Man mountain bike racing is a tough sport!

Mountain bike racing is such a tough sport!  To get anywhere close to the fitness needed to be competitive takes years of hard work, then you need some skills handling the bike and experience with pacing and strategy.  So a winter and spring of great training is only gets you part way to some good race results...

This year I've been riding as well as ever, but don't feel like I've put it together for a great result on race day yet. Vision Quest went really well, but since then the Whiskey 50 and Idyllwild Challenge were tough days on the bike.  Whiskey was a great weekend with my girls and friends, but things fell apart early in the race when I got a flat on the first singletrack while in about 20th place.  I was right where I needed to be early in the race with such a competitive field.  I rode well for a while after getting it fixed but there was no way to get up into the placings I was hoping for.

Idyllwild on the other hand is my favorite race in SoCal and one that I really want to win.  Going into last weekend I had been 2nd or 3rd there 5 times...  This year I rode my best race there yet, beat last years time by a couple full minutes, but other guys were just going faster and I just made the podium in 5th.  I let my focus on the result get the better of me and had a pretty frustrating day when I should have been totally thankful to be fit and healthy riding awesome trails on a beautiful day.  After getting past the frustration it really is cool to stand on the podium with guys like Sid and Tinker.

Thanks to Kathy Burchman for the photo

lots of sweat and tears on that top tube

This week has just been a balance of work and trying to rest up for the Catalina Gran Fondo - a very cool and fun event with 500 mountain biking friends out on Catalina Island.  If you're not going this year, you should definitely CHECK IT OUT for next year...