After more than two months on the road, Amelia Servi and Roxana Safipour have just arrived in California, and it looks like they had a great time.
Read all about their trip at safipour.blogspot.com.
Bike rodeo
Last Saturday, five MIT cyclists (well, four cyclists + one alumna) headed to South Boston to volunteer at a kid’s bike rodeo. The event was designed to teach kids and parents about bike safety, handling, mechanical tips, proper helmet-wearing, and how to steal the wheel of a good lead-out train (joke).
It was organized by our fearless and incredibly hard-working coach, Nicole Freedman, who happens also to be the City of Boston’s bike tsarina. Everybody had a good time, and I am pretty sure I met one 5-year-old named Benjamin who will win the national cyclocross championship in…2022. Stay tuned, I suppose.
Anyway, pictures of the event are up on our Flickr page (which you can also preview to your right).
What a “soul crusher” looks like
This is the elevation profile of Bolton Road, the “3D” in the X-Pot 3D road race, voted the ECCC’s most “soul-crushing” climb.
(Courtesy of MapMyFitness.)
Collegiate and amateur racing in the New York Times
This isn’t really about MIT directly, but a recent post from the New York Times’s City Room blog deserves a shout-out. It’s called “For Would-Be Armstrongs, Some Bike Racing Tips,” and it’s all about the transition from riding to racing in the amateur and collegiate circuits.
It also features advice from the coach and riders from my own undergraduate alma mater, the Columbia University Cycling Team. ECCC pride!
Columbia is a squad that has had an enormous amount of success in the past few years and has turned itself into one of the largest and most successful organizations in the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference. The Lions almost always place talented and skilled riders in every men’s and women’s category. So it’s well worth reading their advice in the Times post.
Jose’s new 80-mile loop
From the recently crowned Fitchburg cat 3 champion comes a new 80-mile ride to test your legs…and your navigational skillz.
Hi everyone,
I’ve just finalized “The Green Ride”. It’s a beautiful, shade covered, calm 80 mile loop on nice roads, with a fair amount of climbing. It leaves via the usual way to Dover, and comes back from Concord using a brand new route. You can think of this as “the new Pie Ride”. The only real caveat is the number of turns. It’s online now at http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2982237.
More goodies, including a PDF cue sheet and various topographic files, will be posted soon.
What MIT students do later in life
Check out this picture of MIT alum Ariel Herrmann putting the hurt on Floyd Landis.
Alumni spotlight: Sal Acosta
Sal Acosta ’84 recently bought two MIT Cycling jerseys: one for himself and one for his girlfriend Elizabeth Glick.
He’s director of operations for ABB, a power technologies company, in Baldwinsville, NY. Luckily for him, central New York State is blessed with great riding terrain—his favorite rides are around Onondaga Lake, Oneida Lake, and the Finger Lakes.
In early August Sal and Elizabeth will be doing a 6-day, 400-mile ride in the Lake Champlain area. If you’re interested, you can download the info sheet here and join them on what is sure to be a spectacular week of riding. And Sal notes that you’ll be able to spot them in their team kit.
Eric on VeloNews
VeloNews decided to give Eric Edlund a 30th birthday present by posting a photo of him from the BC Bike Race.
And of course you can follow the Pedal and Wrench duo at their blog.
Follow Eric and Keith at BC Bike Race
The word “epic” gets tossed around a lot these days. And it’s clear we should be careful when the word is used by event promoters (except X-Pot) or anybody hawking a product. But there is absolutely no question that the word “epic” applies to the BC Bike Race, in which riders haul themselves from Vancouver to Whistler over seven spectacular stages of singletrack. And two riders from MIT are about to embarrass the rest of the field.
Our very own strongmen Keith and Eric have been training for this for many moons. (But not at the expense of the latter’s thesis, of course, heavens no.) Anybody who’s tried to hold their draft in the last few months knows that they have tuned their engines to perfection.
In fact it’s possible you’ve already been following their build-up to the BC race. Since 2008 Keith and Eric have helpfully and exhaustively documented their training and thinking on the blog they jointly maintain as Team Pedal and Wrench. Only a blog by a pair of MIT students, and in fact only by this pair, could include both setting up wireless in Afghanistan and a 10-year statistical analysis of trends in MTB geometry.
The race starts on the 28th. Wish them luck, cheer them on, and follow their progress as Team Pedal and Wrench—on the race website, linked above, and on their blog, when they get a break from a week of unrelenting contact with nature.
Boston Velodrome survey
There’s a project to bring an indoor velodrome to the Boston area. To gauge interest the organizers are conducting a short survey that you can fill out at http://www.bostonvelodrome.com/.