St. Anthony's and The Gear West Duathlon

I never finished a blog after St. Anthony's. I started one a few times but I didn't have much to say. I had high hopes for the race and then swam so poorly I got beaten by a girl. I've become familiar with the ups and downs of racing, thankfully, and after such a disappointing race I just had to put it behind me and get back to training.

St. Anthony's results

With a little more time and another good race under my belt I can revisit St. A's. I swam awfully which wasn't a surprise with the waves. The last half of the swim went farther out into Tampa Bay and the swells were 4 to 5 feet high. I haven't gotten good enough at swimming to do well in rough conditions. But I also raced terribly on the bike and run. I just felt like I had nothing in my legs. I've only run slower than I did at St. A's (34:41) once and it was at my very first triathlon in 2010 (34:57 on a much harder run course). There's nothing more disappointing than tapering for a race and performing terribly. I think the issue is that I put in some great speed work this winter and kept my overall mileage low. Then during March and April when I was moving back to Minneapolis and getting back into the routine of working I missed a couple days here and some workouts there which isn't a big deal if you have the strength to back up your training. For me, tapering after a good long strength block takes a few weeks to get that feeling of snap back into my legs. Tapering after doing a lot of speed work on the other hand is basically nothing. The entire speed block is a taper to keep my legs fresh and work on top end speed. But that also means that after a month and a half of moving, not getting in fast workouts and keeping my mileage low I was well rested but didn't have it on race day. It was my first pro race and I'm fairly confident in saying that I will never forget it.

After St. A's was the worst Minnesota spring ever. It continued to snow through March, then through April and even once or twice in May. The lakes were frozen until the last week in April and a few still held into May. Lake Nokomis, which I live next to, didn't ice out until April 28^th which is the latest ice out ever on record.

Tough stuff.

One of these toes is not like the others.

Now spring has finally arrived, and with plenty of rain and snowmelt everything is very green and the state is recovering from last year's drought. The Gear West Duathlon was yesterday and the weather was warm and muddy. Plenty of rain left standing water ankle deep on much of the run and the second time through plenty of mud. It's always fun to get off the roads and run through a bunch of muck.

We get very excited every year at Gear West for the duathlon and try to put on a really great race. I think this year was a success despite the threatening storms. We had Caribou coffee, pancakes, hot dogs, Zipp give-aways, lots of mud and sunshine at the end of the race. The women's t-shirts this year were also a home-run.

I raced well, which was a relief after St. A's. During the first run I ended up on my ass in a puddle coming

It's better to be lucky than good.

around a turn and thought that I couldn't get any muddier. Then running through transition with my bike I smashed one of my toes into a rack. I got on my bike a few miles into the ride and made the most dangerous error I have ever made while racing. I was trying to get into a rythym and focusing on relaxing while coming down a long, straight moderate descent. The road ends in a T at the bottom with the course taking a right turn. I wasn't paying attention to the road and looked up when I saw the lead vehicle turning right out of the corner of my eye. I was in the intersection with about 20 feet of road before it ended in a ditch with trees and road signs on the other side. I panicked, locked up my brakes, slid forward through the intersection, tried to turn my bike which came to an abrupt stop and threw me into the air. Very, very luckily for me there were no cars driving through the intersection and after skidding across the road my bike and I both ended up in the grass in the ditch. No permanent harm, just a respectable grass burn on my shoulder and a bit of a stiff neck this morning. I hopped back up and the rest of the race was uneventful. It was a fun day. Claire and I first met at the du two years ago. A lot has happened since then.

GW Du Results

Hopefully my toe heals up in time to start running again before Pigman Sprint in two weeks.

GW Du Start Line

Slowtwitch Interview

I am excited to have had the opportunity to do an interview with Slowtwitch. If you haven't heard of it, Slowtwitch is the LetsRun of the triathlon world. 

Slowtwitch Interview

I am also happy to have been able to stir the pot with the pro/amateur argument because I think the current system has some legitimate problems and have tried to sum up my thoughts on the issue here.

