THE 24 HOURS OF MOAB....

I guess it's safe to say the drinking may have gotten the best of me this eve. Tomorrow, I am on my way to the 24 Hours of Moab. Not as a racer, not as support, not to party (I think), but as a bicycle race announcer. Not one of you understands what this means to me nor do I expect you to understand it. After a killer day today fishing the Roaring fork river with one of my best old fishing and skiing buddies from my old Summit County days who now has a very large figure salary position with Johnson and Johnson, who just happened to have biz in Grand Junction and is from Michigan (so we watched the Tigers knock the Yankees out of the playoffs at the Wagon Wheel Inn in Mesa after a several beers with the locals instead of the planned fishing on Grand Mesa due to a snow storm here and everywhere else up high in Colorado), I head to the fabled grounds of the 24 Hours of Moab, a race and place I used to base my entire cycling season around trying to race and win. A place where the taste of a team victory was on the brink of my lips, leading going into the final lap of racing after 24 stinkin hours, only to have another team snatch victory so cruelly away from us at the stroke of midnight, fuckers. A race and place where I supported solo Roan Exelbly, an unknown from South Africa who road with Josh Tostado and Tinker Juarez for eight hours until the night took the wax out of both of us and he eventually finished third. Support is so much harder than actually racing.

So now I get to head back to the roots of 24 Hour Mountain Bike racing in Moab, and call the action, and i can't wait, and it's going to be something special, and I hope I can make it something special for the riders and racers that come to the desert this year, because it's a special race in a special place. I hope I get to ride the course tomorrow with friends, because all though it is not the greatest mountain bike ride in the world, it's a great race, and the course is a classic, and knowing it intimately makes a difference.

See you Behind the Rocks. Hell yes.