Training Week...

  While I wasn't able to race, I was still able to ride a ton.  These are just the highlights.

Dusk training at the Whale's Tails.  Class is overrated anyways... right?

The past week was full of training of the suffering variety with UVM and 1K2GO.  The middle of the week took us to the Whales Tails in Shelburne, an iconic image of Vermont.  There, we built our own barriers out of PVC pipe and managed our own course to work on CX skills like sprinting from a still start, cornering, dismounts, remounts and eating mud.

Runups at dusk.
Not late for class yet...

As a reward for our suffering, we got extra muddy practicing our runups at the Whale's Tails themselves.  Click on the map to zoom in and see the "course."  It's the bottom right corner of the GPS map.  Before moving along to the remainder of the week, I'd like to thank Bobby Bailey for trying to make me late to class, and Jake Warshaw for helping me TT back to campus from the Whale's Tails in 10 minutes.

With snow looming over the weekend, race directors made the choice to cancel the Wicked Spooky Cyclocross Race to be held in Bennington, VT.  Of course, in Burlington, we got no snow and had sunny skys throughout the day.  The boys of UVM cycling ventured out to Catamount Family Center where we attempted to suffer and ride through the pain cave, straight on to the glory hole.

A fine looking crew of UVM CX'ers.  What's Ben looking at?

This was not an easy task, especially since three of the six riders are elite cyclocrossers, and the rest of us are well... out for a Sunday ride.  Nonetheless, we managed to verbally abuse each other just enough to motivate one another to spend a good portion of Sunday afternoon suffering.

Ghost ride the bike. "Alex, catch!  It's carbon"

More specific to the suffering, we spent a good amount of time working on barriers and riding a steep runup in the middle of the woods.  This involved riding over two logs on a decent incline.  In addition to the runnup riding, we practiced bunny hopping barriers.  Let's leave it at, I have no ups, just flips.

Overall, a great week of riding.

Arc hard, ride fast, go plaid!