Triathlon distinguishes between “professional” or “elite” athletes and “amateur” athletes, but it's a vague distinction and this limits the value of using the distinction. As an amateur, you can still win money and have sponsors and even be paid by sponsors though it's unlikely. You can do everything that a professional athlete can do except compete in races with a cash prize purse of over $5k. In order to become a professional all you have to do is meet one of USA Triathlon's requirements, like top 5 at Age Group Nationals, and then send in an application. A lot of people talk about how hard it is to become a professional, but it is actually very easy to meet one of the requirements if you are legitimately fast enough to race professionally. As an amateur even though you can't compete for over $5k in cash, because USA Triathlon does not extend this limitation to prizes Hy-Vee was able to give away $151,000 in prizes to amateurs last year at their race and first place was a car worth $22k and a gift certificate to Orbea for $6k for a total of $28,000. I think if you win $28,000 in a race you aren't an amateur. Even if you can only sell those prizes for $20k, you've just made a year's worth of living expenses.

Even using the term professional isn't clear. USAT uses the term elite for professional racers and elite amateur for the amateurs that are faster than most other amateurs which creates confusion.

If there is going to be a distinction between professional and amateur athletes, I think it's important to only use the term professional for professional athletes and reserve elite for the elite amateurs at the front of the amateur pack. I also think the cash limitation should be extended to prizes. This creates a clear distinction between professional and amateur athletes which is valuable in two ways: athlete marketing and increasing the sport's legitimacy. Having clearly defined professional athletes gives those athletes a better ability to market themselves. The term professional implies that you are an expert in your sport at the top of the field and your opinion/recommendation is worth more than a non-professionals. This isn't actually true, but for marketing purposes implications can create realities which helps athletes market themselves to potential sponsors. As for the sport of triathlon clearly separating and acknowledging professional athletes as just that, professionals, helps to increase legitimacy compared to other professional sports. Of course triathlon is a far far cry from the MLB, NFL, etc., but why would outside companies ever invest large amounts of money into prize purses for the professional race when many people don't seriously see those athletes as professionals.

Basically, if we as a sport are going to have professional athletes we shouldn't stop halfway and need to commit to the system. Have fewer pros that are all legitimately professional and use those athletes to elevate and market the sport in order to give companies a reason to invest money into the big race series. Elite amateurs can spend a few more years racing as elite amateurs until they are faster.

In the end as an endurance sport I don't think triathlon will ever capture interest and investments like football or baseball and so we shouldn't have a separate professional system in the same way that running doesn't. But if we're going to have the system we ought to do it right.

Clermont Recap and Exercising Patience

2013 is officially on! Every winter I spend months training without any real racing and for some reason at the end of every winter I have an absurd fear that I won't be fast anymore. I know that it doesn't make any sense but I even have dreams about it. What if I'm doing all these workouts and think that I'm going to be faster than last year, but when I step up to the starting line I just don't have it anymore?

Putting this annoying fear to rest is always a priority for the first race of the season and this weekend I was able to do that at the Clermont Draft Legal Challenge. The race was early Saturday morning, 8:30 eastern time. It was a sprint distance of 750m swim, 20k bike and 5k run. There was 75 people in the race. 75 guys doesn't sound like a lot, except that all 75 of us start at the same time, and the distance to the first buoy was only 300m, and it was a U25 Elite Development Race, so almost everyone was fast all things considered. On top of all of that I put off registering until the very last minute and each person gets to pick their position on the start line based on when they signed up, so I had a terrible start position right in the middle of the field trying to squeeze in half a step behind two other guys. The first 200 meters was closer to a wrestling match than a swim, complete with swallowing plenty of lake water, getting kicked in the face, swimming over people and getting swum over.

Despite all this, I finally kept my cool in a race, found some open water and got back into decent swimming form. Up until now I have always took off sprinting at the gun and shot myself in the foot with sloppy technique. I could feel myself losing form and kept refocusing on a strong connected pull. I came out of the water in 20^th and was right on the tail end of the first pack getting on the bike. With the draft legal format this made all the difference for me. I couldn't be happier with the swim progress that I've made over the winter.

The bike was four 5k loops with a 180 degree turnaround at one end and a tight circle through transition at the other. My Florida training partner Jake Rhyner and I pushed the pace on the bike to make sure that the first chase pack didn't catch us before the run. I love the draft legal format, the pace is constantly accelerating and decelerating with people moving up and down the pace-line. 20 kilometers of biking goes by in what feels like 2 minutes.

The best part of draft legal racing: the bike.

