Chambery, france

This blog post is being written from an extremely tiny euro hotel room in Chambery, France. Seriously, I think I have to put my suitcase on the bed just to open it. Our double bed room looks more like one bed with a crack down the center, and I could barely turn around in the shower.
Chambery is in the alps a good 8 hour drive from Izegem. We made he trek this morning and got here about 5. That gave us time for a nice opener ride and pretty solid dinner. Chambery is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. We’re straight up in the middle of the alps. Huge green mountains rise from the city and give way to snowcapped peaks. It’s been pretty cloudy since we’ve been here, I’m hoping for clear skies soon.
Tommorow we start the tour des pays haut savoie. Quick Steps devo team, beveren, are here. They’re one of the best, if not the best u23 team in the world. AG2R’s U23 team is here too, I think, at least we saw they’re team car.
Tomorrow’s stage goes like this: 20k neutral, flat, big climb, very small descent, another climb to the finish. 130k including the epic neutral.

Typical belgian roads, hanging out in front of the wall trying to look tough.

Leaving for the alps early tommorow.

shwoooh....

That's the sound of a big sigh of relief, in case you can't tell.

The race schedule has swapped around a bit and instead of doing Roubaix I am doing le Tour des pays haut-savoie. Haut Savoie is in the french alps and suits me a bit better than roubaix. 140 pounds don't do so well on the cobbles and I wasn't too confident of making it very far. haut savoie is a 3 day u23 stage race with some monster climbing so I'll still be doing some bleeding out my eyeballs. I'm pretty excited to get to go the alps for the first time.

Not much else has been going on. yesterday I road 3 hours and apparently didn't eat enough after the race Sunday because I was bonked 30 minutes in. We did ride the koppenberg, which was cool. I busted my ass on a cobble going 6 miles an hour for Matt Brandt's amusement. After haut savoie I'm hoping to do some touristy stuff. there's also a pro kermesse 10 k from the house in a week and the rumor is that tom boonen and stijn devolder will be there.

first race

frustrating day.

We raced the Klein-Brabant Classic UCI 1.12 today. There were some good teams there including topsport-vlaanderen, Davitamon Lotto's development team. But the course was flat and the wind didn't come out the way it could have so it looked to be not so hard.

We started and I wasn't too far forward after a nervous neutral section. For the first 30 k I slotted in the first third of the 200 starters, except for one section where I let myself get too far back and had to work a bit through a town. After that I began to feel better with my pack skills and moved up to where I could actually see what was going on and tried to spend my time in the front 30 or so guys. when it slowed down and went gutter-to-gutter I'd get shuffled back but I made sure to jump back up to the front as soon as it opened up to stay up there. I felt great and it just felt like we were riding tempo.

About 60 k in I flatted and went back to the car to make a routine wheel change. Coming back through the cars I was absolutely dying and cursing myself for not knowing how to ride in the cars. then I made it back on, and two pedal strokes later was dropped. I was done and was now cursing myself for sucking at bikes. I road like 60k back towards the start, got lost, and found a guy who offered me a ride after I asked him for directions.

Putting my bike into his car I spun the rear wheel. It went maybe half a turn and stopped. I could have cried in relief as I stared at the misadjusted break pad rubbing against the wheel. It may suck to not finish, but I felt a lot better after learning that my fitness is so shitty I can't draft off a car.

Anyway, it sucks, but the good news is I felt good and my skills in the pack were pretty good, at least for me. Not sure what I'm doing now for a while, roubaix is next sunday and i'm just going to see how long I can hang on. I'd kind of like to race a kermesse before then but we'll see.

Standard Belgian Day

yesterday was a good example of a standard belgian day:

Wake up around 8 (earlier yesterday), make coffee. Eat breakfast (scrambled eggs, bakery bread, gouda cheese).

Kill some time on the internet until riding at 10:30 or so.

Ride about 3 hours, get minorly lost, find way home.

Eat lunch: leftover pasta and cheese sandwhich (the bread and cheese here might be one of my favorite things).

Head to the delhaize for some cultural immersion and nutella.

Nap.

