PeterHaile

My Aunt Carole and Uncle Walter sent me another care package. It arrived on the 17th ,but I always check my mail when the desk is closed. I won’t have to swipe so much banana bread from the Caf. I am getting a cold, so I am taking lots of naps and downing huge quantities of orange juice. I have two rough drafts to write today, one for ethics and one for rhetoric. I am going to get them done early so I can get to bed early.

I have been eying an abandoned house that is off hickory nut gap road, and adjacent to the cross country course on hemlock hill. I want to find out who owns it and work out a deal where I can fix it up in exchange for extremely cheap/maybe free housing for next year. It is a really cool house and on a very nice secluded street. I’ll post pictures once were in October.

Note to parents: I have not taken work study this semester because most of my time is occupied with riding or homework or sleeping, I have been frugal enough with my money, and I am going to be selling more bikes soon. I would rather just pay the difference then add more stress to my life right now for a small sum of money. Mountain Bike and Cyclocross are my main seasons, I’ll see about the Spring.

In other news there is a crane lifting a huge pipe right outside my windows.

I rolled some air out of my rear ghetto tubeless setup ……again. Yarrrrrrrrrrrr!.
We had a team only race this morning, Without my flat experience my times for the laps were still 3-4 minutes behind Scott Stewart and Brad Perley. But that is not an unachievable amount of time, I hope to be as fast as them within a year.
I am about to give up and just use tubes because it is more reliable, and there are fewer thorns in North Carolina. Maybe I’ll invest in real tubeless wheels.
After racing Dual Slalom in Brevard I was inspired to spend an innordinate amount of time on our pump track.
I’ll take pictures at some point but for those of you who don’t know click here.
I can now manual (ride on one wheel) between lumps, and jump the tables. I’ve learned more about how to handle a bike recently then I have in a long time.
I’m so excited to race everything, I really want to progress in my Downhill/Dual Slalom/Pump Track/Dirt Jump skills. I know I can build fitness easily and predictably, I think I’ve got a better handle on the fitness side of things, but I’ve been wrong about things before.
LMC so far has mostly been about riding my bike, the classes are not bad, and I’m doing well, but I’ve learned more about cycling then academic related topics.
Also back at home New Belgium Cyclocross is starting back up READ ABOUT IT HERE.
 Wish I could be there to put heaping shovel fulls of pain on Skyler, Tyson and Heath.
Please comment!
I don’t know what to write about other than bike stuff.

Check out the very precise work that my friend Renold of Yipsan Cycles did in creating a new cyclocross frame to for me to ride, here.
Please comment on paint schemes, I am very very excited to ride this bike.
My buddy Travis has his looking timeless, here.
I plan on riding this bike forever.
I am going to sell my road and cyclocross bikes and take the parts I like to build this one, I’ll have two different wheelsets so I don’t have to change tires, and maybe in road season I’ll put a road fork on it to take advantage of better brakes, but otherwise I think it will be a much better situation for me. I’ll free up some capital, and I’ll have a bike that fits like a glove, and is unbelievably gorgeous. Thanks Renold!

I don’t know why. I think the original pictures were to big, I tried to delete those but it wouldn’t let me. I’ll try to resolve the issue. Otherwise it is only 10 days till a new month.

Sorry I’ve been neglecting my writing, I’ve been really busy. I had the one of the most fun weekends of my life in Brevard last week. I’m now racing everything Downhill, Dual Slalom, Short Track, and Cross Country of course my priorities are still on ST and XC; but I’ve been loving the gravity events.  I need to take more trail pictures, but everytime I bring my camera it is way to intense to stop and click the camera. One of the best things in being here is I hardly ever ride alone, at home I would get pretty lonely. I am also really tempted to go shuttling with cars on Sugar Mountain or Wilsons Creek on my off or easy days, I think it would help me on both the endurance and gravity fronts, besides being a blast. Now I am sorry I sold my big bikes. The food here is bland, breakfast needs work. It is always the same Potatoes, Pancakes, Eggs, Sausage, and Bacon. These are OK, except for the meat products ,but I would think I am safe speaking for the Cycling team in saying that we are glad they have a blender available for making smoothies. There are a few vegetarians on the team and I think I might go on another diet experiment, but this time I am not just going to eliminate meat, I’ll replace it with other food. Mom and Dad, I am in need of toe nail clippers, I was trimming them with my pocket knife, and cut a little to much. I am on the Mountain Bike Nationals T-Shirt Design squad, so I am pretty excited about that. We don’t have a races this upcoming weekend so we are going to work on our own trails and Dual Slalom course on Saturday; On sunday we are going to have our own race; One that Brian Sheedy says will be a major determining factor in deciding the nationals XC squad. This is because Nationals are here this year and our course demands different skills and fitness aspects then an average course. Sucess on other courses does not guarantee sucess on the home course. I am hopefull that I’ll make the squad, but I need to be reallistic in the fact that there are a ton of really, really fast guys here, there are at least 10 people vying for the 4 spots the USAC has limited teams to. It is a dumb rule in my opinion, because for most other schools it is not a problem, and at any other school the 6 people that won’t make the squad would be shoe ins. Oh well, cyclocross is coming and I am so jazzed about racing that there is no chance for burnout.   I am going to post some pictures and go eat.