Coming off the bike 5 or 6 guys put a really hard effort into leading out the run and opened up a couple seconds gap. I panicked, thinking that I was going to get left in the dust, and tried to pick up my cadence to stay as close as possible. After about a quarter of a mile they all started to slowly come back and I kept trying to move my feet as fast as possible. My final run time was a little slower than I had hoped for, 16:28, but for this time of year it's a good start.

Results are here: http://www.allsportsevents.com/Results/triathlon_results/ClermontChallengeDay12013.html#/results::1363039210251

I will be racing as an amateur through HyVee this year. It was a tough decision but I'm certain that it was the right move. Racing professionally is like running a small business. I know that as much progress as I have made, I still have work to do before I will be a contender. If I spent the spring traveling and racing as a pro I would likely make almost no money and would certainly have less consistent training. Instead, I will spend another half of a year focused on getting all of the details right and making steady progress training. I've been getting a lot of crap for not racing pro, but the choice between stalling my development to make very little money and buckling down for some hard work and getting faster yet with a very good chance at winning $26k at HyVee is a pretty easy one. Patience is a virtue.

I wouldn't do that if I were you...

This post shares my thoughts on our obsession with ultra endurance events and why I don't think that's a good thing for most people.

I want to argue that most people shouldn't make the jump to ultra(iron) distance and what's more, they shouldn't want to. I want to argue that racing, really racing and not just finishing, a shorter race is more enjoyable, healthier, and more challenging than finishing an ultra distance for nearly everyone.

It's not just triathlon that has become infected by the ultra-endurance bug. Marathons have been the king of road racing for a long time and the niche race of ultra trail runs of 50k, 50 miles and even 100 miles have seen a huge increase in popularity recently. And there's plenty of ultra enthusiasts among open water swimmers, mountain bikers and RAAM participants.

I think it's fair to argue that the growth and interest in these events is due to the extreme difficulty they present. When the existence of these events is brought to the attention of normal people, aka non-athletes, aka muggles, their reaction is a predictable “that's crazy” or “why would you ever want to do that?” Mostly though, they are grudgingly respectable of and sometimes openly admiring of people who finish these events. They know that it is a testament of a person's will power to get to the finish line for one of these “crazy” races.

As an aside, there is an unfortunate mentality among some athletes that they're better than muggles because they exercise and eat healthy and they will brag about the 2 hour workout they got up at 4:30am for to finish before work. If you brag about these things with your co-workers you should stop, immediately. It's akin to when that vegetarian¹ blathers on about how they're saving the planet by not eating meat, and about as enjoyable for them as when that coworker shows you pictures of their cat that they dressed up in costume over the weekend.

¹ Don't call a crusade on me angry vegetarians, for I am one of you. But let's be honest, vegetarianism, like religion, is something that should be encouraged through example, not frequent, self righteous lectures.

Challenge

Back to the point, ultras are a challenge, a proving grounds where you can step out of the hum-drum of ordinary routine and attempt something courageous. And ultimately, ultra events actually are just that, a challenge. But, marketing and social hype have taken this challenge and made it the ultimate challenge, the toughest event and so on. Finishing an ultra is made out to be the end all and be all for the endurance athlete, and that continues to drive the obsession to sign up for the longest possible race your sport offers.

But consider this: In order to finish that ultra you'll have to put in a lot of miles. A lot a lot of miles. Finishing is absolutely possible. I talk to people every week who put in one year of really hard work and just barely finished one, but they did it. So if you have a functional foundation to work on, it will just mean an exhausting number of hours of aerobic work. If you don't have the foundation, it will probably mean injury. Most people's lives are already plenty time crunched without trying to squeeze in 10 to 15 hours of training per week. Do you really want to get up at 4:30 every morning so you can ride the trainer for 2 hours before work?

A shorter race means less time spent logging miles. You could use that time to get some more sleep, or tackle a project you've been putting off for a month. If you really want to improve your health the time difference is a great opportunity to work on range of motion and overall strength. It won't necessarily make you faster, but it will help put an end to injuries, and who doesn't want to put an end to injuries?

So would you rather be a lithe cheetah or a rickety Energizer Bunny with kinesio tape covering you from head to toe?

Of course even though it means you'll have more time and feel better and not have to spend every season nursing your tight achilles, you may still be mesmerized by the challenge of completing an ultra. Here's where I will be a bit unorthodox. If you want a real challenge, something that is truly difficult and so tough that you may never be able to accomplish it, race an olympic distance tri and finish in under 2:15. (Sorry girls, I'm not good at estimating an equivalent time, maybe 2:40?)

