12 hours of John Muir

Last week I got an e-mail from Mark over at Vesrah asking if I could fill in for him this weekend at the 12 hours of Kettle. I had a pretty hard day scheduled anyway for Saturday so I figured why not.
Saturday morning I got to the parking lot at 7am. I didn't know the guys I was going to be riding with and one guy flagged me down to go park with them. Turns out they weren't my team but the guys we were going to be racing against. I walked around for a while looking for my team but with no luck. I checked with registration and they hadn't even signed in yet. Finally at 7:45, 15 minutes before the start I decided that I would just register for the 12 hour solo and ride as long as I could. As I was going up to registration I seen their tent. That was a close one...I really didn't want to ride for 12 hours!! Mark was the first guy to go off and got us a really good start. With only 2 duo teams in front of us he gave me clear sailing for my lap. I got around the 2 guys in about 2-3 miles and then put it in TT mode racing the clock. There was a ton of new single track and it was a little wet, I didn't want to start the day off crashing my brains out, so I pushed hard on the flats and took it pretty easy in the tight stuff.
The rest of the day was like any other team endurance race, warm up - ride - cool down - eat - repeat. At 3pm Mark had to leave so he jumped one position in the order and threw down a smoke'n lap joining me in the 40 minute club. With him gone our rides got a little closer, I think that worked good because I wouldn't get as relaxed and wound down between rides. As the day progressed the trails got faster and faster I was throwing the bike into corners just taunting the tires to break loose but they refused, I should have been running this all season they are definitely staying on for the rest!
By the end of the day we had knocked off 14 laps and the win!! We finished about 15 minutes up on second place, who had been consitantly on our heals the entire day. I had achieved my goal to set the fastest lap of the day at 46:34 minutes, although I wish they would have let the 6 hour guys do the same course as us. There were some really fast guys that showed up and it would have been fun to see what they could have turned. My legs finally felt like they had come around, when I wanted power they were there. Hopefully we can carry that over into this weekend.
I will try to get some pictures up here as soon as I can.

SOLD!!!

Finally, after a year of being on the market and about 1040 gallons of gas burned in commuting we are finally moving to Madison!

We had an offer on our house a few weeks ago but it was contigent that they sold theirs first. They had just put it on the market so I wasn't too optumistic about it selling fast. In the mean time we heard that Jerry and Jessica Long were moving to Idaho. Cathy stopped by there place last friday and just fell in love. When she picked me up she was telling me all about it, right then as luck would have it we got a call from our buyers saying they had just sold their house and set a closing date for ours. We turned around and headed back to the Long's so I could look at the place. It was really nice, just how Cathy described it. We thought about it over the weekend and on Tuesday sat down with their realtor and wrote up the offer. They are moving monday and I think we are going to start moving some small things up as soon as Wednesday. This is a huge answer of prayer, going from not looking to moving in only 10 days!!

Gun Show

That is what our Saris vs. Pacific Cycle group ride has been dubbed. The past two times I have shown up on the MTB bike. Today was pretty rough, with 20-35mph winds heading south was pretty painful - for everyone else, I had plenty of gears left going slow! Once we got out to Paoli and started to make our way home is when I started to suffer. A now HUGE tail wind pushed the pace over the 30mph mark so I single speeded it home in my 42-11. I felt a lot better, probably because it was a smaller group and wasn't quite as crazy fast.
We were planning on heading out to the kettles tonight but sounds like the weather is going to keep us in Janesville. I will get enough of the kettles this weekend during the race.

Big Ring Classic = MORE MUD!!

I really hope we are getting our muddy races done early this year. We left Madison right after work and headed up to Wausau. My parents were coming over so we wanted to get our riding done early and then hang out with them Saturday afternoon. We drove through rain most of the trip up and just hardly got ahead of the storm when we rolled into the Nine Mile Park. We set up the tent and no sooner had we finished then the rain caught back up with us. Rain all night, off and on all the next morning. I help set up the start and finish area and then about 2pm the sun came out. We quickly got changed and headed out for a ride. I happy that even after a full day of rain how well the course felt. That night we filled a hotel room with my parents, us, the dog, and Cory.
The next morning I got up early and went for a short ride to wake the legs up before breakfast and then off to the course for an early 10:15am start. I got called up and squeezed into the last front row position. The start was pretty melo we picked up the pace at the gravel road, I shuffled back to about 10th position and sat in the draft. All of the sudden I see Marko get loose and go down. He took someone with him and with nowhere to go I preload and give him the best bunny hop I had. I think I cleared him for the most part but landed on his bike, I looked back and he was getting back on so no harm done. Instantly I was another 20 spots back. I moved up a little but mostly just wanted to get my legs warmed up. The rest of the first lap was passing people getting into position. I hooked up with a group of 3 other guys, I was hanging on for everything I had. At some point Tim dropped off and then I got stuck in some traffic and they put a gap on me. I was keeping them in sight for most of the lap and then about 1 mile from the end of the 3rd lap I BONKED. I new I was sitting in a decent spot so I sat up and spun it in easy to Cathy. She got me a breakfast bar, banana, I finished my clif blocks, and downed a half of bottle of gatorade. Cory rolled through and I tried to jump on his wheel but the legs just wouldn't move. I rode through the lap area and out for my last lap. About 5 minutes in I was only getting worse so I pulled the plug. First DNF in something like 2 years.
I was hoping for a better finish after my parents and Cathy had to stand out in the rain for 2 hours. I don't know how she did it but Cathy rocked the bottle handups as we came through at full on speed.
The season has had a rough start but it is still early, so hopefully we can start getting up to speed here over the next couple weeks.