U.S. Cup/Snow Shootout, Mt. Snow, Dover, VT

i stayed with Andrew Freye his girlfiend Hatie (thanks for the feeds) John Burns ,Macky Franklin, Jaime Dinkins and Kat (real name?)... in a nice place with a rustic widerness/ US Marine Corps theme... it seems the owner of the house was a former Marine and posters and toy army men hidden in every all over the place... it was like an Easter egg hunt trying to find them all... the house was way nicer than a hotel or sleeping out of the car which is what i probably would have done if Andrew didn’t set this up...thanks Andrew

Even though I get schooled at these big national races I enjoy going because i like the big event feeling… there are more people around to see me riding fast and more people who look at the results…those seems to be important things to me (as I mentioned in a previous blog entry)…
The race was dryer and shorter than it was for the regional race two weeks ago...it was about 65-70 degrees…the terrain was typical mount snow… steep climbs and steep descents… this year entire thing was rideable as compared with some previous years when it wasn't.

I felt ok at the start but I found my self in last place going up the first climb… pretty normal for me…I think I’m just naturally a horrible at starts…by the end of the second stair step of that climb I had reeled back about 10 guys and needed to wait a bit as riders had bottlenecked at the start of the single track…I passed a few more guys on the decent…teammate John Burns and I were riding together at this point and we stayed within eye shot of each other for a while…

On the third lap decent I caught up with my root 66 buddies Brent Mellen and Matthew O'keefe on one of the cut across sections of the decent… Brent is normally way faster than me on these ski mountain courses and Matt is normally faster than me on every type of courses … so I felt like I was doing good or they were doing bad? Either way it was nice to see some familiar faces… I led down the decent and i could hear Matt right behind me making comments on my foot out approach to the corners... at the bottom of the decent we regrouped so we could work together on the dirt road that goes through the start finish… Matt put in a big pull and wasn’t pulling off so I went around and let him ride Behind me till we started going up again…

I passed another rider on the 4th lap climb and another on the decent and was closing in on a third on the start finish dirt road… but as approached the finish line I saw a man step out in front and motioning his arms for me and the rider in front of me to slow down…the 80 percent rule was in effect… meaning if your more than 80 percent back you get pulled…I was a bit bummed I was so close to making the cut…Oh well… I had a good race… mechanical free and I felt strong through out… so I don’t have much to complain about…

I finished 34th out of 71 starters… that’s top 50%... way better than my normal bottom 25% I do at these national races....i think the biggest contributor to my better finish this year is the fact that the pro and semi-pro categories were combined… a lot of gentlemen who were slower than me moved into my category…. So now I seem faster than i am at their expense.

next weekend is Windham ... i'm looking forward to it


aqua-car i saw at the gas station on my way up to the race

getting ready for the start of the mens short track

mens short track start

Burns
Andrew and Hatie

results of the mens xc

August 2 2009 Annual Hodges Village Dam, Oxford, MA

Turn out this week not as stacked as it has been through out the year… still pretty good…low twenties I am guessing… It was cloudy and about 75 degrees.

The course was very unique... it reminded me of a steeple chase… a lot of dirt roads and deep puddles...


one section in particular was about 25 ft long and about 22 inches deep…

their was also a bridge that was floating in the water… as a person ran across it, it sank down and tipped… it kinda reminded me of the moving platforms in super Mario brothers

I pretty much spent the majority of the race riding alone… I wouldn’t see any one till the last lap… I passed a couple of guys and was closing in on a third person… I was trying to pull a ninja stealth attack on the third person... my goal was to catch him off guard and make my pass before the quickly approaching finish line.



but my ninja skills were lacking today... he noticed me 200 ft back and started hammered… I tried… but didn’t have enough time to close the gap… i finished 7th

it felt good to take a dip in the pond after the race with Wheels...the clean up /swim after the race has because as important as the race itself... i am thinking about creating a blog that focuses post race swimming places.... it is going to be called... mike joos post race swimming places blog (my towel is better than yours)... not really... but i will probably mention them a lot on this blog.

today i swam here...

MOUNT SNOW CLASSIC CROSS COUNTRY

MOUNT SNOW CLASSIC CROSS COUNTRY

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Location: Mount Snow, West Dover, Vermont

turn out to the race was really good... like it has been all year... for the pro/cat1 open category I am guessing over 30 again…weather has good, bit cloudy and humid and 80 degrees.

I had a bunch of mechanical issues in this race…. The freewheeling of my hub wasn’t working right … it would make a loud winding sound when I wasn’t pedaling... not sure if this hurt anything but it was pretty annoying… my chain came off 5 times…my own fault, I’ve never been very good with adjusting my derailleur… the three smallest rings of my cassette were packed with grass and mud thick enough that they didn’t work…that probably wasn’t too much of a disadvantage considering that everyone was probably having similar mud issues (except of Thom Parsons who was riding a single speed) …also I had a flat tire on the last lap decent… I am pretty sure I was in the top 10 before the flat but fell into the teens after…

The silver lining in it all is that now I know the things I need to fix before racing here again in a few weeks and windham for the east cup races… also… I discovered the possibility of using the pond at he bottom of the course as a after race clean up place…took a dip with Wheels and Burns after the race and it felt really good… I think I found a new mount snow tradition… I noticed some big goose droppings on the out side rim of the pond so hopeful this pond isn’t too contaminated with bird poop



I just registered last night for the east cup races… it was pretty pricey $65 per race… I don’t get why it is so much more expensive fro the east cup race than it is for regional races…I can do 5 regional races for the same price as two east cup races…I paid $25 dollars to race yesterday at mount snow… in a few weeks I will be charged $65 to race on the same course… where dose the large additional expense fit in? more people sign up for the east cup races…I would think the more people, the more profit, and the less that would need to be charged to make the race happen….despite the lofty price tag I am looking forward to both of these races and i plan on having a good time.