I have a feeling a lot of people will respond like this: That's unreasonable, you think that's reasonable because you race fast, but that's so much faster than I've ever gone, I could never go that fast, that's impossible.

Yes, it is very very fast, and yes you would have to drastically improve to do that and some people no matter how fit they get may not be able to achieve that time, but that's the why it's more challenging, harder, more courageous than finishing an ultra. In order to be that fast you'll have to work for years balancing strength, speed and endurance, smartly avoiding injury and you will have to get very lean. It will take intelligence and commitment and long term planning. But if you achieve that goal you'll feel every bit as on top of the world as crossing that ultra finish line.

So here's my question to you: Are you up for a real challenge?

Minnesota: Where Duathlon Lives

USAT has published their 'Athletes of the Year' for 2012. Patrick Parrish and I represented MN well by receiving Duathlete of the Year and Elite Duathlete of the Year.

The full list of athletes in all categories is here: 2012 Athletes of the Year

If you've never done a duathlon before, they're a great way to test the waters of the 'multi-sport' world. The atmosphere is usually a bit lower key and more friendly than triathlons and for the majority of people a whole lot less stressful because you don't have to worry about the swim.

Gear West Bike has put on an early season duathlon for years and is the perfect venue for anyone thinking about trying out a duathlon. The race will be held on May 19th this year.

This year the crew at Gear West will be going above and beyond to make this the best duathlon of the year with the following perks:

• Pancakes and Caribou coffee at packet pickup
• On-site childcare
• Spectator friendly cross country style run course
• Sponsorship with Zipp to bring you some great give-aways.

Zipp is sponsoring the race which means there some great prizes up for grabs, and you don't have to be fast to win any of these, just lucky!

Each month prior to the race all of the registered entrants are entered into a drawing. Matt Moen won the prize for January, a pair of Zipp Tangente tires.

Still up for grabs:

• March: Two Zipp carbon water bottle cages
• April: Zipp Double Wheel Bag
• May: Zipp Gear/Transition Bag

And on race morning, a pair of Zipp 404 Clinchers will be awarded to one lucky participant!

So dig up your lucky rabbit's foot, put a horseshoe in your back pocket and sign up for a really top notch event today to get your season started the right way.

Registration and course info can be found at the GW Du website: Gear West Duathlon

I hope to see you there!

The Importance of Saying Thank You

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I highly recommend it. In the book, Gladwell argues that the widely held view of great success as a result of purely individual determination and hard work is misleading and causes our society to let many potentially great successes stall and fail in their infancy. If you think this view isn't widely held just think back to the one man island rhetoric of the recent election. Through a number of very compelling examples Gladwell argues that success is a combination of individual determination and hard work meeting the right opportunities, and the importance of acknowledging those opportunities in enabling success to happen.

I know that I have worked incredibly hard to get to where I am right now. I've done things like riding my bike to work for two months during Minnesota winter, working for 6 hours and then riding to the gym in the dark to swim at 9:00 at night before riding home. But I also remember teammates from college who ran 100 miles a week and had just as much determination as I did who have fallen far short of their dreams.

With all of this in mind, I wanted to post an acknowledgment and an appreciation of a number of special circumstances in my life that have happened in such a way as to provide me with the opportunity to capitalize on my hard work. Each of these circumstances are not enough in and of themselves to produce success and are by no means inherently necessary for success as a triathlete. But what I want to acknowledge is the cumulative advantage of all these circumstances and to say thank you to those involved.

Special Circumstance #1 – Birth Place and Genetics

Two summers ago I had the opportunity to participate in a study at the Mayo clinic in Rochester on the effects of aging on oxygen uptake in athletes. I did a number of tests, but two in particular were very interesting for me personally, a VO2 max test and a lung capacity test. I found out that my lung capacity is 25% greater than average for a person of my size and that my VO2 max while cycling is 74ml/kg/min. The doctor administering the test also noted that runners using a cycling VO2max test will usually have results understated by around 10%, so my VO2max is probably closer to 80-82ml/kg/min. Here is an interesting roll call of some great endurance athletes and their VO2max numbers for perspective: http://www.topendsports.com/testing/records/vo2max.htm

Both of these aspects of my physiology are more or less entirely out of my control, but still have a big impact on being fast. Having unusually large lungs and a high VO2 allow me to get more oxygen into my system and predisposes me to be successful at endurance events.

