Thanks Junebug. I will be sure to give a report.
Well today is the day we head out. We need to be at the race start the night before. I guess they want to get certain things out of the way.. so that in the morning we can just race. It is a fairly early start. 7:00 am or so.
Some of the reason for the secret course.. is that some of it is on private property and we just have permission for that day. It is going to be tough knowing how to pace myself on this though. Conditions can vary so much here.
Last winter I had planned to do these 3 races, and then maybe others, as they came up. With my bought of over training, nothing else fit in. There may be some shorter local mountain bike races this fall I might do, but we will have to wait and see on that.
This next race will hopefully tell me how I like endurance racing. I did just learn that this race is part of a series. One of several in the Northeast. It might be nice to do more of those. I already know of many things I will improve for next year. Training wise.. of course trying to avoid the over training, I also need to work a lot harder on my core. More upper body strength would be nice also. I need to do more mountain biking in general, and less on the road, [Not that road biking doesn't help immensely] I need more mountain biking at speed, and there are skills I could improve on.
Time has sort of gotten away from me. I had planned to experiment more with food. For one thing I have a recipe for a homemade "gu" that I want to try... but it is too late now. I was going to try different seats, I need new shoes... things like that, but now is not the time to change any of that. I had hoped to be fitter than I am, but I will just do what I can from where I am, and will hopefully build off of this season for a better year next year.
It has been tough this week, semi taking it easy. [That has been my hardest thing in general taking it easy when I should.] We did our beginner mountain bike here from the house on Monday. Tuesday was a road ride, that we lead. I had ended up taking too much time off the previous weekend, so I felt the need for one more semi hard ride. There were no real fast people this night.. so I went to the front..and road steady.. starting easy and slowly building my speed. I stayed at the front the whole night.. and put in a steady effort without going too deep. Wednesday night was a group mountain bike ride. I took it fairly easy on that. Right now on Thursday there is a group that is putting on a trail running series, and they like having some mountain bikers on hand to "run" sweep. It is only a 5 k... and at the tail end, they are pretty slow. So it is a nice "forced" easy night.
It is also a great skill builder riding this technical trail, at such a slow speed. Friday and today we will be off the bikes entirely. This has left me wanting to crank my a$$ off...
My next challenge will be to not start the race too fast.
