Coming back down Mt. Elbert
My Colorado trip has come and gone and I didn't perish. I'm back in Bloomington, trying to settle back into the real world and catch up on the things I neglected for the last week.
The trip was awesome. The hiking and climbing was harder than expected and the views were crazy, the pictures just can't relay the size and vastness of the mountains and valleys out there. Distances that look like they are a few hundred meters turn out to be closer to a few miles than meters. We didn't get to bag as many summits as we had hoped because of bad weather on some of the days, but it was still an awesome experience, we even went whitewater rafting one day to give our legs a recovery day.
Me coming down the side of Mt. Belford
Mt. Belford summit in the middle, from just above the treeline, still a few hours away.
My Dad and I on the summit of Belford
My Shower/Laundry Room
That's a small sample of the pictures from the week. I'm waiting on my brother to put the rest up on Flickr.
It was an awesome experience with lots of amazing views, but I also missed my bike by the end of the week. Now I'm back at it, trying to get my body in cyclocross mode. I'm still waiting on my frames to get here, so I can't really do much yet. All my friends are out doing cx worlds and all that bull, while I'm stuck on the skinny tires. Soon.
Since I headed straight from the Marion NRC race last Saturday, out to Colorado, I didn't get a chance to do my race write up. So here goes... It was a new, way more technical course this year with something like 10 corners. It was quite possibly the most critty crit of the year. I had pretty good legs and was able to hang out at the front most of the race. The whiplash effect was in full-on if you drifted too far back. A Colavita guy was solo from a long way out and he stuck it and soloed to the win. Once we hit 10 laps to go, the field got pretty antsy. With only 4 or 5 guys from the pro squads, the finale wasn't very organized. Lots of fighting and chopping in the corners. The was a crash almost every other corner for each of the last 5 laps. I was just wincing and trying to thread the needle through the carnage. With 3 to go a crash at the front made a nice gap for 5 more guys to get off the front. They also stayed away and so now we were stuck sprinting for 6th. I took some risks and fought for decent position going into the last lap. I dodged a crash with 2 corners to go and kept it upright through the last corner, which is apparently an achievement. I ended up 6th in the sprint which put me in 11th on the day. A decent result, but it would have been a lot better if all those guys hadn't been up the road.
I'm off to a friends wedding this weekend and hopefully I can find a bike race to do or something. I've still got the itch.
Hopefully my next post will be showing you guys my fully built cross bikes.
Thanks for reading
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