Just got to Plymouth New Hampshire yesterday afternoon as I make my way north to Quebec to start the Canadian season. The riding in Plymouth as always is great and its nice to hang out with Ben and Onda again. Ben's a super fast retired XC racer who does a bunch of the DH now and hard rides where he pinns it for multiple hours on end. Onda is a retired DH ski racer from Romania.
Todays ride was pretty sweet, we had a road ride and we climbed for 40min on a gravel forest service road then descended down the other side of the mountain on pavement where there were still patches of snow in sections!
Monday to Quebec

Ducktown

The SERC # 4 was held at the Ocoee recreational site just outside of Ducktown Tennessee. Same place the 1996 Olympics were held for White water Kayak.

The course for the weekend was super fast with us riding 53km in 2hr 11min for an average speed of 24km/hr pretty quick for so much single track and climbing! We started off heading up a climb and we pretty much climbed for the next thirty minutes before descending on a fravel road for about a km before hitting some more downhill singletrack and finishing the lap with another km on the road. So of the start there was a group of five of us who were together for the first bit of the climb which eventually went down to three of us Matt Hadley, Charles Pendre and myself. I honestly wasn't feeling the strongest on the climbs but was going to try and hang on for as long as possible. I got dropped about 15min in when Charles upped the tempo a little and I just tried to keep them within range. on the descent I would make time and then try and hold it and on the section of road before the start of the second lap I was able to bridge up to the two of them. I probably went a little hard to bridge up to them. Once we hit the start of the climb Matt went to the front and slowly rode away and me thinking (or not thinking) that we were about to hit the single track attacked and couldn't hold it and also realized there was still another section of climbing to do before the first downhill. So no more group of us and there was also a fourth guy slowly closing the gap on me. The third lap I rode as hard as possibel to try and keep my third position and every once in a while could see Charles so was also motivated thinking if I could catch Charles and hold of the guy chasing me I could be 2nd. I didn't hold of the Robert Marrion (the guy chasing) and ended up riding on his wheel until the gravel road descent but I did catch Charles which put me into 3rd at the end of the day.

I have also been having some troubles with Allergies the past week where my throat was super sore and it made it hard to swallow food or water( I did the race on 1 bottle and no food or gels). But it is much better today and I have almost no sore throat at all. There was a flower in bloom in Georgia which I think was really bothering me.

Next race is Bromont!

Oh ya the cape is because I didn't know what else to do with a 10ft Schwalbe banner

Table Rock and Tour Of Georgia

The last couple of weeks I have been spending some more time in the mountains riding. First we went to Table Rock state park in South Carolina where we based ourselves out of. From there we were able to ride a lot of good roads with climbs up to 40min long and multiple ones throughout the day! The descents were also super fast and all the roads were nice with lots of corners.

While there we did a mtb ride in the Pisgah National forest which was fun and hard! It was basically either riding straight up or or down so we climbed for 1hr then descended for 10min and did it over again.

After Table Rock we went to Dahlonega Georgia to train there for a couple of days and also watch the Tour of Georgia as it made its way through the mtns. LOts of fun watching that and on the Brasstown Bald day we finished our training ride with climbing up to the top of Brasstown. A climb that is just over 5km long with an average grade of 15% and maximum of 25%.

Now its continue the training with more climbing for the next few weeks until the start of the Canada Cups Series on May 17th in Bromont Quebec. Looking forward to it!

FlatRock

Yesterday I raced in a Georgia State Championship held at Flatrock park in Columbus GA. The course was super fast with lots of corners and fast accelarations. I was actually pretty tired this weekend from training, so went into the race knowing it was for training and the goal was to ride hard. It ended up that I would chase Matt Hadley for the entire time and never actually catch him but we did finish 1st and 2nd with a pretty good gap over the rest of the field.

Fury Of the Yukon

Now have the website up and running for "Fury of the Yukon" a 3 day mtb stage race in the Yukon this August. Its going to be a great race with tons of singletrack and spectacular views. Still need to have some work done on the site but check it out at www.furyoftheyukon.com

Diggin ditches

Today I helped Chance with his yard. Pretty much his back lawn is so saturated with water that it's turning into a swamp. To fix this we put in 300 ft of ditch filled with 17 tons of crushed rock and slotted pipe. Of course we had to shovel all the rock into wheel barrows to move around the yard but we did rent a little excavator to do the digging, which was a huge help!

In the photos you can see the first two of seven ditches that we dug. Plus a lot of mud.

Some sights around Phoenix