The Season in in Sight...

It’s been a long and inconsistent winter for many of us in Southern Ontario, which usually means that training is forced into the basement and onto trainers for FAR too long. But now that the warm weather is here … hopefully to stay…. it’s great to get outside and breathe the fresh air again!!! I’ve had a good winter of training… been doing some different and more specific training, and getting the strength back into the program. I’m feeling really good right now…. healthy, strong, comfortable on the bike and eager for the season to start. But that being said…. it’s always a test of the last 4 months when you step onto the starting line for the first time and test yourself against what everyone else has been doing for the last few months. With the dry roads, I’ve been able to get the new bike out for some rides…. Trek Fuel 98 with full XTR…. and boy is it nice!!!! It took some time to get used to a full suspension bike again after 2 years of hardtail and a rigid winter bike… everything just felt “soft” … but I found that my intended endurance rides turned into tempo rides because it was just so nice to ride!!! Here’s to more warm weather so that we can get into the trails soon… So my focus this year is going to be back on mountain biking… I really enjoyed focusing on the road last year but realized that my first love is the trails… so I’m back full time. I’ll do a few road races with the “boys” during the summer, but will be more willing to work for the team than worry about my own result. My goals for this year are pretty simple: stay healthy so I can have a consistent season (last year I started the season with pneumonia and took a while to fully recover from it), make a presence at the Canada Cup races in Quebec and a few of the bigger races in the US, perform well at Nationals… and have lots of fun this year!!! I love to ride / race my bike, and the people that I have met through riding have become some of my best friends, so when you can do what you love with people who are great… every day is fun. My first planned race of the year is going to be the Paris – Ancaster… I’ve done it a few times in the past and it’s a great early season test at race pace. We’ll have to see what the weather brings this year… it can be great or it can be nasty. That’s about all the news for right now… so I’ll sign off with a thanks to Barry and the rest of the crew at the Trek Store Toronto for taking such good care of me over the past couple years, and I look forward to another great year of riding and racing. Talk to you next post!!