Almost 12 Hours of Stanky-ness

Walking the kids to the

bus stop up the street

Having lunch with Eric at his school

          Last weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my family for four whole days. Better yet, there are less than two weeks remaining of my temporary assignment to Georgia. And as for the title of this post, Heather was kind enough to allow me to enter a 12 hour mountain bike race! So I arrived home late Thursday night and kissed all the kids goodnight without waking any of them. Which means that I was able to surprise them on Friday morning with pancakes, one of our favorite family traditions! Well, usually it's a weekend tradition, but I figured that with my race being in Saturday I'd better get in a slightly less healthy breakfast while I could. After seeing the kids all off to school, Heather dropped me off for a preride of Stanky Creek Bike Trail and then we met the kids for lunch at school. However, our real lunch was much more satisfying as Heather and I spent it at the Flying Saucer, a place that I'm surprised that I'm only just now finding out about!

Heather enjoying elementary school
lunch were our two Tauruses

          So I got to bed kind of early since I knew it was going to be a long race. Little did I know how long it was going to be. It rained practically all night! And no, the race wasn't cancelled. My Saturday morning it was predicted that it would rain two more times throughout the day. Not a good omen. After lugging all our gear to the starting line and with the kids looking like the world's shortest band of gypsies (except Emma, she's a stinkin' tall kid!), I began my race prep. This included preventing Eric from tearing into my Hostess Crumb Donettes, a favorite mid-race binge food that's covered in "crunchy flakes of real coconut"!

Trying to figure out why my disc rotor
no longer fits inside its brake caliper

          At 8:45 am we all started lining up and at 9:00 am we did a mass start. If I'd been paying more attention to the race start directions and spending less time using Heather's van keys to pry open my frozen front brake that Eli managed to compress during the short car ride to the trail, then I might have realized that it was a mass start and not staggered by category. So I got stuck behind some slower riders than I would have chosen, but quickly fought my way into the front ten or so. That wound up being the prudent choice because when I did manage to break free it only resulted in my crashing hard about five times in the first two laps. Only eight more to go... Fortunately, my various lumps and bruises enlightened me to the fact that a trail that's been rained on all night might not be the best place to go all out. By lap four the trail was getting pretty dry though and I decided to starting ratcheting things back up.

Last minute hydration
before the start of the race

You should have seen the
other guy...

          Key the first scheduled rain of the day (yeah, that one that the cursed weatherman had mentioned earlier).  Also, key my sixth crash of the day. Good thing I didn't decide to make the jump to a carbon fiber frame this year. This time it only took me one crash to realize that slow is smooth and smooth is fast, as least when racing in the mud. I continued to drive on and by the end of lap seven I caught the race leader. This gave me  the impetus to shorten my pit stop and we continued to jockey back and forth for the rest of the race. Fortunately for everyone the race was ended at nine hours rather than the prescribed 12 due to the horrible weather. The second "light rain" that we were supposed to get had turned into an Ark-worthy event and no rainbow was in sight. If it was out there somewhere then the falling darkness quickly extinguished it. Fortunately more me, the ever depending mud starting clogging up everyone's drive trains and I was able to scoop up a last minute win, literally in the last 100 yards of what became a grueling 105 mile controlled (and often uncontrolled) slide through slimy Memphis mud.

Emma, Erin, Eric, and Eli enjoying
the awesome Fall weather. So much
better than the hot Memphis summer!

          My fantastic pit crew met me at the finish line and we got everything as clean as possible so we could evacuate the misery of the mud as soon as the awards ceremony ended. Fortunately for me, the fantastic crew at Stanky Creek Cycling had a garden hose to clean my gear off, canopies to shelter under, and some awesome BBQ chicken sandwiches to chow down on. No sooner had the last award been handed out than the rain started coming down for a third time. So thanks to my awesome wife Heather for her support and to the Stanky Creek crew for putting on a great race and knowing when to shorten it a little.

Georgia, Nashville, Georgia, Memphis, Georgia...

Leading the charge up Texaco Hill
during the 2012 Dirty Kanza 200 gravel
road race in Emporia, KS (on the left)

My first encounter with a

timber rattler, glad I got the

drop and struck first

Recently I've been bouncing back and forth between Georgia and Memphis as I go through yet another school and also try to get time with family on the weekends. I've still managed to enter some races though and the trails out here in Georgia and just across the border into South Carolina are awesome. So far I've managed to enter three Category 1 mountain bike races. The Legend of Stanky Creek in Memphis, the Georgia State Championship Series in Helen, GA, and the Sizzler in Greensboro, NC. Including the Dirty Kanza 200 gravel grinder and two marathon XC races in Kansas earlier this year my racing season has been all over the map!

