Home frome the gila

Well, I'm home......and I'm a wreck. I raced my heart out for 5 days, drove 2200..miles(round trip), and drank gallons of starbucks coffee....I'm not going to mention some of the restaurants I ate at, lets just say it wasn't organic and my driving partner was a bad influence. I'm glad the drive is over. I still wish I was racing...after pouring everything I had into a five day stage race I feel kind of lost trying to figure out what to do afterward. Luckily I have a sinus infection....a little one...and I'm going to kill it.

I just raced with Lance Levi, and Horner........Holy shit, LOL that's something I never expected to do. Now the fun is over and I'm trying to make sense of it all......

First....Lance is the real deal....after racing with him for 5 min it's obvious, He is one of a kind, untouchable, a rider with genuine ferocity and pure determination. He is focused and aware, but on a completely different level than the rest of us......its as if his singular purpose or resonate frequency is fully realized and boldly expressed through each movement on his bike. Its like a great white shark as it attacks its prey. TV coverage of the tour de france does nothing to convey this.


Some quick highlights are......cresting the pinos altos climb and then passing the entire mellow johny's team...(lance included) then leading them out on the first descent.......I hardly pedaled, just wanted a clean shot at the descent, 170 guys on a narrow gnarly descent like this is not pretty and I didn't want to get caught out behind a crash or miss an acceleration. It was actually really cool because they couldn't hold my wheel on the decreasing radius turns and I'm sure they thought I was a lunatic for going so fast. Needless to say they all sprinted past me on the first little climb after the descent.....

Second highlight was riding the tt on my steel pegoretti with clip on bars....at first i was disappointed that I wasn't riding the Parlee,( the carbon braze on mount broke the night before I left for the race) but as it turned out using the pegoretti was pure motivation and in retrospect I think the bike performed better than I did.

Thirdly, not sure if that's a word..I got dropped on the first cat 2 climb of the last day. Then I decided to blaze the descent like a possessed grey squirrel from Marin. The tenacious little bugger that just stuffed his belly on table scraps from an overpriced breakfast eatery and is laughing in the face of civilized comfort while decisively evading cars as he dashes down cameo alto on his way to his little stand of conifers not yet overtaken by urban sprawl . That said its was a blast whipping in and out of the draft of the team cars(a skill honed on the slopes of teton pass) as they almost went off the road, (They were having quite a good time also, no cops to dish out tickets meant free time to rally the company car). I caught them all by the bottom, then It quickly blew to pieces on the way back up....Shit really hit the fan at a hemorrhaging ridiculous speed and our group of 70 was shattered into about 20 fragmented little groups.....this was a definite vision quest of a climb.....I just tried to stay conscious.

Gotta run.......the crit was great too......check back later.... addios