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Okay,

I wrote this post about a week ago now, but I've been away from the internet and kinda busy and stuff so I haven't been able to post it. I feel like a jerk. Here you people are taking time out of your busy lives to check my senseless ramblings and I've been keeping it all to myself. Part of the problem was that the house I was staying at didn't have internet, but thats not much of an excuse when every cafe, restaurant and taco stand has wifi these days.

Well heres that old post. I promise I'll get something else up here in the near future.


Whoooooeee.

I've been down in the bay for about a week now and I've been splitting my time between pondering my future and cleaning up wreckage left in the wake of the puppy I'm dogsitting. She's about the cutest thing you've ever seen, but turn your back for one second and she'll be gnawing through anything (and I mean anything) she can get her teeth on. I think my personal favorite was when she started taking books off the shelf and tearing through them. A voracious reader, perhaps? Don't hate me for that.

I also made my glorious return to NorCal racing by dragging my sorry self out of bed at 4:30 am on two consecutive days to hit the CalCup races in the delightful central valley. Saturday was a 22.5m time trial. I hitched a ride with my boy Mr. Pickles and we screamed out towards Knights Ferry, CA. We got there late. This is a leitmotif that you may see repeated throughout the CalCup. We had little time for warmup or any of that, but its hard to get fired up for a Velo Promo TT in the middle of nowhere on no sleep anyway. This is only the second TT of this length that I've ever done, so I'm still figuring it all out, but I was pretty happy with my ride. I got third, which sounds awesome until admit that I was 1:48 off the winning time and the two other people I was looking to beat flatted or soft-pedaled. Oh well. I'm happy to lose to Phil Mooney in a TT any day. The guy is a machine.

The next day was the dreaded Patterson Pass Road Race. I'd never done this race either and didn't really know what to expect. Turns out the course is one of the most challenging on the NCNCA calendar. I slept through my alarm and actually would not have gone except that I got suckered into giving a friend Alex a ride. He called me and woke me up to ask if I was having trouble finding his house. I jumped out of bed, threw my stuff in a bag and ran out the door. I had no time for breakfast or any other pre-race stuff you normally do. I had just enough time to get into my kit and pin a number on before the race started. The course climbs steeply almost from the gun and I was hurting immediately. I somehow managed to hang on over the climb and then had a rollicking good time on the descent. I knew I'd never make it over the climb with the group again, and honestly I didn't think I could ride 94 miles on that course with no breakfast and no fitness anyway, so I attacked like an animal at the bottom of the descent. I had heard the climb was nasty, but the rest of the course was rolling so I figured if I could get and hold a gap I might be able to hang in there. Well, turns out theres a second climb. I slammed myself into it and pretty much exploded, leaving pieces of myself all over the road. The last thing I remember is my teammate Greg looking over his shoulder at me with pity in his eyes as I was dropped like a sack of rocks.

Alex actually had a pretty impressive ride. He's a cat 4, but they did almost the same distance as the p/1/2s and he dragged himself around the course through the heat and suffering and managed a solid top 20. He could teach me a thing or two about toughing it out. Oh well. Some days you just don't have it.

Next weekend is a flat nasty road race and fast crit so I'm looking forward to that. I'm feeling a bit burnt out from the 3 months of travel and racing, but with a bit of luck I might be able to put together some decent rides.