Getting schooled in the fine art of
running by Eric, looks like his
running form is shaping up nicely

Most of my training rides have been in the awesome Fork Area Trail System (FATS) just across the Savanna river into South Carolina. It features six sweet professionally built trails that span over 25 miles and flow like no other. There's also some great riding up at Modoc (aka Stevens Creek) and Wine-Turkey Creek, but I can honestly tell you that I'm anxious to get home to Memphis and start pushing down the Strava times on my local trails there. Next up I'm planning on doing my first ever 12 hour XC mountain bike race, hopefully on a new Salsa Spearfish. That should dampen the grueling mileage a little...I hope. It'll be back home at Stanky Creek, which should be good since I achieved my highest Cat 1 finish there to date.

Getting ready to ride with Heather

on the Wolf River blue trail

Also, there's a BMX course near us in Memphis and, as you can see, Eric is getting into the swing of things. Hopefully he'll be up for some BMX training when I get home so we can hit the races on Saturday at Shelby Farms! Heather's also getting in some riding and we recently took on the blue trail (aka WRT North) at the Wolf River Trail system just east of Memphis at Shelby Farms. Now we need to get the girls out there on their bikes and this might just turn into a family affair yet!

Mountain bike season is here!

Emma, Erin, Eric and Eli getting ready for their first taste of a

Smithsonian Institute at the Museum of National History

 I haven't been much for posting recently, but since my last update I managed to qualify for Boston and finish second in my first mountain bike race of the year. At the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach I posted a 3:06:43 marathon time with a 7:08 pace. Things were going really well up until about 18 miles when I started to fade a bit. They kept talking about the tailwind on the return loop, but the trees and buildings put a stop to that ever materializing! The next day we were able to have a fantastic time in downtown Washington D.C. and although we tried to do it all, there is still a lot left to do for follow on trips to the capital!

Minutes after finishing up

my first official marathon,

felt good to be done and

was over much quicker than

your standard ultra!

Next, I was able to scoop up a 2nd place finish at the Wilson Lake Fat Tire Festival in the Marathon category. After five laps and and well over three hours of cranking through the red rock and sand I missed first place by under a minute! That's alright, it was a good start to my mountain bike racing season and next up is Dirty Little Secret at Fancy Creek. Congratulations to the guys at Big Poppi Bicycle Company for winning their bid to host the state championship this year! I hope that I'm successful in defending my title this year in the twisty switchback cedar forests and many rock gardens.

Because I just can't back down!

The race started at 8am

with a bit of a breeze

and temps below zero

So this past weekend I completed my second running of the annual Psycho Wycho 50km trail run. About two months ago I felt really good about this race (perhaps I said some things to some friends about taking a top three spot). Unfortunately for me, immediately after returning from Christmas break, and a nice bit of daily running I might add, my right knee decided to start having IT band issues.

No time to slow down
for a gear change!

About one month ago I bailed out of a long run (hobbling back to the car the remaining several miles) and for the past three weeks I haven't run a single step. Nope, zilch, nada. Unless of course you count the daily cycling and elliptical workouts, which I like to call "cross-training". Of course, the best was to train for a big trail race is, you guessed it, run trails!

Fast forward to Saturday the 11th of February. Loaded up with gels, electrolyte tablets, and lots of of pain killers, I embarked on a 4 hour, 51 minute, and 9 second journey around Wyandotte County Lake, all so that I could relive the joy of climbing over 6,000 feet in less than five hours and reclaim my entry fee. Yes, I did beat my time from last year by over eight minutes, but now I'm paying the price and stairs are my enemy!

Sunday I sat on a four-legged stool at the counter and did homework, though I think the lack of movement may not have helped my cause. Monday I rode my bike to school, albeit not without some aspirin and no extra miles. And now it's Tuesday. My major accomplishment has been going up and down stairs without crying like a little girl, though I must confess that I've avoided them at every opportunity (even parking my bike at the front door to my academic building so that I could walk straight onto the main level). My legs still resemble large summer sausages, although the initial swelling has gone down and I can don my favorite pair of jeans again. Hooray for small victories!

So, if you're interested in seeing what a few hundred crazy people were doing this past Saturday morning in negative starting temperatures, then head on over to Bad Ben's Trail Running site or go straight to the fantastic photos that Dick Ross and his team were kind enough to share. And a special thanks for my family to enduring it all!

Eggar Kids Growth Update

So we did the kids' heights and weights today. Here's where they're all at:

     

    Emma: 4ft 6 inches at 63 lbs        Erin: 4 ft 2 inches at 54 lbs

    
     Eric: 3 ft 9 inches at 51.5 lbs      Eli: 2 ft 9 inches at 26 lbs

So Emma appears to have some lead in her bones and Eric the "superchunk" is rapidly closing the weight gap with Erin. Eli's eating everything in sight (I can't even grab a snack from behind the squeaky pantry door without him being alerted), so he'll probably start gaining on the girls in the next couple years as well!