This weekend we raced the inaugural OZ MTB 3-stage race in Bentonville, Arkansas. If you’ve never heard of Bentonville , it’s truly the mountain bike capital of the world. There are 80 miles of trails running throughout the city, which seamlessly connect to over 500-miles of trails which spread over the bluffs and hollers of Northwest Arkansas. And since our last visit in October for Little Sugar, there is a new Bike Park ( Oz Trails Bike Park ) which features 20+ miles of gravity (downhill) trails and the first chairlift-served mountain bike park in Arkansas. Over the three days, we covered ~105 miles and nearly 10,000 feet of climbing across every type of terrain imaginable: slick roots, chunky rocks, steep descents, flowing single track, endless switchbacks and muddy technical trails that demanded full focus and commitment. The one word to describe our experience at the event was…..eventful. Pre Race On Wednesday, we flew from Greenville to ATL to XNA so it was a quick 2.5 hours of ...
For the past few weeks, I’ve been completely captivated by coverage of the Cocodona 250 - a 254 mile ultramarathon across Arizona with over 36,000 feet of elevation gain and a cutoff time measured in days, not hours. Watching runners push through exhaustion, sleep deprivation, heat, cold, dirt naps and hallucinations, I kept finding myself thinking, “That’s incredible. I want to do that!” But after a few days, I realized that I don’t actually want to run 250 miles. I don’t even want to run 50 miles. Truthfully, running 26 miles at the end of an Ironman feels long enough. What I was really drawn to wasn’t the race itself, it was what the race represented: challenge, grit, resilience, purpose, and the pursuit of something meaningful. This got me thinking that there are probably a lot of people like me who confuse being inspired by someone else’s finish line with needing to chase it themselves. There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by people doing extraordinary things. In many ways, ...