Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/1545984
10 Trail Rider www.TrailRider.com The week a er I came home from the En- duroGP, I finally made the drive over to Ross in Virginia, and with a few simple mechanical changes and a remapped ECU, we finally have a bike I want to ride, and I finally have a smile on my face. But I was in a really dark place for a good chunk of the season. Some people, given my on-paper EnduroGP success, might ques on how big a problem any of this truly was. First off, if you look at ANEC results here at home, I was ge ng beat by six and seven minutes, not even compe ve, in a series that I won last year. And with EnduroGP, I'll be honest, I never felt like I rode well. Ev- eryone else just had bigger problems. Mechan- ical DNF's, injuries, and massive inconsistency plagued my compe tors. I only had a couple of wins, fewer than last year, nothing spectacular. But I didn't go 1-1-9-8-4-2 either. And thank God for the extreme test. My hard enduro background gives me enough advantage over my compe tors in the extreme tests that I can afford to be a li le slower than I should be in the cross and enduro. The week between the double-header weekend in Portugal was ac on-packed, to say the least. Someday when I'm re red and nobody cares, maybe I can tell the whole story. But the cliff notes: We won some, we lost some, Shelby Turner made a guest appearance, her first me at EnduroGP, and we had some fantas c ba les on the bike. Off the bike, she talked me into trying to ask somebody on a date to cheer myself up, with mixed results. I learned how to surf; I did some training and coaching. There was a paperwork-related crisis at work with my remote job; I ended up doing 12 hours of pa- perwork and phone calls in the three days leading up to the race. Special tests were walked. Jokes were made. A compe tor of mine (who also happens to be my mortal enemy) tried to bait my suspension tech into a fis ight in the hopes of ge ng me disqualified. I accidentally missed the podium one of the days and nearly got a 500 euro fine for it. Had next-season mee ngs with a whole menagerie of teams and sponsors and team sponsors. Then of course, the stress of the racing and the champi- onship on top of it. Though my stress about wrapping up the tle was ever-present, nobody else seemed to realize that it was possible that I'd could win the tle two rounds early.