There is nothing like the first race of the year. It’s a test of fitness, trail skills, planning and organization. After a few months off the race circuit, it was time to get back into the pain cave. As we are still looking at snowy and muddy trails here in Grand Junction, CO, I packed up and headed off to St George, UT. After a quick 5 hour drive in rain, snow, and sun, we finally made it to the race course for a pre-ride. There is nothing like riding in short and a jersey.
(more…)

I wanted to touch base with all of my new teammates.  I am pretty new to 29ers but now that I have ridden them, I wouldn’t ride anything else.  I am excited to take my big wheeled advantage to the local Kenda Series this year in California.  Tomorrow, if weather permits, will be my first race this year.  It is just a pre-race, but will make for a really hard training day.  The race should be interesting because it will be my first Cat 1 race, and it is at one of the hardest race courses for me, Fontana.  Hopefully the rain today will pack the ground for tomorrow, so I can go extra fast on the downhills.   I am proud to race for such a great team and represent the big hoops out on the race track.  

If you have never seen “The Year Without A Santa Claus”, you really are missing out on a true piece of Americana. Snotcycle 2010 was the work of this man-The Snow Miser. Only He could turn a seemingly somewhat ordinary XC SS race into a 16°, half a foot of snow and 20mph wind hulabaloo!

Thanks to Jon Rogers for plugging me in to the 29er pipeline. Great rep and friend. This is my first year racing for the Crew, so I will get this outta the way right now. I love to ride. I don’t claim to be an eloquent speaker. I love to ride. As I post more blogs, you will see a pattern start to emerge. I have none. I love to ride. My thoughts are generally random, and I make no claims about the order in which they should follow. I don’t really like to type. I will accidently and on occasion purposefully ignore rules of grammar. Who needs semi colons anyway? I dare say that…I don’t own a cell phone either. AHHHHH!!! All the humanity of it all. I was a designer and illustrator of 17 years before wrenching and selling 29ers full time. I will, from time to time, incorporate illustrations into my blog. So that being said, here is the first entry. Good luck. I love to ride.

My friend Auggie and I made to Leesburg, Va. by 11:45 for the Snotcycle race. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground, not much to get alarmed about. SS class started at 1:00, so we had some time to get warm. Wasn’t gonna happen in my 2001 Neon, so we headed out with some friends to do some warm-up jaunts through the now heaver falling snow. I nearly got tagged from a sport rider during our warmup. It was my fault, I think. The snow was covering the course which passed right in front of me. “Sorry” I said. He mumbled something and peddled off. This was a bad sign for things to come. I went to get a small sip of my favorite cytomax citrus and gu gel mix and low and behold, it was frozen. I tried to chew through the top portion, but it made my teeth hurt, so I stopped. I was relegated to the fact that I was doing this thing dehydrated. (more…)

Ok finally…not all but at least it’s Day 1

It’s not too often that you take your definition of “Epic” and completely redefine it. Most of the time the word often gets overused a bit, but I doubt there is a better term for the El Reto de Quetzal race that I participated in October 9,10,11th in October. I teamed up with local supa fast roadie Todd Scheske (who convinced me to go last winter). We put in lotsa miles on the 29ers down in Naples hitting up the trails and working on riding together. Heading down to SA was like being back in the stone age. Do you believe we were the only guys on 29ers?? What could they be thinking. We got lots of oogling over the bikes, fielded plenty of questions and got some people swayed on the big wheels.

I was a a little tentative and scared to head to Central America at first, but in the end everything worked out fine and it was actually pretty easy to get there and deal with customs. We arrived on wednesday prior to the race. Giving us some time to get settled, rest up, put the bikes together and explore the city of Antigua via bike. We rolled through the cobbled streets and markets with the locals gawking and staring at us and finally made our way out of town. We climbed up the highway out of the village up the mountain, but unfortunately we couldn’t find the way back down! This meant we ended up doing the ‘death descent’ down the highway using the shoulder into oncoming traffic. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been that freaked out on a descent in my life before. There are pretty much no rules for driving in South America and cars were whipping all over the windy blind corners, passing the chicken busses wildly and not even realizing we were there to try to descend down. Luckily we made it down without dying!

Day 1

Day 1 started us right in the City center of Antigua. Rolling out on the cobbled streets of the city, zig-zagging out way to the day’s first climb. Right away the fireworks hit and the front runners pulled no punches and lit it up the first climb. It started out steep and just got progressively steeper. The first parts of it were paved in the city and then we hit the dirt. With the slick clay it became pretty easy to justify hopping off the bike and saving the efforts.

(more…)