fitness

Yesterdays gncc was old school. It was just an old fashioned battle of who trained harder and who could dig deepest. Three hours on sand is bad, and its made even worse when the parts that aren't whooped out are covered in these giant palmettos that feel like riding on conrete blocks. I didn't realize how bad it would be until David Knight rolled into the finish with a giant lead. I figured he was cruising to the finish. But the guy was exhausted. Just spent. He told me the problem was that if you went too slow the track was actually harder, so he had to keep pushing. Then I knew the rest of the guys would be in trouble. Sure enough a huge battle came barreling into the finish next, with Jimmy Jarrett, Garrett Edmisten and Barry Hawk waging war through the final turns. They finished in that order, but Jarrett and Edmisten were totally spent on the podium. Edmisten, in fact, could barely even get up after basically collapsing off of his machine at the finish. Everyone was whooped.

I felt bad for the guys, but it was cool in a way to see a race that really came down to guys just laying it all out there. Whoever was strongest, fittest and dug deepest did best. That's old school.

What a Champion

Big news: Tomorrow night (Tuesday) I'm leaving to go to Japan (yes, JAPAN!) to cover this weekend's final round of the JNCC Series (that's Japan National Cross Country). Charlie Mullins, Rodney Smith and Jason Raines have been invited to race, and yours truly will be there with a lap top and a camera to cover it all. It's kind of old-school to me, not having to do any announcing and instead just being a reporter, but lucky for me I don't speak the language. So I get to enjoy this.

So I'm rushing around getting ready today, and I get an IM that I didn't have time to answer regarding David Knight. The big man is now the GNCC Champion. What we have learned here in the never-ending Knight versus Juha battle is that they're both able to win the GNCC title, so there's just more of a dead heat there. But this year has really shown everyone the difference between the two men, and I'm sure the fans, KTM and the competition sees that.

Who is better. I have no idea. I've said again that Knight is more of the Stewart and Juha more the Carmichael, with Knight perhaps possessing more total jaw-dropping skills and Juha having a more robotic absolutely no nonsense unstoppable sense like Carmichael. On his best day, Stewart may beat RC and Knight might beat Juha, but for a whole season it seems like the consistency of the other would win out (it has for RC. For Juha, we'll never know).

Anyway, another key difference came out in the IM session. Knight has had troubles this year with his mechanic that led to some issues with his bike. He's not kept that secret and has no worries, mate, about telling people about it. He hasn't trashed the old mechanic or the team, but he hasn't kept the dirty laundry behind closed doors (I just paired up two awesome cliches there).

So does that make Knight cool or is he a jerk? Should he reward KTM by saying "everything is awesome I love these guys?" or should he have spoken his mind, and instead said "listen if you don't give me a mechanic up to my standards I'm going to let the public know, so give me what I want!"

Which is the better way to do it? Like Knight versus Juha, we'll never know.