For your delectation, the Men’s “A” race in just over 5 minutes:

This is the Fort Langley Cyclocross Classic, race #1 of the BC CX Cup, which happened September 10, 2006. I rode in the B group just before filming this, and can assure you this course was as fun as it looks, though very decidedly non-traditional. Race winner was Symmetrics’ Andrew Pinfold, in the yellow and black jersey.

The song (Re Your Brains) was provided by Jonathan Coulton, whose routinely delightful songs are made available under Creative Commons license, and I thank him for that. Go listen to his stuff.

Thanks to Masi-Adobe for putting on the race, and Aldor Acres for providing the venue (they’re also good for pumpkins and Christmas trees!), and The Lovely One for indulging my dirty cyclocrossing misadventures.

And I hope you’ll be inspired to come out to my club’s cyclocross race, happening September 24: the Team Escape Velocity Grand Prix of Cyclocross. In contrast to Fort Langley, it will be Euro-style all-grass, wide-open course. It’s gonna be epic.

You don’t have to keep reading, the rest is about creating the video. I was able to borrow a pretty nice miniDV camera for this race, as opposed to the various digicams I used last year, and it helped. I really had the song in mind before I made the video, so I laid down the music track first, and tried to track and time the edits against that. I think the result was mostly good. I knew my own race was going rather badly when I realized I was thinking about how I would assemble this video while pedaling down the fast gravel sections.

I have a very nice, very large version of this video if anyone cares for it. It would fit on one CD, but you’ll get a nice, 480p, 30fps version of the video with very clean sound. Perfect for sponsor presentations or whatnot. Let me know.