Nationals

It rained the night before, and thundered, and lightning was quite noisy too. the lightning kept me up for a while, but I slept quite well given my proximity of about 25 feet from the trail itself. I stayed in the Hotel at Mount Snow so that was one less headache when it came to preparing.

My pre-ride of the course was crap. I drove down from Lyme NY after staying with family and only had $25 cash for lunch, which I promptly was charged for the right to park. "Daily parking or weekend parking?" the attendant asked. "You tell me. I have reservations at the hotel so does a reservation come with parking or not?" "Nope." She was wrong. So I hung around on Thursday checking out all the courses and watching energy-drink fueled crazies ride their downhill bikes off of mountains. At around 3:30 I suited up for a pre-ride or the course.



So as you can see the course is a lot of fire-road climbing with a good stretch of fast technical single track coming back down the mountain. I felt like crap on the pre-ride. A big part of that was the lack of any food that day. I also decided to just go straight into the climb instead of any kind of warm up. Jesse Lalonde passed me when I was warming up and that made me feel even worse. If you dont know Jesse you need to up you Single Speed game yo!

I proceeded in loosening up when I hit the downhill, but nonetheless becoming thoroughly discouraged by the pre-ride. I drove back home discouraged but excited at the same time. There was still the real race a few days later!

Keep an eye out for part 2 coming soon

Wow, this time in english

I promise the Nationals update is coming, im waiting to get my pictures; then the goods. In the meantime, heres something cool:

I dont know what "wow" is in Asan, but insert it here

http://vsearch.cctv.com/plgs_play-CCTV4news_20080719_6392208.html

National Championship

Well folks, wish me luck. I will be out of the office (yeah right) for the next week. I am heading up to Vermont to compete in the National Championship Single Speed race. Hopefully we will see full equipment cooperation and good legs next saturday as I line up to start the biggest race I have ever been involved in. Wish me luck!

Road Bikin

SO as some of you may know. I raced a road bike this past weekend. Im a little ashamed, and my Niner missed me. But The Serotta got to go fast and have fun too. Ill preface this by saying my Serotta fork is cracked so I rode a friend's Bontrager RXL fork. THat explains the poor matching in the pictures. Here we GO!!!

The race began in a big ol field of cat 5s. In the mix were a bunch of good folks; however new to the sport of road bike racing. I was a little concerned, as anyone in a cat 5 race should be, especially given the technical nature of the course. As we took off I was sure to jump into the top 5 just to be safe. In the mix were two racers from the Fat Frogs race team, who wins the award for stupidest and least appealing team name, and one of the VT/Rouges Racing racers. The FF guys kept going off the front and getting pulled back in. Im not really sure what their plan was but it became apparent that it didn't really matter as they were consistently easy to pull back into the pack and not really threatening since they were just two men.

This is where the fun begins. Someone (not mentioning names here) went down around the 1st corner and split the field up. Thats why I was hanging around in the top 5. So from there it was just Jared Wilburn and I, the FF guys, and the VT feller. At that point something magical happened and Jared and I were putting the hurt on the rest of the field.



We continued to push it a little by a little as we kept lapping the field time after time. I tried to get passersby to jump on but no one really hung on all that strong for very long.



And so Zippety doo da we went around and around Jared and I....



I wasn't very concerned with beating Jared just because I was having a great time zipping around putting in a really good effort with Jared. I put a little into thinking about getting him at the finish. I knew I couldn't take him on the line, given the size of his quads. SO my thought process is this: "It sure would be nice to get a gold medal, but whatev..." So my idea was to go two laps at the front and guilt Jared into taking two laps. On the second of his two laps he flicked out and I went...way to early. I got a little gap, but not as much of a gap as I thought, or as much as I needed. Jared sprint, and I didnt so there goes second place. heres a good pic of me crossing the line:



And heres one of "Tim's buddy" Jen getting ready to do some power sweeping (thats her sweep face you see there)



And here is a good photo of Dave "The Leprechaun" Tompkins and Bob "The Closer" Welsh shooting the breeze