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!

LA is Shaking...

What a way to start our stay in LA! We only got here Sunday night and pretty much next thing you know, we are in an earthquake. Interesting. I must say, we were a little dumbstruck at first, just looking at each other as no one of us had been in one before. It took us a couple of seconds to realize what was actually happening but by that time it was almost over. Fortunately, it didn’t do any damage to our host house. So we survived an earthquake.

Besides that, nothing much has happened here in LA so far but we raced in San Marcos last weekend. It was a 1.6 mile circuit with a decent climb in it…and a really stellar field. Healthnet, Jittery Joe’s, Successful Living, Toyota United… yep, they all send at least a rider out there. It was a really hard race and none of us made it into the final move that stuck. I finished 10^th, second of the first chase group and Corey came in with the second chase. Unfortunately, Will and Phillip both got dropped. Peter is still healing up. He’s getting better and is out riding but last weekend was too early to get back in a race. Hopefully he’ll be good to go for nationals.

For me it is already nearly time to say good buy to California as I will be flying out to Chicago this Friday for Elk Grove. Leo is coming too, so we should have some fun. I’ll keep you posted.

California

We finally made it: We are in California. After leaving our great host family in Bend, we drove down to Sacramento where we stayed with yet another fantastic host family for a couple of days before we moved on to San Luis Obispo. We got here last Friday in the afternoon and jumped on our bikes to shake out our legs a little bit. Turns out "a little" ended up being nearly two hours but at least we finally got a glimpse of the Pacific. Yep, apparently the ocean is further away than we thought... Unfortunately, we didn't have that much daylight-time left, so we couldn't stay long but maybe we'll have some time today on out off day to hit the beach.

The reason we decided on San Luis Obispo for our next stop was that there were two races this weekend: a circuit race on Saturday and a crit on Sunday. The circuit race turned out to be pretty hard with on short but very steep climb and one more sustained climb. The fact that quite a few pros showed up didn't make it easier. Also, we had to observe the yellow-line-rule. What was that again? I've been racing on closed roads for the last couple of months (pretty much ever since Mississippi in May) so that was interesting again (by the way, I still don't like it). The plan was to ride for Corey and get him some points but one of the Successful Living guys took off and was never seen again... so we raced for second. Still enough points, so I got to the front on the last climb and set a steady tempo which I had to keep up pretty much all the way from the climb to the finish too, as no one else would do it. So I ended up pulling the last 5 miles of the race and then leading Corey out. We were sitting pretty good in the run in to the finish but unfortunately got boxed in a little at the end. Ultimately, I couldn't start my sprint early enough to really launch Corey and actually came in in front of him... bummer. Still, 5th for me and 7th for Corey wasn't too bad.

What was really bad though was the fact that Peter crashed hard and separated his shoulder. That's even worse as we are getting close to nationals... At this point we don't know if his ligaments are just stretched or torn... Let's hope for the best! So I spend most of my Saturday afternoon in the Emergency room with Peter... at least, nothing broken (including his head; looking at his helmet, that was NOT a given).

So Sunday, we were one short for the crit. We still did ok, Phillip did pretty well during the race and I managed to come in 8th against some pretty tough competition. You would think that all those pros got something better to do than show up at all those local races but apparently not. Still, it was a good race (no crashes for us). Corey couldn't quite perform at his best though because his shifter cable started fraying and he couldn't get into his lower gears... not so good in a fast crit. I had some technical trouble myself as my chain skipped in my 11. Also, not so helpful in the sprint. Oh well, better luck next week.

We will probably stay the rest of the week here in San Luis Obispo and then make our way down to LA. The road trip continues!

Cascade Cycling Classics

This past weekend I got to play with the big guns at the Cascade Cycling Classics in Bend, Or. We drove in on Monday last week from the east and got our first surprise when we crossed the border into Oregon from Idaho: everyone was expecting lush green forests and mountains but instead we got high desert and flats. No trees whatsoever… Next surprise was when we stopped for gas: in Oregon you are not allowed to pump your own gas, so there is someone there to do it for you. Very weird. Anyways, we made it to Bend and, fortunately, 10 miles before we hit the city the forests started and Bend turned out to be absolutely gorgeous. We stayed at a great host family that took exceptional care of all our needs and made sure we didn’t lack anything.

