How is my racing going?
Weekend Warrior. That word popped up in a thread on Ridemonkey and I pointed out that we are all weekend warriors. We all make our money somewhere else. We might be students, engineers, bums, or construction workers. It doesn’t really matter. However, we still race and that makes us all racers. I race because I’m competitive and I like to make myself better against a lot of odds. Mostly its odds I put on myself. I always learn stuff in defeat and victory. However victory has come easy or at all this year. However I didn have one of my great accomplishments a couple of weekends ago. I got 4th at Snowshow in the Elite (pro) class. That class is always stacked with US world championship team selections, ex-national champions, fast locals, and up and coming juniors. My best finish to date was a 7th back in 2006. And let me tell you the difference between 7th and 4th is huge. I took a different approach to this particular race run. Since Snowshoe’s track are always long by DH standards I figured I should pace myself instead of just going 100% from the beginning. I accelerated to the end and finished up the most technical section of the track with just the right amount of energy to still be riding in front of the bike instead of hanging on and riding behind the bike. It made the difference. I finished within 8 seconds of Chris Herndon. Which is a tremendous accomplishment on a Snowshoe track. I usually finish 20-30 seconds behind him. I know he hasn’t trained as hard this year and he has been fighting a bad knee injury, but I take it. He is the standard against which a lot of folks in the South are judged by.
I finished up a 3 week race back to backer with a 3rd at Beech. I was only 0.003 seconds out of 2nd against Ethan, who is an ex-Junior National Champion. I’ll take it at 15 years his senior.