Kwik Trip

I had a fast-paced weekend. I left on Saturday morning for the Cities (leaving Heather all alone with 3 dogs...we were dog-sitting Sampson for the Leedahl's while they were in Missoula for Scotty's wedding). I hung out with Foxy for a bit, and we killed a chicken six-pack at Taco John's. It was good to see him...it had been far too long. I then proceeded to go to Aunt Alane and Uncle Dick's...had to drop off her Team Brown Bear wind jacket! After a fun visit with them, I went over to Brandon and Gillian's house to catch up with them and spend the night. Extra cheese pizza, indeed! In the morning we went to a diner for some good breakfast, but I was running a little late leaving for Eau Claire for the WORS race. I rolled onto the race site just after 1pm...my race was starting at 1:30 and they close registration 1/2 hour before race start. After some pleading with officials, they let me race. I had just enough time to change, pin my numbers on, and head to the start line before the Elite's started. Close call.

We had to do 3 laps on a 8 mile course. It was a fast course, no real climbs to speak of, just lots of sandy doubletrack mixed with fun singletrack. I had a great start, avoided a crash at the beginning that caused a split in the group, then hammered to catch onto the back of the leading group of around 10 riders. Once we entered the first set singletrack, I got caught behind some slower riders and lost contact with the leading group. I settled into a good pace for the 1st and 2nd laps...had some chain skipping issues in the 2nd lap (I think I bent my rear derailleur or hanger with all that chainsuck in the last race) that miraculously disappeared after a creek crossing. The legs felt very strong for the last lap and I was picking off riders until a big group of us got caught behind 1 slow rider in the singletrack for the last few miles. I ended up getting 5th in my age group...my best ever WORS result. I was only 25 seconds behind 4th (medal) and 2 min behind 3rd (podium). I feel encouraged with how good the legs felt.

Heather thinks that I have too many Flites. I think that one can never have too many of a classic saddle that is being fazed out of the Sella Italia lineup. Here is my current collection, not including the yellow all-Kevlar one on the Trek 970:

In other news, today was my first day at my new job. That's right. I moved from the Ascend dept to the E-Trek dept. I will be in charge of loading bike images onto Dexter (dealer ordering website), maintaining data on a geographic program that we have, and other such computer geek functions. The good news is that means no more customer service calls and no more on-call. Yippee.

I hope everyone has a good 4th of July.