I am, by birth, a mountain man.

I have my birth place and genetics to thank as the first special circumstances that have gotten me to where I am. I happened to be born at 5000 ft in Denver CO and spent the first 5 years of my life in Boulder and Nederland CO at altitudes of 5k-8k feet. Studies have shown that populations born at higher altitudes have physiological differences including... increased lung capacity. VO2max is a more or less static number that is determined largely by your genetics and cannot greatly be improved except through the use of performance enhancing drugs like EPO.

Special Circumstance #2 – Growing Up “Not Affluent” When Kids Played Outside

I didn't grow up in poverty. I always had food to eat and clothes to wear. But I certainly did not grow up wealthy either. I never watched TV as a kid, and didn't have a gaming system until 8^th grade. I'm not complaining, in retrospect I consider this one of the most important circumstances of my life because as a result I spent all of my time outside. As a kid, what I remember is learning to ride a bike without training wheels and spending every day after that riding everywhere on my bike. I remember every evening getting together with all of the kids in the neighborhood and riding bikes or playing tag or football until the sun went down. What I don't remember is sitting in front of a TV playing video games everyday. Please don't think I'm condemning anyone's parenting. I'm simply acknowledging that I spent nearly every day of my childhood running and biking outside. This was the “base” of my endurance training. Every kid my age in St. Louis played soccer. I spent countless hours running up and down a soccer field as fast as I could, and I usually played mid-field, the position with the most running.

Special Circumstance #3 - 8^th Grade Track

When I was in 7^th grade, there were no sports at my junior high. Then when I was in 8^th grade we had spring sports for the very first time for 8^th graders. The sports that were offered: baseball and track. I wanted to do a sport, but would never have chosen track. Except that I am terrible at the only other sport that was offered, baseball. As a result of this circumstance I happened to go out for track. This is significant because if I hadn't tried track in 8^th grade I would have played soccer as a high school freshman and would not have ever run cross country and probably would never have done track either. I can assure you that I would not have had a chance as a professional soccer player. So as a result of very fortunate timing, I ran track in 8^th grade because it was the only sport offered besides baseball and as a result began running competitively and accumulating training hours in 8^th grade.

Special Circumstance #4 – Mizzou Mindset

The head coach when I ran at the University of Missouri was Rick McGuire. He is well known in the sport psychology field and placed a very big emphasis on sports psychology for our team. In 11 of the 12 Big 12 teams if you were a scholarship athlete and you ran poorly, your scholarship was pulled. In 11 of the 12 teams the only goal of the team was winning. At Mizzou, if you had a scholarship, it was never reduced. There was no cut throat mindset and no extreme pressure to perform. If you performed well, it was rewarded and if you didn't, you just went back to work, no negative consequences. From this I learned everything that I use today in regards to sports psychology, which is another post entirely, but I'll say that without the lessons I learned about how to think about racing, I would likely have given up at this point or would be struggling with external pressures.

Special Circumstance #5 – My Dad Worked at Target Corp in 2009

As a junior in college I got an internship with Target for the summer. I may have gotten this internship through my own merit, but I doubt it. My resume was passed to the head of HR by my dad because they were friends and I “happened” to receive a call from a recruiter soon after. Luckily I am reasonably intelligent and getting the internship is much harder than getting an offer, so in 2009 after I graduated I started working for Target. While at Target I had a moderate interest in getting back into racing for fun and looked into the tri club. The tri club happened to have a presentation for rookie triathletes a week or so later. Who happened to put on the presentation? David Thompson, professional triathlete from Gear West Bike. Through a number of circumstances and opportunities too long to list, I ended up living with Thompson and soon after working at Gear West Bike and Tri.

I cannot emphasize the importance of this opportunity enough. As a rookie triathlete, I was able to live with and observe a professional triathlete that had been racing for over a decade. I had a job at a store focused on triathlon with a staff that knows more about triathlons than any other tri store in the country (IMHO). Because I worked a salaried job for one year and then worked at a store where I could get product at cost I could afford a road bike, a top end tri bike and all of the equipment that young athletes struggle to afford. And when I started to seriously race, because of the groundwork that Gear West Bike has put into fostering the multi-sport community in Minnesota, I had a summer schedule of over 80 races to choose from all within driving distance, many of which offered prize money. I cannot think of better circumstances to have started racing in.

