Monday, October 18, 2010

Camping, Training and My dad coming for a visit.

Last Friday I went camping with some of my friends in the woods near Yangji. It was really fun. We cooked steak over the camp fire and the weather wasn't too cold. Saturday I went for a 5 hour bike ride with Danny and my Korean bike friend Chang Jo who I ride with every week. It was a really hard course and the ride was only 11okm but felt a lot longer. There were a lot of hills and false flats but it was a really pretty route. My dad is in Korea this week for business meetings so I got to meet him on Sunday in Seoul. We went to the Korean War Memorial and had lunch before he took the KTX (like a bullet train) to Busan for a diabetes conference. It was a busy but fun weekend. This sunday I have a race thats a 70km TTT!

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Wedding trip and Tieing in a bike race

I have been pretty busy the last 2 weeks with work, driving all over the place and trying to ride when I can! Last weekend one of my good friends from the Korean summer camp I worked at 3 years ago got married. Her wedding was way down in Busan which is on the south coast of korea and about a 4 hour drive from my place. I drove down with 3 other people from the camp. Korean weddings are pretty fast this one was only 30 minutes and afterwards they have a big buffet lunch instead of a party. Busan is famous for sea food and they wedding was actually in the same building as the huge fish market! The buffet was awesome! probably the best buffet I have ever eaten at in my life. It had tons of raw fish, sushi, crab and even raw beef!!! The weather was good so after the wedding we went swimming in the ocean!
This past weekend was busy too. Saturday I volunteered with my camp organization and it lasted way longer than I thought it would! Anyway it was pretty fun. I had a race on sunday so I drove down and met my team at the condo afterwards but I didnt' get there till 10pm and I went straight to bed! The race yesterday was really cool. It was an mtb road race held in a county next to the ocean. The weather was awesome like 70 sunny and light wind. The course was great too. It was about 30 percent rode 5% single track 20% dirt road and the rest was on one lane cement farm roads through rice paddies. It had one small hill that was off road with a single track descent. There were about 600 people in the race. The course was basically flat except the small hill and since there wasn't much off road I rode on slick tires. It was really fun. My teammates and I composed4 of the 7 in the lead group until 2 of my teammates crashed into each other resulting in one getting dropped! The last 2 km were super crazy narrow fast and with a lot of sharp turns. My teammates pre rode but I didn't. I ended up finishing just a head of my teammate for the win in our age group and 3rd out of everyone (but the prizes and points for the team comp were all based on categories not on overall). The race was done on net timing with chips and I started .2 seconds ahead of him and beat him by .2 seconds at the end so we had the exact same time! It was ok though since we are teammates. The prize was rice I got 180 pounds of it! Our team ended up getting 3rd in the team comp(which factors in every category and the teams that beat us had about 30 people each!) which was good for ~300 dollars. It was an awesome course though. There is one more similar race this year. It looks like I will have 4 more races this year. In 2 weeks there is a team time trial that some how also has an invidual race in it and the rest will be mtb road races like this one.
My dad is coming to Korea this week for business meetings so I get to see him on Thursday and sunday! Im excited. i need to keep up my training so I can keep on getting good results in the races too.