Redlandssssss

I think I may have gone too hard in the prologue. Well, I should rephrase. I went too hard given the slow ass time that I put down. Even slow would have been alright, but I was almost ten seconds slower than last year. I'm trying to tell myself it was the wind or something, but Ben Day had no problem beating his winning time from last year by 3 seconds. Whammy.

But yeah, too hard. We all saddled up for the Beaumont RR today. That pain train left the station at around 10am. The only problem was everyone else looked like they were on a pleasure cruise. They changed the course from last year, taking out a big section of the flats and rollers and adding another KOM loop right from the gun. If they were hoping to make the course more selective they failed pretty badly. Its not the course that makes that race, its the wind. And though last years gusts would have had Dorthy talking to the Tin Man, this year was disappointingly calm.

I should probably be thanking my lucky stars. My legs were terrible today. Awful. Wretched. Horrendous. I can't recall the last time they felt this bad. Its a pretty frightening feeling to have a bad day like that as a cyclist. I mean, I spend a goodly chunk of my time training to be fit and fast for races. Being forced to fight my legs for 105 miles today just made me feel... well... helpless. I was stuck. There's no magic potion or voodoo dance that can bring the legs around when they're that bad. You just have to buckle down and try to stick it out to fight another day.

If it had been blowing like last year I wouldn't have made it one lap. But make it I did. Not in any kind of style, mind you, and certainly not with the front group, but I made it. I lost contact the last time up the climb. Same as last year. Ughh. I tried to get Adam in position going into it, but I don't think I did much besides tire myself out.

The team did well. We missed the early break and with it a shot at the KOM and Sprinter's jerseys, but everyone was sharp all day and 5 out of 8 finished in the front group. It would have been 7 of 8, but for 2 poorly timed mechanicals.

So yeah, I survived. My awesome host housing found us a student from massage school and I'm feeling much better than I did a few hours ago, when I just wanted to amputate the damn things and have done with it. The crit tomorrow is going to be insanity. 186 riders on a 9 turn, crazy-technical, arrowhead-shaped course. Madness. Madness. We'll just have to see.

On a lighter note, Ronnie Lenzi is a whiz when it comes to taking photos and she has some of the best images of cycling that I've ever seen. She's so good, in fact, that she somehow took this photo of me suffering slowly up the SDSR HCTT, and made it look as though I were enjoying some kind of forward momentum. She's the best.

Lastly, I have to give a shout-out to two very fine ladies I'm proud to call my friends. Jazzy "The Hurricane" Hurikino and "Righteous" Rae Brownsberger are down here racing for Third Pillar and they are tearing it up! They're both young up and comers, and they're down here duking it out with probably the most stacked women's peloton in US racing. They both crushed their way into the front group in the RR today (with Jazzy mixing it up in the finish) and both are holding onto some pretty respectable GC positions. Basically, they're hitters. Remember those names.


For those of you interested in full results Velo News seems to get them before the officials do.