Today wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but there’s always another crack at it tomorrow… It was a nervous day on the roads out to the Mogollon climb and it took a fair amount of work to cover the 87 miles getting to the base of the climb. On the way up things started all right, but shortly after beginning the second half of the climb I hit the limit of how fast things could go. Getting dropped isn’t fun but I kept it together and got myself to the top the best I could. Part caloric deficit, part altitude, part ? got the best of me and I wasn’t my best those last 6.7 miles of today’s stage. A couple of small breaks were away and some riders survived to finish amongst the leaders today while others popped on the climb. Tomorrow ought to be a good one with several climbs along the route. More to come, -TJ

Rolling through the hills of Fort Ord with Chris P. and Bender.

Sea Otter is shaping up nicely thus far. The weather has been great and the company of teammates has been a lot of fun.  I’ve got the bike mostly dialed after having some interesting issues with front wheel traction on our initial ride.  I’ll typically race with low tire pressure in the 20-25 psi range so I inflated the Raven 2.0 front tire up to 25 prior to setting off on the course.  The entire lap I was fighting the front end of the bike as if the headset was binding even though off the bike the headset was just fine.  Turned out that the contact patch of the tire is/was so huge that it was just biting into the ground that much… So with some more tire pressure up front the bike is once again handling as normal. Who would have thought that it’s possible to have too much traction up front? Only on a 29er!

My approach coming into Sunday’s XC is a little diffrent this year as I’m opting out of the Saturday  Short Track.  The xc has always been a fine line as far as race speed versus glycogen stores goes. Last year I had a solid result shaping up only to run out of steam coming back up the long climb to the finish. By avoiding a 20-25 minute near max effort, I ought to have that much more glycogen in the tank for when it matters most this weekend.  All my eggs are going into the XC basket! I hate passing up a race, but the xc is where my attention has been placed this weekend and I’ll be going for broke en route to the finish line.

Race report to follow,  -TJ