Trifecta Complete

So we won our 3rd straight National Title. This one was the hardest, with last years elite silver medalists racing Masters this year. It was odd since everyone raced Masters the year.. 7 teams in our field beat the winning elite time.

It was also nice to see the Moab team get crushed. It's nothing personal, it's just that all the trash talk (and not by them, but by a lot of other "real mountain bike teams) about how weak Nats was and how if a real team showed up we'd get our asses handed to us proved to be a lot of whinning.

So at this point, if you post that you could win Natz because it's a soft race well.. maybe you should shut up and show up instead. My guess is that any of the top 3 teams would beat you.

I do want to say that for the 3rd year in a row I am trully impressed with Dan Norton. Every year the racing gets harder, his team gets faster but comes up just short. But he never gives up, never surrenders and never makes excuses. He's a tough cookie who races you tough and respects hard riders.

Those S&M guys impressed me too. I was amazed at how smoot they were. We'll fully admit to being strong riders with limited technical skills. Those guys may not have been as strong power wise but they were pretty close and there was no drop off in the skills. The difference was organization.. we didn't make any mistakes. But purely on the course they were the stronger team. Lucky for us 24 Hour racing is more than just on the course. My hats are off to those guys. I suspect they'd win 2 out of 3.

For me, this may be my last hyper-competitive 24 Hour event. I will probably do more, but not full-on. I can't say I enjoyed knowing I could put in a 56 minute lap and still lose time. I'd prefer to be able to enjoy it a little more. Last year I think I went faster with the skills/strength I had. This year I went faster but didn't quite race my potential.