Iceman

It's so freaking cold here. Yesterday it was 23 when I went to bed...on the chair and probably 64 degrees inside our place. I feel like I must be feeling a little frigid from the Iceman Commeth race this past weekend.

Seems like winter is here. The race was a great reminder of that being the first day (which mostly consisted of getting into Traverse City, MI and setting up for a demo) was 68 degrees outside...not too bad for race weather. However, the race wasn't until the next dreary morning day. It turned out to be about 47 so not too bad. During the warm up I couldn't get warm. Knees felt bare to the wind, teeth chattering, and hands clenching the bars with a death-grip to power out the chills in my body. I decided to throw on a wool base-layer to keep dry and warm before the start but it took a while to get on so I was almost late but slipped threw the barriers with my Gary Fisher Paragon and hit it hard for the first three miles. The landscape in upper MI is a mix of hard packed dirt and sand pits. Not cool. Super fast but the navigation through the pits was pretty hard for most of the riders. At mile 3 some guy in front of me went down and I pretty much had to run right over him and jacked myself in the left shin from my pedal making direct contact. I tried to shake it off by jumping back on and trying to ride back up to the pack.

Right around mile 5 I was getting WAY over-heated so I had to shed some layers. I had to stop and take off my wool base-layer which took a large amount of time since it was beneath my vest and long sleeve jersey. I wrapped it up and put it in my back and set off to catch back up to the field. By this time I was probably 5 minutes back and out in no-man's-land waiting to see someone, anyone, to catch up to. Finally I was picking people off one by one (keep in mind there are about 2,700 people that do this race so you're bound to see someone eventually). I rolled with a few single-speeders for a while but once we got to the hills I started to roll them since they didn't have the gears.

Around mile 17, half way, toes were freezing but there really wasn't much I could do as we started heading into the single-track. I felt like there was an absence of experience in this part of the trail because I was rolling past people and trying to get by almost everyone I came up on. The other riders seemed to do fine on the flats but had no idea how to negotiate quick turns and fast downhills. Things were going well. I was doing negative splits and rolling past people which is always good for the mentality of things. Hamstring felt fine but I started to get a little cramped up near the end. Probably a combination of the continuous hills disabling all momentum I was working off of. By the last part of single-track I was out of the woods with no-one around so I pretty much coasted to the finish. Ended up getting 44th out of 94 at a time of 2:19 and change. I feel like I could have dropped at least ten minutes if I would have dressed better and didn't' have to shed the extra layer and had some better riding legs under me but all-in-all it was a fun race that I will most definitely but on the schedule for next year.

The winner of the Pro team was actually with us as well. Jeremiah Bishop took the men's trophy which is a NASCAR like trophy cup made out of a solid block of ice. It's pretty freakin sweet especially since the winner gets to drink out of it all night from the local bars for free.

Sunday was filled with a 38 minute flight out of Michigan to Chicago and then another 27 minute flight back to Madison to reuite with the blowup matress for a long awaited nap while football echoed in the background.