days flying by...

seems like i've been doing nothing but been real busy at the same time, or at least active I should say.

Did my first ever road race in auburn, ks. 39 mile loop for the cat 5. I stayed with the pack almost the whole time and got dropped on the one climb towards the end. Kevin from Trifam and myself however worked our asses off taking some pulls for about 4-5 miles and caught back up to the lead group. About ten seconds later we hit the 1 K make and the front jumped. I desperetly grabbed any wheel I could, looked upand could see the finish line so I hammered it and passed a couple guys at the end to finish in 10th. not to shabby for a first timer I would say. Colavita Parisi cleaned up the cat 5's: mike e. won it, jake got 7th, ty 9th, me 10th, john p. 18th, nathan c. 19th. Phil w. got 10th in a tough 4's and matt got 11th. spencer m. got 2nd in the 3's, while matt o. got 3rd in the 1/2/3 behind tilford and adam mills. britton and jk were also in the 1/2/3, jk said he was way out of shap and called it after one lap (they did 2) and britton lost the group abou 3/4 the way through he said. all in all a good day for the team.

have been doing a fuck ton of trail work recently. I am officially at 100 hours! Here's the breakdown (formatting's a little off because of copy/paste and laziness):

Date Trail System Hours Total Hours

11/16/08 Kill Creek 3 3
12/6/08 Stocksdale 4 7
1/3/09 Landahl Park 4 11
1/31/09 Blue River Parkway 4 15
6/20/09 Shawnee Mission Horse 4 19
6/26/09 Blue-Swope Connector 5 24
10/3/09 Blue-Swope Connector 4 28
11/7/09 Swope Park 4 32
11/8/09 Blue-Swope Connector 4 36
11/21/09 Wyandotte Lake Park 4 40
12/6/09 Swope Park 3 43
12/17/09 Swope Park 2 45
12/18/09 Swope Park 3 48
3/19/10 Swope Park (IMBA) 3 51
3/19/10 Swope Park 3 54
3/26/10 Swope Park 3 57
3/28/10 Swope Park 3 60
3/29/10 Swope Park 3 63
4/25/10 Blue River Parkway 4 67
5/1/10 Swope Park 4 71
5/15/10 Swope Park 4 75
5/18/10 Swope Park 7 82
5/19/10 Swope Park 4 86
5/21/10 Swope Park 6 92
5/22/10 Swope Park 4 96
5/25/10 Lawrence River Trails 4 100

have had some interesting discussions with the lawrence trail hawks regarding destruction of clinton lake. it's not their fault, it's just sad to see clinton is such disrepair. Read more here: http://forums.earthriders.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11533 and here: http://lawrencetrailhawks.com/blog/2010/may/25/post-race-trail-conditions/

swope phase 3 is damn near ready to open to the public. mucho man hours in that section. still a lot of rock work and benching to do though.

helped art king yesterday do some mowing and built the new "chicane" right before the 3 mile maker. we took a huge rutted mess and made it into super fast twisty banked turns. getting ready to go try in out in an hour :)

my lasagna's probably cooled down now after this type fest. later on.

peace and riding!

gravel circa lawrence, kansas, usa

went on a little recon mission for the lawrence legato yesterday to make sure my map was alright. surpisingly the first 3 miles of the river trail were about perfect on the cross bike and the gravel roads were butter good. checked the route around the airport and it looks good. there was another levee (mud creek) that I could have thrown in, thre's some nsty gravel up there though so I'll leave the parallel gravel road as the route.

gonna go explore the rest of the route I haven't ridden yet between the grant township and phillips road. mason is going to join me here in a few minutes and we're gonna get out before the rain hits.

so far i've ridden all but probably those 5-7 miles of the route. It's gonna be extremely tough on a SS MTB. The best bike is going to be a fully-geared hardtail MTB with a front suspension that has a good lockout function, or even a full suspension that has front and rear lockout capabilities (you'll want suspension of some spot at clinton, I guarentee it, actually not really, a fully rigid MTB could handle it but clinton white won't be fun, haha)

Hopefully I can get some pics of the route today, if I can find a camera...

peace and riding!

here we go...

so i am finally gonna report some stuff for you....let's see, hmmmmm....



