Philly Phlyer circuit race

This was the 3rd time I've done this course, first time was as a 5 back in 2009, I think. Last year I did the collegiate "B" race, and went to early, faded on the roundabout, and lost a few spots on the final sprint when I had nothing left. The finish was nervous and positioning was aggressive on the final incline, so I was curious to see what the A race would be like this year.

We started just easy, but the climbs were brisk, and the field was slowly whittling down. I heard one nasty crash off to my right near the gutter along River Dr, probably a victim of a sewer drain. Then on the next lap I got caught behind some crash on the climb near the hay bales, I was far enough back that I managed to scoot around cleanly, and then chase hard, but that probably ended a few races.

I tried out the $40 "keychain camera" from some Chinese eBay seller, and for it's cost, it looks pretty good. This one is the 808 #16 version. One minor drawback is that the battery lasts only about 40 minutes, but a more significant issue is that the cheap CMOS sensor uses a rolling shutter, so you can get some bad motion induced artifacts. Anything with vibration looks just awful. I decided to try and get the camera mounted as securely as possible with a bit of dense rubber, and try out some of the post processing options to remove camera shake. Some of the more advanced tools can even compensate for a rolling shutter by applying a different transformation to different parts of the frame. I tried a plugin for Transcode and it seems to work pretty well. You can really see it working in on the final climb when I'm rocking the bike. Edited with Kdenlive.

Here is the video. I originally had a much better soundtrack picked out, but my M83 selection caused the video to be blocked in the US. So instead I substituted some bad, royalty free beats. Apologies. Anyway:



The finish was much more reserved then the B race was last year, although when the top guy went, the rest of us were left to just drag race for the final few points.