Long time without posting

Well here it is, 10/3/2012.  I haven't posted anything since early July after the Stony Creek marathon.  I've been pretty busy since then.  We took at 2 week trip out west to Breckenridge and Jackson. If your friends with me or follow me on Twitter you've probably seen all the photos and heard all the stories.  Long story short, I had a wonderful time with my wife and dogs, trained and raced at altitude, met new people, and met people in person that I felt like I've known for a while even though they didn't really know me.  When I returned I had some amazing fitness from being at altitude and I was pretty excited to go race the Brighton MTB race.  Unfortunatly I crashed and hit my knee pretty hard and it forced me to DNF the race.  That was the last USAC mtb race I've done for the year.  The only one remaining is the Iceman.  I also raced the Ruby 50 and was in a good position in 2nd place but on the 2nd to last lap, I flatted and I wasn't able to get the tire to seal so I DNF'd again.  August for the most part, was not a good month for me.

September on the other hand has been great.  A few weeks back, I had a double race weekend where I raced the Ithaca Grand Prix cyclocross and the Addison Oaks Fall Classic.  Ithaca was my first cyclocross race.  Wow, is CX a blast!  I would have never thought I would like it this much.  The next day I raced the Addison Oaks race and was able to pull off a win!  I was pretty stoked about that.  That's win #2 of the year and my first win as an Expert MTB'er. A couple weeks ago was the Ronde Van Stony race.  This is a mostly gravel road race that starts and ends at Stony Creek.  This is a good race to put on the schedule.  It's basically road racing on the dirt.  I got in a good group with some Cat 3 roadies and we worked together till we got back to Stony.  Once we hit the 2 track I was able to get away from them.  I know that dirt well from riding there so much.  I also raced a crit on labor day and did ok there.  I was 9th.  I'll be doing a lot more road racing in the future. 

Since then I've done a couple more CX races.  CX hasn't come along all that easy to me.  I'm still getting comfortable with the bike.  It's not like mountain biking and it's not like road biking.  It doesn't even feel like something you should be doing.  It's a total blast to do.  For 45 minutes, I don't think you can have more fun on a bike.  At the last race I blew my front tire and I didn't have a spare to swap to so I ended up DNF'ing but actually I feel like that was the most comfortable I've felt on a CX bike yet.  There are plenty more races to come and I feel pretty confident that in the next couple this is going to click for me. 

Here's a few pics from the last few months .