april 10 was the lawrence river trail UFD race. I of course opted for the marathon class (3 hours) on my single speed. didn't finish too terrible, 9th out of 19 marathoners...finished 9 short laps (4.7 mile laps for 42.3 miles total) in 3:15. The only real complaints I had were the short laps the promoters decided to run...the whole loop was ready to go and it should have been used, but I guess I can't complain cause I'm didn't help do any work...thanks to free state racing for the good time. by the way, my boy steele mopped up the sport class winning by 11 minutes in his first MTB race, which was pretty sweet.



april 11 was the god's country duathlon, again at the lawrence river trails. started with a 2.3 mile run, followed by a 14 mile bike, and finished with a 2.2 mile run. First run was ok, i was proud of myself because I ran the whole thing and didn't walk any. transitioned to the bike and started passing people like crazy. probably passed 60 people during the bike portion, no lie. there was one section I was off in the grass/woods passing a train of 20 or so riders. I had seen it ahead and told myself to just keep railing by and keeping yelling out to people i was coming through, or I would never get through. It ended up being the right call for sure. My overall time was definitely saved by the bike portion. The second run started well, and exactly at the 1 mile marker I started to cramp up and my legs decided that I hadn't trained enough on the running. The last 1.3 miles was a half walk, half jog strip fest, as I had to pop off my jersey cause I was burning up once we popped back out on the levee. finised with a total time of 1:48, good enough for 46th overall out of 104 participants. unfortunately for Chris, I think the numbers suffered a little from the rescheduled UFD race the day before. It was an experience working with him and the crew for sure, getting flyers distributed, setting up and marking the course/transition area, getting registration going, and finally tearing everything down. sunday was a long day all said and done and finished a great weekend of racing in lawrence.





April 18 was the bonebender 3/6 hour race at smithville. absolutely perfect trails and administration of the event. I opted for the 6 hour solo single speed. nutrition was off for sure as I ended up having to pull after 5 hours. finished 4 laps (11.5 mile laps for 46 miles total) in 5:10 which was still good enough for 12th out of 21 in my class. I expereinced the worst cramping I'd ever had during the 3rd and 4th laps and finally threw in the towel. better training and better nutrition will solve these problems. It was fricking sweet to see 250+ racers out there though. The first two laps were spent basically in a pace line through the woods, lap three our group broke off, but we still had 5-6 guys in a group and lap four we were still in the group, lost one to a flat, another crashed hard, then I bonked and had to stop and stretch cause the cramps were getting so bad. it was really fun to see the whole racing scene, from cameron in his special bibs to all the ladies and kids that made it out for the fun.



found out my boy steele is moving to austin cause he got a job in a sweet shop down there. sad to see him go, but it'll be good for him, great trails and a real freeriding scene. looks like a visit to austin is in the works for the future.

did some more trail work at swope may 1 and knocked out around 300 yards with a great small group of peeps. see details here: swopetrails.com

sold my full suspension specialized to mason so that I can get a new bike... http://www.jamisbikes.com/usa/thebikes/hardtails/dakota/10_dakota29team.html ... I'm just getting the frameset and moving all the sweet parts from my on-one to the new extremely light carbon frame. I'm thinking it'll be about 20-21 lbs. as a single speed with my reba, stans wheels and carbon flat bars/ergon grips w/ bar ends. either way, I lose at least 5 lbs off my current set-up, look for the new bike in June!

ok, so you got a good write-up and pictures! which I hardly ever do. looking forward, mason and I are scouting the lawrence legato route later this morning, more trail work at swope this weekend, maybe a race in columbia on sunday, riding with steele before he leaves, and chilling until classes start back up on june 7. until then...

peace and riding!!!

freedom!

I've finished this dreadful semester, freedom!

i still am going to do race reports for the river trail XC, duathlon and bonebender.

but it's nice outside and i need some liquor in me to celebrate, and i'm gonna go ride some bad ass KC singletrack.

so i'm gonna go do that now and write later, since i've typed over 4000 words today.

peace and riding!

dead...

I've read 316 pages, typed 15 pages, and done a GIS powerpoint presentation in the past 27 hours.

I'm tired.