It has been awhile since I updated the blog.  In that time I raced in Telluride and took a trip out to NY for the Wold Cup Finals.  Details for those events will have to wait though.  Today I'm busy getting my stuff together for an epic mountain climb.  Taking off at 2:45 am tonight (or actually Wednesday morning) for this beast:
Photo credit:  www.summitpost.org

I figure that after 9 months of doing nothing but riding bikes I will be sore that I won't be able to walk for at least 4 days after tomorrow so I'll have plenty of time to blog then.

I guess I have to eat my words.  Leipheimer crushed Leadville and put all the mtbers to shame.  Holy crap!  Well done.

The Leadville mountain bike race is an odd beast.  On one hand it receives the most media attention of any mountain bike race in the U.S.  On the other, top North American mountain bike racers have been absent.

Obviously a lot of the attention paid to the race has to do with the Lance factor but it has always seemed odd to me that the race is billed as a battle of titans: The 7-time Tour de France winner vs. the 6-time Leadville winner.  I guess that is just too juicy of a subject for media to forgo but it doesn't seem all that accurate if the fastest domestic mountain bikers aren't there to contest it.

That's going to change this year.  I'm actually excited about this year's event and can't wait to hear how the battle between Wells and JHK goes down.  It seems like those guys are always off the front by at least 10 minutes at any race at altitude battling each other.  I know that between the two of them they have probably completed one or two hundred mile races but I think they are head and shoulders above all the rest and shouldn't have much trouble with the distance.

It's just too bad that Lance won't be there to be whupped by America's best mountain bikers.

The women's event should be epic too.  Last year wasn't a fair fight.  Amanda Carey suffered some serious mechanicals near the beginning of the race and was never able to truly battle.  This year Amanda is back and I think she has it in her to drop Rebecca Rusch and take the W.

Since getting to Durango in May I can count the number of times I've hopped on my road bike on one hand.  The trail is just too good.  But if there is one thing that can motivate me to get out there on the asphalt it is some new, sleek-looking shoes showing up on my doorstep yesterday. 

Just look at them.  Who could resist their sex appeal?

I woke up this morning tired and cranky after laying in bed listening to the new neighbor's dogs bark until 1:30 am.  That mood has turned around though after a good session on the bike, although it's tempered a bit since I still have to confront the neighbor about his dogs.  That should be fun:  "Hi, my name is Andy.  Welcome to the neighborhood.  Nice dogs.  Now please make them shut up."

Back to the story though.  I'm the first to admit that I'm a bit of a headcase when it comes to training.  Most often it manifests itself as stubbornness, which is generally a good thing, it allows me to push myself when I train (although I've been known to push past the point of effectiveness).  Sometimes however, I'll find that I'm not into training at all.  It has nothing to do with how my legs or lungs feel, it is simply mental (I have found that it is often directly related to the amount of sleep I've been getting, less=bad) and it is nearly impossible for me to overcome this.  I figured that today was going to be one of those days.

It is crazy what music can do to your mood though.  I was still not in the best of moods when I started the ride but my iPod just kept pumping out the perfect jams.  It started out with "Ballroom Blitz" by Sweet, which I believe is one of the first cassette tapes that Sam ever bought and I can still remember rocking out to it with him, and continued from there.  Some days it seems like my iPod can read my mind and knows exactly what I want it to play even before I even really know.  Today was one of those days.  Music and mood aligned on the ride and I attacked the efforts that I had to do like a cheetah after a water buffalo and before I knew it, I'd done all that I needed to do.  Perfect.

Durango has been getting a bunch of rain lately and it is really hampering my riding schedule.  This is only my fourth summer in town so I'm by no means an expert on its weather patterns but in the past three summers the weather is incredibly predictable.  As July starts you can expect it to be sunny in the morning and then a big thunderstorm to roll through town sometime in the afternoon.  It'll pour rain for 20 or 30 minutes and then start to clear up and be nice again in the evening.  They call this the monsoon season.

