Government anyway.

Corrine and I went for a night training ride to check out the whole shutdown thing around Red Rock. All of the roads and trails are blocked.

Shhhh, you can ride around the fences. The water level in the river down here is extremely low. 

IMBC #10 Lake Ahquabi State Championships

This is the MTB racing season finale, at Lake Ahquabi. Absolutely perfect weather and a great turnout in participation. Everybody was mass-started in short waves so I don't really have any pictures of actual racing. It was a great time with the, now standard, pot-luck feast afterward. Corrine and Cody both came away with first place finishes and State Champion titles while I finished up 6th and almost got a 3rd place State title due to a rule where you must have a valid annual license to receive a state award. Enough people didn't have current licenses that they made it back to 5th before finding a 3rd overall.

Before any race venue pictures, we have a couple pictures taken during the trip. This one ran extremely high on the WTF-factor scale. Here you have a woman who is driving along, reading a book which is resting on the steering wheel. She's got this figured out pretty well and only has to look up every 20 seconds or so. She even knew to anticipate stop lights and could continue reading while stopping. The truly amazing thing is that, if you look closely, you can see there is a mug of coffee and also a bowl of cereal on the dash to the right of the instrument cluster. After she stopped at a stop light (without looking) she proceeded to take a sip of coffee and replace the mug back up on the dash. 

Here's her license plate number. If you see her around, make sure to honk a couple time to wake her up.

Random sunrise

It's rapidly becoming that time of year. The leaves will change, jackets will be worn again, day and night will seem to blend together. It's random sunrise time!

Capital City CX

Capital City Cross Day-1, we headed out expecting to get wet. That's the odd thing about cyclocross I suppose, knowing that it would be cold and raining just made me look forward to getting onto the course all the more.

It did rain during the men's race but the course held up pretty well and remained rideable (for most people anyway). There were a few off-camber hills that turned to mud and there were the run-ups which became mostly mud as well. There were definitely plenty of people who decided to lay on the ground and take a nap for a bit, so they were easy to ride around. 

Day-2 promised sunshine and clear skies. Double-race weekends still working great - I felt even better today than yesterday and went on to finish with my best placing in a cyclocross race to date. We had a great showing today as a whole team.

Dirty Wooden Shoe CX

Wooden Shoe! Back-to-back race days are going well so far, I felt good today despite doing a race and a wedding yesterday. A little riding and a lot of wandering around checking if tape needed to be repaired. Our event went great and the weather was nearly perfect. 

IMBCS #9 Banner Lakes

Corrine, Cody and I are playing hooky today from our team's race in Pella. We went to Indianola instead to race in an abandoned coal-mine pit. 

We were about half way there when Corrine realized she forgot her bike shoes and helmet and only had sandals. She called Amanda in Carlisle to check if we could borrow anything. We got some plastic flat commuter pedals and a helmet. Along with the shoes Cody wore on the way, she was ready to go.

Also coolest number plates yet. 

Course Building

It's Friday afternoon and the Jimmy Johns team is out in force to prepare for a big two-day race weekend. We're using the South Overlook property at Red-Rock Lake again. I still don't like this area as well as the Whitebreast location myself but it always turns out great and it's more accessible here from major highways. 

I think we put in about 500 poles and started with 14,000ft caution tape (not sure how much of that we used). It had rained recently but the ground handled it just fine and the forecast was clear for the whole weekend!