My voice is my passport

Three outta four blog analysts found Bad Idea Racing to be "just okay, but still worthy of a bookmark".

Yesterday my friend from way back in the day Shon "Warchild" Simon left an interesting comment regarding my recent media exposure in Mountain Bike magazine.

Nice dude, that is f'n awesome.

Shon

P.S. I hate you for living the life.

Shon and I go waaaaaaay back. A coupla years after I got into mountain biking (@ 1990 or so) I met Shon through a friend. Next thing you know we were traveling all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in an attempt (failed) to dominate the beginner and sport class. We cut our teeth together on the ""circuit" at ski resorts, farmer's fields, and landfills all over the tri state area. I can remember sleeping together in a tiny 5' x 5' tent in the rain the night before the infamous Di Di Mau race in Athens, Oh, and I recall with great fondness the time when Shon finished his race at the Lake Erie landfill after being shot in the throat with the top cap and bumpers outta his Rock Shox Quadra 21.

Good times.

Our lives after leaving Ohio have gone down separate paths. He moved to California and hasn't been riding as much (he still owns his Litespeed elevated stay full suspension bike), and I moved to North Carolina. Since then we met up in Moab once, he supported me at my first 24 hour worlds in Idyllwild back in 2000, and he swung out to Napa last year to witness some of the debauchery that was SSWC08.

Both Shon and I had aspirations of eventually getting good at this cycling thing. I have found a happy path to relative success through moderately good (but quite random) results and slightly better than mediocre writing. This is what has propelled me into the spotlight, not quite the center of the spotlight, but definitely inside the fringe of illumination that gets past the big heads of those that deserve it. Yes, I'm living the life Shon.

As luck would have it I have once again managed to get into a printed publication during the very slow period for cycling publications known as winter. Some press is better than none, but being that my relative success is mostly based on my mediocre writing 7% of the people that read the article (more of a blurb) are gonna wind up here trying to figure out what all the hoopla (six square inches of hoopla to be precise) is about. Now comes the hard part. You folks that have remained loyal to the cause have waited patiently through the slow winter to occasionally get some entertainment from here. I know things are pretty hit or miss, but in the winter it's a lot more miss than hit. You have to read about things like what I keep on the shelves in my bike room to get to the random post that hits the mark once a week or so.

So with the exposure comes new people who come in with high expectations. I know some of you will be all like "I was reading Bad Idea Racing before it was fashionable". Don't worry, I won't let you down, faithful blog readers. I will do my best to disappoint the newcomers so as to push them away and keep it real between you and I forever. We need to keep up this level of intimacy we have going here, and I won't have it any other way.

So batten down the hatches. The shit storm is on the horizon, and it looks like this one's gonna stall out over our heads for a week to ten days.