A great weekend

Saturday
Started it off with a cx race up in St. Cloud, it went pretty well. would have been great except that my contact fell out and i had no depth perception, that made barriers hard. i was right with sean or within 30 meters of him or so at this point (45-50 minutes) but after losing the contact he got further away. oh well id get payback.

as soon as we got back from anoka (5:30) the crazyness for our race really began. Olaf gave us a bunch of poles so we (sean and i) went and got those, then raked the woods part of the course. Then we (sean, ben, brandon, finn, peter) started to set up the course. the poles olaf gave us were no where near sufficent. so ben and i went to menards and got a bunch of cheap wood poles. While we were gone the others started taping the course, then dissapeared (except sean). so sean ben and i went and pounded steaks into the ground by moonlight for 2 hours before we got to the hard part of the course. the spiral. in concept easy, actually making it hard. in the moonlight, harder. after about 90 minutes of trying to figure out how to make it work i, yes i, made the breakthrough and we finished that up. that was about 11. after that bikes were prepared for the race. then i went to bed.

the remanents of the spiral...

Sunday
Woke up at 6:45 and went down to the tavern to have breakfast. finished that at about 8 and went back to olaf and began taping. I was in charge so i was giving task to everyone, and soon the tape ran out really fast so we had to scrammble to find more. ben went to the store. unfourtunatley the course got taped off wrong in a few spots, so sean and i were running around fixing the wrongs. after a stressful 2 hours we finished up only 10 minutes late, and the C race was off. I watched it a little to
I got some time to warm up for the colligate race at this point, which sean and i did. Eventually that got around to being started.
Right from the start sean and i were out front. by the end of the first lap we had a good gap. for the first 25-30 minutes he lead for most of it, then i went to take my pull and he dropped back a little. i just kept going and slowly putting some time on him. unfourtunatley he crashed on the decent (in the sand i think) and the race became mine. apparently he broke his shifter, but hey mine was screwed up too. once i knew i had it, i ended up lapping finn right around here too, so i yelled at him to beat the guy he was right behind while i was spirling. Then hit it hard for the finish. finn won his sprint. I was hoping that the race between sean and i would come down to a sprint, make things fun, although if he would have pulled the whole race i would have given it to him. but ill take a solo anyday. conference champ! wahoo.

its a race

i win
after that the b race was off, i watched from the far side of the field as the group of 60 went into the spiral, it was a wall of people, so flippin cool. then sean and i went off and heckled. at one point some dick broke the spiral. luckily i was standing right there and fixed it really quick. it would have been real bad had i, ben or sean not been around. anyways, besides that everything went well in that race.
eventually it was time for the A race, sean and i were both dead so we did one lap to go through the spiral in a group. although he caught the tape and did not make it into the spiral with the group. i did, it was fun. so i waited for him after that and then we had a sprint to the line to drop out. he won, i can live with that.

a race on thors revenge

then clean up time, luckily lots of people helped out so it went pretty quick. that made me really happy. i might still be doing it had it only been sean, ben and i.

I'd like to thank all the volunteers. you were all great help. There are a million pictures, so eventually i will get a bunch up. but not tonight, so thanks to those who took pictures (most of the photos here from Jim Wellbrock, hope he (you) don't mind). and also to ben for helping out with funding.
was fun, lets do it again next year.

i think now that i have some time, i can take my first shower since friday...