Sunny at an EC race, WHAT??

Manhattan skyline from Long Island...Post Card Style!

The first Jeep race was lats weekend in northern New Jersey at Mountain Creek. Eric Carter put in massive amounts of work to build a pretty sweet slalom track. It was one of the coolest slalom tracks that I've ridden. It had tight bermed corners, flat corners, little doubles, a md sized step up, good sized berms, big doubles, and a huge ski run type huck at the end. I was pretty pleased with my jumping on the course. Unfortunately my cornering is still sucking, and I didn't qualify for the finals. That was a big bummer since by just making the finals you got paid!

2-1-3

Lisa, Kathy, and Melissa

CVD got knocked out early, so he decided to be the bar tender!

Cody Warren, JD, Rando, and Petr were all on fire all day for the men, and Kathy Pruitt and Melissa were riding through the field all by themselves for the women. The men ended up in that order, as well as the women after Melissa crashed in a turn that sent Lopes home in the first round earlier in the day!

Look closely, you'll see her, well you'll see her backside!

After a fantastic breakfast by Buhly on Sunday morning, we all headed into the city to do a little sight seeing which turned into a lota sitting in horrible, horrible traffic and ultimately not getting to go to either ground zero or the Statue of Liberty! :( We did a Statue of Liberty drive by, well a drive by of her back side, so at least I got to see her, sort of. haha After we split with Buhly and Dave, we returned our rental car, checked all of our luggage in and then took a cab down to Long Island. It ended up being super cool with a really nice view of the Manhattan skyline, good food, and then almost missing our flight back home. Dohhh! Almost being the most important word in the last sentence! :)

Cool Graffiti artwork heading down to the water in Long Island

I don't think I'll be heading to the east coast anytime soon. It was nice (sometimes), very green, and had big buildings, but there were just too damn many people for my liking!

G3 in Sol Vista this weekend!! 3 DH races in 3 days, wahooo!! :)

Off to the Jeep KOM Race in the Morning

Well, I've been working hard at school trying to get caught up and ready to go to Schladming. This weekend, though, Petr and I are leaving tomorrow to head out to New Jersey to the Jeep King of the Mountain DS race. It's the first race in the series, so it'll be fun to see what they've got to offer this year.

Should be fun!!

Bike House Party Semester Kick Off

Most of these shady characters were in attendance...including John, The Scorpion King!

There is a famous, well maybe infamous, house here in Boulder that has been home to countless (well over 25, I'm sure) different names in the Boulder cycling scene. I think there has been as many as 8, maybe just 7, different people living there at any given time over the past couple of years. The house has a bomb shelter that has even been home to a couple of really poor bastards needing a halfway house for a month or two.

Anyway, they usually have a few parties throughout the course of a semester, and they got things off on the right foot last night! A keg of Dales Pale Ale, two grills with brats, burgers, Phil's fantastic King Salmon that he caught with his own teeth (well that's the story that Kiel is telling anyway), and a great group of people who LOVE to laugh and have a good time! I'm glad I decided to stop by on my way home from school. As usual, they did not disappoint! The night was finished off with me and James "racing" home. As it turns out, it is a little far to sprint the whole way, and the race wasn't so fair as James was rolling on big knobby tires!!

It's gonna be a good semester! :)

Gravity Girls and Their Pearly Whites :)

Me, T, Jill, and Jaym

I just found this picture from Sea Otter, and I decided that it should be the new ad for Colgate!

Surreal

We have some really nice sunsets (and sunrises, I'm just not usually up early enough to see them!) here in Colorado, but last night the colors of the clouds juxtaposed with the moon were really surreal. It was pretty cool, except that I was just leaving school when I happened to see it. :( The picture doesn't do it justice!

Also surreal was my good friend Jon's description of his adventures on a nuclear submarine this summer. He is in Navy ROTC, so he did his summer cruise this summer. He spent 39 days on a nuclear sub, and his description of what it was like was crazy. He said the air on a sub generally smells like amines mixed with ozone. Amines are similar to ammonia for those of you who hated chemistry, and ozone has a strange smell as well. He said that after awhile you don't notice the smell...ummm, probably not very good for the health of the sailors!!! There were many other stories that make me question his sanity for signing up for that, but I'm sure many of them are classified, so I shouldn't share them...haha, j/k!

Jon Topside in the Panama Canal

Bromont World Cup

A bit overdue...

Women's Final at Bromont

The track in Bromont was huge! It had the biggest berms I've ever seen on a 4x track! The course Builder, Phil, had ~700 truck loads of dirt to work with, and he and his crew did an amazing job. The first straight was super long and had great flow. A couple of pedals out of the gate and then the pumping began...step down, step down, step onto a table, try and sneak in a crank or two, step off of the table, and then a quick jump into the first berm! Awesome!! It rained like crazy so parts of the track were super muddy with some crazy ruts that formed, but all in all, the track was amazing, and SOOO long! Mio had the fastest qualifying time with a 1:10!

