Sea Otter

I flew into the Monterey airport yesterday afternoon, right before Eddie's race. He picked me up, we returned to the race/expo venue, and he proceeded to frantically get dressed and prepared for his 40 mile race. In the meantime, I wandered around and said "hi" to some of our sponsors--Crank Brothers, Magura, DT Swiss, Continental Tires...in the middle of that a somewhat familiar face came up to me and said, "Hi. We're facebook friends."..and from there, John Stamstad and I became BFF for the rest of the day :-) We hung out at the Bike Magazine booth and had a couple FOGs..that was new to me. Anyway, the rest of the day was pretty laid back but nice.

Today, Saturday, I was determined to ride my bike. I was still waffling on whether or not to sign up to race, but it would cost me near or over $100 to race at the last minute..and to just race for 1.5 hours. I decided it wasn't worth it. Luckily, I am racing for pretty much the next 5 weekends straight so I am trying to be OK with sitting on the sidelines this weekend. There are plenty of diversions, though! I borrowed Jeff Kerkove's 2009 Rotwild Hardtail and took it for a 20 mile spin on the XC course today. The course was nice..a lot of doubletrack, steep climbs, some sketchy descents, and fun singletrack. The views were awesome..so much so that I almost flew off the course in a turn more than once, just because I was distracted by the view. The course reminds me a lot of the 24 hours of Vail Lake course we raced on a couple years ago. After that, we did some video shooting for Ergon. I got to ride Yuki's 2010 Hardtail with the Sram XX. Woweeeee. Love it. Now, I cannot wait to get back and race on my new bike!