Long Offseason, New Website!

Hey Everyone, this is my first blog post on the newly updated website, hope you all like it, if there’s anything you guys want to see more of shoot me a DM. The Red Bull Global Rally Cross season ended all the way back in October which is a long time outside of the race car. I have been keeping pretty busy actually with a few things, the number one is taking a full schedule of college courses at Folsom Lake Community college, I’m still up in the air about what degree I want to get but I really like Communication classes and also think Marketing could be a good route for me to go. Of course if all i did was schoolwork I don’t think I could keep sane, so I do quite a bit of other things to take up my free time as well. Number one is probably taking care of my dog Dierk’s who is still just 9 months old, I got him back in August and he was 30 pounds, since then he has grown to be 75 pounds and man is he strong. I also have been working part time as well to help keep me going.

Back in December I worked a lot of days at Laguna Seca for Skip Barber racing school which was an awesome experience and will hopefully help me get into some new projects. My friend and teammate this last year Cabot Bigham has been working at the school with me and I have to say we have been having the time of our lives. Its really one of the coolest jobs ever and I wish I could do it everyday. Working at a racing school has been my form of practicing and seat time since the season ended since we get to drive Porsches around the track to show people the proper racing lines, and sometimes we get to throw in a drift or two. The biggest change in my life related to racing has been a little side family business we had started in my household. By “little side business” I mean huge undertaking seeing as we have taken over operations at a local outdoor Go Kart track. Its been really fun and a ton of work but I hope that for the summer alongside our competitive racers we are going to put together a great rental Go Karting program so that people in the Sacramento and surrounding areas can come out and have the most fun driving experience.

I grew up racing Go Karts, and after driving open wheel cars and Rally Cross I still am impressed by the performance of a Go Kart, nothing compares. While thats all hard work I still have a little fun every now and then, including snowboarding and a few music festivals I go to. This New Years I went to the Snowglobe Music Festival in South Lake Tahoe and it was an incredible experience. For 3 days you wander around 3 stages listening to your favorite artists with your friends. The coolest part for me actually is when I got lost from my friends and got to meet all kinds of people from different places and different backgrounds. My favorite performance of the event was on the final night by an artist called Illenium, for anyone who listens to EDM you have probably heard his name. I am also a season pass holder at Sierra at Tahoe resort where I try to snowboard 1 or 2 times a week, we had one of the best powder days of the year just a week ago after storms in January have brought us over 30 feet of snow! Thats a lot of snow in case you were wondering, theres even a few houses in the area that are completely buried. Luckily we need it as California has been in a huge drought.

Besides all that, I am currently training to get ready to be back in a race car. I got very sick at the beginning of the year, perhaps from the cold weather at Snowglobe, so for 2 weeks I had about every sickness imaginable and lost track of my fitness a little bit. Now that I’m healthy and back on track with my fitness program, I’m bettering myself for the upcoming races. My program consist of weight training 5 times a week, then I try to get my cardio either mixed with my weight training or through fun activities like Snowboarding, Hiking, and Mountain Biking. Mountain Biking and Snowboarding are great as well because they use a lot of the same concepts as racing, like grip and weight transfer. I also try and drive go karts on the days I’m working at the track to sneak in little bits of seat time. My little brother and I actually filmed a cool little edit of me driving this week. Thats basically been what I’m up to, not to exciting but life is pretty good, hope everyone else is having a great winter as well. The Alex Keyes store will be launching soon so there will be tons of awesome gear for everyone. I hope to see some of you guys at some of the races this year, the season schedule was released on redbullglobalrallycross.com so head over and see if you can make it to an event!

Peace,

Alex