I crashed really hard in my last practice run right before the racing started and sort of felt like my head was underwater most of the time after, but I still had a lot of fun racing! I was in 7th in the small final and made a similar mistake to the weekend before and swung too far wide letting Eva pass me on the inside right before the rock garden! Ughhhh!!! I will learn to protect the inside, I swear! I ended up in 8th, but I still had an awesome time riding the track and keep learning more and more each time I race!

Break From Racing

This weekend was the G3 at Snowmass, and I definitely should have gone to the race, as I am sure that the promoters put together 2 great DH courses and an awesome Super D, but the bottom line is...I'm tired! It's already the middle of August, and I'm wondering where the summer went!

Instead, I decided to put in some time at school this weekend and try and get my life organized again. It seems every time I leave for a long trip, I come home and things are in disarray (I think that's the definition of Entropy)! :)

PLUS, the Olympics started today, and I'm a huge junkie for that every four years! Good luck to Jill and Jared, two kick ass 4x racers who are racing BMX in the sports Olympic debut this year!!

What Day Is It?

Well, when I look at my watch it says Monday, but somehow it's gotten screwed up. I wish it was Monday, that's when I was supposed to get home from Canada. Unfortunately Chicago SUCKS! Yesterday I had a pretty epic day of being at the Chicago airport with thousands of other people not being able to get flights to where we wanted to go because they just kept having lightening storms after lightening storms! Long story short (or shorter) I finally got on a plane that began our attempt to take off around 11:30 last night. We were next up on the runway for takeoff when the pilot told us we would be delayed because there was another lightening storm at the end of the runway we were trying to take off on. About 20 minutes later the pilot comes back on and tells us that our plane has just taken a direct hit of lightening to our tail!! I was too busy trying to thoroughly enjoy the only time I've ever been in Business Class, so I didn't even notice until the fire trucks made their way to our plane!

Spent the night in the airport and got a flight this morning which I got upgraded to First Class on at the last minute! Wahoooo!! Asking for an upgrade with a smile seems to go a long way these days. :)

Prior to my Chicago adventures yesterday, I met up with Katie and her bf in Burlington on Sunday. We had as nice of a day as you can have enjoying the town when it's raining the whole time. They had some crazy Dragon Boat Competition going on when we walked down to Lake Champlain. It was quite comical as many people were taking it quite seriously. It was good for a laugh and an inquiry from us. We decided to dodge the rain and see The Dark Knight. It wasn't what I expected, but it was good.

I'll have to do a race update after I get caught up on some school work...

Canada WC Update #1

Jess, Me, Lorena, Melissa, Jill, and Fee...Quebec City

On Monday, we had a bit of a duvet day (as my English friends call it) and took our time getting ready to move camp from Mont St. Anne to Bromont. We spent the afternoon in Quebec City. It was fun to see the Old Town and get to partake in their 400-year celebration. We had a lovely lunch with our own personal serenader. We walked around the city a bit before we got back in the car and made the rest of the journey down to Bromont.

A Cool Statue in Quebec City

Ha ha, the Lesbians Are So Funny!

We arrived in Bromont to the gracious hospitality of Phil and Marie, Melissa’s Canadian mechanic and his wonderful girlfriend. On Tuesday morning, our first stop was the Chocolate Museum that made Jess very happy! Melissa and I went on a road ride to get her prescribed training in for the day, and then we went to visit some friends of Jess’ who cooked us a magnificent steak dinner.

Jess and the Chocolate Museum Wonderfulness

On Wednesday Melissa and I headed down to Burlington for her to catch a flight home for some important family stuff. When I got back to town, I decided to call it an early night since I had to get up early to register. Thursday morning found us being awoken by crazy thunder and lightening storms and a torrential downpour. DH practice was delayed by about 2.5 hours. Once 4x practice finally started an hour late, it started pissing rain again, so we each got about 1 run in before practice got canceled again! The weather has made things a bit disappointing, that’s for sure!

Today, however, we were treated to sunny skies and drying courses. The 4x track still had spots that were a complete mess, but at least we got to ride and qualify today. I didn’t have a very good qualifying run, but it was good enough to make it to the “big show” tomorrow night. I’ve got a lot of work to do on this VERY long track before racing time comes tomorrow. It’s such a fun track; I’m just excited to get to ride it again tomorrow.

Pimp Daddy Shane and the 9 Lovely Ladies

Otherwise, I’ve just been doing loads of schoolwork when I’m not doing anything else during the day before practice and racing. I’ve got tons to do, so the rain has at least been nice as a motivator for me to get some work done!!