All in?

I'm officially in for some pain.

I'm not down with this due to scheduling. (and I'm bummed)

I'm also down with this.

Oh ya, and this one to.

Some good early season fun built in this year. My only problem is lack of any long rides. 3 hours has been the single longest ride this year. I've only done that once outside and once on the trainer. Beyond that I've got a lot of 2 hour rides in. That may be ok prep for some things, but I definitely need to hit a few long days before Almanzo rolls around. My goal is to beat last years time of 8 hours. Not getting off course for 6 miles and taking less than a 35 minute break at the checkpoint should be good for taking at least 45 minutes off my time right there.

Beyond that, I need to set down and evaluate the IORCA schedule for the year and single out some important races as I can see right now there is no way I'll be able to race everything listed. I'm hoping to hit maybe 6-7 of the races in that series. Add in possibly doing a road race or two and some local crits and it's a damn full season considering the things I also need to get done before fall rolls around.

So how is my fitness you ask? Well..... Actually, I think I'm probably as fit right now as was at any point last year and maybe even more so. I know I've done a ton more focused riding and spent more hours on my bike than ever before. I just don't know what kind of snap I have. Another big question in my head is how I'll feel once the ride goes past the 2-3 hour mark. Even though our gravel grinders from last winter were pretty slow, they gave me some experience with going long in the saddle. All in all, it looks to be a fun year. I think I'll be competitive moving up to Cat 2 (the old sport class) in MTB and starting as a Cat 5 on the road until I get enough mass starts to move up. I guess that means I should go ahead and drop the $ to get my license coming now.