March-April

The weather in Minnesota this spring has been super erratic with rain, snow, sleet, and 70 degree days, sometimes all in the same week. I dare not cancel my Zwift subscription just in-case we get another crazy weather system in the next month or so, with Minnesota you never know. Going from trainer workouts to riding outdoors and back again has been annoying but a necessary evil in order to be ready for all the racing coming on the horizon.

Barry Roubaix will be my official season opener this year and I will again be racing the 62 mile version as it ends up being the most competitive. This goes against the stereotype of most gravel races nowadays where the longest event is the Mac daddy, uber competitive distance. The race always seems to play out the same way being a massive fight for positioning during the first hour and a half through sandy MMRs. This is where the front group is decided and it is also where I end up being too far back and miss the move. Hopefully this doesn’t happen this year but you never know how things are going to play out until you are there in the heat of the race.

March 7-13

This year I took a jaunt with the UMN cycling team down to Knoxville, TN to go and ride road and gravel in the Smokey Mountains. We had about 5 days of riding tentatively planned during our week off in March but trips like this happen how they want to happen and the itinerary is always just a touch too ambitious.

The drive to get down to Knoxville from Minneapolis is 13-14 hours at best and in order to stay in daylight for as long as possible we left at 5:30AM from campus. Our caravan consisted of a Hyundai Sedan and a F-250 pulling a 25ft trailer full of bikes. I happened to be in the truck and quickly realized that I was going to have to drive with a trailer for the first time on this trip. In classic Minnesota fashion it snowed till we got halfway through Wisconsin. The rest of the drive was relatively uneventful but driving with a trailer through cities and the windy plains was a white knuckle experience for sure.

Once we actually got to our hotel and started riding the trip was absolutely amazing. The roads down there never get snow so they’re perfect year round