Just like that, 2022 comes to a close. We started out mountain biking in the snow, enjoyed a full season of racing on every possible surface, and featured plenty of other adventures on and off the bike. Here’s a look back at the highlights of the year as we covered it on the To Be Determined Journal.

THE BEST RIDE: PERFECT FALL COLOR IN NY

Fall may be cyclocross season, but come late October TBD has a well established tradition of hunting for the best fall foliage New York has to offer. Two weeks ago this tradition had us wandering the beautiful gravel roads surrounding Katonah. But that ride was a touch early for peak colors. So this past weekend we headed back to Westchester and were rewarded with some of the best color imaginable.

I RODE TO CANADA: NYC TO THE BORDER ON THE EMPIRE STATE TRAIL

In 2017 Cuomo announced the creation of the Empire State Trail, a 750 mile bicycle and walking trail that would span New York State from Buffalo to Albany, and from New York City through the Hudson and Champlain Valleys, to Canada. It was towards the end of 2020 that the trail was completed, and so opened the longest multi-use trail in the nation. At the start of 2022, I’d made a commitment to myself. I would ride that trail from NYC to Canada ~400 miles to the border, a great safe introduction to multi-day adventure riding, a type of riding I was growing increasingly curious about.

EMTB RACING TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD

Turns out that eMTBs are not actually super popular with the bike racing crowd. They are, however, really popular with the dirt bike racing crowd. Most of the eMTB races to be had on the east coast don’t happen at bike races, but at dirt bike races. The big series is the Grand National Cross Country (GNCC), but the JDay Offroad series in Massachusetts also added an eMTB race this year at many of its events.

GNCC races attract the most people, though, and doing a few was my goal for the season.

This past race was in Snowshoe, West Virginia, a ski mountain on the eastern edge of West Virginia, probably best known among TBD’s audience for its excellent downhill bike park and annual UCI Mountain Bike World Cup race. Snowshoe also, it turns out, hosts a GNCC race. As a fangirl who has been dying to go to a MTB world cup, Snowshoe was the GNCC race I was most looking forward to.

INSIDE A SUCCESSFUL WEEKLY RACE SERIES: FIFTH STREET CX

We have learned a lot from the ups and downs of sanctioned racing in our decade plus of racing. One of these lessons has been that a weekly race series can be the beating heart of a local cycling scene. For instance, we were in awe of the Driveway Series during our first visit back in 2017. And this year’s return of Tuesday Night racing at Floyd Bennett Field has reinvigorated the NYC race calendar amid post-pandemic struggles.

More recently, images from a local series called Fifth Street Cross have been popping up on our social media feeds. The photos have been striking. But what also caught our eye was the diversity of the racing - it is not just a cyclocross series, it is also a cross-country running series. And, later in the season, it takes place in twilight conditions. And sometimes in a torrential downpour that borders on flash flood conditions. With riders using everything from modern CX bikes to mountain bikes to classic steel bikes.

In short, we had to learn more. So we reached out to Gabe Lloyd, who you may remember as one half of the race director team behind Reading Radsport. We interviewed Gabe and his wife Kacey about how they were changing notions around crit racing back in 2019 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Three years later, Gabe was kind enough to fill us in on Fifth Street Cross… how it came to be, how they keep it going, and what makes it unique:

NYC CYCLOCROSS GUIDE: DRIVING TO BIG RACES AND GETTING NO RESULTS IS WHAT WE LIVE FOR

First, let’s get this out of the way. There is no cyclocross in NYC. There is Rainey Park, and you can choose to be one of the many whose cyclocross career is just the annual trip to the starting grid in a little park in Queens. This article is mostly not for you. But, for those of you looking to abandon your loved ones every weekend to stand around in a grass field all day - get in the car, loser. Cross is here.

TBD X CASTELLI NEW KIT DAY

As TBD enters its second decade, one of our traditions is that every few years we hand Daghan Perker the reigns and ask him to come up with something special for team kit. Back in 2020 we asked him to do an evolution of the team’s prior kit, and he did not disappoint. For this year’s effort we took a different strategy. We gave Daghan pretty much carte blanche to come up with a new design direction - something independent from the maroon and navy colorway that has been present in TBD kit since 2017.