That hasn't been the case this year.  We've been getting hit by reverse monsoons.  I've been waking up to clouds, lightning, thunder, and rain.  And it rains.  A lot.  And for a long time.  Finally things start to clear by mid afternoon and the sun finally shows in the evening.  Unfortunately the trails in Durango don't handle the rain very well either.  Most of the trails are on clay soil so if they are wet at all the become un-rideable.  The mud sticks to your bike and body until your bike weighs a hundred pounds and your wheels won't turn at all.

The river is up and muddy though which should make for an fun tubing experience this weekend.

It's a lot easier to blog when you are busy going to races every weekend.  You at least have more going on that seems blog worthy.  Not that I haven't been doing anything.  I've actually really been enjoying my short break from racing.  Let me catch you up with what I've been doing.

Nationals finished up a bit better than it started.  I managed to narrowly avoid Ryan Trebon taking himself, and a bunch of others, out at the start of the short track and was able to suffer my way to an 11th.  I spent the day after Nationals in Rocky Mountain National Park and got to see the Colorado River in it's infancy.

It's hard to believe that this little guy provides a bulk of the water for southern Cali and Arizona and makes your realize that there is a real limiting factor to the growth down there.

Since then I've been hanging in Durango.  It has been really good weather.  We've gotten just enough rain that the trails stay in good shape and other than that it's been really hot so the river has been a daily attraction.

I've also been getting in some mountain biking with the Durango crew.  I even did my first high country ride of the year last week.

Oh man, yesterday was painful.  I partook in the National XC race in Sol Vista and I did not have "it".  When you are racing at altitude "not having it" becomes all that more apparent.  I took 6th here last year and even though I knew I wasn't riding quite as fast this year I was still hoping for a good result.  I ended up finishing 21st which is not quite what I'd hoped for.

It started off good enough.  I took the begining of the race pretty conservatively and by the second lap I was feeling decent so I started moving my way through the field.  That feeling didn't last long though and I realized that I was progressively getting slower and slower.  Pretty soon I was doing damage control and trying to not let too many people pass me.  It was like I was pushing on the gas pedal as hard as I could but I was just sputtering along.  I went through a lot of suffering for a pretty mediocre result but I'm still happy that I was able to push through and keep battling all the way to the end.

It is pretty crazy because I know I probably suffered more last year on my way to the sixth place finish but it felt a lot more painful this year.  Last year I was cramping really bad by the last lap and was racing a couple of people all the way to the fniish line but it is one thing to be suffering for a good result and an entirely different thing to be suffering for 21st place.  Maybe I'll come away from this bike race a tougher racer.

Congrats to Todd Wells.  I think that he has been looking to win this race for over a year now and he put in a bunch of effort to make that happen.  He really deserves it.  It is always such a great feeling when you set out to accomplish something, put in all the hardwork to make it happen, and then have it all come together for you.  Also, congrats to my Dad.  He took third place in the old-man masters field.

Maybe I'll get a little redemption in the short track today.

That's how Sam described the race on Saturday, and after evaluating how sore my hands are today I'd have to agree.  There is no other explanation for how sore my hands have been for the last few days other than I have been squeezing my bars as hard as I could.

It makes perfect sense too.  I just finished up the final race of the Pro XCT series in Colorado Springs.  I raced there last year and managed to crash on three out of four laps in the cross country so needless to say I had a bit of trepidation coming into this year's event.  The problem really isn't the solid section of really rocky technical trail.  No, the problem is the smooth buff trail that makes up the final 3/4 of the descent.  It is buff and smooth, which shouldn't be a problem, except the trail is scattered with tiny rocks which act like ball bearings.  It makes me feel like I've never ridden a bike before.  I take the corners so slow because you never know when your wheels are going to give away and you find yourself on the ground with rocks buried in you.

So I gripped my bars as hard as I could, took my time during the race, and gave up plenty of time on the descents, which is always frustrating, but I only wrecked once and it was really minor.  I have to give a lot of credit to my 29" Felt Nine (a shameless plug but I think that any bigger wheeled bike was an advantage for the weekend).  I haven't been a complete convert when it comes to 29ers and will still argue that a 26" bike is better for some courses but the 29er was the ticket for Colorado Springs.  I felt like I had a lot more confidence in the rocky technical sections because the big wheels rolled over the rocks better and more traction in the corners because of the bigger tred patch.