PATS PEAK MTB Festival,Henniker NH 2009

I went over to mount A and did some hill intervals on the access road 3 times in the past couple weeks in preparation for the upcoming ski mountain races… pats peak… Windham… small mount snow race… and big mount snow race…

On Sunday I raced the first one… pats peak… the turn out was good…30 something, I think (didn’t count)… the weather was nice… around 80... it seemed like a reasonably sunny dry day but the trail was water logged from heavy rain the day before…

I think the mount A hill intervals helped… I was feeling better than normal on the climbs …it was short lived though… by the last two laps (of 5 ) I was back to my normal slow and steady climbing … I came in 7th ( I was happy with that)… here are the rest of the results…

next weekend I don’t have any races planned… Andrew and I have hesitant plans to do some mountain biking @ mount A ( mount a web site ) …speaking of Andrew he had a good race at pats peak, coming in second... especially impressive because he won the 6 hour race the day before and the week before he did the 7 day BC bike race with Burns (came in 10th)... hopefully he will completely burn himself out with some more long hard rides this week ... so i can school him this weekend and inflate my ego.

why dose realizing i missed a race make me panic?

why dose realizing i missed a race make me panic?

I missed last weekends race… the root 66 one in ware mass… I didn’t realize there was a race till about an hour before the start of the race … so I went through my panic mode for about 10 min till I realized that there was know way I was going to make it before the start… and I was a little bit disappointed in myself that I could let missing a race get me so worked up and worried… I go to these races for fun…so why did I get so flustered… Am I on some ego trip where I feel I need to ride my bike faster than others to prove myself ?… if I am alone riding fast and no one is around to see or care the ride doesn’t feel quite as fulfilling as if I rode fast under race conditions and had an official result and witnesses to prove that I had rode fast… so I guess @ the end of the day I am just a tool, trying to impress others…

I suppose we all tools to some degree… humans are social animals, always doing stuff to be loved, get attention and respect… if I didn’t care what anyone thought of me I would always we wearing the same sweat suit… I would ever shave and I would fart, pick my nose in public and wouldn’t race as much… if at all.

Despite the tool racing makes me I don’t think I will stop doing it anytime soon… racing is rewarding it creates goals and motivation in my life that keep me driven to be a healthy and fit person… and maybe that dive transfers over to other aspects of my life in a positive way... I suppose the same competitive drive that make a person driven also makes them more susceptible to getting worried angry or depressed when things don’t go as planned…

Putney/West Hill Mtn. Bike Race, Putney VT 2009

Putney/West Hill Mtn. Bike Race, Putney VT

Race went good… big turn out …in the men’s pro /cat 1 category there was 35 people.
It had been raining a lot that week so the conditions were pretty muddy… it was nice that the rain gave way just before the race… still got a bit wet from sweat and puddle splashes but not completely waterlogged.

I was worried going into this race because I had sprained my wrist a couple weeks prior at the gym lifting weights…

my wrist was weak and unable to move in certain direction… for the first week I had the problem I wasn’t able to ride my bike, turn the key in my car ignition or a door knob with my right hand… it felt pretty messed up… but in the past week my wolverine like mutant healing strength kicked in and my wrist made a lot of progress…

If you are unaware of the wolverine healing factor I included this very informative article…. Just click on wolverine….

I also found this article that explored the possibility of using wolverine’s healing factor to cure the swine flu… mmmmmm…. a very interesting proposition.

The wrist doesn’t have complete mobility but it was good enough that I felt comfortable wrapping it up tight and racing… my worries were that I might re-injure it or be forced to drop out if it because too painful but I hardly noticed the wrist problem and had a great race….minus the start...i started off 4th row and had a foot slip off the pedal... so I was pretty far back probably 30th…

here is the is a video of us at the beginning of the race

Cycling Videos on CyclingDirt

I passed a lot of people and was feeling good… I caught up with Brent Mellen and we rode together for the last 2 laps we passed some more guys and finished together… I came in 7th and Brent came in 8th…

Brent and I were planning on competing in the wildcat epic team stage race mid June in the Catskills of NY but due to lack of registered entries the race organizers called it off… we were both bummed … we would have made a good team… maybe next year?


the winner of the race Kevin Hines is the masters national champion @ 49 year old!!... I really hope to be still be competitively fast when I am old… i brought up this topic in a previous blog entry.

I think a lot of people who get up there in age set a mental block that prevents them from continuing to try…they feel over the hill , like it is unnatural to continue and use they use this as an excuse. I suppose kids, jobs ,other life issues and time management issues play a major role but for the most part I think it is the societal expectation that influences peoples perception of what they are capable of achieving that is to blame… that’s my theory anyway …seeing as I am not actually that old yet ,I cant say for sure… I will be sure to make a blog entry about this 20 year from now when I know first hand… Hopefully with some persistence and smart training I will be riding as strong as Kevin.

kingdom trails

went up to kingdom trails in nothern VT this weekend.... huge network of over 100 miles of trail...
Andrew... friendly wave

me trying to look huge and intimidating

chris and burns looking @ map

new stone church on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere


coolest trail i have rode in a while... the trail zig sags down a descending vally... get going supper fast then rip up the other side...then repeat all the way down... in this pic we are waiting for chris who rolled his tire at the bottom of the vally were g- forces where at the max...he was ok...