Launch of The Racing Reds' Report

Welcome to the first, official post of our new blog, The Racing Reds' Report.  After receiving a few requests for race reports from fellow cyclists, I came up with the idea for this blog. Race report blogs are nothing new, I follow several local racers and enjoy reading about their personal exploits. If I was going to start a blog, I wanted it to be a little bit different.  First, I didn't want it to simply be a personal blog. As a member of Gastown Cycling's race team, the Racing Reds, I wanted the whole team to be involved. We often share detailed race reports with each other through email.  I wanted to create a central location where we could post these reports and share them with interested friends, avoiding the messiness of email chains. This could be place where we could better document our races, without them being lost within the clutter of an email inbox. Finally, I hoped to create a blog that could provide more varied content than just a collection of individual race reports.

The Racing Reds are an amateur road cycling team based out of Vancouver, BC. The team is composted of primarily UCI Category 3 racers, with a few outliers in both Cat. 4 and Cat. 2. This is a local team; we all have jobs in other fields, but evenings and weekends are reserved for communal suffering through long training sessions and at local races. We, like many of you, probably take our local races a little too seriously during the events themselves. After the fact however, any dodgy line and blocked sprint is (relatively) quickly forgotten and the embellished reminiscing can begin. Within this blog you will find our personal race reports, but you will also find information that we believe is useful to all the other beer league racers our there. We will write reviews of equipment that is often ignored by mainstream press, including open mold "eastern" components that help us keep the costs down on our bikes.  As most of us race track at the Burnaby Velodrome, there will also be an emphasis on reviewing track bikes and related gear, as there is surprisingly few reviews of track equipment elsewhere. Finally, we will use this blog to share any other information we deem relevant to the amateur racer as the Report evolves.

At first, we will work to back-fill the blog with a selection of race reports from earlier in the season and write some equipment review to establish our initial content. After that, we will aim to provide frequent posts and updates on the site.

Thanks for reading!
Brad
Racing Red

2014 Racing Reds:

-Derek Ulrich - Road, Track

-Brad Dean - Road, Track, TT

-Jakub Wasiela - Road

-Simon Le Pine - Road, Track

-Chris Jameson - Road, Track

-John White - Road, Track

-Adam Holcombe - Road

-Michael Thompson - Road

-Scott Lytle - Cyclocross

-Rob Thompson - Road