Thankfully, The Storm Has Passed

Ain’t it nice to be out?

Now there’ll be no more of this:

White Russians, Cocks, Drivetrain Trophies and Lightsaber. Sounds like a 4 band bill at your next all ages show, but no, it’s the stupid things we occupied our time with at HQ, locked in halfway up the west hills by the snow and steep grades.

Happy to be out riding now….excellent stuff, isn’t it? Gotta get some base mile action up and running, as Banana Belt is right around the corner after all!

Lana Pressey Closes Season By Winning Last Race on Schedule

Check out what Lana done brung us.  Nice work, kid.

The solo Ironclad representative won Psycho Cross #5 and said it was one of the best, coolest courses out there. Certainly worth putting on the schedule next year for those late year cross addicts.

We’ll see if we can’t dig up some photos of this fine achievement. The event was weeks ago when our site was in a coma, so we apologize that the update comes so late.

Congrats, Lana! Way to end the season!

Did You Get The License Plate of That Holiday?

The days after X-Mess are like the aftermath of getting hit by a truck, or having had a holiday bomb go off nearby. There’s a haze ringing inbetween the ears, a slow settling of the guts, bits of garbage strewn about, and a magical extra half inch sits on the waistline. Nice.

Here at Ironclad HQ, we’ve been busy preparing our all-out assault on 2009 by holding special training camps around the glove….er, globe.

Sure, some of us are still in the Northwest doing our thing with our bikes, even  if said thing means riding inside because you live at elevation. I wonder what local shops have seen as far as uptick in trainer sales….I bet it’s good. Rollers, too. I digress…..we’ve sent agents to far off lands to set the charges for next year. For instance, we sent good ol’ Brian Gerow to Belgium, where he’ll be watching some top notch cross race. We’ll, he’ll be near one, I’m sure he’ll be too plastered to watch one. Who cares anymore, anyway? Cross was so November….keep your mud. Anyhow, Brian is there in the motherland of Cross and close to Holland, which is a way cooler country anyhow, so hopefully he’ll get a chance to see some good Euro shit.

We’ve also dispatched Sanders and Clark to none other than Patagonia.  As in the LAND, not the clothier. You can check up with their shenanigans by clicking here.

The rest of us are weaseling about the ol’ town, seeing old friends and the like. Oh yes, and Spanish Coffee is IN, in case you didn’t get the memo.

Many special thanks to these folks for getting our internet ship righted. You need web design help? This is the person to contact. 2nd to none.

Looks like the thaw is in full effect….got your fenders ready? We leave you with a familiar sentiment from Sanders, deep in the Patagonian bush.

Later!

Merry Christmas, One And All

Our team wishes you a very Merry Christmas, at least it won’t turn out like this. We hope.

Since you really can’t ride outside without a mountain bike and a gallon of whiskey, we hope your roller time is fun. Or, since it’s Christmas, let’s forget about rollers and riding for one day, and instead eat and drink and lay about with family and friends.

Enjoy the day, everyone!

PSA: Riding in a Blizzard – NOT ADVISABLE

We’ve all done some stupid things in our lives, no doubt, but we put a top 5 selection up there yesterday with a mid to late afternoon jaunt up Lief Erickson right during the meat of the snow storm. What seemed like a good idea went really well until we saw the obvious in that Cross bikes weren’t going to cut it past mile 5. It seemed like a 2 hour struggle just to get that far as the snow drifted and worked against us. 5 miles up. Long. Slippy. There were a few tire tracks already laid down, but if there were folks farther back than 2 hours from when we went, chances are good their tracks were completely snowed over.  We saw 5 folks on the way down on bikes, all other souls save for two were of the skiing variety.

Hudson moves ahead…..damn fat tires!

John Beer, Carrie Veloforma, Mark, 3 Ironclad (Dave, Kristin, Hudson), and Heidi and Sal, all thought going vertical into the teeth of a blizzard would be wise. All of the aforementioned folks need their heads examined. Heidi and Sal made the best move in turning back before the higher elevations. Dave, John, and Carrie were simply stuck by the poweline portion of the trail, their CX wheels unable to turn anymore in the deepening snow. Greg and Mark, on mountain bikes, made it to the predetermined turnaround spot but when others didn’t follow, they turned for home too.

Passages from Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” played back in folks’ minds – we need to turn around to go home, and it’s going to take a while to get down this bitch, or we’re goners. Never before had this group ever seen a Lief ride where going down was harder than going up. Before heading down the hill, we pulled out a few Olympias well on their way to being frozen through, and also an MP3 player with some external speakers, to listen to Metallica’s “Am I Evil”. We also documented the depth of the snow for you.

They stand alone…..

It looked akin to what one might think a post-apocalyptic Northwest Portland would look like upon exiting the trail after an hour’s struggle to egress out of the jaws of death above us. Very few folks out, and those that were made no bones about questioning our faculties: “you guys are crazy.” Thanks, we know. If we could pry our frozen lips apart and coerce our frozen tongues into making audible sounds, we’d agree with you or at least smile.

We now know how those InBev Clydesdales feel. Crappity!

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

Wow, what the hell was that? We went into a website coma there for a few weeks, we apologize. Seems a nasty ‘bot got all Cylon on our stupid asses, and the site went kaput. Bye bye. Durrrrr, pretty birds. In other words, someone sent us a box that was ticking. Tick-tick-ticking. Kaboom.

Though we have been down, we are not out. We will be doing our best Steve Austin job on this sucker. Time to hunker down and do some serious tinkering. For now, all the old archives are not available, as they’ve been amputated and moved to the ICU of the Interwebs. We’ll have them linked and ready for your viewing pleasure once the wounds heal and the scars become less visible.

We did take the opportunity to maximize our downtime by having our year end party, attending the Cross Crusade Party, going to the USGP, doing some riding in the snow, having a fit kit party for our new 2009 uniforms, and all kinds of other shit. For visual evidence of these shenanigans and more, go here.

And while we’re rolling up our sleeves and scratching our heads figuring out how to put all this shit back together, you can watch this highlight reel of our 2008 year. It’s poorly done, and has a shitty song on it, but there’s some ha-ha bits.

We’ll be back in full force soon. Promise.

We got hacked, Jack.

Sorry for the long, long delay in getting some posts up here at Ye Oulde Ironclad website, but as it turns out, the site got hacked and got a bad dose of what I could only think would be a website’s version of cancer. Whatever got to us ate us away in big chunks, so we’ve lost a ton of information that needs to be rebuilt.

So, nice to see you again, and nice to be seen……stand by as we overhaul what’s left over and get back to the business of being the team blog you know and love…..

Stand by…………..