Garden Leave

I guess you could say I finally hit a wall. After CX Worlds I was on a high. With so much time between the USGP finals in Bend and Nationals, and then even more time between Nationals and Worlds, I came out of the CX season mentally refreshed. Then there is always the fact that when you're winning you always feel better. So when we got back from Louisville I pretty much just started cranking out the base miles testing out power based training. That turned into power based intervals leading into the opening round of the Psycowpath MTB series at Swanson.

Then winter decided to stick around. Six days off the bike left me not even closely prepared to race the Twin Bing Classic. I still poured everything I had into the race for teammate Lucas Marshall and we were rewarded with a 'best we could have done' 2nd place finish. Then winter decided to stick around. Six more days off the bike.

Finally I said screw it and I literally went on gardening leave, building some veggie boxes in the back yard and just doing house stuff.

When is CX season again? The timing was just about perfect. Two solid weeks off the bike and the stage is now set to begin the long slow ramp up to CX season v4.0. Fourteen weeks of base, 8 weeks of specialization and boom, it's CX season.

Of course I'll still be racing here and there. There's the "must do" races, Platte River Battle Royale, Ponca's Revenge...I'll probably try and do the Big Ring Ranch Enduro as it'll fit nicely into the base mile routine. Not a lot of criteriums to hit though but whatever, I'm not really into traveling a whole hell of a lot.

I will have some exciting announcements coming up soon and I know I've said it before but I'm going to really try and make an effort to keep the blog content fresh. I've been kind of bummed on the general devolution of social media. It seems the written word is being left behind. We started with Blogs, then devolved to 140 character Tweets and now we don't even bother with words at all we just post pictures on Instagram. Then again, since a picture is worth a thousand words maybe that means we've come full circle and we're back at blogs. Hmmm, who knows, regardless, I should probably write more.

So, time to say goodbye to my single race road and mtb seasons, hello cyclocross. But then like I've always said, everything is just prep for cyclocross anyway, right?