sooooo pumped!

nice!!!! jeff cup is reall soon its about to get awesome up in dat joint!

but really i am pumped for the cup, plus it looks like its gonna be pretty nice weather, especially compared to last year...only bad thing i did something to jack up my back last week so it starts hurting like 30min into every ride...sooo for anyone in the 123 field wondering why im sitting up straight and stretching like every 5 seconds its cuz ma back hurts ! and im trying ta make it feel good!  alright to more important matters gamjams did that contenders thing, personally thought it was kinda week, but whatever im now going to predict the winner for every category in the jeff cup bicycling race:

Women 123: Jen Rasmusson

Women 35+: Chris Kelley

Cat 5: Jon Hicks

Women 4: Robin Schroyer

Jr. 10-14: Andy Mount

Cat 123: Steven Grant

35+: Rick Norton

Cat 4: Avery Wilson

50+: Steve Hetherington

60+: Ron Sutherland

Jr. 15-18: Steven Kendall

I'm pretty confident in all these predictions...I do have to admit I was not familiar with the cat 5, women 4, and 50+ fields so had to make educated guesses based on name quality, but I am still confident there superior names will carry them to outright victory!

I hope everyone has been training like crazy and is ready to throw down because in my mind nothing after sunday really matters, at least to me...so lets go out there and have some fun, my whole season is sunday basically so if you see me struggling just feel free to give a little push or ease off a fraction have fun

weekend and other stuff

Pretty good weekend...saturday me and blair drove down to richmond to race the cullops import crit in bryan park with jeff brandon...and jonny sundt from the pro team.  It was a pretty big field, i think 50.  The course was pertty fun but mad bumpy.  I felt pretty good but suffered viciously from a mechanical.  I've been very pleased with my new bike but the clamp where thte seatpost grabs the saddle rails isn't designed that well, in mmy opinion.  On the bumpy course...and the combo of me having my saddle slid pretty forward, about 5 laps in the bolt slipped and my saddle slipped, nose down, not the seatpost tslipping down.  I took a free lap and fixed it.  A lap or two later it happened again so I freelapped and fixed it again.  when it happened agian I was really pissed and decided to just ride the rest of the race with it that way...like 15 more laps.  It wasnt that bad my quads just got really sore and I had to stand up a lot.  The race went pretty well for us...I felt pretty good, we were all pretty aggressive, I got off the front with 5 to go but came back pretty quick, the next move that went blair was in.  It looked pretty good, with 1 to go they still had a solid gap, but harley missed the move and keck baker went to the front and killed it, the pack kind of exploded into different groups or we just broke off the front of the pack, not sure exactly what happened.  Well the break got caught in the closing meters...jeff powered through the traffic for fifth, blair held on for 7th i think, and I was in there i think 13th...didnt check results but I counted on a video.  It was decent but I was pretty annoyed about my seat...when I got home I greased the bolt and tightened it way down it seems a lot better now.

Sunday me and blair went to the mountains...parked in sperryville and did a nice big climbing loop.  I felt pretty good and the weather was nice...we were planning on coming back on skyline but there was a shooting and the shooter fled into the park so they had the whole thing shutdown.  There was helicopters and I think every police car in front royal there.

Training has been goingn pretty well, not that exciting to talk about though, right now its about 7 weeks to tour of the gila, which is basically my first big objective for the season...i mean i want to crush every race, but this one i really want to crush!

Also, this weekend..friday saturday sunday were doing a little training camp down in lexington, va im pretty exicted for there especialy since i get to miss school on friday...tho rick is a teacher maybe he'll just make up for the missed day of school by teaching me a bunch of latin.  Otherwiise not much to talk about, I'm pumped for jeff cup! hope you are!

The Wheels I've Got

I'm pretty lucky in that I have a pretty good collection of wheels to race on, mostly cuz of people doing me favors and hooking me up with some good deals.

I do about 75% of my races on my dt swiss rr 1.1 powertap rear wheel with a mavic ksyrium sl front thats pretty old ( i thinlk 2002) i also do all my training on these wheels.  main reason I use these wheels is because...they're decent, and i dont really like using my carbon wheels in crits cuz they're not that strong, and crack easily with a good pothole, plus i like looking at the powerfile after.

Ok so my other set of wheels for racing is a pair of American classic carbon 38, which i think is just an  old (not dimpled) zipp 303 rim.  I got these for a steal from a friedn, I like them they're really light, I just use them for road races though, and some crits in stage races cuz I'm too lazy to change the brake pads.  They're not that strong though, I cracked my front rim at green mountain last year, and had to get a new one thi swinter.

Also, I recently collected a new set of wheels, my new bike came with some bontrager race lite clinchers.  Admittedly i havent ridden them yet.  They look nice, they're very shiny, I'm sure I will ride them soon!

for TT's I got a pretty good wheel too.  At the beginning of last year I was able to score a bontrager disk for a good deal off of a time trial loathing evan fader...just kidding, but he was able to give me a good deal on it.

Then this past winter when i bought my new TT bike from lengermann he sent it along to me with a hed 3 front.

So really I have no excuses for not crushing people in every race ever this year...and I plan on it!

picture post

I wanted to make a post, but i didnt want to really write anything, so i found some pictures from the past few races.

This is at the wolfpack rr less than 30s from the start going up the hill with the feedzone.
This is going up that same hill on the 2nd lap, the time guy is jon hamblen i think, my teammate ryan is on his wheel, the guy behind me ( i have the blue helmet) is the guy on team type1 who won the race.
This is from the wolfpack crit note my freshness:

-blue helmet

-fresh kelly jersey

-black shorts

-bike belonging blatantly to another team

dont you all wish you could be fresh like me!

At the start of the snowball crit, surrounded by team natures path

During my breakaway