In The Crosshairs

Amazingly, no helmet cam footage made it into the final cut.

Since late last year Rich Hohenbrink, founder of Moneynstuff LLC, and I have been plotting out a commercial for his First To the Line card game. In March we got down to filming. It started by assembling a makeshift peloton on a cold Sunday morning and forcing them to do hill repeats for about four hours. Followed that up with some sprintervals and a late night of card playing at MNS HQ. The result is a nice little 30 second spot that will be airing during Universal Sport’s streaming coverage of the 2011 Giro.

Big thanks to Sean O’Donnell for all his help, Rich for giving us the opportunity to do the project, JBV Coaching for lending kits and the hearty souls of MABRAland for climbing up that hill. As much fun as it was to film and edit, the purpose is to get more of these killer decks of cards into people’s hands. It’s a great game and fun to play. So go get one for yourself and give a spare to mom this Sunday. They are for sale here.

Here’s the video. Thanks for watching.

Setting up for interviews in the junkyard. All photos ©2011 Sean O'Donnell

Last December we traveled to Philadelphia to film the Bilenky Junkyard Cross race. An incredible event that is as much a Bilenky Cycle Works open house and holiday party as it is a race. The race footage from that day got a lot of play on the Internets, which was really cool.

About a month ago we decided it would be even cooler to head back to Philly, hang out at Bilenky Cycle Works for a day, grab some shop footage and some interviews, and put together a more developed short film on the annual race. We spent a super fun day talking about the race and playing in the junkyard.

Stephen Bilenky was nice enough to come to the office on a Sunday.

The completed short film is now in the hands of the Bicycle Film Festival. Hopefully, they will deem it worthy to be included in their shorts program.

Sean O’Donnell, who races for TOMS Shoes p/b Kindhuman Sports, was a huge help in putting the film together. He is also a talented photographer who is turning out a ton of sweet bicycle culture photos for his Smoke to Ink Photography mark. Check out the nice set of shots from our day up in Philly here.

Courier Cross. DC. May 15.

And, hey,  if you’re not doing anything May 15 and want to  try your hand at some urban cyclocross/alley cat mayhem, Sean is promoting the first annual DC Courier Cross. We will be out there filming the chaos. You should come out, too. All the details are here.

Talk to you soon.

In MABRAcross Tandem-Cross blood will be spilled. And duct tape will be used to contain it.

In this final installment of MABRAcross tandem-cross, we saw some familiar story lines. The team of Adam Driscoll and Pat Blair (Adventures for the Cure), collectively known as Padam, completed a sweep of the series by winning this final event. The competition definitely kept them closer as the weeks went by, but nobody ever caught these guys at the line. I’m sure they will be lobbying for the inclusion of a tandem-cross MABRAcross Verge Sport leaders jersey in 2011.

In the MABRAcross Championship race, the SingleSpeed Outlaw tandem piloted by David Kegley and Todd Bauer gave the Padam squad a run for their money and may have made it even closer if the race had gone another lap. And the always entertaining Team TOMS Shoes squad did not disappoint as Sean O’Donnell took over the Matt Bartlett seat and helped Chad Bartlett secure the most adventurous ride of the day. The TOMS and SingleSpeed Outlaw teams handled helmet-cam duties for this race. Saturday morning television provided the soundtrack.

Thanks for watching.

The Team TOMS Shoes Bobsled Start

With the meteoric rise in popularity of tandem-cross in the Mid-Atlantic region, we thought it was a good time to give everybody interested in this nascent category a few pointers on how to place high in the standings. For our first installment we caught up with Chad Bartlett and Sean O’Donnell (Team TOMS Shoes p/b Kindhuman Sports) at the MABRAcross Championship in Taneytown, Md., to find out more about their unique bobsled style starts.

Although their technique may seem a bit unorthodox, it put them in position to finish third on the day. Ultimately, though, they were bested in the finishing stretch by a tandem with a nine-year-old stoker and one with a thirteen-year-old stoker after resorting to the same bobsled technique for the sprint.

Thanks for watching.

Sean O'Donnell at Schooley Mill

We caught up with several podium finishers at Saturday’s Schooley Mill Cross race to get their thoughts on the course and how the day played out. The idea in putting together these interviews was to give you a video version of what we used to do every week on this site: seek out the podium finishers to see what they did to prepare for their race and what they were thinking about during it.

Much more still to come including helmet cams from Schooley Mill and Rockburn, and some pretty cool tandem-cross coverage. Also, the MABRAcross Championship preview video should be up Friday.

Thanks for watching.