After a fun and successful stay in Canada Subaru-Trek made the voyage down to Vermont where we were posting up for a few days between the MSA World Cup and Windham World Cup. Schultz and I opted to ride in with Matt and Shep in the truck and trailer! It was fun being truckers for a day. Ha! Once in the land of Maple we were told we had a surprise waiting for us the next day! I love surprises and even with some hints had no clue what we had to look forward to. After driving for an hour the next morning we pulled into the Team O'Neil Rally School. I was so stoked! We spent a couple hours there taking a tour, 4 wheeling, getting to ride along with some students and at the end of the day we got to ride in a totally tricked out Subaru WRX with Travis Hanson, one of the top 3 rally racers in the country right now. The experience was incredible and we were moving mach 2 on tree filled country roads. Thanks for the surprise!
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So fun!
While in Vermont we stayed in a town called East Burke, home of the infamous Kingdom Trails. The trail system has 100+ miles of fast, flowy East Coast riding with some bridges, jumps and roots thrown in for good measures. They were a blast and a great way to get some good training in before Windham. We headed to Windham Wednesday and I went for nice spin on some roads there. I scoped out a pretty cool looking cliff jumping spot I thought would be cool to checkout. I returned with Sam and some of the BMC crew the next day. We all got in a few jumps before the New York PD came and busted us. I guess we should've known it wasn't a legal spot to jump due to all the no parking signs and no trespassing signs. Luckily we walked away without any tickets or anything.
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Later that night we caught the tail end of a tricyle race!
The next few days were pretty low key, just hanging out and keeping the legs up. The course was awesome and I was excited for the long climb. World Cups these days are normally short climbs. After my 8th place ride in MSA, I had a pretty nice start number, 20th, which reflected my new ranking in the World Cup overall ranking. In the race I didn't have great legs and quickly found myself off the back climbing and my descending, well it was even worse. It's frustrating that while two races are only a week apart, my performances can be drastically different. I guess that's racing, but in Sun Valley this coming weekend I'm ready to bring my A game 110% of the way and earn a jersey.
Getting my suffer on at Windham. Photo courtesy: Dave McElwaine
After my race I watched the women's race. Both Emily and Heather put together great races. I also watched the first few laps of the mens race. Sam decided he wanted to start 45 seconds down in the start (just kidding, some Euro chump crashed him). Despite being DFL going into the first lap he still rode to a solid 45th place. Jeremy also crushed it. After a bit of spectating Jack, Kerry and I headed out to do some cliff jumping at a location 30 minutes away I'd found on Google. We got there, scoped it and hit it. It was a sweet 40+ footer into a pool. There were a few different ways to jump all with varying heights. One way was to climb this tree above the cliff, then jump. An easy 70 feet. I opted out on that! it was really sweet and a great way to cap off my time on the East Coast.
That's me, flying!
Hanging with Jack and Kerry. Both are great friends and fun to hang with.
Next up is the US National Championships in Sun Valley, ID then Pro XCT finals in the so called "center of the universe" according to Sam, or just Missoula.
I spent my forth of July in Vermont. Without any fireworks and a need for explosion, here's what we came up with!
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