Monday, May 31, 2010

3 day vacation and a bike race!

I ended up getting a 3 day vacation last week because of a school trip! I didn't want to let it go to waste so I took a trip to Songnisan national park with my friend Ji Won who is working at the summer camp I worked for here 2 years ago. It was awesome! A really beatiful park! We did a hike up to a huge rock on top of the mountain on Thursday afternoon then camped out at the park Thursday night. Friday we hiked a little bit more and then headed back to Jiwon's place (which is about 1 hour from my house by car). I did pre race warm up ride around his around his house(which had awesome roads for road riding!) and then headed home to get some sleep. Saturday I did a 100km road race in Hwaseong city which is about 1 hour from my place to the west. It was a completely flat 5km oval used for testing cars. we did 20 laps. It was sunny and now very windy. It was also my first race with my new road racing team. My friend Andre loaned me a really nice Stork to ride in the race. It was a pretty aggressive race with lots of attacks. At one point midway through the race me and my teammate scott got in a break of about 10 guys that I thought would stick(we had a big gap and were off for about 5 or 6 laps but we got brought back with 4 laps to go. Scott attacked again with 2 to go and managed to get a way with one other guy and take the win! They only paid the top 3 guys and I tried to sprint but ended up finishing 8th. The race was fun but I guess if I wanna win money road racing here I better start training more than twice a week since every race seems to only pay the top 3 guys rather than top 10 or 20 like races in the US. It was my first race with my new team but it looks like there aren't anymore road races for at least a month! I have a mountain bike race in the north part of Gyeonggi do in 2 weeks though. I gotta try to ride more this week so I can be more competitive. Sunday I went to a play too. I went with one of my friends to a place called Daehagno. (it means college street). we went to a korean play called liar it was a good test of my korean ability I was actually able to understand about 70 % or so of the play. I was happy but I still have a long way to go in improving my korean abilities. After that I ate my first hamburger in like 6 months! The was extremely nice last week too (low 70s every day and sunny). Ill try to post some pictures later on this week of the race and the national park.

1 comment:

Joey said...

Podium or nothing, now eh? Sounds like PM's words from last year at Grandview are coming back... Nice job on the 8th place!