Dinner.

Chores.

Internet.

Bed.

Of course the routine gets shaken up some by racing. Also, I'm hoping we go to brugge or somewhere cool monday after the race.

And, congrats to robert j. and chad d. for going 1 and 2 at the tour of atlanta tt. Haven't checked many results due to the brutally slow internet but good luck to you guys in the other stages.

I'm going to die

got to europe after some smooth travel. racing a 150 k flattish, windyish race on sunday. Then next weekend I'm racing the u23 paris roubaix. Paris-Roubaix! I'm going to die. It's 180k with like 18 of the cobble sections. Wow. We'll see how far I make it.

Manana....

is when I leave for Europe. 10:30 pm flight=rad. I'm even mostly packed, a whole day beforehand. personal record. No idea what races I'm doing yet but hopefully some good races and good times are ahead.

I hate powertaps

Really, I do. At least when I can't get mine to work. I tried to hammer out a 20 minute fitness test this morning. Then, after downloading a file that doesn't look quite right, I realize I forgot to zero the torque and the file is crap. On the bright side, my legs felt great and I feel like I'm in good shape right now.

Video Test

trying to figure out how to post youtube videos:

Cup Time

The cycling coverage on OLN (versus?) may suck now, but at least they show hockey. The Playoffs have vaulted Hockey back into my "coolest sport after cycling" spot.




In other news, I've been riding bikes a lot. Today I'm not riding bikes, a day off after 5 days in a row consisting of a race, some mid-length tempo rides, tuesday night worlds, and a double day yesterday. Tuesday night worlds was hard as always, I tried to throw down but mostly got worked by the Blue Train.

The End?

Macon was rocked saturday night by a Tornado...yours truly slept straight through it and didn't realize until mid-day yesterday that so much damage had ocurred. My high school got pretty drilled. With only five days left on the calendar, will we be going back? I'm not sure how I would feel about that...
Anyway, day off of school = lazy morning, lots of coffee, and now a few hours of flogging it on Mid Georgia's finest farm roads.

Bike racing

Raced yesterday in Cumming at the Georgia Cup. First of all, thanks to the Security Bank team for keeping me in the race...someone was an idiot and forgot there shoes. Thanks to Robert for having an extra set of pedals and shoes, and to Ron for the quick mechanic work to get me to my tt start.

The time trial course was ridiculously hilly including some small-chainring climbing. I managed my first good time trial of the year and grabbed sixth place. As a testament to how stupid-hard Georgia Cup has gotten, all five riders ahead of me are on UCI Pro teams. Jittery Joes, Toshiba, Jelly Belly and DLP were represented this weekend. We were also packed in pretty tight, I was only 12 seconds off the winners pace on a 7 mile course. Normally I'd be a little frustrated knowing I needed only a few seconds to move up the leaderboard but mostly I'm just thrilled and relieved to get the tt monkey off my back.

The road race started at noon with the sore legs and too-full stomachs that come with racing a time trial only 3 hours previous. It didn't last long as on the first of four laps my group was directed off course. We were chasing a break of 7 or so about 15 seconds up the road when we made a wrong turn. The breakaway went the correct direction as did a group of riders who had been dropped so we became the last group on the road, several minutes down. Most of the field dropped out in frustration and the rest of us just road around like it was a group ride, getting in miles. To add to the drama, the entire breakaway was dq'ed for disobeying instructions to neutralize. So I guess the official winner came from the group of riders behind us who went the right way? Interesting day at the races for sure.

Intro

Yep, I've jumped deeper into the world of the interweb and started a blog. This is going to be a place to keep people updated on my racing and traveling. Specifically, I started it because I'm heading to Europe on May 21st and this is the best way for me to let everyone know how the trip is going without sending out 20 emails of the same race report (not that I don't like getting emails from everyone, but this will save me some repetition).

Thanks to my buddy will for the title inspiration (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=I1P9318qkhc for further explanation).

Anyway, I'm racing a Georgia Cup in Cumming Saturday so I'll post an update by then. Can't promise what the content on here will be like but I'll try to do something to keep it entertaining.