17 March 2009  |  Misc

First race coming soon

So here we are at the beginning of a new season.  It seems like a long time since I’ve raced- even though it was only 6 weeks ago.  It has been really nice to have some time at home; I feel rested and ready to jump into a new MTB season.
The weather has certainly made training a lot easier- mild temperatures and not much rain/snow have allowed us ride trails almost all winter.  Ben and I have been mixing it up with some road rides and group rides too.  Overall I’ve gotten in some great training and I’ve been feeling really good.

On Thursday I head down to Santiago, Chile for the Continental Championships- my first MTB race of the season.  I’m excited, but it will be a short trip- arriving Friday morning and leaving Sunday evening.  From there, I head straight to the Bay area for our Team Camp/Photo shoot, and then it’s down to Fontana for the first US Cup race.  After that I have a few weeks at home before Sea Otter.

This year, I will be skipping the first World Cup (in South Africa).  After last year’s monster travel schedule (all the National Series races and all but one of the World Cups) and looking at the schedule, it just didn’t make much sense.  Sea Otter is an important race for the team, so I would have had to race in South Africa, California, Germany and Belgium on back to back weekends.  After talking to Waldek and Ben, I decided that I would rather focus on having GREAT races at the 2nd and 3rd round of World Cups instead of a bunch of potentially mediocre races because of extra travel, fatigue, etc.  We’ll see how the new plan works.  This is a good year for trying a little bit different strategy and seeing how it pans out.