Sea Otter

Last week while thousands of BYU students were taking advantage of reading days and finals week, I drove to California.

What better way to prepare for the tests that would determine a large part of my semester grades than to go spend some time somewhere a lot warmer than Utah to race my bike. It makes more sense if you think about it while out riding bikes...


So Tuesday, right after my last class, I took off for California. It was nice drive, other than the sand storms in Utah.
I got up early each day to ride and enjoy the beautiful California scenery.

That wasn't the beautiful scenery, that's just me. Here's some pretty scenery.
My friend Kirsten was kind enough to let me stay with her for a week in Sacramento, about 3 hours away from Monterey.

Thursday we headed down to Monterey for the race, which turned out to be probably the first sunny day of Sea Otter history.

After getting dropped like a sack of rocks at the road race last year, this year I decided to do the circuit race. Kyle tore it up in the circuit race last year, getting 3rd place. The Sea Otter circuit race takes place on the Laguna Seca race motorsport race track, home to several famous races including the famous 1996 race featuring "The Pass"

It was really cool to race bikes on such a sweet course. Each lap was about 2.2 miles and invloved 200 feet of climbing. 200 feet of climbing might not sound like a lot, but it was a pretty dang steep hill. This is the altitude profile of the entire race:

So I lasted about 4 laps with the group before getting dropped right at the top of the hill. I figured I'd driven almost 1,000 miles to race the thing, so there was no way I was going to drop out. I ended up getting 24th of the 30 guys that finished. And that's out of the 55 that started. I didn't feel too bad.

At least I finally got some sweet pictures of me on the road (thanks to Kirsten)

I was going a lot faster in that last picture than you can tell...

Anyway, it was a ton of fun. Getting dropped wasn't, but overall it was a sweet course, a great race, and awesome company.