UT MTB Race Weekend

"Someone may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it."
-Steve Prefontaine

This last weekend, Texas Cycling was out near Comfort, Texas, for a great weekend of camping, mountain bike racing, and road riding. Some of the guys went out just to ride around the Texas hill country, but I was there to race mountain bike. I had never raced a lot of mountain bike, so this was my first real, full mountain bike race. For some reason, I wanted to win more than usual. At races, I always get a burning desire to completely demolish the field of riders that I am racing with. Now I really wanted to win!

This weekend there were three races, TimeTrial, Short Track XC, and XC. The first race was the time trial, which was a four mile loop around a mountain that you do by yourself. My goal was to catch at least two people in front of me. The officials let people go every 30 seconds, so that means that I would catch my 30 second man and my minute man. Ordinarily, I am pretty bad at time trialing. I worked pretty hard over the summer to try to get better at it (on road) so I was hoping that things would go pretty well. I knew that my weakness was going to be technical sections, because I am not as comfortable on a mountain bike as most of my competition. But, I had better lungs and stamina, so my plan was to go as fast as possible on the straight parts to make up for my lack of technical skill. It worked. I got first in the time trial by about 20 seconds! It was also some of the hardest riding I have ever done on a mountain bike. i was about ready to quit halfway through, but knew that I had to keep going. Andrew, a guy from Baylor got second, and I immediately knew that he would be my main competition for the weekend.

The second race was Saturday afternoon. After lounging and eating under the live oaks scattered around the ranch that we were racing at, I had to get back on the bike. To say that I didn't want to race this afternoon would have been an understatement. But I was in first place for the overall competition, so I had to defend my title. The short track cross counntry (STXC) is a race that involves a very small loop that you go around many many times. It hurts. Bad. It was so cool to be the leader in points because I got to line up at the front and no one said anything. From the time the official blew the whistle until the end of the race, my legs were on fire. I started reasonably near the front, about five guys back. Andrew was second. I knew that at some point he would pass the weaker rider in front of him and then he would be gone. I had to stay on his wheel for that. Sure enough, about halfway into the race he 'got on his horse' and sprinted into the lead. I quickly passed four guys at once and got right on his tail. None of the other riders could match his pace. I barely hung on. Going around turns, I took any chance I could get to let my redlining heart rest. At three laps to go, we were well out in front of the rest of the riders. My heart had stopped beating so hard at this point so my plan was to stick to his wheel like gorilla glue until the final straight-a-way, and then outs-print him for the win. Luck would have it another way. On the next lap I heard a pssssssh come from my back tire and my back tire started to fishtail as it complete went flat. Crap. There was no chance to change it and get back in the race because there was only two laps to go. I was really mad. I tried not to take it out on my bike too much, but, well lets just say I wasn't happy. I walked back to the finish just in time to see Baylor's Andrew cross the finish in first. I got a DNF. So much for defending my lead. Later Cameron found a huge piece of bailing wire sticking out of my tire.

The Race Killer. I kept it as a souvenir.

The third race was on Sunday and was a cross country race, which is just a regular race. Nothing fancy. My plan was to stick to Andrew's wheel and not let him out of my sight. This worked for most of the race. I had him on the first section because it was flat. We dropped almost everybody except for an A&M rider that was stuck on my wheel. Then the three of us started to climb. Andrew said to me, "Feel free to go around me because I'm going to take it easy here." I said okay, but stayed behind him. I didn't want to over-exert myself on the climb. He went pretty slow. I was not breathing that hard and the Aggie was still there. I kept almost going around him, but every time I just said to myself, "stick to the plan!" So I just stuck to his wheel. After climbing we had a long section of very technical rock, which the hill country is so well known for. It was tough. Soon we dropped the Aggie and then Andrew started to inch away from me. I fought as hard as I could to stick to him, but I just wasn't as good at picking a smooth line. By the next climbing section, he was probably 200 yards in front of me. This climbing section was long and painful, with lots of switchbacks. I gained a little time on him, and every time we would go around a switchback, we would stare each other down, looking for signs of weakness. I tried my best to look in good form, but definitely was not. He was doing his best to keep the distance between us. Then we went back downhill. I could barely keep my arms straight and was having a tough time on the downhill. At one point I took stupid falls twice in a row, I screamed at myself to concentrate and things were better after that. I don't have a lot of downhill mountain skill, but I pretty much just careen down the mountain with disregard for my body. I was trying to win a race here! When we came out of the downhill, I had almost caught up with him! I pushed my legs as hard as they could go. I was gaining time on him, but he looked behind and saw me coming up on him and wisely floored it so that I couldn't catch up. I ended around 20 seconds behind him. The Aggie came in 4 minutes later. We had pushed each other to the limits of our abilities and even though I lost, I still had a lot of fun. I congratulated Andrew and he said he really enjoyed the race and that he wasn't planning on going that hard.

