Predictions of Glory! (not until tomorrow...)

Registration for the 2017 Paranormal bike race closes in 7 hours and change.  But let's face it, any hope you had of actually racing this thing died long ago, right around the time you started scheming for how to best make your bike look like a veiny, uncircumcised phallus.

And I applaud that.  You know what you're good at, which is the costumes, having fun, drinking beers part of the Paranormal, and like 90% of the people who will be present, you'll be there to have fun the old fashioned way: intoxicated, among friends, laughing Brunswick stew out of your nose by the campfire.

There are a few, though, who will have fun the other way.  Which is 6+ hours of fury around a shit-hot, 7.5 mile single track loop that has more or less a thousand feet of up and down.  Those details still being worked out (in some cases, actually being built.)  But never mind that.  Looking through the current list of contenders, and contemplating the annual predictions that I am bound by birthright to make tomorrow on the eve of the race, a couple things jump out at me already:

1)  Mike The Hurricane Coco and Matt Kesecker aren't technically registered in the same category.  Not that they won't be both racing singlespeeds (The Hurricane doesn't even own a derailleur, as far as I know), not that they won't be absolutely murdering this loop with huge gears that I couldn't even pedal down Afton, and not that they won't be neck and neck at the bitter end, trying to crash each other into the creek for the glory of the top step...but they're not actually registered on the same page of BikeReg.  Interesting...

2) If you count Matty K, there are 20 fast, solo men signed up at this moment, but how many are actually there to race is impossible to say.  Hard to think Ricky Everington is coming for the party and not the glory.  Ditto that for multi-year Paranormal Champion, Johnny P.  But Thomas Bouber?  If he's there to hurt you with real intent, well, you're gonna get hurt (he's Dutch.)  But is he?  There's no way of knowing.  The same can be said for a lot of those names.  So picking a winner based upon pedigree alone won't due this time around - you've gotta have pedigree AND the fury in your heart to race hard for 6 hours in late October.  Which is not a common pairing.

3)  The solo women's category, like almost every other category, is a little lean on entries at the moment - and I know for a fact that the people who will win many of those categories aren't yet signed up.  So with 7 hours left to get your shit together, I ask that you actually get your shit together, tap all those clicky letter thingies down there under your enormous pumpkin pie eating fingers, and make my job of pre-picking a winner easy.  Vegas is counting on me.

That's it until tomorrow, at such time I'll chime in with who I think will get paid for their efforts, and who won't, and then we'll sign off for a weekend of actually finding out which is the fun part anyway.

Until then, I remain, yours truly...

The Haunted Head.