I've been riding bikes all my life, starting with learning how to ride without training wheels in my garage (taught by my sister) when I was probably 3-4 years old. When I was in the 6th grade, I got my first full sized mountain bike, a Gary Fisher Wahoo. I rode it constantly with my next door neighbor Joan. In 2002, a friend of mine Mark Marrama took me to my first mountain bike race at Lake Sonoma put on by a local race promoter "Billy Cross Racing". I was hooked. I road my Wahoo beyond repair in under a year by putting hundreds of miles on it on our local trails here in Montclair (Oakland, CA). I continued to race mountain bikes at local races, just for the fun of it, until I got into high school at Bishop O'Dowd. In my freshman year, I raced a full mountain season with the Northern California High School Mountain Bike Racing League, this proved to be a tough year, but one where I developed tremendously. I got a road bike in the beginning of the 2004 summer. Around fall of that year I meet the Tieni Duro team for the first time.
I spent 2005 mostly focusing on the mountain, but also racing a fair bit of road in the early season. I ended up having a pretty successful mountain campaign including two wins, and 3 2nds as well as 3rds. I also won a week long mountain bike development camp in which I was racing against guys that were one and two years older than me.
2006 is shaping up to be another year of intense development and hopefully some amount of success. I will be focusing entirely on the road this year racing with Tieni Duro's Elite team. |
