone was collected we were given the following manifest:

(this is going to be a long post, click below to read the rest)
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