Committed

Well the winter training is truly under way. DC and I have been meeting at the gym early in the morning before work. I think its crucial to have someone to keep motivation high. When you're doing it by yourself its too easy to skip it especially on a freezing, wet winter morning.

At the moment I am concentrating on strength so I am alternating between an upper body and lower body free-weight workout. I think its safe to say that motocross requires a good balance of both upper and lower body strength.

We planned to go riding on Sunday and have the infamous DC vs AT race. These are two of our mates who are into bmx and have both had the chance to learn and ride a motocross bike for one day. We came up with idea during the summer of making them race each other, one on my bike and the other on Cooper's bike.
Unfortunately the weather was terrible so it was cancelled. Fingers crossed that things will be better this weekend.

Punked!

Its been a great couple of weeks. I've signed up to the S10 Gym with DC and training has begun. We went for a nice swim the other night. It felt really good to be back in the water again. Swimming is such a fantastic form of exercise and I plan to do it regularly as I think it will help with my motocross and it will also help me when I go back to South Africa in December/January and get my surf on!

Here's a video of Travis Pastrana getting punked. It has no great significance to the motocross journey except for the fact that Travis is a legend in the eyes of most motocross riders. Enjoy!

All done!

Its been a great weekend. I went to the Sheffield Supercross on Saturday afternoon and watched practice and qualifying. It was very entertaining and I think in some ways better than the night event. Ryan Mason hooked me up with a pass so I was stoked. We saw some pretty horrific crashes but luckily no one was hurt. I then went to Hannah's 80's ice skate disco which turned out to be really fun! I just wish I had dressed up as everyone else looked awesome! After the skating I nipped back over to the Supercross and watched the main event before heading home to get some sleep before the race.

Sunday was a fantastic day. The weather was perfect riding weather, nice and sunny but still chilled so you never got too hot. I was a bit worried going into the race as I hadn't ridden for a while and I had done absolutely no fitness training for over 2 weeks. I went to sign up and there was pretty much a full gate, almost 40 riders. I knew it was going to be tough. Everyone had turned up due to it being the last race of the year and some fast school boys had also moved up to my class.

In my first two races I managed to get decent starts and ended up finishing 9th and 10th which I was happy with. The last race I got a bad start and had to work my way up from the back. I managed to get back up to 13th which gave me 11th overall for the day. I felt pretty good the whole day and didn't make any stupid mistakes. I also felt like my jumping had improved as I was nosing it in really nicely on some of the jumps. I still feel my strength and fitness is my biggest let down which is exactly why I will be working hard in the gym this winter.

I'll be starting gym this week so that gives me about 4 months until the first race of next season.