You're A Peeing? No...European!

So, we had one Mr. Richard Geng (the German sensation of Fitchburg '06) visiting Burlington last weekend. He and his girlfriend came to Burlington after visiting another friend down in Southern Vermont. They were just here for a day and a night, but it was fun. Helen and I and the two Germans went to see American Gangster on Saturday night. It was a great movie. Its long (2 hours 40 minutes) but the story is really interesting and I'd definitely recomend it. They stayed over at my sisters apartment and then we took them over to Bruger's Bagels the next morning. Dan and Erin met up with us and we all talked about biking and bike racing way to much. It was fun. Richard's girlfriend is actually a physical theropist for the T-Mobile mens bike racing team. As in Tour de France and all that jazz. They ended up heading back to Boston early though because of the huge snow storm that was coming (and has since made the skiing amazing!)

Then, the next day I got a call from Sasha. He is in search of a road bike to send back to Belarus to his dad. His dad was a bad-ass racer back in the day, and is getting back into riding. I heard he was on the USSR "A" squad back in the 1970/80's. For those of you who don't know, that essentially means he was a Tour de France level rider. The USSR had the best amateur team in the word back then. Sasha and I also talked about Sasha's winter visit to Vermont. We're going to do some x-c skiing like last year, but some downhill skiing as well this year. Should be good.

Speaking of skiing, the first races of the year are this weekend. The NYSEF Opener on Saturday in Lake Placid, NY - and the Craftsbury Opener on Sunday in Craftsbury, VT. It is going to be a great weekend. I was out skate skiing this morning over at the Catamount Family center with my friend Anja and I had an "ah-hah!" moment while skiing. I sit a little bit too much in the "back-seat" while skate skiing and all of a sudden really shifted my weight forward by bending more at the ankle and pushing my hips forward. That change really made things a lot better. Its really interesting how long you can do a sport and keep tweaking things and trying to improve.

Here's a seasonal picture from Richard training last year in South Africa (a popular place for German Pro's to go train). He was sporting the CCB colors on this day of training.