Fork in the Road - Eastfork MTB over Tour De Grandview - Ohio State Road Race Championships

I decided for the second year in a row to go mountain bike racing instead of racing the Tour De Grandview. I could have raced the Masters 3/4/5 race which would have ended up being a CAT 3 / strong CAT 4 race or I could have done the CAT 4/5 Race. Naaaaaa. I am going to hit the dirt with Tim S. I am glad he's going to race with me. I think he'll do great and finish high. He's pretty fit and I hope he can crush some of the competition. My goal is to beat my 5th place from last year. It's not my home court so to speak and I battled last year, getting to know the trail during the race. I will run lower pressure in the tires compared to what I usally run, with all the rain, it will be sticky and require some serious confidence in the bike to win I think.

I finally put a new 2.0 Specialized S-Works-Fast Trak LK Tire on the back of my bike today. The old tire, has seen three Iceman's, two hundred mile Lumberjack races, a dozen local mountain bike races, a Mohican 100k and a few other thousand miles. They are and have been beastly tires. Unfortunatly, they will soon go away with the onset of a new team sponsor - Kenda Tires. I have some Small Block 8 Mountain bike and Cyclocross tires on the way. I also will be training on Kenda Road tires. They don't manufacture a tubie cross tire or a tubie road tire - yet so that eliminates them from being raced on with my carbon cross wheels or my carbon road wheels.

The state Road Race Championships were about two weeks ago. They finally posted up results. I was Top 10. I'll take that - not where I would like to have been, but it was a hard race, with a big super steep hill half-way around from the start. It certainly was a make or break for those that made the final 14 or so in the last two corners. Unfortunatly, the four that went up the road, all wrecked and left a mess on the road for the rest of the other leaders, to weave through. I had a good shot of a hole through it, but there was a train with Dick C and Shannon and Dayton guy rolling by me about 35 mph. By the time I braked, got through the wreck hole on the right side of the road and tried like hell to on the back of Shannon (DarkHorse) and the Dick C.(Abundance) train, I had sat out in the wind too long and didn't have much left to out sprint the others that had caught up to me. However, I am sitting in the top 10% of the CAT 4's in the State of Ohio. I think Dick and Shannon have enough points to CAT up, but it's not like they have been winning races all season. The three of us have been battling it out for finishes all spring and Shannon seems to be getting more of me at the finish's than Dick. They are good people and keep the racing fun. Justin from Jeni's has also had a great spring of racing.

I went out tonight and did some short sprints to just get the motor going for tomorrow. Wow, the Garmin-Powertap does look good. I hope that means good things to come. My buddy, Ben is also racing tomorrow. Hopefully, he'll do well and we can all get up on that podium.