Helloooooo Wisconsin

I’ve been sick. Yep. Sore throat, oodles of phlegm, the whole deal. Lame. I was hoping to get some good fitness from Nature Valley, but it looks like I dug a little too deep and now I’m paying the price.

I mostly just lay around for the few days after the race until Wednesday when I struck out for Wisconsin. After one night in a hotel I lit out bright and early for the first stage of the ToAD (Tour of America’s Dairyland). Sick and tired is no way to start a 10 day series, least of all when the first stage is a 90 mile road race with a ton of climbing. I would have happily skipped the race and slept in, but you have to do all the races to be considered for the omnium so I headed out there.

The course was really a beauty. Gorgeous rolling roads with a couple short steep climbs and one longer steep drag and a finishing circuit up to a park at the top of Blue Mounds. If Chicago gets the 2016 olympics this is the course they’ll use for the RR and it would sure make for an interesting dynamic race. Long story short, I got dropped during the neutral rollout and did one lap to stretch the legs and see the course.

For the last two nights I’ve been Staying in Madison thanks to Jenny Meyer. Jenny is my good friend and former teammate Rob’s sister. Rob is working for Specialized and is also coming onto some killer form, honing his TT skills in preparation for a run at Track Nationals and putting the hurt on norcal in the process. Jenny is one hell of an athlete in her own right and was off the do a half Ironman on Saturday. That kind of effort blows me away. If I ran to catch a bus I’d be sore for days and I swim like a penguin flies. Hopefully if goes well for her.

Jenny helped me find a place in Madison and I’m pretty impressed with the town. I stayed on the isthmus and it was a pretty hip scene, some kind of mix between hipsters, crunchy granola types, grad-school ghetto and some families. Really nice. The first night I got there Jenny was nice enough to take me over to a friends where she made some stellar risotto and a fresh salad. Home-cooked meals are a real treat.

Later that night the weather took a turn for the worse. A big storm rolled in and right when I was trying to get to bed things really got crazy. I’m a western wuss and I’m not yet accustomed to these Midwestern storms. It blew me away (no, not literally, thank goodness). Tornado warnings preceded the most intense lightning I have ever seen. I saw more lightning that night than I had in the entirety of my life to that point. I have some video of the storm that I’ll try to upload, but there was easily a strike every second, and this constant flashing would be punctuated by these incredible strikes that stretched across the sky and sent thunder that shook my bones. Truly wild

I did not get the best nights sleep of my life, but I managed to drag myself out of bed and head out to the Waterloo Criterium, race number 2 of the ToAD.

Here's a highlight reel from the storm. This is taken from just 3 minutes of video so you get the idea...