Sunday, May 4, 2008

Being there




This past Sunday saw the 2008 edition of the "12 Hours of Lodi Farm" mountain bike race in Fredricksburg, VA. Hard as it may be to believe, I actually managed to drag my butt out to shoot it. I was out "in the field" from about 8pm Saturday till 2pm Sunday with naught but a two hour nap between 5am and 7am Sunday. I have no idea how all of those solo racers can actually ride a bike for 12 hours. I could barely walk back to the truck from shooting in the woods at 5am without falling over. Kudos racers.

All of my straight-outta-the-camera shots are on my Pbase site.



As an aside, I've been trying to come up with a way to make the best use of my two paid photo services: Pbase (good for mass image storage and grouping by event) and Flickr (good for general photo exposure and comments/critiques). I think my new plan is to dump every decent image from any given event to Pbase, and then edit/tweak/process my favorite shots and shots of friends and post those to Flickr (with a link back to Pbase site for anybody who wants to wade through all of the images). This, in my mind, seems like a good use of the two services.

I took the liberty of liberating somebody else's map of the trail network at Lodi from the official race web page. They had it as a 7MB TIFF download. There's no need for that. I converted it to a JPG and reduced its size by an order of magnitude to about 600kb. Much more handy size.

7 comments:

Lee said...

Nice work as usual. That's a long long day of work. Have you ever ridden that race? I missed it this year, don't know how sad i am though.

rickyd said...

Lee, you missed a good one. No rain, cool weather, great new sections on the course. Were there any Pedalshoppers there?

gmr2048 said...

Thanks for the kind words, Lee! Sorry you couldn't make it out. From what I remember of (hanging out at) past Lodi events, this one was pretty nice (weather-wise). We haven't even brought up the Lynard Skynard cover band, tho. Oohfh.

gmr2048 said...

Oh, and no, I've never ridden the trails down there. But apparently they are open (for a fee) at other times of the year, so I may have to make the drive down there one day soon and give them a ride.

Blue-eyed Devil said...

G-man, no fee required, though a donation is appreciated (and only fair--these are some fantastic trails considering their proximity to the DC metro area, and the land is privately owned, so there's no federal or state funding). The downside is, sometimes the owner closes it for hunting and because of weather or for other reasons, so heading down there on a whim is a bit risky.

Great race; perhaps the best course (and weather) in 5 years.

Great pix, by the way. Nice job. But what were you doing in the woods 4 hours before race time? ; )

gmr2048 said...

Icon: I was...uhh..."exploring".

Lee said...

Gary, they are great trails. I'd like to get down there sometime this summer for sure if you want to make a trip of it.

Ricky, I do wish I could have ridden this race. I missed it last year too. It's still one of the best races around. Only Dharma and Chris Webber made it down this time around. Seemed we all had some sort of family function this weekend.