Special Circumstance #6 – A Moustache and a Speedo

Now that's a headshot.

This is my favorite circumstance of my current situation. In Oct. 2011 I grew a mustache for Movember. Everyone said that it looked horrible. I knew that it looked awesome. So I kept it and raced St. Anthony's with a mustache. Jake Rhyner, who happened to live next door in Wisconsin at the time happened to be racing St. Anthony's as well. We happened to be treading water next to each other while waiting for the race to start and Jake complimented me on how good my mustache looked. I won the race and he was second by only 30 seconds, so after the race we cooled down together and chatted for a while. Because he was a cool guy and was racing Lifetime I offered him a homestay at my dad's place for the race. Jake happened to be coached by a guy who lives outside of Clermont FL and could get Jake a job in Orlando. Clermont FL happens to be a hotspot for professional triathletes and after Jake moved down here he was able to finagle a way for me to live and train down here for the winter. Since moving down here I've had the opportunity to swim, bike, run with and learn from more professional athletes and have had huge improvements in all three sports.

At the end of the day, I have worked very, very hard and struggled often to get to this point and I am confident I will make it. But the truth of the matter is, without all of these circumstances happening just so, including 5 or 10 more that I don't have the finger strength to type out, I wouldn't have made it to here.

So thank you to everyone who has made this possible, especially my parents and Kevin O'Connor at Gear West Bike. I appreciate the opportunities you have created which I have worked so hard to take advantage of.

Getting Into The Routine

During my first week I had 4 flats. 3 due to
sub-par rim tape. 1 due to this giant nail.

     Believe it or not, it is now 2013. I've been training in Clermont, FL since the first week in December and it has been fantastic. Quite a few professional triathletes make Clermont their winter training camp and I can see why. The weather is fantastic which makes it possible to swim outside at the National Training Center everyday. For me this is a big win from a mental standpoint. During the winter I want to get in some great training, but I also want to start the season mentally and physically fresh. Since starting to train down here I have started to look forward to the swim each day more than my run (This is blasphemy coming from a runner, and I apologize to any non-triathlete runners for admitting it). I know that I'm not going to have to worry about mid-season mental burnout because I'm not “grinding” through training right now, instead I'm making steady progress and feeling fresh. The old schoolers out there would say that grinding it out during a long cold winter makes you tough, and they may be right... but I'll trade toughness for speed any day.

Swimming with McLarty and Rhyner Outside in January

     To be fair I'm probably enjoying swimming so much because I've made some very big improvements in the last 5 weeks. I'm fortunate enough to swim with some really fast people every day like Sara McLarty, Lauren Goss, Sarah Haskins (these girls are smoking fast), my fellow northern ex-pat Jake Rhyner and Romain Guillaume. The bottom line is these people are usually swimming on a 1:15 base without even really trying. With some stroke pointers and a lot of chasing after feet I've gone from killing myself to swim 200's in 2:35 on a 3 minute sendoff to swimming 200's in the low 2:20's on a 2:30 sendoff. My number one priority for the winter was to make improvements swimming, so this has been very encouraging. To put it into perspective, my race pace last year on average was around 1:17's so even with rest in between intervals I'm usually swimming faster each day than I could race last year. Extra bonus: I have a really great speedo tan which may or may not come in handy this year depending on race kit choices...

     Each day is part of an overall routine blending swimming, biking, running, aerobic work, speed work, strength training, stretching, rolling out, eating, resting, sleeping. I know what I'm going to do every day and get it done as best as I possibly can, making sure to focus on the details. It sounds a bit boring when I say it out loud, but I really enjoy the routine. I'm always hearing about breaking out of routines and ruts, but if you ask me, having a routine is a great way to get work done. When you know what you're going to do every day, you find a way to get it done. Whenever I don't have a routine I always find really good reasons to not do my second workout or to skip stretching.

Claire, still fresh and smiling after running 10 miles on the clay trail.

Hopefully you're having a great winter, even if you are stuck in the snow. If you're on the Twitter be sure to follow all of us training down here in Clermont, sponsors love that sort of thing.

@D_Hedgecock, @jakerhyner, @Lauren_Goss, @SaraLMcLarty, @trialsyorke, @TriCoachK and even though they're back in the arctic, @ClaireBootsma and @dpalmertri.

Thanks for the support!