Mt Snow

Feeling better today. Roy Orbison was bringing the heat on the scenic route 2 from Boston to Vermont. I knew I was feeling better when I started to get goosebumps singing along to my boy Roy and wanting to rip peoples legs off. Weird combo. But like ninja kitties kicking me in the teeth it was getting me all fired up.

Tom Albert and I rode a couple laps and I must say this place is a real mountain bike course, not watered down in any way. Up for 1.5 miles and then down some super tech... no rest areas any where, seriously. I'm a little concerned about the climbing which is a little over the top. It's got some serious loose steep ups; picture the climbs up to the picnic table at Chubb but make it 4X's longer and then stack them one after another with just a brief cross section of super technical, rocky singletrack linking them together. By my second lap I felt like I was floating through the technical stuff really well on the OIZ. The legs seemed to be feeling good and today I felt pretty normal and got some calories down without too much effort.

I ran into JHK, Treefarm and the LaLonde brothers and chatted about pro stuff. JHK had a photo shoot going on so he narrowly avoided getting dropped by some of St Louis's finest. Treefarm was asking me what kind of gearing he should be running for CX this year and the LaLonde brothers were telling me they were thinking about getting geared OIZs after reading about how great a bike it is on my blog. On a more serious, note it is going to be awesome to see how they stack up to the big boys here. Should be sick to see and I'm glad I'm here for there first big trip to the pro ranks out of Wisco. JHK seemed to give Tom and I a dirty look as we pre-rode the course in the right direction and interrupted his photo shoot that was going the wrong way. He was pretty tan, hopefully he put as much time in prepping for Nats as getting ready for the photo shoot!

After we rode Tom and I went over to the Luna/Orbea van and I was welcomed with open arms. I guess having multiple $5K Orbeas is a free pass onto the bus? It was really weird but before Chloe went on to win the U23 Jersey her and Georgia Gould offered to rub our legs down on the team van, which was really nice of them to say the least. It was a happy ending to the day.

Jen and I are going to hook up with Tom and Sandy over at Stratton Mountain for some dinner to avoid the crowds and then I'm going to get a couple fast laps in tomorrow a.m before watching my buddy Grahm (a Mesa Junior Expert rider from KC) tear it up!

More tomorrow