A week without the bike (kind of)

It felt good to finally have a race-free weekend and some time off the bike. I only rode a couple of hours last week and I feel ready to rock now again. I also did a threshold test, as I always do after my off-week and the results were encouraging. So I’m really looking forward to this upcoming racing block, starting with Hotter Than Hell this coming weekend and continuing with 100k and a lot of other fun races still further away. It will keep us on the road pretty much all through the end of September but it should be fun.

Unfortunately, they are patching up the course for the “Tuesday Night Worlds”, so no racing tonight. Bummer! I was really looking forward to that. But oh well, at least that gives me some time to update my blog. Hopefully the weather will hold tomorrow, though, so that we can go out and play at the crit in Ft. Worth.

Tornados and Air Travel don’t Mix.

My stay in LA was shorter than anticipated as Leo called my up after just a couple of days there and asked me to meet him up in Chicago for the Tour of Elk Grove, a two-day event with a separate cat 1/2 race and a lot of money. It didn’t take a lot of convincing on his part and so I found myself at the airport Friday morning at 6 (thanks Corey for getting up so early and driving me there). Problem was I was flying standby (can’t afford anything else) and so I spend pretty much the whole day at the terminal until I finally made it onto a flight in the afternoon. That put me in at Chicago at around 10 pm. It was then that I found out that we didn’t have a hotel for the weekend… So, after a couple of phone calls and a 30 min cab-ride I finally arrived at the race venue, where Carlos (Vargas) and John let me share their hotel room (thanks again). I think it was around 1 am when I finally lay down; not the perfect preparation for a race.

Racing this weekend was ok, I finished 10th and 11th, which put me in 9th overall. I wasn’t too happy with the results as I had hoped for a little higher placing but it made me enough money to at least pay for the trip.

On Monday it was back to the airport to get back home to Dallas (finally). The problem: Monday morning a pretty decent thunderstorm came through the area and a lot of flights were cancelled. So what happens to you if you are on the standby list? You are pretty much f*?%ed. With all the extra people trying to get on flights, I ended up somewhere in 160^th place on the standby list… no way to make it onto any flight soon. So I settled in for a long day at the airport (PSP is the best invention EVER!) but it got even better. At around 10 pm storms picked up again and the weather got so bad that the authorities even issued a tornado warning… So we had to move away from windows into the food court (which had a glass ceiling…). Needless to say that ended all my hopes of getting out that day and so I settled in for a good nights sleep in one of the corners of terminal 3. I finally made it out the next morning after rebooking my flight to go through Newark and than to Dallas (otherwise, I would probably be still in Chicago as we speak).

The rest of the week was rather eventful, being stuck at a friends place without a car (the van is still out in LA with the boys at Nationals). I did race at Rockwall this past Saturday though, which was a rally but with money for the first three. As was to be expected, a lot of people showed up and it was a good race. I felt pretty good that day and ended up in a break, soloing in for a win with 2 km to go. Thanks to Gary at Mad Duck for pointing this rally out to me, I had a blast. Oh, and the best thing besides winning on Saturday was that they had free ice cream at the finish! I’ll be back next year, you bet!