a lot of the time by hand.
We are turning our three car garage into a finished and heated space for me to work on bikes, cars and carbon repairs. This means running hundred of feet of new electrical service to the house and garage, gas to the garage, water to the garage, cable (for TV) to the garage. Kim's Dad found some great cabinetry out of someone's kitchen that even includes an island (workstation!) and Trevor is helping out with the gas stuff and with a great price on a heater. When it all gets done it's going to be incredible.
Work has also begun on what I've decided to call "Wilson World"... which will be .5-.7 miles of trail literally in my backyard. A lot of the woods on the back half our property are pretty open and will be easy to route though... but the crux of the project was freeing the entire perimeter of the property. The back of which was a dense thicket of sumac trees which took 3-4 hours to chop though. My best estimate is 150-200 silly little trees laid to waste by my axe. Not sure when I will have time to work on this in the near future as there are a lot of higher priorities, but I can see it being valuable and awesome once completed.
I've also been working on this... which is basically going to be a super fun, low key cx race followed by a do or die world championship level crossathlon. You will want to be there. If things go well with the above there may even by more crossathlon afterwards back at Wilson World.
Finally, the Colesburg 40. Glad I went. It wasn't on my calendar until it got so hot and I missed WORS, but I wasn't liking the idea of heading to the 'big' cx race in Madison next month without a couple of races under my belt this 'season'. I showed up a bit tired (see the above, particularly the axe work Saturday and Sunday) but with a general feeling of 'belief' that I haven't felt since early June. $20 entry fee and there was a $20 prize for the KOM at the top of the first climb. I appreciated the symmetry but wasn't feeling like being real active until we got about 2 miles into the gradual climb and my legs woke up. Hit the next steeper ramp pretty hard and got a gap then blew a little bit and knew the group would catch up but rested a touch as they did and went again uncontested for the $20. We immediately turned down a B road that was full bore crazy. Kevin McConnel was in front bunny hopping washouts at 25 mph and we were gapping the rest of the field pretty quick until I took a bad line and went offroad entirely. I fell back after putting my foot down and waddling back to the road and wound up falling back with a chase group after a brief solo chase, did too much work and caught Kevin too early (or maybe no amount of time out solo would have made him fallible). Anyways, it was just the two of us for a bit with Cochran on our heals and than one of Kevin's teammates caught up and they were able to spring themselves on the largest climb. This was partly aided by my front derailleur cable breaking and taking away my big ring, but I was toast either way. Luckily I had enough left to ride ahead of Cochran to the line. This was the hardest 43 miles of 'gravel' I can remember unless you count the last 43 miles of something like the Royal. I hope to be back next year.
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