the what what:

frederick city alley cat, w/ checkpoints, contests, challenges, scavenger hunting, and rad urban cyclist prizes.

Where: meet at the big bell tower in baker park downtown frederick.  you know it.  MAP HERE
all the normal crap too: skid competion, track stand comp, rapping comp.

do we all know what an alley cat is?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleycat_races

the saturday after halloween, as in nov 7th.  meet at the baker park bell tower….

extra points for rad post halloween costumes.

other stuff:
bring a cell camera or a camera
a sharpie
tail light
beer bucks
messenger bag or basket
$6.66 entrance fee

screen shot, obviously

Incidentally, Whit and I are sort of Co-Hosting a Rapha Continental Ride in State College on May 20th.  It follows the basic route of the October Ramble, (pics link here) with a bit more mileage and a bit more climbing.  We’ll obviously post pics of it all when its done.  My lazy ass is riding in the team van with a clutch of old rangefingers at the ready.

From the Rapha webs sight:

oddly, whit appears to be in a car…. hmmm….

I’d be really impressed if they add a feature to upload the data continuously so that if you are doing a race then people can track your progress or your frequent walking / flat tires. I think that would be invaluable if you were in at relay race and you wanted your teammates to get the maximum amount of downtime before their next ride or if you were running a marathon and you wanted friends / family to follow you to cheer you on.

Here is a review of the software and another option, check out the pic that shows elevation tracking.

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so we had a super good turn out for the scramble.  dave got points for driving the furthest to get here.  phil got points for riding a bike that would give a cory townie a run for its money (crappynesswise).  way to many people showed up on fixed gears and kicked ass on them.  joe, jay, john (sort of) jason and phil were all punished the roads with their insanity.  there were, if i recall, 9 flats, 4 of which happened to Rob and two of which happened to Damien.  Is that right?  Or were there more?  We made it home before blinky lights were needed, but not by too much.

Dave took pictures, which he hasnt posted on Flickr yet, so did John (same thing) but Joe has some up here.

I hope everyone had as good of a time as I did, pain aside.  That said, I rode the next day and felt 90 percent OK.

I want to not feel OK next time.  I want to be groveling on the side of the road.  To that end, I propose a mega monster ride for october.  That gives you almost two months to lay off the sauce and ride a bunch.  We could split the ride over two days, but where’s the suffering in that proposal?

I’m thinking sort of an expanded dirty sugar ferry ride, to include much more dirt and plenty of more excuses to get flats.  there would be no singletrack, but just alot of farm roads and potholes.  120 miles.  It’s totally doable.  We’d have to start early, and we’d definately end after dark.

here’s a link to the proposed ride route.  

Go ahead and call me crazy.  There will mad amounts of dirt.  Or you will be mad about the amount of dirt.  Check it against the dirt road database.  There is more dirt than pavement, almost. I’d say at least 40 solid miles of dirt.  Let’s say October 26th for now.   Image from last year’s Ferry Ride here.

Maybe someone knows someone’s yard we can sleep in down that way.

More info

anyone who wants to join me in this is welcome…I do this every thursday morning. Except next thursday the 5th, resting for Big Bear. Email me if you interested.
Rob

anyway, they got ‘bought out’ by mapmyride and so we have to use that now.  which is actually a good thing.  it makes your cue sheet for you, has a decent road follower tool which allows you to delete big parts of mistakes at once, shows real time elevation, ect.  the cue sheet set up is particularly nice.  i tested its accuracy yesterday, and it was spot on, even giving the name and route number of a given road.  this feature is super good for country roads missing signs.  this feature makes it better than bikely and routeslip combined.  it also allows you to add tags like water or food and provide a description, like google my maps.  so i started an open group, for who ever, to add ridelugged minded routes.  the URL is http://www.mapmyride.com/community/groups/833088119056

you have to sign up to the site, which is free and easier than even getting an email account from a blind chinese fortune teller.

go sign up, make a route, join the club, go ride your bike.  yeah you, the one who should be training.  go ride.

Google Maps

It’s kind of frustrating how hard it is to find decent maps of Patapsco so I figure this is at least a start.

I found this site with a bunch of GPS files that mapped some of the trails at the Patapsco Avalon Area and I converted them to google maps files and then imported them into the google map.

For those who haven’t been to the Avalon area in a while there are some really nice trail improvements. The ridge trail is really nice on a single speed because they’ve cut out some of the really grueling washed out climbs and replaced them with some fast rolling switch backs.