On Wednesday the Race finally started for me and it definitely exciting riding next to Levi, Chris Horner, Botero or Tom Danielson who were all in the race. The first two stages were both road stages with a mountaintop finish. I’ll spare you the details but I felt good on the first day but, as always, I flatted just before the KOM halfway through the stage and found myself chasing like crazy for the next hour to get back on. At the end I managed to get back into the field and finished 33^rd. On Friday I didn’t feel too good and made a stupid mistake at the bottom of the final climb (I was sitting way to far in the back when the climb started) which resulted in me ending up behind the split. So I came in somewhere around 50^th place on that day. On Friday there was a time trail in the morning and a crit in the evening. The tt was very painful and I got a package by Levi, who put about 4 minutes on me. With a length of about 24 k, that comes down to me loosing 10 seconds every kilometer… autsch! The crit went pretty well, I avoided all the crashes and finished safely in the pack. There were tons of people out to watch, so the atmosphere was great.

On Saturday we had another road stage with a mountaintop finish. I was pretty tired by that time but wanted to make sure to hit the final climb in a better position than on Thursday. I did a decent job at that until the teams started to put their leaders into position. I was sitting top 20 all the way before that but once the trains started forming I got swarmed big time. So I ended up in the second group again… It was a hard day. On Sunday the race finished up with a hilly circuit race. A break went just at the start of the second lap. I only realized that something was up the road at the bottom of the first climb but managed to bridge up to it on that climb. We worked well together for the next three laps but it started to get unorganized with one lap to go and so we got caught with just 5 k to go, just at the foot of the last, steep climb. Bummer! I was pretty toasted at this point and couldn’t stay with the leaders but I guess that was all right. There are Articles on Velonews and Cyclingnews covering this stage if someone wants more detail on it ;-)

It was quite funny as I started out 33^rd in GC after the first stage, dropped down a bit during the race but managed to finish in 33^rd at the end of the five days. More results can be found on the Cascade Cycling Classics home page.

Today we are already down in Sacramento, on step closer to LA. I had originally planned to go to Boise, Id but that fell through at the last moment. Not too happy about that. It would have been nice to do another high caliber race (Boise is part of the US Crit series) and also try to get a good overall result in the Series but instead I’ll have to settle for some regional racing here in California… Anyways, I’ll get over it. Hopefully, I’ll get over my cold by the next race, too. Will has been coughing for the last two weeks and I guess he finally got to me. But enough rest and sleep should do the trick and I should be good to go by next weekend.

On the Road Again

Tonight: Salt Lake City, Utah; tomorrow: Bend, Oregon. We finally broke down camp in Colorado Springs this morning after 10 days of good riding there. Thanks again to Brad and David for letting us stay at their place.

So after a good breakfast at Einstein Bagels we got on the road at eight and pretty much drove all day to get to Salt Lake. We managed to get here in time to go for a little ride and shake out our legs after sitting in the van for over ten hours.

So tomorrow is going to be pretty much the same: pack up the van, grab some breakfast and drive, drive, drive… good thing I got my PSP before this trip!

"Mountains, Gandalf; I want to see mopuntains again..."

Wow, so I fell behind on my blogging again... Sorry. The excuse this time: trying to plan our eight week road trip to Nationals in California in August. It was pretty stressful but we are finally on the road. First stop: Colorado Springs. We piled into my old van this past Tuesday and drove through the night to get here on Wednesday morning. The van was pretty packed: four bikes on the back, two inside together with stuff for eight weeks. On top of it, Will, Phillip, Corey, Peter and myself had to fit too.

We got some solid riding in, about 30 hours last week. We've got another week before we'll move on to Bend, OR to race in the Cascade Classics. Should be a lot of fun: racing for five days with some of the best riders in the country (Levi, Danielson and Co decided to show up...). After that we'll head on to Idaho for another of the US Crit series races and after that we'll finally make our down the coast to LA for Nationals. I won't be able to start there but it should be fun watching the others and lending as much support as I can.

But there also was a life before the road trip: the weekend before we left we were down in Austin for the AMLI AT&T Crit, also part of the US Crit series. It was pretty hard because I tried to get in a break. I was up there but unfortunately non of them stuck. So it came down to a sprint. I got stuck on the back stretch but still managed to come in 18th. Considering all, I was pretty happy with that. Unfortunately, it didn't go that well for some of the others: Will went down with five to go after some guys in front of him decided to tangle up on the straight and go down; fortunately, he only lost a little skin. Rachel wasn't as fortunate: she went down hard in the women's race and broke her collar bone. Very unfortunate, so shortly before Nationals.

Get well soon Rachel!