Update from The Bearded One

No, my brother isn't writing this entry, I am. So why then am I claiming to have a beard? Because recently I've received no less than 5 comments about my increasing level of facial hair. I haven't really been trying to grow any fuzz, it's more that I'm just trained to only shave once a week, if not less. With my new found pubescence, my old shaving rate doesn't seem to be cutting it (get it... cutting it). Although I may now be capable of growing what is generally accepted as "facial hair" I dont plan on shaping it into anything or changing my methods, I guess I'll just be looking slightly more white trash than usual.

Any-who, back to the normal bull that I write about on this thing. I raced in Kentucky this weekend, instead of going to Tulsa. Tulsa would have been some serious critting and some serious driving, but Kentucky had a nice little Omnium to offer. with Nature Valley coming up in just over a week, I figured that an Omnium with a TT and a 90 mile road race would be better prep.

The race was in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky and the race took us through the foot hills of the Appalachian mountains.

Friday evening was a 7.4 mile TT in which I participated. I performed as I usually do in that discipline, mediocre at best.



Sunday was a 51 mile road race with a few small rollers, but nothing like the map in the race bible would lead you to believe.

The scale is wack. There really was hardly a hill you couldn't roll over. Anyway, a group of 8 or so rolled off kind of late in the race and we had Greg in it, but didn't really like our odds so we decided to chase. Other teams had similar numbers to us, so we thought they might help us chase. No one did. Kirk, Chris and I tried to bring it back, but we fell a little short and the group had about 5 seconds on us at the finish. Greg sprinted to 4th place, so it wasn't too bad, but it would have been nice to give Chris a shot at the sprint.

Sunday was the Queen Stage, as they say.

The scale on this one is less wack, but it still didn't have as much climbing as I was hoping for. The race was pretty standard, a group of us would make our way to the front and get a gap over the field, then we would get dragged back. This happened over the first 3 of the 5 "major" climbs, then we finally hit the longest climb of the day and got rid of the field for good. The front group had the usual suspects represented, with Rolf, Greg Strock, Erik Hamilton, some other dude who raced like a pussy, Greg Christian, Wes and another Nuvo, and Niel Forbes, a 17 yr old from the Turner team. The omnium made the racing kind of lame because some were interested in racing for the win and some were just racing each other.



The rain was off and on all day, making the descents pretty sketchy. Rolf crashed early on and took out Uberti, and Dan crashed solo off the front and dropped out too. Bummer, because those guys would have been in the front group for sure. Greg and I took turns trying to get away from the group. Greg ended up launching a counter to one of my moves at about 4 miles to go. He is such a monster. He had a good gap immediately and I knew he was gone. I just surfed around the remainder of the group and watched the "GC guys" attack each other. I helped drag back the guys I didn't like even though there was nothing in it for me. I was just sick of the way a few of those guys had been racing.

We sprinted it out and I got 2nd in the sprint from our group, giving us 1st and 3rd on the day. It was definitely nice to have a break from all the hour long crits around here. I think with a little bit of rest I should be in decent shape for the NVGP in a week's time.