Home sweet home!

Today marks me being back in Colorado Springs for a whole week, longer than I have all summer. I love travelling all over the states and checking out sweet new trails and awesome towns but nothing compares to riding on the trails you've grown up on and shredding with your buddies. This past week has been great. I've got settle down a bit and lay off the intervals. With over a month until my next big race I took a couple days off the bike for some rest, got in a few sweet rides on the new single speed and got pretty epic today. Both Kelli Emmett and my good friend Kalan Beisel are training for Leadville 100 so they're putting in some big hours. Today Danny Pate, Branden Rakita and I became victims of their ultra endurance training and set out on a ride with 6,300 feet of climbing with a max altitude of 12,300 feet. Ouch! It was a pretty sick ride with some awesome views, sweet descents and an all around good time. We climbed for about 3 and half hours to the top of Amagre which is a mountain located a bit south of Pikes Peak. We headed down a super steep, super loose, super off camber trail that was new to me! It tied into Jones Park for a grand total of 15 miles of ripping singletrack and a total ride time of over 4.5 hours. We climbed 25 miles so it would've been nice to get that in DH, but let's not get greedy. I was an idiot and brought my hardtail instead of a dully. The superfly is sweet no doubt but 5 inches of suspesion would've been sweet! We started the ride at 9 so I blame being in "zombie mode" for this lack luster descion. Here are some pics from the ride:

The crew minus Kalan Beisel (photographer)

Peaks Peak across the valley. It stands at 14,110 feet.

Looking south towards Pueblo. You could even see Pueblo Resavoir.

Colorado Springs in the distance!

Above timberline.

Awesome views the whole way down!

Talk about singletrack. It was like this for nearly 5 miles.

I'm excited for the next few weeks ahead prepping for worlds. Like I mentioned previously I'm basing out of the OTC starting Wednesday with Jack and Kerry and am excited to show them some sweet trails while getting fit. I got them some 5 inch bikes from SRAM to borrow so you can guarantee some time before worlds will be spent doing some shuttling, possibly some lift access riding and definitely getting rad!