Blogging by Colin

Having already raced once this year, I figure it’s about time to revisit another “professional racer” pastime: blogging. This year, I’ve been trying a few things differently in hopes of getting fast, the biggest of which has been relocating to warm weather during the winter months. This past February, I drove from Colorado Springs to Tucson, AZ for team Kenda/Felt’s first training camp of sorts. Amanda, Judy, and I shared a place, and Andy was already down there. It was more or less the training utopia that I had hoped for with riding, refueling with Trader Joes, watching the Olympics, and, well, not much else occupying my days. That sort of ascetic athlete lifestyle was perfect for a few weeks, but I soon began to romanticize about the hectic school life that I had been so eager to leave just a few weeks earlier. If you ignore the training, I had effectively gone from a college-kid lifestyle to that of a person from the geriatric neighborhood in which we rented our Tucson house. Oro Valley, AZ, it seems, is ideally suited for the elderly and athletes alike.
From Arizona, I took the long way home, seeing the Grand Canyon (indeed grand), stopping for three days in Moab, UT, and even fitting in one last day of skiing at Copper Mountain, which means I ended up using just half of my “four-pack” pass...ouch. Weather on the Front Range was still pretty sloppy, but the dry Moab weather enabled some long rides during which I recalled lots of previous Moab adventures—from some of my first experiences mountain biking, to a few harrowing 24-hours of Moab-induced bonks, to a training trip with then-teammate Sam Schultz and now-teammate Andy. That’s right, I was following the Schultz brothers long before schultzbrothersracing.com.
After a few days back in Colorado Springs, just long enough to remind myself how fun it is to ride with numb fingers and toes, I flew to San Dimas for the first Triple Crown race. My result wasn’t stellar but I was satisfied with my form for this early in the season and even happier with my new Felt LTD 29’er. With it, I went over the bars once going down Santa Barbara’s Cold Spring Trail; without it, I would have gone over the bars many, many more times. Turns out the recent 29’er craze isn’t all just hype.
My week in Santa Barbara was the antithesis of the Tucson training trip. Instead of staying with two dedicated athletes, I stayed with ten friends from school who were on their spring break. I did some of the hardest rides I’ve done all year, but thanks to evenings spent grilling with friends, zero time in compression tights, and very little bike-racing talk, the hard work was hardly hard. It’s becoming increasingly clear that for me, balance between training and rest, work and play, spinach and chocolate, etc., is the most direct route to fitness...it’s finding that balance that’s the hard part.
Now I’m staying in San Clemente for a few days before the first US Cup in Fontana this weekend (huge thanks to Lydia Tanner and her generous, unsuspecting housemates). I never really fancied myself the So-Cal type, but I could certainly get used to the ride/beach time/Mexican food routine that we’ve fortunately fallen into here. Then again, the So-Cal sunshine wouldn’t feel warm with the cold Colorado days, both of which, I hope, will contribute to a good race this weekend and a good season.

Judy Freeman Joins Kenda

Rider Bio:

Judy Freeman
DOB: January 3, 1974 – Frankfurt, Germany
Residence: Boulder, CO
Discipline: XC Mountain Biking
Year Turned Pro: 2003

A Colorado upbringing on swimming and lacrosse, a BA from CU Boulder in Communication and French, a stint as a bike tour guide in France and a couple of years in England and Japan all led to the next logical step - competitive mountain biking?

In 1999, Judy moved to Vail, Colorado to snowboard all winter, picked up mountain bike racing that next summer - and has been hooked ever since.

Now a top-10 rider on the U.S. national scene, she can also be found riding with local Boulder groups and teaching at mountain bike skill clinics.

Judy will be new to the Kenda/Felt Professional Mountain Bike Team for 2010. She’s excited to be racing Felt bikes and ripping it up along side Amanda Riley-Carey, Andy Schultz and Colin Cares.

You can read about Judy’s biking experiences on her Singletrack.com column, Life as a Bike Jockey and her blog, www.judy-freeman.com.

Career Highlights:

2009
39th World Championships – Canberra, Australia
7th XC and STX National Championships
1st Mountain States Cup #4
2nd Mountain States Cup #3
8th US Pro Cup #4
2008
Colorado State XC Champion 2008
2nd Colorado State STX Championships
5th NMBS Series Finals STX
8th National Championships XC
10th Overall Pro Women XC & STX NMBS Series

Iceman 2009

Amanda Carey took 4th spot at the 2009 Iceman Cometh Challenge in Traverse City on November 7th. She finished in an elite group of women that included Alison Dunlap, Heather Irmiger and Kelli Emmett.

Colin's World Championshiop Report

Sleepless on my return flight from Australia, I thought I’d recount some of the week’s highs and lows. I arrived in Australia last Sunday and was set to race the team relay on Tuesday, which didn’t leave much time to recover from travel. Fortunately, I had pulled all the travel tricks I knew—eye patch, earplugs, Ambien, compression tights—and, with a couple of “long black” coffees upon arrival, I felt surprisingly fresh. USA Cycling’s crew of mechanics, doctors, and managers have logistics dialed and within just a few hours I had ridden (and seen a kangaroo!), eaten a good meal, and was set for a long, well-deserved sleep.

If I had any residual jet lag, it was surely blown away in the team relay event. The relay is relatively new and brings a rare element of team camaraderie to the largely individual sport of mountain biking. Each nation sends one elite man, one elite woman, one U23 man, and one junior man out on one lap of the cross-country course in any order. We took the unique tactic of sending our woman, Heather Irmiger, off first, followed by Russell Finsterwald, me, and finally Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski. It was an all Colorado crew of national champions in our respective categories. The race stayed suspenseful until the very end as most countries sent their fastest rider first and gradually lost ground. USA moved up with each lap and eventually reached 12th place with a mere 40 seconds separating us from the 6th place BELGIANS. It was an honor to represent the US and amongst the word’s mountain bikers, both current and future. Though it might not be in the next year or two, I hope to have another crack at the team relay some day as an elite man.

