On The Pegs January 2018 - Volume 3 - Issue 1 | Page 100

On The Pegs
Last year Freixa beat you. What did you do
over the winter to improve?
I worked on a lot over the winter. I would say
that the biggest thing was probably mental be-
cause in 2016 when I heard he was coming over
I knew what he had done in the past and I think
mentally I was beat before we started. So the big-
gest thing was getting over that and just trying to
enjoy riding. That really helped take the pressure
off a little bit and just let me ride without think-
ing that I have to win or else. Mentally that was
the biggest challenge to just have the confidence
to know that I’m capable of beating him, since I
didn’t feel that I was the year before. A lot of that
was due to Ryan Young having the confidence in
me. During the off-season he just told me, ‘hey,
we’re going to win again’. It was maybe at that
time tough for me to believe but after he said that
I’m like, well, I’m going to do everything I possibly
can to try to win again. A lot of that was spending
a lot of time in the winter riding outside. We had
a pretty mellow winter. The ground was freezing
and thawing a lot, but I was riding in those worst
possible conditions more than I had in the past. I
had always ridden no matter what the conditions
were, but this year we just had a lot of weather
that allowed me to ride outside more. We didn’t
have a lot of big snows where you just couldn’t
go anywhere. It was more like a couple inches of
snow or just really, really soft mud. So, just riding
in those conditions and figuring out how to find
traction where there is none. I spent a lot of time
out there in the woods by my house. You never
know if it’s going to pay off, but this year it actual-
ly did with the conditions in Rhode Island. So I’m
P 100
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