January is pretty much gone. It went by fast. Despite being in a relaxed mode without much on the agenda it's still hard for me to sit still and do nothing so I have been keeping at the home projects. I've painted 3 different rooms and 6 ceilings, put a new exhaust and oil pan on the Mazda, redid a bunch of lighting in the house and various other projects like that. It's a good feeling to knock out the projects I've wanted to get done but are low priority when I am on a tight schedule while training.

I haven't touched a bike in 3 weeks now but did finally get out on skis twice. The snow is disappearing fast right now so I have a feeling those might be the only two times I'll ski for at least a week looking at the weather. Maybe even for the winter. I almost wish it would be cold and snowing so I would be distracted by skiing to think about riding, but when it's close to 50 it seems like I should be riding and I want to hold off on that a while longer.

I watched the CX World Champs on Sunday and truthfully I thought it was a pretty boring race. the course seemed like it was way too narrow and selective to be a good cross race and I think more or less the race was over for most at the first corner if you weren't front row. I don't mind courses being selective but for the most part everyone was out of contention 2 minutes into the race. Neils totally dominated but not very many other guys really had a chance because it was so bottlenecked early on but I think Neils was by far the best. The US guys didn't seem to have very good races other than Trebon, I still think cross racing in Belgium is a completely different sport than cross racing in the US and based on how the best racers from the US did over there that would seem to be the case. I heard a lot of guys it was a "specialists" course but looking at the results they were pretty consistent with all other euro races so specialist or not, guys sorted out where they normally do. I think if it was really a specialists course the top 10 guys wouldn't have been the same top 10 guys you see over there all year long getting the same spots and it more or less was. It's just a different kind of racing and we don't have those kinds of courses here in the US which puts us a pretty big disadvantage when it comes down to real hardcore cross racing.

I'm putting up my Felt Edict from last year for sale. If anyone is interested you can email or comment on this blog or tschouten@gmail.com

I don't know what I'll be doing for mtn bike yet this year but for now if anyone locally would like a great new bike for the year I'd like to get rid of it.