Chopped Venison

Woke up Tuesday morning early enough to actually get some shizit done before work. Got out the mower, turned the corner to start mowin' and found half a deer in the front yard. Okay, it wasn't really in the front yard, more like on the berm, but a few choice parts did jettison themselves about and were subsequently sent through the mower deck.

Colin and I have been leading a cross class on Tuesday nights and its a heck of a lot of fun. Last time we hit the loop where they hold the Philly 2-day race and tried to make everyone barf up a lung with some intervals before progressing to the whole dismount/mount thing that is essential to cross racing. I'm always excited by the progress I see my athletes making and so far everyone is progressing real nice, getting more fit, eliminating hitches on the remount, getting comfy with the dismount, and getting psyched up to race.

I'm thinking about trying some cross racing this year. It'll work on my biggest weakness for sure with all the high intensity and that ought to help out for next year. Actually, I suppose my biggest weakness is that I'm not actually getting to the races this year, but we're (Cadence) doing this combo thing with CycleOps at a lot of the cross races this fall and that should let me get to at least one per weekend.

We'll be coming out to the events with a warm up tent featuring trainers from CycleOps that everyone will be able to use to prep for their races. We'll have a Cadence 'cross warm-up protocol for anyone to use and will also lead a lap of the course to preview with folks a few times throughout the day between the races. We're working to put together a PowerTap demo for the races too. Riders will be able to race with a PowerTap and then one of the coaches will go through a short analysis with the athlete post race. Pretty cool.

It is sweet when work and racing come together this well.

Until next time

Thank some deity all my solo (by solo I mean Kris, my folks, her folks, my great team mates and some good friends) race promos are done for the year. I'm feeling some great relief at this and even enjoyed cancelling out the cross relay though I'm sure it'd be great fun.

I'll be helping out a bit with the STXC finals at Bear Creek and then there is Iron Cross and IC Lite and the boys from Philly Cyclismo have asked me and Yozer to help with course layout at an event they're planning for late Nov/early Dec at Spring Mountain, but no more solo stuff. I have to figure out next year...I have all these ideas about cool events and things I'd like to do, but I want to race 'em too. Its basically impossible to do both unless I quit my job and promoted full time and raced on the weekends I didn't promote. Working weekends and promoting makes for too much. I'd be all for this gig except there is no money in race promotion when you're generous with awards and swag unless you land mad sponsorship and that ain't easy (or I suck at it/don't like doing it).

I saw Jac Frech at RB Winter last weekend and am going to be bugging his ass about taking over the RB Winter event. He's the guy that used to promote the Spring Mtn MTB race and owned Tailwinds bike shop, but he's now up in the Lewisburg area and just opened up a rock gym in Milton, PA...www.miltonrockgym.com. Look him up if you're up that way and tell him he should run RB next year.

I'm trying to talk Kris into this little gig - no luck yet, but its over my birthday so there is hope.