I ended up third overall for the weekend, with the aggie coming in second and Andrew from Baylor in first. The conference championships are next weekend, so I'm ready to kick up some more dust.

Halo Training

It has been raining in Austin for around the last week on and off. This makes it extremely hard to ride. On one hand, it is not raining when I can't ride, which makes me want to ride. But then, when I can it is always raining! So lately, I have resorted to riding my trainer, which is never that fun. But Nick came up with an amazing idea the other night: halo training. This is where I ride my trainer and play Halo at the same time. It is absolutely the most fun, ever. A great study break for sure. I have depicted below what I think this looks like. Master Chief shooting up the bad guys on a bike. The bike happens to be one that was designed by Thomas Edison.

I found that positioning my body to use a controller and ride at the same time can be quite difficult. I either put my forearms down on the handlebars, or just sit up and spin with no hands. I also have to be careful not to sweat on the controllers! I have also found that when there are lots of bad dudes to kill, I find my legs stop as I concentrate on the game. I'll have to work to keep my legs moving!

Forgive my poor Photoshop skills, I'm an engineer, not a graphic designer.

New Pedals

At one of my last races, my foot kept coming out of my pedal when I would pedal hard. That's a great way to crash! So it was time to get some new ones.

The ones I decided on were the Keo Sports. I like them a lot! At first they were a little hard to get into because I had to get used to turning them over the right way to push my cleat into the pedal, but I have it down now. That's really good because while I was learning, I would almost fall at every stop light. I probably looked like I had started cycling last week!

This next weekend I will be racing my first mountain bike race of the season! UT is hosting the race and we are camping out! I haven't camped since my trip back to Texas with Ally so I am pretty excited. I will be mountain biking a lot this next week in order to prepare for the race. Hopefully everything will go well!!

Also, I pretty sure I'm going to take the GRE so I can be prepared to possibly go to graduate school as a fall-back plan if I don't get a job out of school. The future is unpredictable at this point, but actually I am not worried! I am enjoying the uncertainty! I don't think I have ever been uncertain of my future (2-3 years out anyways) so it is a new experience.

Table to Bike Rack FTW

Safety First.

A couple days ago, I went to my friends Kyle and Joseph's house for a cycling officer's meeting. Upon entering their abode, I was stunned by their glorious bike rack that bookended their big-screen tv in their living room. I was taken aback, and inspired. When I got home, I was determined to build a bike rack similar to theirs, to solve the problem of my bikes being sprawled haphazardly around my garage. Ryan, one of my roomates, helped.

We started by going to Walmart and buying heavy-duty hooks to hang the bike from the wall. We soon discovered that it is almost impossible to find the studs in our house. After using a razor and banging on the wall for half an hour, we finally just started nailing nails into the wall hoping to find the stud. This was a disaster.

We also reasoned that the bikes would be too far apart if we were confined to placing one at each stud. Therefore, we concluded that we needed to nail a piece of wood on the wall, from which we could hang the hooks, and respectively, the bikes. We did not have the foresight to buy a 2by4 at Wally World, so we decided to use wood that we could find around our house. Ryan suggested a fence post that had fallen off our fence last week. Too thin. Then we decided that the best piece of wood was a leave from a table that we had found near the honors quad freshman year. We unscrewed the leave from the main part of the table and soon had it nailed up on the wall. It worked perfectly! The bikes were up and hanging neatly from the wall within two hours. Win, Upson House. Best thing about it, we covered up all the nail holes.

hybrid, commuter, race, and mountain (L to R)

We Will Never Forget

I still remember in 2001, I was getting out of the shower to go to school when my dad told me that the WTC had been attacked. My friend Collin Huber wrote an excellent blog about September 11, 2001, that was really neat to read. It can be found here.

Second Week of September

This last week was a whirlwind of acitvity! I had my first test, and also tons of things to do with the cycling team and Hill Country UT. These two things have kept me very busy. I am happy to be busy because cycling, being around cool people, and Jesus are all things that I enjoy thoroughly. School is always present, and seems like this semester will be a steady deluge of homework, but not so much as to be overwhelming. I have had some time to just relax at the newly renovated Zilker Park, which is a convenient five minute walk from my house.

