2007 year in review

2007 was a ho-hum year for me. I managed to pull out a couple of age category wins in a few of my races but an overall victory eluded me. I dipped my toe into the endurance scene and had some reasonable results and more importantly learned some valuable lessons, over and over. Hopefully next year I won't have to re-learn those lessons (must remember to eat early and often-duh!). 2007 also allowed me to really realize where my strengths & weaknesses are right now. I've always been a fairly good climber and even though I wasn't up to my personal best this year, I could still hold my own. My tech skills seem to be better than ever despite not actually riding my mountain bike all that often because of time constraints. I'll give the credit for my tech skills to the Dos Niner. Where my real weaknesses are is in sustained power. I have great max/repeatable power (for me at least) but my sustained power is VERY lacking. This first came to light during the Wilderness 101 where there are many sections of flatish fireroad sections where you can really hammer. I found that I was unable to maintain a good pace while riding alone in the wind and needed to rely on others to draft off of. It came up again in the Hampshire 100 where again I had to suck wheel for a large portion of the race on fast sections. This seems to be my biggest weakness and somehow I need to figure out a way to fix that for next year.

I've thought about getting a coach next year (an inexpensive/kinda hands off type package) to just help me focus my training a bit more. I probably wouldn't need too much hand holding but a little direction would definitely be nice. I don't plan to (check that, will not) buy a new bike next year so that is $3k less money I'll be spending next year so maybe $500-600 for coaching isn't so bad. I know for a fact that a coach would make me much faster than a new bike. My teammate, Andrew Frye, is a certified coach and talked about coaching me for fairly cheap so I have that as an option. Who knows what will happen at this point, all I really know is that the Joe Friel book helped me some last year but I don't seem able to focus enough on my own and could really use someone checking in with me on a weekly basis to be sure I'm getting my shit done and staying on target.