Trans Rockies Challenge - Done!

I should be in bed, but instead I'm sorting through pictures (I'll post 'em soon, you can find a raw dump in my Flickr stream), drinking beer, and listening to this which they played every night at the awards ceremony (warning: very cheesy video. Your best bet is to let it play in a background tab).

Trans Rockies was HARD, way harder than I expected it to be; Jen and I are both pretty strong, and we finished 19th out of 30 teams that started in our category (Open Mixed).

I didn't realize going in that most people train for at least a year for it; I did it mostly as a lark, and had an absolute blast, but it was incredibly humbling to go from winning at adventure racing to being back-of-the-pack.

I'll try to do a better write-up in the coming weeks, but the whole thing is basically impossible to describe; it was hard and amazing and inspiring and scary and frustrating and rewarding and I'm a better rider by at least an order of magnitude from when I started. I also have an idea of how much I have to learn about the sport, but I think I really started to get why people are so passionate about it, and am looking forward to getting better and being able to RIDE stuff, not just survive it.

Anyway, great people, great race, great course, hard, hard, HARD work. I loved it.