A Good Idea at the Time

The Cohutta 100 has finally arrived, and sadly, it is my first real race of the season... Should be a good shock to the system.

Elizabeth is doing alot of the SERC races this year, so I've accompanied her to Chickasaw and Tsali for some SS action... The first race was a mudfest, and I ended up slipping back to 5th after figuring out that the XDX tires were great for the clearing the wet course the first lap, but not as great on the 2nd lap when everything turned slick as snot...

Tsali was less fun. I made it 5 minutes into the woods, hit a bump, and wound up on my top tube... I looked down expecting to see a broken chain, and instead noticed I didn't have a right pedal. The threads were still good, so it seems to have just unthreaded itself for no reason... Of course I had every hex except the 8mm I needed to tighten it back on. Eventually someone had an 8mm that I borrowed to save myself a 10 mile walk, and I managed to finish an impressive 30 minutes back. I did beat one guy though who had his left crank arm fall off. "Hey man, do you have an 8mm?," he asked.

So back to Cohutta... It will be my longest ride of the year thus far. I tried to do a run of the 65, but the fireroads were all icey snowy. The picture below is the start of a big fireroad descent. We turned back after a few wrecks...

I'm going for the whole "I've done way too many of these fricken off-road centuries, maybe my experience will pull me through." I'm running the 32x20, again, for the third year in a row. Every year I think I should use a 19, but then I get on those hills and am glad I have the 20... We'll see how it goes!