Long story short, we could not be happier with the results that you see here. Daghan placed every dot on the jersey by hand using pen and paper. It was a marathon 8+ hour session, but when finished he then converted this physical artwork to a digital template. We then handed these templates over to our friends at Castelli, who applied it to their industry leading apparel.

Is it a summer jersey? Is it a cyclocross kit that lives dangerous with mostly white fabric? Or maybe a limited edition ‘FunFetti’ kit? Or is it our primary kit design going forward? The honest answer is that we don’t know. We’re just excited to start wearing this absolutely beautiful kit.

THE RACE TO THE SKY: MOUNT WASHINGTON HILL CLIMB

It’s been a long, hot summer of fast road racing here in the city. So, last weekend, TBD racers, Dana, Matt and Ben slowed things down by racing to the summit of the country’s toughest climb, Mount Washington. This is the race to the sky.

The road up Mount Washington is 7.5 miles. A short distance to ride on a bike, by any stretch of the imagination. Most people would comfortably cover that two or three times in an hour. In most park races you’ll be eating up that distance almost four times over.

This year, Phil Gaimon set the KOM time up Mount Washington of 50 minutes and 3 seconds. Let that sink in for a second. For the best part of an hour, the fastest person ever to ascend the climb, did so at basically jogging pace.

It’s not just that Mount Washington is steep (it is) or long, it’s completely unrelenting. You hit the bottom and think “this cannot possibly be how it’s going to be for the next hour”. And yet, it is. It’s a breathtaking, punishing topographic freak… and the perfect place for a bike race.

GRANT'S TOMB CRITERIUM 2022: THE RACE REPORT AND DAGHAN PERKER PHOTO GALLERY

Grant’s Tomb Crit is one of the only “real” street criteriums raced in New York City. It’s the gem of NYC racing scene and it never disappoints. In the first GT Summer edition (it has historically been in early March), we had a scorcher of a day with some excellent racing.

MOUNTAIN BIKING IN A WINTER WONDERLAND

There are some rides that you know you’ll always remember. Riding in fresh snow at Stillwell was one of those!

RIDING THE NYC MARATHON COURSE

We have a proper love affair with the NYC Marathon. So much so that it has been a regular feature on the journal. Back in 2018 we called escorting the marathon’s wheelchair athletes a “bucket list experience.” And in 2019 we declared our second year of escort duties “NYC’s Best Holiday.” However for this year’s race, with some of our teammates taking over escort duties and no teammates in the footrace, several of us set very early alarms to ride the course as it was closing to traffic.

Which is how Daghan, Mitchell, friend of the squad Ceren, and I wound up churning through pitch black Manhattan at 5:15AM on Sunday morning. We met Megan and Lisa at a Bay Ridge Dunkin’ Donuts where the sun was only beginning to rise as a couple hundred cyclists gathered in the parking lot. With unseasonably warm temperatures the crowd continued to swell until it overflowed onto Fourth Avenue.

A NEW NYC HOUR RECORD

Sunday September 25: it was still completely dark as we gathered at Kissena Velodrome in Queens. Planes lumbered overhead but otherwise the morning was cool and quiet. Coffee and doughnuts arrived. We swept the track as the sun rose.

Then, shortly after 7AM Ben rolled off the start line. Cheers mixed with the sound of a disc wheel whooshing down the straights at more than twenty seven miles per hour. Sixty minutes later it was official: Ben is the new New York City Hour Record holder with a confirmed distance of 44.54 kilometers, surpassing Ken Harris’ impressive 2008 performance by 370 meters.

We’ll have much more about this special morning at the track in the coming weeks including Ben’s perspective on the feat and a short film by Daghan. As we said, we hope this effort is the starting point for a new round of Hour Records at Kissena. There are lots of blank spaces in the record books just waiting to be tackled!