Spanish lake

It was a stressful week as far as being the end of the semester, maggie being on call a few nights, and starting to train hard again in a final build up to nationals. My bike situation was essentially taken care of for me by Shimano and my new sponsor, Walt's bike shop. Basically all I had to do was choose a new cross frame and where I wanted my old broken frame to get repaired. I knew what I wanted in a cross frame immediately; carbon, shorter wheel base, 2 water bottle mounts, tapered head tube, preferably not BB30, and preferably internal cable routing. The final decision came down to the Trek Cronus and the Felt, with the Trek finally being an easy choice because of excellent tire clearance, positive recommendations, the internal routing, and availability. By friday afternoon, I was spinning around on the new frame with my mechanical shifting and an ad on StL biking for the electronic Ultegra Di2 for sale!

That being said, let me take a moment and give a plug:
I have for sale a 53cm 2011 Carbon Kona Major Jake frameset + Thompson seatpost (internal headset, option for BB adapter cusps to run conventional cranks).
Also, an Ultegra Di2 upgrade group with a brand new warrantied rear derailleur. Included are shifters, wires, battery, mounting hardware, charger, and a 34.9clamp front derailleur.

The last bubba race turned out to be a ton more fun than I had expected. Wonderful weather helped, and for some reason, even though many people dread racing at Spanish lake, the clock-wise course direction made for a really fun, mostly non-technical power course.

I went pretty hard from the gun and basically felt like I had nothing to loose in this one. Josh had already cinched the series, so I might as well forget racing smart and take a Trebon approach to just laying out some power. That worked for about 2 laps. Then my legs hurt. In the last couple of years, my lungs have always been my limiting factor and I hardly ever feel a cross race purely in my legs, but man did I hit a wall of lactic acid earlier than I expected. Josh rode up and quickly dispatched of me. I chased in vein and basically was humbled by his excellent tactics, skill on the cross course, and well-honed power/fitness. I genuinely hope that he can sustain and continue to build for the next month and go crush some souls at Master's worlds.

As for me, it looks like I have a good starting position right now at nationals. According to USA cycling, my point value predicts a top-5 finish given the current registrants, which doesn't really mean anything to me except for the fact that I'll have a good starting position, which has been my number 1 goal for this season- to go into nationals with a legit shot at doing well.

If you click this link, on the right-hand side of the page, there's a grey button called View registrants. Then go down to 1/7 saturday afternoon at 3:45pm (Master's 30-34). You can see the list and click another button called predictor to see how we rank amongst each-other for start relative start position.