The race organizer put on a good race too.  I've always been a big fan of stage races and wished we did more.  This weekend we raced a time trial on Friday, XC on Saturday, and the longest short track ever (one hour) on Sunday.  I am actually a really big fan on the Triple Crown format where you race XC on one day and short track and a super d/time trial on the other.  You definitely get your money's worth that way and if one event doesn't go like you want it too you still have another opportunity to pull off a result.

One crazy thing was the difference between the race this weekend and the one in Wisconsin.  They were polar opposites.  Colorado Springs had a full expo area.  Most of the teams had their trailers there and there were quite a few other vendors.  There was hardly anyone around though.  On the other hand, there were only three trailers in Wisconsin but the place was packed with racers and spectators.  It was really too bad that there weren't more people in the Springs.  Part of the problem was that there were two other mtb races going on that weekend-one in Aspen and another in Winter Park.  You think that USA Cycling could do a better job facilitating between the different race promoters and help avoid problems like this.

Speaking of USA Cycling, you think that they might take advantage of a high-profile mountain bike race that is taking place in the town they are based in but they sure didn't.  USAC will probably blacklist me for speaking my mind but instead of fostering a little bit of good will with it's riders by having a booth and maybe a pep talk from Steve Johnson, the president of USAC, they just filled the courses with officials and even tried to DQ amatuers.  I'm all for rules and understand they are there for a purpose and as pros we should be held accountable but there needs to be some leniency when it comes to amatuer racing.  They are out there for fun after all and if a kid is walking the course because he broke his chain and doesn't know how to fix it don't try to kick him out of the race just because someone on the course helped him.  Maybe USAC's attitude contributed to the small turnout at the race.  Just a thought.

Regardless of all that it was a really good weekend with some fun racing.  I'm enjoying a few days at home before I take off for Nationals.  Well, this is starting to sound like a Wells' blog with lots of random observations and ramblings so I'm going to pull to plug.  Thanks for reading.

I love DIA.  I just got off of my delayed flight out of Milwaukee which caused me to miss my connection to Durango.  Frontier only has a couple of flights into Durango each day so I get to hang out until 3:30 to catch the next one.  I was supposed to be home by 9:30 am.  At least there is free internet in the airport.

I'm on my way home from a weekend of racing in the midwest.  The ProXCT race we did was part of the "WORS" series of racing.  I have always heard that the WORS series was one of the strongest mountain bike series in the US and it didn't disappoint.

I had my doubts about the race on Friday.  Colin and I showed up to preride the course and we were one of three vehicles in the parking lot.  There were also only three team trailers around.  Things changed dramatically between then and mid-day Saturday though.  When we arrived for the race the parking lot was packed and a field next to the race was filled with tents and campers.

The course was filled with short, steep, punchy climbs and some tight trees.  There wasn't a lap where I didn't bump a bar on a tree.  It was pretty much exactly what you would expect from a race in Wisconsin.  I rode my heart out out there but didn't seem to go anywhere.  It was still a lot of fun though.  There were more fans out on this course then on any other I have ever done.  It was awesome.

Sam had a breakout race.  He led for the last 2/3s of the last lap and then threw down a big attack in the last K and blew it wide open to take the W.  It is a huge result and I'm stoked for him.

The STXC went a bit better for me.  I worked my way into the top ten with two laps to go but then managed to crash myself.  I hoped up and started riding right away but my bike felt all kadywumpus and I quickly realized that my bars were crooked.  After fixing those I had dropped back quite a few spots and didn't have enough time to make them up.  It was still a great weekend.

I think the sign at our motel summed up Wisconsin pretty well.  Simple Charm.

Although Wisconsinites seem to have quite the fetish for fireworks.  There were firework stands all over the place.  And they weren't the type that gets thrown together a few weeks before the 4th.  No, these were full on warehouses.

Colin and I finished up the weekend in downtown Milwaukee at Whole Foods eating overpriced salad and in honor of Milwaukee's great beer brewing past, drinking a Schlitz.

 

There are a few more photos under the photo tab.