Pre-Race Rubber Ritual

Tires, tires, tires. If you ask me the tire is certainly the most important component after the frame and brakes. I'm an over-thinking, note taking, Excel crunching, relentlessly habitual offender when it comes to my tires. I always take close note of  how they do on particular genres of trail, different weather conditions, pressures, courses, ect. I track my mileage on my tires, my results with tires, my feelings towards them...their behaviors, likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses. I know everything there is to know about everything regarding my tires. I stress each race about which tires to run-fast or slow, safe or fast, gonzo or grandma. So what's with my decidophobia come race day?

It's come to my attention that 100% of the time come race day I have erred on the side of "better safe then sorry" and run my go to combo for pretty much anything any course can throw my way. For the umpteenth time I spent yesterday and today weighing the pros and cons, asking around about conditions in Ellicottville, reading over their weather history for the past week, mulling my options, ect. Once again last minute I finally made the decision to leave the Renegade home and run my  Captain/FastTrak combo. Then it hit me a few minutes ago while making my weekly tire shuffle-"You dumb ass you do this every week!"

Ellicottville tomorrow morning for my first Duathlon, the Dirty Duathlon. I'm pretty excited. My teammate Doug's gonna have some extra fast for breakfast and rip out the run portion, then I get to shred a couple laps with my mtb on a glorious course to finish it out for us. Hopefully we'll do pretty well. It's kind of funny...two mtber's showing up at a Duathlon on the same team...but hey, we should do twice as well on the mtb part right?!?!