Monday, September 22, 2008

3 Week Makeup-2 of 3

Aight, and now onto some other events...
CYCLOCROSS - CYCLOCROSS - CYCLOCROSS
Two weekends ago I got the entire family out to the first Cyclocross race of the season, Pain on the Peak. Firstly, I would like to thank Portland Velo & OBRA for putting on such an awesome event. The course was great and everything seemed to go great. I personally started the day of with some serious mechanical issues that were going to put me out of racing. Luckily for me though, cyclocross is filled with Amazing people. I had two different teams offer me a front wheel to race on. A HUGE thanks to teams Ironclad & Veloshop. I ended up riding on Brad Urban's (from the Veloshop) pit wheel. I know Brad through the ski patrol and he saved the race for me by allowing me to race on his only pit wheel. I did really good for myself at this race. I continue to learn new stuff and advance my skills every race. I got 11th, which has been my best rank in any cross race that I've done so far, & Laird did awesome getting 12th in his newly upgraded Category B race: Results.
Here are a few photos from OregonVelo. This guy is at all of the cycling events that I have raced in. He takes some awesome photos & here are some of them from the super dusty Pain on the Peak race:
From Cyclocross

Here's a shot of Brad (the guy who loaned me a front wheel for the race)
From Cyclocross

And here's Laird Novak representing Team Vista Ridge.
From Cyclocross

God damn do I ever love Cross!!! The Cross Crusade begins October 5th and I'm hoping to hit as many of the races as possible. I hope that the Cross bug hits you all this fall and I hope to see you guys out at some of the races! Here's a link to the cross web album online: Cyclocross Photos.

- Ski Patrol -
Along with the cross season starting, the snowy mountain season is also upon us. I woke up bright and early on a cloudy & raining Sunday morning yesterday to head up to the mountain for some training. We did our annual Chair Evacuation, Rope Rescue and Avalanche Transciever training up at Summit on the base of Mt. Hood. That's correct, the lowest in elevation resort at the base of the mountain is name Summit. The event went good and I got to see some friends that I haven't seen in awhile. I sadly had to let the Patrol Chief know about the fact that I won't be able to patrol as much this year. With the new addition to the family, work, going back to school, cyclocross and the other commitments that I have, the mountain time is going to have to decline a bit this season. I'll still patrol this season just not as often as I have the past few years. We have to keep our training up-to-date each year in the horrible case of a chair breaking down and us needing to evacuate everyone from it. Here's a shot of the prior weeks session of chair evac taken by my great pal, fellow patroller, fellow cyclocross racer & new parent Brian Barker:

From Blogger Pictures


That's been the past few weekends for us. I went to a Cyclocross Clinic during the week two weeks ago and that was great. I learned some great skills that I think are really going to help my cross season this year. So there's cross racing, patrolling, doctor's visits with Cyrus, a bunch of other random stuff and some random house work as well to tack onto our list of stuff. But I'll get into some more of that in the next post...


Sincerely Yours,
-The Rodriguez Bunch-

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