Vacation Race Weekend

 At least with a smartphone I have better access to more pictures now. I'm also always blown away by some of the pictures that show up on Facebook now that people take, they are really good.
This past weekend the family and I stayed near Mt Morris at an aunt and uncle's cabin on a lake and it was a great little vacation with some bike racing thrown in. It's hard to relax though when you ahve to race 2 of the 4 days but it's a nice feeling when that was over Sunday afternoon and I didn't have to worry about thrashing my legs on the paddle boat while Jocelyn turned us in circles. She is not a good driver!







The racing actually went really well. The cross country was kind of two seperate races for me, the first 1/2 and the 2nd 1/2. I'm not sure what happened in the middle, I think I'll credit my great sponsors Clif for the turnaround since it wasn't very long after eating some gels that I started to turn myself around and start moving forward again. I wasn't as far back as I thought I was so when I started going forward I moved up into the top 10 pretty fast and finished off a solid 9th, my best Pro XCT result. The first 3 laps I was bouncing off rocks, roots, really just about anything on the ground and I didn't feel fast but the last 3 laps I was accelerating over the climbs and felt I was pushing the bike and my limits and I was going fast. I'm glad it went that way and not the other way around because it left me motivated for the short track on Sunday.

 The cabin we stayed at is on a private lake and it's really quite. The fishing is good, I dont' fish at all, ever in fact, so the last time I did was last year while we were here. I know that at this lake if you don't have a bite in 5 seconds you need to pull the hook back because they already ate your worm so I think that is pretty good fishing. I did finally catch something other than panfish, I have no idea what it was but at about 8pm I couldn't even get the worm in the water and stuff was grabbing it. I reeled in this guy, maybe 10" long, I'm thinking large mouth bass but really no idea. Ellie caught a nice crappie so we kept them both and ate them for lunch, actaully quite delicious. By far the biggest fish I have ever caught.

Finished off the race weekend with a podium finially in the short-track. I've been chasing that podium for a couple years and finally this year I had good legs and played it out right. Cyclingdirt had some really good coverage of the weekend and a short interview HERE if you are interested.