Promise of a New Year

The past two years have been pretty crazy and I'm ready for a nice progressive good year. With my PE in 2010 and my father passing in 2011 I'm looking ahead and keeping my fingers crossed for a year with promise. A year with great potential. A year with bigger goals. A year with more success, happiness, and miles.

The off season has been nice as I've done a bunch of good riding either solo or with friends and teammates. Base training is in full effect and it's nice to not be riding so hard and doing the specified structured workouts. I do miss it a bit and I will be looking forward to racing again soon but I'm biding my time so that I can come out in better form this year and really put a dent in the competition. I've been looking back at the way last season went and I've had some ups and downs. The downs were hard to fathom at the time but in retrospect, they had some glaring errors surrounding them that I need to correct for this coming year. Hindsight is 20/20 right? For sure...

So for 2012 the name of the game is endurance once again. Last year I tackled a nice mix of 100's/12hrs/6hrs and 50 milers. This year I'll be looking more towards the 100 milers with some xc's thrown in and some other middle distance races too. As always I battle with my list of priority races since I want to do every race out there. For now the schedule is looking good but still in progress. I'm thinking of doing 5 100 milers this year. They will be the Cohutta 100, Mohican 100, Wilderness 101, Hampshire 100, and the Shenandoah 100. As a warmup for the Cohutta 100 in late April is the 6 hours of Warrior Creek in early April. That should help ramp up fitness and give me some nice early season goals to shoot for. I'm really psyched and hope it should give me a nice boost for the remainder of the season, whether physical or mental.

The next debate is the bike debate. Still trying to figure out the FS vs HT debate. I've always been a hardtail man. People are trying to influence me into the FS discussion but I don't think I'm quite ready for that yet. I want the most efficient means to an end, and I think that's on a HT for me. If I'm not fast enough on it, I'll have to work on my fitness and not blame the bike. We'll see... It's always a fun debate anyway.

So those are my thoughts at this point in the game. More to come and I'm just enjoying the nice weather that's allowing for some great early season riding.