A Little Fried

So "The Tour" wrapped up yesterday evening with a circuit race in the rain with some crazy winds and wet hairpin corners at the bottom of the main descent. We were supposed to do 10 laps of the finishing circuit, but they cut it to 4 once we got into town since the weather was deteriorating quickly. There was a gnarly, steep, brick climb on one side of the lap, and the other half was mostly twisty and downhill. It was a really cool loop, and made for an interesting way to sort out the GC a bit at the end of the week. I paced myself on the climb and bombed the downhill to move up, and ended up 11th on the last stage and 22nd for the overall for the week.

After the race, I was ready to get away from the race scene and back to real life. We brought RJ back to Bloomington and went out to catch up with some of the guys who were in town for the Bloomington Crit. While we were out, I got talked into racing again on Sunday at the McCormicks Creek road race. I really wasn't feeling it, and hardly had anything left in my legs, so I decided to lay low for the first 9 of the 11 laps of the 5 mile circuit. With 2 laps to go, a group of 2 got off with Charlie Crouse from Dogfish and one of the Zipp Factory guys who rides like 50 minute 40K time trials. They got a 20-30 second gap and the field seemed really unmotivated to bring them back, so I jumped across to them on the climb with a lap and a half to go. From there our gap grew and it was down to us 3. Charlie asked how I was feeling and I told him I wasn't sure, but he lead it to the final corner for me anyway. We all jumped hard and it was a drag race to the line. I got the Zipp guy by about half a bike for my first "W" of 2008. It took a bit of time to get it, but it feels nice none the less.

As I sit here typing this, I am seriously cracked, I need recovery badly. I'll be taking a couple days off and maybe playing some golf. Since John took the time to show me how to set up some new graphs on CyclingPeaks, I'll now be working on getting my TSB back in check, because it's getting pretty far into the red.

Now that I'm finally home, I'll put up a few pictures from the week.

Chris and Aaron Pre-Race


John on one of our off-road recovery spins


Pre-Riding the crit course


John unsuccessfully trying to make his leg look large...