The next couple days were spent in the cycle (no pun intended) of rest, riding, and eating with which bike racers are all too familiar. It’s true what they say about the seasons down there; it really is winter. Training was chilly and we saw plenty of kangaroos and weird birds, two of which viciously attacked me (apparently it’s nesting season for the Australian version of the Magpie and they become just like the birds in that Hitchcock movie). I had to self impose a ban on riding with earphones so I could hear traffic coming from the right as I looked left. My roommate Tad Elliot thought Vegemite was going to taste like pesto…not so. Do you have to have grown up with that stuff for it to be palatable? Other than that, I hate to admit, my cultural experiences were largely limited to watching Australian TV and meandering through the two nearby food markets.

Despite going into the race rested and confident, things did not quite come together for me as I had hoped. I finished exactly where I lined up—46th—never finding the power necessary to move up on the windy road sections of the otherwise single-track course.

It’s been a great 2009 season and the support of Kenda, Tomac, and Hayes has made all of the highs possible. The lows keep things in perspective and provide motivation to improve. Now it’s time for a break from the race routine, but I’m already scheming and dreaming for 2010. Thanks for reading!

Heather's Report from Marathon World Championships

Heather is back in the US after competing at the Marathon World Championships. It was only her 2nd marathon event! You can read her report and see photos at:

MTB Race News

Intermontane Challenge: Amanda's Race Report

I just finished in 2nd place overall at the Intermontane Challenge, a 5-day stage race held in Kamloops, BC. It was the hardest race I have ever done. There were many, many challenges in this event but the most formidable one was the heat. It was 100 degrees every day, adding an extra challenge to an already difficult race. This was only my second stage race so I went into the event knowing that I had to be prepared for anything.

When we arrived in Kamloops on Saturday afternoon our car's thermometer read 103 degrees. Yikes. I was especially nervous about the heat because I had a terrible time of it at this year’s Sea Otter and could barely finish the 1:30 race! However, Kamloops’ heat was incredibly dry. It felt slightly less oppressive than the Massachusetts brand of humid heat I grew up in-no hot and sticky here!

Stage 3 course profile. It didn't matter anyway
because 1/2 the field got lost and the stage was neutralized.

I could write a 3-part novel about drama associated with this first-year event. The important details: we had 4 huge stages ranging from 40-60 miles and a final 17-mile time trial on Friday. Each day we set off in the morning with a 30 min. neutral rollout on paved roads escorted by the RCMP. Every stage included what felt like an obscene amount of climbing and super-fast downhills on trails that varied from technical, narrow, rooty-rocky singletrack to wide open doubletrack and graded dirt roads. Only a handful of the trails were built for mountain bikes and much of the terrain was barely cut in and much of it was overgrown. The course marking were insufficient most days and people were getting lost all week long.

This is the race director's moto. He really
enjoyed riding it on the trails we raced on.

After riding with or directly behind Sue Butler for most of day one I lost 38 minutes when I took a guess on an unmarked turn at mile 40 with a group of men. For some reason we thought we were on the right track when a race official smiled and waved at us from a passing truck when we were headed 6 miles in the wrong direction. Right. Miraculously, I recovered from that added 40 min. time-trial/detour and kept my head in the game for the rest of the week. I rode my heart out every minute of every day through flat tires and numerous crashes no matter where I was in the GC.

I ended up taking crawling back from a distant 4th place in the GC on day 1 to 2nd overall. I decided to split my prize money with the 3rd place woman, Sarah Kaufman. In my opinion, nothing about this race was fair to anyone involved so sharing my prize money evenly with Sarah was the one little thing I could do to correct one of the wrongs. Every single Pro Woman got lost at least once during the week and depending on what day it was it either killed your spot in the GC or it didn't count against you.

Most importantly, this week was a phenomenal reminder that a pro mountain biker is only as good as the support she receives. Many thanks to Tomac bikes for making the Type-X, the nicest carbon hardtail on the market. This race was loaded with steep climbing and fast, technical descents and I couldn’t have wished for a better race bike. My set of Kenda Karma 2.0s were the perfect tires for the terrain, as I needed something fast rolling for all the fire road climbing, but also something that would hook up well in the loose, moon-dust filled Kamloops desert. My specialized S-works helmet was as close as I could get to wearing nothing on my head. It vented extremely well and my specialized BG Pro shoes kept my feet the most comfortable they have ever been in an endurance event. They provide just the right amount of room in all the right places for your feet to swell throughout the hot days.

Hammer Nutrition kept me fueled and hydrated. Fist-fulls of endurolytes, heed and especially recoverite allowed me to perform and recover from the extreme heat and get back at it day after day in the triple digit temperatures. Oh, and a special thanks to the inventor of ibuprofen, zoots compression tights and arnica gel. Dave Zabriskie deserves special mention for making the best chamois cream on the planet. Lastly, a uber big thanks to my husband Nate who stood by my (and LOTS of other racers he didn't even know) side the entire week, handing me freezing cold bottles, stuffing ice down my shirt at every aid station, washing and fixing my bike and especially for encouraging me day after day when I thought there was just no way that I could-or should-pedal another day. I couldn’t have done this without him or without all of the support from my generous sponsors-thank you!

I am incredibly grateful for the experience as I got in some good training, learned a lot and made a ton of new pals. Next on tap: The Leadville 100! Although some are affectionately calling this year's edition the Lance-ville 100, I am very much looking forward to this crazy event. This will be my second attempt and I know that the energy and positive vibe of the circus that is Leadville will only fuel my fire!

Thanks for reading!