these I had to buy them for my daughter because they match the Velo Bella kit perfectly! It's hard to tell on the pictures, but the blue fade matches the jersey exactly.













Of course with carbon soles and well-made construction they're darn good shoes too ;-)

The Bar-H Bash

I think we more than doubled the town's population this weekend!

Chillin' before the race... 

"Team" bikes... 

"Team" car ;-) 

This is the look you get when the morning of the race you put on a new chain, make some derailleur adjustments, and right before her start she gets chain-suck... I fixed it but unfortunately it happened again during the race and I'm still not sure why...

Ready... set... GO! 

I wish I had shot this in focus, but the 11-12's and 10&U's all started together and he just dominated the start! 

Doing some serious haulin' butt! 

Leading the big girls! 

Crankin' on those cranks! 

After going off-course in one race, flatting in another and not feeling well in the last race, he was due for a drama-free race. He got it... sort-of...

Puttin' the pedal to the metal he outsprinted all of his competition down the long start and hit the trailhead first!

Feeling good he kept the pace high, leading everyone in his class and even some in the class above him for 3/4 of the race until he endo'd on one of the whoop-dee-doos that he launched off of. Bruised but not battered he recovered but quickly lost first and second place.

Regardless he perservered and closed the gap on the leaders and finished barely a minute behind them.

With this third, he's now solidly in third place in the state championships!

Disappointed that his maiden victory still eludes him after coming so close, he was excited by his performance and declared this also his "favorite-ever race"!

Since she clinched the state championships in her age group she wanted to race up with the "big girls" on the full adult course. It's a competitive class, with the top three girls ranked number 1 (and she is also the reigning national champion), 2 and 3 in the country! They're all sweet girls and friends of her, though, so she was excited about racing with them.

She is tiny for her age and if the course doesn't have much climbing or technical sections and a lot of power sections she typically can't outrun the bigger girls... and this was definitely more of a power course.

Unbelieveably, though, she led the first part of the race which was a complete surprise to me, and then rode the first steep climb which two of the other girls walked. Shortly thereafter, though she began to pay for the high pace and dropped back. A mechanical then dropped her to fourth, and then at about the half-way point she also ran out of water!

She didn't give up, though, and passed the reigning national champion for third and set her eyes on catching second place.

Her brother had finished his race so we got to a vantage point where we could see her on a couple of different places on the course.

With 3 miles to go I calculated that she had a two minute deficit...

Then with 1 mile to go it was down to a one minute deficit...

And then she must have put the afterburners on because in the last mile she erased that one minute deficit and she almost caught the second-place girl at the line! On the final stretch to the finish line she was sprinting so hard her rear wheel was losing traction! She was scored 1 second behind her in third, but more importantly she erased a two minute deficit in less than 3 miles on the power section of the course with no climbs!

Although third matches her worst-ever finish, considering the competition and how much she enjoyed coming from behind she said it was one of her all-time favorite races!

Chillin' with the chicks afterwards... 

I saw four of these at the race... one for a trauma and the other three for heat-related incidents... man it got hot fast!