re: tOfficial Cycling Thread

Time for the report from Nationals at Trestle Bike Park (Winter Park, CO).


We started out in Santa Fe and Durango for a week, which wasn't really elevation. We then went to Frisco, CO for a couple of days for the boy to hit some dirt jumps and work on backflips at Woodward Copper Mountain (successful).

We went to Winter Park on Sunday with race day being the next Saturday. The boy rode for a week, staying pretty focused on pre-riding his Enduro stages with the majority of the time, despite the fact that he had a ton of friends who were also just riding park and filming all day. I was really proud of his focus, and he was feel great and fast all week. He also opted to not ride the Dual Slalom event as he felt like the course was sketchy/dangerous, and practicing it was distracting him from his main event of Enduro.

The night before the race, he slept really poorly. Then he puked that morning when we were getting out of the car at the mountain. This has happened once before with a big race, so we just assumed it was race nerves. Unfortunately, he felt pretty poorly the entire day of the race. He's never had issues with altitude before, but I think it got him this time. He just felt like he had the flu and was sick feeling all day with no energy in his legs.

He ended up taking 9th place in the nation (we were stoked on a top 10 finish), but he's bummed as he feels like he could have podiumed if he'd been riding as fast as he was earlier in the week when he was healthy. Still, he's 14 years old racing against a lot of kids who are local Colorado kids and 16 years old... so I'm proud that he's as competitive as he is on the national scale. He's also even more fired up for racing/training after seeing that he needs to keep on working on his fitness and sprinting more than his technical bike skills (which are excellent).