To Phoenix and Back

What a week! I guess I spend more time in the van than anywhere else this past week. It wasn’t too bad though, as it turned out to be one of those classic road trips. The destination was Phoenix, Arizona, for the Valley of the Sun Stage Race. So we spent Tuesday and Wednesday on the road, which turned out to be rather fun. As everyone who has ever driven through Texas towards El Paso knows, there are some quite long stretches of road where there is neither cell phone nor radio reception (and for whatever reason we didn’t bring any CDs) so Mike took over as entertainer and helped pass the time (his singing talents are quite remarkable!).

Anyways, we finally made it to Phoenix. All of us were looking forward to some nice desert climate, i.e. clear blue skies and sun… Yeah right, sun! Temperatures in the 50ies and rain for the TT on Friday… GREAT! TT didn’t go too well for me, I thought I was going pretty well until the guy that had started one minute behind me came flying past on the way back in… I ended up 30^th, some 3 minutes down. There went my ambitions for GC… I was somewhat disappointed, as I had expected more but that’s the way it goes. Corey was still struggling with a cold and his TT went even worse. With no more GC goals we decided to focus on the individual stages. That worked out a little better: on Saturday both Corey and me came in the top 10 and on Sunday I managed a 8^th place in the Crit; overall, this bumped me up to 17^th. So I guess the weekend went ok after all.

Today I’m back in Dallas and, unfortunately, got a little head cold. Corey did a great job racing in AZ while sick but I’m afraid he passed it on to the rest of the team so most of us were sniffling and coughing during the drive back to Dallas. I’m feeling a bit better though and hopefully will be back to normal tomorrow or the day after. In any case, I hope that we all are over our “team sickness” by this weekend and we all are on top of our game this coming weekend for Pace Bend. We should have a rather strong team down there and hopefully a shot at winning.

Until then, I hope the weather holds (no rain, please) and I my cold might just miraculously disappear over nigh. We’ll see if that’ll work…