They call this "Drinking from the Firehouse"

Well let's disect that statement for a second, what does it mean to drink from a firehose? Could you? That may be 1 cubic metre/second, I know maybe one or two people that could throw a cubic metre back in a second...But that's not much.
A couple more guys from Canada showed up at the hostel; endurance cyclists. They were riding super 29ers, and were super friendly. We had some beer and all hung out, and they told me about how they had raced the Trans Alps race in Europe last year, frequently do 100mile rides, and manage to travel and do this while working (they do some sort of computer tech stuff). These guys don't ride the roads on their road bikes, they spend ungodly amounts of time on their mountain bikes. Soon enough they had me thinking that it would be a great idea to race this 100km cyclocross race how bad could it be? 2+km of vertical gain, fire roads, gnarly gap riding, and beautiful weather! Surely this would be nothing but cupcakes and sprinkles!
We have a couple of problems-firstly I had no bike to ride it on, but the crazy guy at the bike shop (who can apparently marry people too) could potentially fix that problem, next I only have road shoes (full carbon soles, and pedals that only clip in on one side), also I had never raced an endurance event before, I had been training hard in the mountains all week, and lastly I haven't raced since Ontario Provincial Championships in 2009 (August).
But then again, what could go wrong? Last time I raced I was great at it! So I decided to do it. How long could it take? 6 hours? big deal.
The next day I was stoked to go in and try to wrangle some sponsorship from the local shop here's the plan. "Hey, if I race in your jersey and place well can I race one of your bikes for free?". So that's what I did, the shop owner just laughed somewhat maniacally "now that's what we call drinkin' from the firehose!" and he seemed to take a liking to me. Guess he thinks I'm crazy, maybe he respects it, or maybe he's stoked to see a major crash and burn. The following sentence came next "Y'all should come to my party Saturday night! There's gonna be dirtbikes and fireworks and shit! It's gonna be awesome!". Who could refuse?