Tri Geeks and Other Stuff

First off, I've thought of a long list of reasons not to ride LoToJa next year. However, out of respect for Adam and the crew, I'll not rain on the parade. Let's just say I'm very comfortable with my decision not to ride it next year.

It's been a pretty good week. Here's some pictures.


We visited Ashley at USU. Here she is with one of her roommates, Kim. Her apartment this year is much nicer than the dorms last year.



Seems everyone I know is doing Tri's now. We checked out the start of the Ogden Valley Tri prior to our MTB ride Saturday. Here's a very happy Eric coming out of the water after the swim.

This is Eric's group starting, I think. Hard to tell. They all look the same to me. I must admit watching the race made me want to do one. It has a good vibe, similar to MTB racing 10 years ago. Tyra, Bonnie and a friend of theirs did the relay. It was great to see them there and they made it through the race pretty well. I also saw a few of the local bike guys racing, Brad Pilling and Will Purdy to mention two.

After watching the swim and some of the bike, we were off to ride Skyline trail. Doug, Tanner and I started. Unfortunately, Doug's saddle sore from LoToJa (one of the not mentioned reasons to not ride LoToJa) was too painful so he headed back after 40 minutes or so. T and I continued up to Lewis peak. It was a cool trip up and down memory lane. I was telling Tanner stories about first riding Skyline 29 years ago on a motorcycle. 9.5 miles and 3,300 of verticle later, we were on the top. Not too many trails give you an uninterupted 9.5 one track descent. If you haven't made to trip to Ogden Valley to do this ride, you should.

Here's the view of North Ogden from the top of Lewis Peak.

Friday, I sent some time at Miller Motor Sports Park watching some machine powered racing. Here's a Daytona Prototype car. These are serious racing machines. Loud and fast.

After the qualifing run, the teams completely tore the cars down. At MMSP, you can freely walk around the pits. That was the best part.

Here's Travis Pastrona's Mustang for the celebrity race. I hope the insurance was paid up. Fuzzy Hall was one of the celebrities. I've always liked Fuzzy, but they were stretching a bit for celebrities.

I registered Tanner, Dave and me for cyclocross nationals in December in Kanas City. The race is broken into 5 year age groups. The field sizes are huge and your start position is based on when you register. The registration opened at 11:00 pm Friday. I was pounding the "refresh" button to be one of the first in. I did me first, Dave second and Tanner third. It took less than two minutes to complete all three. I was the 5th on the list in my group, Dave was about 40th and Tanner was 3rd. We should all have good start positions. In about 5 minutes, some groups had more than 60 registered and by Sunday night most had more than 100. The online registration now says it's full. Amazing that many people will go to that much trouble to race for 45 minutes in the winter in KC. I can hardly wait.