So it's been a couple of weeks since the last post and the 8 hour. I had a little spill unpacking the car and managed to shred my knee....nothing serious but it sure looks nasty. As bad as I want to say I was going 40km/h down some sweet single track and I went down it just isn't the case....basically fell out of the back of the van and landed on my knee. No impact to riding.

Speaking of riding I have been managing to get a fair bit of it in recently which is nice. The scale has noticed as well. Around 8 lbs in the past 2 weeks. It's a good start. The Keslo O-Cup is this weekend and since it is my home course I thought I'd at least go up and check the course out. I went yesterday late afternoon and took the full suspension with me. Pretty tricky course with just about every rock garden they could find thrown in. It was extremely hot as well....the fire road climb up was brutal, especially when exposed to the sun. Another strange thing were all of the inch worms. Tons of them....so many you could hear them hitting the leaves on the ground. It became a little frustrating when they would constantly land everywhere. The rocks were still a little slick with moisture from the humidity....course was pretty fun overall. I went again first thing this morning but rode up (about 75 minute ride). Was feeling a little tired but wanted to do a little experiment. This time I took the rigid Niner. It is about 5 lbs lighter but of course no suspension. I ended up riding the course about 4 minutes faster than the day before.....probably could have been faster if I was a bit more fresh. I think the lighter weight helped with the long climb as well as the constant acceleration. I didn't find Kelso to have too many high speed sections where the fully would benefit and most of the technical sections were slow so the suspension didn't make much of a difference. Too bad I don't plan to race Kelso, but if I did I'd probably use the Niner.

So I guess I'll have to think about lightening up the Niner even more and making it the short course racing bike. I wonder what I'll use at the 24 hour race?

Steve