This last weekend went by very fast. I really like the camaraderie of the squad, you really feel like you are a part of a whole, and you get to know people very well.

Evidently in the past few years the cycling team has gone way over budget, so we are trying to save money whenever possible. We eat an enormous amount of PB&J and Bananas, then we have one large and delicious meal on the way home. We had burritos at a place called barbaritos, I used my signature method of asking for extra ingredients with a LOT of extra rice. This pushes the stuffing out of the realm of a single tortilla and into two burritos.

The races themselves were fast, and fun.
I raced Short Track on Saturday Mornin’ the lap took about 2 minutes and was extremely non technical except for a little jump off a pipe in a corner, and if you get lapped you have to pull out. We started the race with maybe 30 A men, at the end of the race it was my 5 remaining teamates and myself and ONE other guy from Brevard who got fourth or something, it was a very, very fast race. The B mens was not as much of a blowout ,but I think they swept top three. The Womens A was went 1-2 for LMC with Carla and Allie.
Later in the day was the downhill, our downhill team is incredible, particularly Ben Hulse and Aaron Bradford. Ben is very creative in his lines and ended up winning the downhill easily. Aaron seems so calculated and has more handling skill then almost anyone I know. Aaron also won the mens A XC race on sunday, he can ride any kind of race at an elite level, he is an omnium rider. The rest of the squad also did well and didn’t get hurt.
The dual slalom was most fun to watch, and made me want to race gravity very much. My downhilling isn’t bad, but its not exceptional. I want to race downhill and dual slalom to hone my skills, so I can ride faster wtith less effort. I am going to go practice dual slalom with the South African later today.

The XC on Sunday went well with my teamates taking 1-4 in mens A. I was fith going back into the woods after 2/3’s of the first lap. I burped all my air out of my ghetto tubeless system, and because I had misguided faith in my methods neglected to bring a CO2. I ran a few miles till I got back to the bus. this put me in last, but we didn’t need the points so Brian Sheedy (tour of california KOM winner) said I should just ride at my own pace for the remaining three laps. So I fixed my flat and was on my way. I helped people with their mal adjusted bikes on the side of the trail and followed some of the girls on the team to help them with their mountain bike basics.

Overall a great weekend. I need to be more villagent in my picture taking because they didn’t turn out very well and I didn’t take very many. I’ll post all I have taken so far. More will come .

I am racing the short track at ETSU tomorrow and the cross country on sunday, I may race in the downhill and/or slalom if I feel like sticking around another few hours. It is really cool having the support of a team here. There is so much positive pressure to train, race, and enjoy life.
I just washed the my bike, all I need to do now is true the rotors and switch the tires the tires that I have now to the tires that my uber cool boss’s at Lee’s Heath Garvey and Tyson Kamann let me bring to the east coast.

My family sent me two boxes, including a camera, so pictures from this weekend will be up shortly.

Going to bed now,

Good Night

I rode 2 loops of the XC course in addition to climbing up Beech via dirt double track today, I really learned today that aerobic fitness is situation specific. I have been having trouble on our XC course since I arrived, usually I feel really confident in riding something as fast as I want; however the course is chopped up into small sections of either really steep uphill or really technical downhill. It has been hard for me to find a flow and really lay down some power, my technical skill learning curve has taken a major leap although I am still a fish out of water ( or should I say Mud.) when it comes to riding here with  finesse. The riding is different, but substantially harder than Colorado.
 Beech Mountain is more conventional to me and except for the flora is similar to some Colorado mtn. bike climbs. Albeit it is a road and has some ludicrously steep sections. I rode my cross bike today with 38×23 gear, however we went up the jeep trail which has tamer gradients than the road. I felt suspiciously good, but we were not nuking it. One of these days I’ll go all guns up the road to see where my times stand against the likes of  Lance Armstong. Lance Armstrong made Beech famous when he built himself into a cycling superstar on its slopes after surviving cancer.

Here are some stats on Beech Mtn.

Average grade of 8.9%
Max grade of 35% !!!!!!!
6 Km length
530 Meter gain

It is not as long as some climbs at home, but it sure is steep. The numbers below are in Meters

Thanks for all the emails, I’ll try to reply when I get the time.

In other news my good freind Renold Yipsan has started building a cyclocross frame for me,
this bike is going to be revolutionary. My foes….I mean competition… will be spinning circles in the dust because of this soon to be preeminent machine. I felt a little to violent right there so I am going to go pet some dogs, and help some old ladies across some streets.

Peter Haile