Do'in work...

Literally... In a couple of different ways.

First. My job. My plan this week was to head to Solvang to get in some riding with Lucho, but work prevails. A major datacenter outage last week has spawned a week of intense meetings dealing with things like RFO (reason for outage) and RCA (root cause ananlysis). Thankfully this major F-up was nothing of my doing but my boss wants me to be the one to make sure it doesn't happen again... so I had to cancel my plans to travel and train with the big boys. It sucks but I can't complain. The flexibility of my job 90% of the time makes situations like this one very easy to deal with... so I will just be training at home the week. No worries.

Second. The trainer. As I enter my build phase my workouts on the trainer are getting significantly harder. I can definitely tell that I am considerably stronger on the bike now than when I started this training plan back at the beginning of January. I have never done this kind of specific training on the bike. I started with a bunch of skill/technique work and right now I am grinding some hard, brain-hurting intervals. The "work" (kJ) has doubled for the same amount of time spent on the bike. I am never so glad to get off the bike when these sessions end.

One of the latest torture sessions:


This past weekend was good one. Saturday was solid:
swim: 45 min - 2500 yards
MTB: 3:40 - 38 miles, 4600 ft of climbing, 4 x Black Mountain (2 seated/2 standing)
run: transition run, 30 min/4+ miles

Sunday I raced in my first XC mountain bike race of the season (I am not really considering Vision Quest a "race"). They have recently started a weekly mountain bike race series called Racers and Chasers out at Vail Lake in Temecula. It's pretty low key but they race on a lot of the same trails that are used in the Xterra West Champs so the more I can get out there and race the better. The course we raced on Sunday incorporated two key sections of the Xterra course. The race was three 6+ mile laps. So including the pre-ride I got to ride these sections 4 times. This is going to be huge come race day.

I met my homeboys Luke and Eric at Vail lake around 11am for pre-riding. Eric was racing but Luke decided it was better not to race and just ride long. We did one loop of the Xterra course and then one lap of the race course. Good times.

the boys chillaxing.


By the time the race started at 2pm I was pretty tired and it was hot (85F). The turnout was small because of some other MTB races going on down here in socal. There ended up only 3 of us in Expert but I knew we would push each other... and we did. It was a mass start with all divisions heading out at the same time. I by no means got the haul shot. I think I was around 5th or 6th going into the first short, steep climb.

My goal was take it easy on the first lap and keep the other guys in sight and then make a move on the second lap and try to hold on. That's what I did and it worked. At the end of the second lap I was on the leaders wheel and just went for it.

I got gap and just kept pushing up the climbs and ended continuing to pull away for the rest of the lap. I just continued to push the pace on the final lap and felt good. I took the victory but more importantly I felt great.





Props again to Beth. She killed it as the support crew again! She even handed me bottles between laps and took some rad photos. I owe her... again. It's a good thing she can be paid back with large quantities of Golden Spoon.

$3.15 = cheap date


showing the support crew some love.


final descent.


that's it. back to the grind. thanks go out to Luke for taking some killer race photos of me.