Joe Martin Stage 2

I like neutral feeds. Neutral feeds give me an opportunity to exchange my crappy, moldy bidons for fresh new ones. Normally you can get some nice ones, preferably of the Specialized variety, maybe even the green gatorade ones. Well The bottles they're giving out here aren't much of a catch.





Who wan'ts a pink bottle with someone else's baby on it. Babies are weird looking. If water bottles were trading cards, I sure wouldn't trade you my Michael Jordan rookie card of a Gatorade bottle, for your Dog-ear'd Kurt Rambis neutral baby bottles... Well maybe I would, because I've done it about ten times this week.

Anyway... there was a bike race today, and an early one at that. I had to get up way early so I could eat and try to digest a bit before the race. Come to think of it, this is the one year anniversary of my "issue" in last years Collegiate Nats RR. Luckily I avoided all such problems today. So yeah the race rolled out, and HN rode the front for the majority of the day, giving the early break a bit too long of a leash. That long leash lead to a pretty wide open chase effort late in the race, unfortunately that was really the only time that the race got tough. I was hoping it would get a little harder a little earlier so maybe we could get some splits and help me crawl a few more spots up the GC. We did hit some serious speeds on some of the descents today, a little bit too fast for me to try my very first mid-race urination. I've been practicing my peeing off the bike recently on my solo training rides, but I'm not quite confident in my 60mph, 1 handed urination skills, maybe next week. So the race pretty much stayed together for a nice long drag race field sprint. It was pretty chaotic, and I attempted to act like a sprinter and get towards the front, but I didn't really get too involved. I just followed some wheels to finish safely near the front of the field. Tomorrow is a the crit in downtown Fayetteville. It looks like a pretty good course with a decent rise every lap, should be fun. Alright, I think I'm going to go explore for a good coffee shop and some decent reading.

Well it looks like some tornado's are coming for Fayetteville as I type this, so maybe I'll just go sit in the bathtub instead.