Jay Richards

With a huge wedding over the weekend, it was amazing I snuck down with Jake, Jon and Jens to St Cloud for the skills clinic. Friday was pretty much 6am to midnight, including frying walleye for 150 and keeping bonfire stoked until the moon came up. Get ready for race? Sure.
Last year I had a hard time "racing" on that course and with Jake's desire to ride/race together and a little slacking on my part in the motivation department, a more conservative start was in order. If Fisher would of been on the line, might of had a different race plan as things were pretty close in the overall but he was off doing imporant things like honeymooning with his wife, I am told. Off the start, Jake had trouble clipping in and I looked back to see if he had other troubles but no, so we rode near the back and moved up a few spots before the singletrack. Once we started the full lap, I had SKJ (male version) and Luke Nelson in my sights and was looking back to see if Jake was going to get on my wheel. He was just a little ways back with Barry, McBurney, Hinkens and maybe Heath. Hard to tell...not a course you want to be looking back.
Anyways, he wasn't coming up so I sat up a bit and joined their group and we pretty much rode the rest of the race together. McBurney attacked on a ski trail section at the end of lap two, I think, and we let him go and Heath made a nice attack as well on the end of the third lap, I think, that we didn't respond too. The plan was to just ride steady, being we figured the race would be over two hours, and then go hard on the last lap. The last lap, Jake went to the front on the singletrack and he rode his pace and I tried not to say much and irritate him other than when we were riding the new super tight stuff. Jake almost caught Heath and ended up 8th for his second top 10 finish in Expert. I was happy with the race and fun to ride with Jake. Most of our rides are interval like stuff or just easy riding so fun to do race pace thing. Pretty much hopped in the car and left as advertised and added to the probably 10,000 miles we have put on this summer of racing.....whew!...ready for some isolation in the deep woods. Nice job to Kris, Kyia and others for all the work and efforts to pull off the race. Picked up Jack at bowling alley who stayed home for birthday party and made it home 30 minutes with some change before serving. Jumped in the pork roast carving station and sliced away for 35o fine folks. Slicing away and felt like a bear jumped on my back....it was Chico as referenced in last post. Awesome. Fun catching up on old times and he was rattling off names or runners of years past. Lots of teachers since father of the bride was teacher in DL (including for me, Sociology in HS) and local folks including a few of Jake's "girlfriends" that had Jonell on A game but shes always on her A game. Helped with rest of evening stuff and called it a day at 2:30am.

The "worst" coach I had in high school and ever for that matter.



No slowing down with Sunday Smorg.




Sunday afternoon pretty wiped and only way to keep moving was to head out to the woods and work on the new singletrack loop we have been working on. Lars made some good progress when he was here and we are really taking our time, getting everything right, we hope, the first time and maximizing the terrain and acreage we have to work with.

Jack working on a ironwood. An ironwood this size is rare as my dad has cut probably thousands over the years. They don't lose their dry brown leaves til end of Feb and not fun catching them with the soft wax so we are cutting the sapplings constantly.Jake testing out one of the course features. Bypass for this of course.
Amazing how much the trees have changed the past 3-4 days. A great time of the year for sure. This ski trail used to cross the driveway but super high risk area having skiers cross the road after screaming down a hill. Jake has his eye on some stuff that would make a nice long downhill leading to the start of the new section.