Enduro World Series - Crested Butte, Colorado PREP

RACE SCHEDUAL

Enduro World Series - Crested Butte, Colorado, USA - 3 Day Race - 31st/7 - 2nd/8

Enduro World Series - Whistler, Vancouver, Canada - 1 Day Race - 9th/8

Crankworx Whistler FOXAir DH - 1 Day Race - 11th/8

Crankworx Whistler Garbanzo - 1 Day Race - 12th/8

Enduro World Series - Sobrabe, Spain - 2 Day Race - 26th/8 - 27th/8

Enduro World Series - Finale, Italy - 2 Day Race - 3rd/9 - 4th/9

With a 3 months of bike parks and epic mountains ahead of me, the packing for this trip was important. Iv taken basically a second bike in spares all for that 'What If?' that lingers around in my head leading up to this trip. But with only 2 x 23KG checked in bags I had to get priorities right, so I packed the essentials. 

I had to say goodbye to my girlfriend of 1year and 10 months, This was tough, as she will be leaving to go on her own adventures to the USA by the time I get back. So goodbye for 5 months <3

It was a long travel day, 13hour Flight to Los-Angeles, Bus to Domestic Terminal, 5hour wait til my 3hour flight to Denver, Train to my baggage!?, Bus to Car hire to meet the lads Lindsay Klein, Timmy McCullough and Issac Denny. We jumped into our BEAST F150 and had a 1h 40min drive to Winter Park, Denver, Colorado.

Found it! #BillyMadison

 #PerfectForKids

The riding in Winter Park was amazing (VIDEO BELOW)

The visit to the Yeti Corporation in Golden, Colorado

A Woman set a land speed record of 140km/h down a hill in the snow. #78ToothCog #78

Years of history

Love land Pass, Colorado

The Altitude

Mt Buller, VIC, AUS - 5,922ft in village

Winter Park, CO, - 9,100ft in town

Keystone, CO - 9,280ft in town - 12,408ft at summit

Crested Butte, CO - 9,375ft in town - 12,162ft at summit

To put it into perspective, iv always felt the altitude when going to Mt Buller, lungs hurt, short of breath, and when it comes to sprinting a bike, 'tunnel vision' would be my word of choice.

At Winter Park and Keystone! Its all the same except much more, slight tunnel vision can be felt just climbing up a hill, lungs and legs hurt, and the  sprint efforts...that was an experience, I felt like a kid from fat camp that had to sprint with his mouth shut.

Crested Butte

The Crested Butte Trails were interesting at first, High speed, Foot wide narrow, and can only see a couple of meters ahead with the outside of the trail being covered by flowers upto your handle bars which you hit non stop, to be honest, not that fun, just epic scenery. But it turned out that all the stages of the race were a 20min drive away from the town of Crested Butte.

The practise days were long. On the Wednesday the course got released at 8am so we decided what we wanted to do and headed off at 9am to practise stage 2 then stage 5 and 8 in the after noon. We got to the liaison that goes upto the stage of stage 2. "Ah yeh should take us take 45min to climb" 1h25min later of walking up steep 'Hiking' trails we got the stage of stage 2. It was a good 15min stage down a long open field down a rut of rocks, then BAM into a 30second climb that we got off and pushed :/ (It was steep! and at altitude) then we had to ride out to where Timmy was waiting with our shutttle (2 hours later). We then found another way up the hill that was a lot easier. We did one more run that was only a 45min Ride/Push to the top. We got home for lunch at 4pm 0_o

We then headed out to the next stage for practise, Issac and I went shuttled so we only got 1 practise run, other guys got 2. By then we got home at 7:45pm and then rode out to stage 8 got to bottom at 8:15pm with a 30min climb to our accommodation, THANKFULLY a polar bear named Shaun was picking up Grubby Graves and his side kick Richie. So we hitched a lift up the mountain via the grocery store.

We got home, starting cooking straight away... finished eating at 10pm

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