It'll Be Just Like Starting Over. Starting Over.

Poster for the new race series our new team is starting. Art work by John Martinek.

So, here's the deal. John and I and some other friends started a new bike team this year. The team we were on wasn't very supportive. Last year, John did so much work to get a permanent cyclocross course set-up and we both spent almost every weekend from April through November working on the course, also many evenings during the week, and John also got some great volunteers, like our friends Chelsea and Burne to work on it and bring landscaping equipment. Unfortunately, the team we were on wouldn't support us in putting on a two day race once a year. First they said it was because there was a home football game in town that weekend. Then they said it was because there WASN'T a football game in town that weekend and the president of our team needed one of those days to put on his own race. We never saw them try to control races from any other teammates, so we bailed. We didn't want it to be some big, dramatic thing, we just wanted to be on a team that would support us in our races, just like we would support any races anyone else on our team wanted to put on.

At first, we thought we might just join other teams. We did email some friends of ours to let them know that we were quitting the team and some of those friends asked if we'd start another one, and if we did, could they join. We thought about it a bit and figured, what the hell. So, now we have a new team and we're trying to figure out how we want to do it. We took some of the things we liked about the old team, and we're changing some things we didn't like. We want it to be open to anyone who wants to join and is respectful of other people and we want it to be a multi-sport team. We'd like to help other people get into racing and playing outside more too.

Our new racing kits!

Getting this new team off the ground has been an interesting experience. We have about 12 members right now and so you get 12 different kinds of input. You can never make everyone happy, but we try to make most members happy and go by what the majority wants. We had to pick out a name, and pick out what we wanted our racing kits to look like, and what colors we wanted. We just got our new kits yesterday and John got a race series going and a website put together: https://www.crandicracing.com/. All that's left now is for our members to race in our new kits. Woo hoo!

As far as I'm concerned, this is all a good thing. I know John is sad about not getting to put on the cyclocross race, but on the upside, we don't have to spend all of our precious spare time working on the course and painting barriers and bridges and mowing...So many less things to deal with.

Right now, I'm excited to see how it all goes, and I LOVE the colors of our new kit. So many ways to win.