So before talking about my first race, I'm going to try and recap, hopefully in some semblance of chronological order:

• Super Week was super... but not as super as I thought it was going to be.  I did take my Spider completely apart, and rode my roadie a lot, but not nearly as much as I said I was going to.  I suppose laziness and poor weather got the best of me.  I will say, though, that my Super Week was supplemented/enhanced by a Super Training Weekend with Zach.  We did 4hrs on the road Sat 3/8, followed by a meal and an hour of Super Training X, then I rode for about an hour on a trainer instead of doing a mtb ride because it was really, really, really, REALLY windy out.  The next day was a 5 hr mountain bike ride.  It was good
  
  


• Zach's camp was awesome, even though JB didn't show up.  We had Rob Lichtenwalner instead, which was equally as cool.  And we did a nice long mountain bike ride that rode most of the kids into the ground.  The last day of the camp was a race in Michaux which Zach organized.  We had a good turn out.  After riding the 6 miles from the site of the camp to the site of the race (with the youngest among us pulling the line the entire time).  I managed 7th in the race, which was the first spot behind the pro's/eilte's/expert racers... right where I should be.  Then a few intrepid survivors joined me for a 10 mile mtb ride back to the camp.


• This week of a lot of riding was followed by a week of not riding due to my school schedule... damn it all...


• I have been riding 3-4 days a week since then... as much as school will allow unfortunately.  That is about to increase very soon.


• A few weekends ago my bike went from looking like this:

             To looking like this (you may call it the new sexiness):







             Note the new (super light) FSA K-Force Light 2x9 crankset!!!

• I got sponsored by Crank Brothers last week!!!!!!!!  This is super exciting as I have been eyeing a pair of those Ti Candy's for a while now... I just need the form.  I would like to thank the fine people at Crank Brothers for sponsoring me this year.

And now on to the racing... The name of the event was the 2008 US Open Mountain Bike Relay.  It serves as the opening of the Mid Atlantic Super Series, awards extra points in the XC category, but is basically a big party for the racers to get together, get reacquainted, and ride some laps of a fun course with their buds.  Some even invented crazy costumes.  I joined up with the Nudy's (a few Bean's Racers and their father) to form team 3 Fresh Beans and 1 Old Fart.  The race starts Le Mans style, with a short run to your bikes.  DJ took out the first lap for us.  The second lap was handled by Mr. Nudy, and the third lap by myself.  I felt good for my first lap and turned out a time of 17:29  and averaged somewhere just above 10mph.  I handed it off to Matt for the 4th lap.  The rest of the 4 hr race continued much like this.  My second lap was 17:24 and my 3rd was 17:27.  These were the fastest lap times for our team.  DJ ended up barely getting in for a 4th lap  and we finished somewhere in the 30-somethings (there is a handicap for this race based on your category... Elite racers get 0 points to start and Junior beginners get a lot).  It doesn't really matter though, we had fun and that's what counts.  I'll put up some pics from the weekend on the pics page after this.  The bike worked great.  The ergon's worked great, everything just worked great.



Anyways, next weekend is a more real start of the season with the Fair Hill XC race.  I'm going to kill it.  I am hungry.  I want wins.



Peace until then,

Jake