What a great long weekend with the boys! Since Dot was at a sorority reunion in PA and I had to take the time off to watch the boys, we decided to go "camping". We left Wednesday to camp with our "toyhauler" at Lava Hotsprings. The boys had a great time on the water slides. The next day we set off towards Jackson and found a great spot to pull over about 20 miles from the race site. Thanks to Google Earth we scouted open camping areas as near to Teton Village as I could find. The place we ended up was exactly how it appeared on the internet. It was perfect! We had a fish laden stream, open land with noone else around. It was as close as we were going to find even if we went to a "real" campground.
BOYS IN THE MUD ON THE FALL CREEK RIVER BANK.
Thursday we dropped the trailer and went up to pre-ride. Thanks to Shandy, Kendra's daughter I left the boys with her after their "pre-ride" and Kendra and I headed off to try the course. Unfortunately, Ed had just gotten there and the course wasn't marked. I got us lost about 2/3 of the course in. Oh well it was a good little ride to loosen the legs. We spent all day Friday fishing and camping. It was just Dad and the boys and I think it will be the most memorable day with them that I will have for a long time. 
THE RACE
I wasn't feeling too bad pre-race but I new the fast guys in the group were going to show. And they didn't let me down. All the top guys showed except Darren C. They took off fast and I quickly was shunned to 4th where I stayed the rest of the race. It is a fun but challenging course with lots of single track and rocks to make it quite technical. There aren't any real sustained climbs so there is plenty of recovery time. I usually do better on the longer sustained climbs. I continued to plug along limited mainly by my lack of technical skills rather than my legs or lungs which has been my usual whining pattern. I did manage to get close to Fred Porter, but as at Solitude once he saw me sneaking up he took off and I didn't have it to catch him. I did spill on the last lap mainly because I was trying to push it on the downhills for more practice. The worst part was how dirty I got in the deep dusty powder on my sweaty body.
NOTE: This year my time was 5 minutes faster than last year's (this includes a time correction for a slight course change) when I got first. I guess I have to work harder towards the challenge.
ARANTIX TOTAL MILES 1121!
2 comments:
Sounds like you had a great time. Good to see you up there. Where did you camp?
Looking forward to Evanston.
Ahhh, the mud, and the momories! Wouldn't it be fun to enjoy those simple times again. You're a cool dad.
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