Hello all! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Grant Shoemaker and am a racer on Team Mojo who has the pleasure of communicating the results of each of the races to you this year. We had a decent showing this weekend in Nathrop considering the majority of the team stayed in Denver to practice. I can pretty well tell you that all who showed up had a total blast!

The racers that showed up were myself, Phu Nguyen, Troy Cooperman, James Gillespie, Nadia Steinbrecker, Scott, Jake & Matt Branney, Matt Ripley, Tyler Linne, Crazy Mike Piwowarczyk, Tim Dufficy, Zach Saipe, and last but not least Colin Lynch. If I forgot your name here, I truly apologize, please let me know!

Jon Watt, our coach last week at the super-windy practice, showed all the Pro Men what was up and finished with a first place! The women were all grouped into one category, from beginner to pro, and our own Nadia Steinbrecker came home with a second place! My category, Old Men’s Expert, was combined with Junior Expert which made for some interesting racing. T-Coop came in second with me right behind him in third while both beaten by a Junior rider.

For those of you who didn’t make it to this weekend’s event and are planning to race 4x this year, rest assured that you will have a great time as long as you come with the right attitude! Riding bikes is fun, right?! Looking forward to seeing all of your smiling faces in our new jerseys dominating at a rival team’s home turf!

At the time of writing this email, results are not up yet, but should be available sometime soon at http://www.rpmcycling.org/race_results.html.

Well, as I`m sure almost all of you know, we had an excellent showing at the RPM/Yeti Spring Series race in Nathrop on Sunday. There were just over 120 competitors with just over 50 of them being Mojo Wheels racers! As far as I understand it, this is the most competitors in a spring series event yet.

Being that we constituted almost half of the competitors there, we somewhat dominated the races there and, by my count, had ten of our riders make the finals! If you made the finals and I don`t list your name here, I apologize and please reply to all telling us how good you are! Congratulations go out to all of the riders who showed up and competed. Just for that, consider yourself a winner! The riders who made the finals (as I remember them) are as follows:

Jr-Beginner/Sport Men’s
2. David Powell (first race!)
3. Harrison Ory
4. Matt Ripley (first final!)
Sport Women’s
1. Nadia Steinbrecker (first win!)
Expert Men’s 19-29
2. Bob Allen
Expert Men’s 30-39
1. Grant Shoemaker
3. Troy Cooperman
4. James Gillespie
Jr-Expert
2. Justin Hallenbeck

The racing action was exciting for sure! Bob was leading his entire final race, but the rider in second had a little more energy or something coming through the rollers before the finish line and passed just before the line. Bummer. In my final, Troy and I were basically neck-and-neck into the first corner where he took over the lead with me sliding in behind him. After the first turn going into the rhythm section, he uncharacteristically slipped a pedal and went down right in front of me where James Gillespie was unable to avoid him and got stacked up in the mix.

Big congratulations to Justin for killing it in the most competitive class we had a racer in! Those junior experts are our next pros!

On a side note, Lisa wanted me to tell everyone that with my seeding time yesterday, I set the course record, beating all the pros in the process! I really wish it were true, but I`m positive that somehow the timing was messed up for my seeding run. But I`ll take it - the track record and lane choice all the way through definitely helped!