Rocky Mountain Devo Camp Day 2

Day two at camp and we got down to business today.  One of the main focuses of the camp, as it was last year, is the Ute Valley XC race.  This year it happens to be part of the national tour- so its bound to be a pretty big race with some good national competition.  Since it is an important part of camp, today was spent checking out the course.

One really nice thing about Colorado Springs is that you can get virtually anywhere around town via recreational paths.  Colorado College is an 8 mile ride away from the race venue, and we were able to spin over to the venue hitting virtually no roads...just awesome.  So this morning we cruised over to the venue, of course checking out some trails along the way.  Once at the venue we broke everybody up into 4 groups and worked on riding the course first to get a feel for the difficult sections.  Once we finished  a lap we headed out again and whatever section someone had difficulty with we hung out and practiced it until the riders were all comfortable.  One particular section was right at the beginning of the lap as it was a pretty technical rocky downhill section.

The majority of the morning was spent riding around the course, talking about good places to pass, places to drink, sections to be ready for.  We finally rolled back to College for lunch and had a little down time before the afternoon skills session.  In terms of fitness and physical exertion, this was pretty low key- which was good since we were riding for a solid 3 hours in the morning.  Instead the afternoon focused on basic bike handling skills.  It was a surprise for me coming into camp to find that practicing and developing skills is really the focus of camp, and is really the direction that rider development is heading.  Fitness will come later on, but being able to develop great bike handling skills right away they are finding is much more beneficial.

So the rest of the afternoon was spent running drills like learning to bunny hop, riding in groups, doing water bottle hand offs, and straight line riding exercises...all topped off with a little game of team bike basketball (not really a good name for it).

After the skills session it was back to college to review the race course again, which we did first by recalling everything from memory.  Then after dinner the kids got to watch the GoPro video I shot of our lap pre-ride earlier (its 20 minutes long...I doubt anyone wants to see that plugged in here) cleaned the bikes and got ready to race tomorrow.

We'll have some Cat 2 riders heading out early with one coach to be there early for their 9:15 start, I'll head out with the Cat 1 riders and another coach a little later for our 11:00 start.  I actually get to say "our" start on this one, because it sounds like all the coaches will be freed up for the cat 1 race, soooooo they don't need much from me....soooooo I that means that since he offered for me to race I better take advantage of it.  So yeah, I'll be hoping into the Cat 1 race as well (even though I've bee racing pro/open at home, I've been doing that under the "open" class, here the race is strictly those with a pro license).

Much more to come!