NPS rnd1 today

Well done to everybody that won, raced and supported. Fantastic job, some of you did better than you expected and some of you didn't perform as well as you hoped/wanted/intended to..
Its a tough old game and all the categories are being hotly contested.
XC racing is never easy or fun, its just a Gladiatoral Contest between you, your machine, the environment and 80 or so opponents. To come through unscathed is to be a winner.
That might sound a bit corny but at the end of the day your biggest battle is with yourself and how you deal with your victory or your defeat.
Remember its only rnd 1, theres another race in Killarney in 2 weeks. it only took us 2.5 hours to get there last year.
Don't break on me now...get out on spins..get in to the CLub League..pick yourselves up, find that steel inside you and get stuck in..don't put off going out on your bike because you don;t feel like it ..
get out there and train smartly, think about where you fell down, you have 2 whole weeks to train and rest and train like a *******. Then rest again..
Improve on today..
XC racing is hard and unrelenting, theres no magic formula for winning and if there was I'd be using it myself.
Prepare yourself..think about how you are going to improve and picture yourself winning the damn race,
Richie

As some of you know, I've a huge amount of racing experience in other disciplines, which I bring to bear whenever I go MTB racing. What Richie says is all true, of course! Probably the single most useful thing I've learned in racing (and it applies to everything), is that it doesn't matter what brought you to where you are know... it can't be changed anyway. But there is an optimal way to get from where you are no to where you want to go.. work it out and do it! That applies in races, and preparing for races. Race hard, but more importantly, race smart!