Teva Mountain Games MTB Race Weekend

After going to Bryce's sister's Master's graduation in Denver Friday night, we woke up early Saturday morning, packed up the car, picked up crazy Aussie Josh Carlson and headed to Vail to participate in the 10th Annual Teva Mountain Games. Click on the logo above to check out the website and the numerous fun events they had going on all weekend.

One of the events for the weekend was a cross country mountain bike race that had A LOT of prize money to win. Of course, I had no intention on winning any of it as all the big hitters were there, but it's always fun to be at big races with big crowds and lots of hype!

Let's just say my race went pretty much exactly how I expected it to go. I started out really hard for 10-15min trying to hang with the fast girls then began seeing stars and knew it was time to shut it down. The professional men and women had 4 laps on a 5 mile course that had about 1000ft of climbing per lap that started at an elevation of 8600ft. Not only am I skeptical about racing yet, I'm definitely not ready to be hammering at altitude so I put in a solid effort and had a great training day. I also made for some good laughs in the feed section since I was probably the only person coming by that was able to get several words out!

The expert men and women had 3 laps of the course and since it was Bryce's hometown race, he had to give it a go. He's been extremely busy with work the past couple weeks and has only ridden a handful of times, but he finished quite respectably and even got an interview over the loud speaker when he crossed the line since a long time friend was commentating the race :)

Although he didn't race, Tony came up for the weekend to help out and hang out!

I had to post this video because this was by far the most attended event at the Teva Games. The rubber toy started around 3 feet high and eventually went up to 6.5ft before they crowned the winning pooch.

Not a bad view of the start/finish area...and of Josh, Judy and Tom too!

As with every weekend we head to the mountains, Momma Bingham had a full fajita dinner prepared with homemade poppyseed cake for dessert...mmm! We hit the hay early that night so we could go cheer Bryce's dad on at his first bike race in 15 years. He was participating the road timetrial and finished 8th in his class! We're all so proud of him :)

After watching Brent go by, we decided to head up to Nederland on our way back to Boulder to ride mountain bikes since hardly anything in the Vail area was rideable due to immense amounts of snow. Ironically, almost the entire ride in Ned was dry except a few snow drifts which Josh thought would be funny to leave his bike in for a bit! Good times, good times.

Josh is an absolute NUT on a bike (maybe it's because he used to race Factory Honda Motocross), but nonetheless, these videos are quite entertaining.

And round 2...

Nothing like another amazing weekend with great people. I may not be riding fast or performing well right now, but as Scott Tietzel said earlier, at least I'm out there and not sleeping 23 hours a day again :)