Long day

After a hard 5 hour ride in the morning (and most of the afternoon) I now have my hands full trying to pack up everything I will need for the Tour of Gila. It is amazing how much effort it takes to get ready for a trip like this. When you spend a lot of time on the road packing becomes second nature. Everything has its place and nothing gets forgotten. Routines are well rehearsed and smooth running. Once it is all down packing takes 30min. 45 if there is a bike to be packed. However, once you get out of the swing of things.... things get a bit interesting. For example: once I got home I realized that I had not done any laundry in 3 weeks. I had absolutely no clean cycling clothing left. I did not even have any clean cloths from last years kit left! So, here I am at the laundry mat doing 5 loads of laundry at once so I can get packed and into bed by a reasonable hour.

Hey, at least there are plenty of hot college girls here with the laundry blues too!

Climbin', Wheelin' & Shootin'

After a hard day of pure climbing (we spent 4hrs sprinting up some of the craziest climbs Boulder has to offer) me and Micro decided to take his new pathfinder out for a little drive. After Micro's driving skills got a nice dusting and the tire pressure got dropped a bit we were cruising over, through, and around terrain that would impress the residents of ward and make the average city slicker, straight up faint (and I thought the roads we were riding on were steep!). Fun times were had until the confidence got a little too high and a snow drift was miss judged. Did we get stick in that snow drift? No. Did we over gas the engine, slide down the hill and come dangerously close to sliding into an old mine shaft? YES. I knew we were really in trouble when neither one of us, no matter how gingerly we were, could get out of the car with out it sliding further down and becoming even closer to rolling off into the hole. 45min of hard core whenching, anchoring, pushing, pulling, praying, and team work got us back onto solid ground.

(It's kinda hard to tell but, Micro is pretty much holding the car up right)

From there a little more creeping brought us to a sweet shooting spot and we spent the rest of the daylight we had popping a box of clays.

Up and up

Today I got the chance to do a little training with a number of the local pros including some of my team mates. I went into the day a little worried because thus far I had not had a chance to do any climbing with anyone other than my buddy Julian so the state of my climbing legs was a bit up in the air. The early climbs were pretty rough but by the end of the day I was one of the stronger riders on the road and feeling fine. Probably the best part of the day was getting fallowed by the sweet team car piloted by the legendary Dr. Lim.

-Right now I am feeling good 'n' cooked. I guess over 10,000ft of climbing will do that to a body.

Still with the rain

I think I can see the sun!

Nice easy day again. Slept in today because the forecast was calling for cold rain all morning and warm blue sky in the afternoon. Problem is the local meteorologists do not really have a feel for the Boulder area and seem to get it flip-flopped most of the time. It was nice out all morning and rained for a solid two hours in the afternoon. The rain started as soon as I left the neighborhood stopped for 5 minutes out on the road and resumed until I got home.

Also:

Learned today that for UCI drug tests a, "Maximum 5 ml of blood shall be drawn." Now, I do not sit down and measure out how much blood they take from me each week but, for the team's tests, I am pretty sure the lab uses two 2ml tubes and 2-3 5ml tubes. That comes out to almost 20ml of blood each week! Talk about anti doping. No wonder I feel tired.

rain, rain

This is what my bike looked like last time I road on a day like this!

(That is not mud. It is ICE!)

There's no better excuse for taking a rest day, than a full day of rain. Forcast for the day: 45mph winds; 35 degrees for the high; and 100% chance for rain/snow showers. Although these are typically my kind of crazy man training conditions I opted to pay the trainer a little visit and give my room a much needed cleaning. Man it feels good to just be lazy for a day!

numba one

soo... not much going on right now. my need to kill time is the reason why this was created. this way my mama can find out what i'm doing w/ out killing my cell power. i'm going to go ponder life now.