Zilker: The grass seems more like a golf course than soccer fields.

The last five days, it has rained. This means that I have not been biking. I've also gained five pounds, which I think is quite funny, because that's a pound a day. I hope this relationship of raining to weight gain does not stay linear, because it's supposed to rain for another week! haha.


I wrote a blog recently about the first week of school for my church, which can be found here.

Now, I must plug SWEATIN BURNT ORANGE!! This is a bike tour that UT cycling puts on every year. We have beer and food and we ride our bikes around the beautiful Texas hill country. So like the three people that read my blog should sign up. More info can be found here.

Tour of Austin Day Two

My tour of Austin Day Two was actually the third day of the tour. It was also very stressful.

The course was pretty dicey to begin with. There was a huge corner that had a 130 degree turn and lots of bumps and pot holes. I felt excited and anxoius at the start of the race. I was also happy that my parents and my dog shadow came down from Dallas to watch. In the starting laps I was cornering strong and really happy to be out racing.

There was one section that narrowed extremely fast. On the first lap, people were crowding in around and bumping shoulders because the course went from 20 riders to 10 riders wide. On the second lap, I suppose there was just not enough room for everybody, and I heard a loud "WHOA!" and people started going down around me. By a stroke of luck, I did not go down. Unfortunately, Jacob, one of my teammates and fellow bloggers, went down in the crash.

He ended up being hurt pretty bad. Right at the crash, there were some dumpsters sitting next to the course. Jacob tried to move the dumpsters out of the way with his head. As I watched him, I couldn't help but be frightened for him and started praying that God would protect him and help the medics do a good job. The medics did a great job of stabilizing his head and asking him questions about where he was. Class act. Jacob was responsive to questions that were asked of him. They quickly took him to the hospital to get a CT scan. As he was put in the ambulance, he gave us a horns up!

We lined up to start racing again, and everyone was really supportive of our team and was really nice. I am always amazed at how supportive all the racers are. We really take care of our own. I was really worried about Jacob, and got really jittery, going around the sharp corners slower with less confidence. I was soon dropped. I just didn't feel like racing after that hard crash.

Jacob ended up being fine. I went to go visit him at the hospital about two hours after the crash, and he was already discharged. I was very thankful! Overall, the Tour of Austin, as Joey put it, was the Tour of Suck. Now it is on to mountain bike racing for the rest of the fall and looking toward road racing in January.

After the race, my mom, dad, and I went to Wich Wich to grab a sandwich and talk about life. It was good to catch up with them, as I did not spend many days in Garland after I came back from Alaska.

The rest of the week will be spent riding mountain bike and swimming at Gregory Gym. Oh yeah, and school.....

Tour of Austin Day One

I was really excited about the Tour of Austin. It is a three day stage race around Austin that tons of people go to.

It was one of the most dicey races I have ever been in. Right before we started, it started to rain. It was just a slight drizzle, just enough to wet the road down. Even though it was barely raining everyone was really freaked and riding really sketchy. Of course, just about 5 minutes into the race, there was a crash. I was riding well when I heard "CRASH!" and people started falling over in front of me. I was able to avoid the crash to the left but almost fell when I hit my right hand on the butt in front of me.

The next 30 miles were pretty uneventful. It stopped raining on the back of the course, but people were still very shaken up by the crash. I was jittery. I hadn't raced in months and then there was a crash in the first five minutes that shattered my nerves. No one was attacking off the front. This turned out to be very boring. A lot of people in the peloton were joking about how boring the race was. I was happy to just sit in!

Five minutes from the finish, there was another crash! But I was in this one. I was right behind the guy that crashed, and there was no way to get out of the way. I had the surreal feeling that you get right before you go down when you tell yourself, "okay im going to crash, this might hurt a bit...." Luckily, I was fine and ended up with just a few scratches and bruises. The guy that ended up on the pavement next to me was sitting there and yelling. His middle finger was bent 90 degrees in the wrong direction. As I sat and watched him, he bent his finger back in place. I was appalled. I couldn't believe that this dude had just bent his finger back in place! I'm pretty sure I would have laid down in the road and cried until the med crew came and picked me up. We ended up finishing the race together. I got 25th out of 60 or so. I race again on Monday, and I hope to do well!