Brandon's Slow Ride: Winter Passion...

So I am back in the creek at Campbell where I just started my last semester as an undergraduate. Its still unbelievable to me that I am graduating in May with a Bachelors degree but Im excited and looking forward to continuing my studies somewhere in the fall.

I am moving into my final month of offseason cycling before road racing cranks up February 12-13 at NC State University. This will be my first road race and lets just say my expectations are much lower than when I attended my first Mountain bike race. I hope to just have fun and lock onto a group and stay there. As long as I don’t finish ten minutes off the back alone Ill call it a success. Our race schedule for the Spring has pretty much been finalized to consist of three races here in NC and then the conference championships at Virginia Tech.

Here’s the dates:

February 12-13 NC State

March 5-6 Dooke (AKA: Duke)

March 26-27 Wake forest

April 16-17 Virginia Tech

There are ten races total in the season but our budget just wont allow us to go to more than half of the races. I am still hopeful that we can mix in one more race at Virginia Common Wealth March 19-20 but it really all depends on how much money we have.

So that’s how my spring shapes up with 6 hours of Warrior Creek mixed in there on April 3^rd. It should be a fun way to spend the first half of my cycling season.

I really enjoyed the collegiate racing atmosphere during mountain bike season. I was real nervous before mountain bike season last year at how we would be accepted as a new team but it only took a few minutes to see just how cool all the guys were in the conference. It just seemed like a fast paced group ride with everyone cheering everyone on and just having a good time with people who shared the passion for riding bikes. Now with that said Im am a bit apprehensive once again about road season as I know road bikers are generally a bit more serious than mountain bikers but none the less I expect it to be a good time.

Then as I already mentioned 6WC was my favorite event all last season so I know how much fun its going to be to go out to the home trails and kill myself for 6-7 hours.

All this rapidly approaching makes the time on the trainer a bit more tolerable and provides motivation to get back on. I have been taking a easy this week trying to let those base miles soak in and rejuvenate my legs for next week when Im going to set in hard on the intensity training.

In other news I did get back to some of my more enjoyable winter sports, apart from riding the trainer, this past week. I went up to Beech Mountain Ski Resort in Beech Mountain up above Banner Elk and Boone for the first time ever Sunday night. The temps were hovering in the low teens all night but it never bothered us one bit. The amenities at Beech were lacking but the slopes were awesome. It was a steep slope with several real fun black diamonds. There was about a foot of fresh snow on the ground as well which made for some fun ‘out of bounds’ runs. One time however on a out of bounds stint I was going a little to fast and it was a little to dark for me to spot a snow blower head and dodge it. It ended up hitting me square in the knees and sweeping me off my feet face planting me in the snow. Luckily it only lift a small cut on my knee but nevertheless it proved to be a good sow for my buddy Ben who watched the whole thing go down.

Downhill skiing easily ranks right up there with cycling for me. I just wish I could do it more often and in more obscure spots where I could hike in and take some back county runs…Maybe one day. We had a great trip and though it was my first trip to beech it certainly wont be my last.

I also hit up a little waterfowl hunting when I got back here to the eastern part of NC on Tuesday. We left out for Lake Sherron Harris early Tuesday with some treacherous road conditions after the ice storm the hit Monday. However, this did translate into conditions that saw a lot of ducks in the air. We probably saw a thousand ducks by lunch time however we couldn’t get any to some to the decoys. The problem started when we got there and were the first boat in the water however by the time we got the motor started we were the third boat to head out and it just so happened one of the boats that got going before us had made a bee line for our spot. Adding to the problem was that after we had spent so much time working on the motor we only had time to set out about 30-40 decoys before it started getting light. All of this translated to us watching ducks fly by and fly into the decoys of the guys in our spot who were set up right across the lake but none coming over to our side. It was a fun morning though with perfect duck hunting conditions that saw things just not come together in our favor.