June 18-19, I had Stage race here in Utah called the High Uintas Classic. This stage race consisted of a Road Race, Time Trial, and Criterium. It was my first race as a Cat 3, and I was excited to see how I compared. I was very happy with my road race, as I put in a very solid attack and stayed away for 50 miles before they caught me 7 miles before the finish on a 80 mile race. The time trial went alright for my first time on a TT bike(which is very different). I was most happy with the Criterium as I was 2nd and moved myself from 6th to 3rd in the overall standings! Being 3rd overall was nice, I scored some valuable points towards my Cat 2 upgrade, but also made some money which was more than the entry fee!
Last week, our team had our 2nd training camp of the summer in Steamboat. This is our yearly 4th of July camp, where the juniors train with our team and we have some very fun competitions. Once again we started jumping in x-c suits, which is very difficult to jump well. From there we moved to jump suits, which was nice and I felt very happy with my jumping. On July 4th we had a very fun race on main street right before the parade. Several thousands of people came out to watch which was very fun to participate in. I had a solid race moving up to 3rd, but 5x Olympian Todd Lodwick pulled out the victory showing age is not a factor. Young junior Michael Ward, had a very impressive performance placing 2nd just ahead of myself. He has shown that talent that can turn into a world class athlete!
On Monday, our whole team leaves for Germany and France. The nice part of this camp is, we are jumping and biking. There will be no roller-skis taken on the camp, which will be very nice. The highlight of the camp is when we are in France, in which we will be going to ride some stages and watch the Tour de France. This will be my first time watching this amazing event which is like the Superbowl for 21 straight days.
Stay tuned for many pictures and updates as this will be a very exciting camp for our team.
So far the summer has been great! Our team has been very busy training both in Park City and Steamboat! Recently we had our first camp in Steamboat, where we had to jump in x-c suits. Things went pretty well, and I was happy with the level for our first jumps of the summer. We then came back to park city, and had our first sessions of the summer on the k90. It was a nice start to be in xc, then go to jump suits on a larger hill!
