Cyclesmart International, Day one

How did we get here?

I'm a mess. I sucked on Sunday, and this week is like slow torture. I have a gigantic monkey on my back and it's not going anywhere. I can't concentrate on anything. Nothing satisfies me. I'm craving something, but can't for the life of me figure out what it is. All I know is that I am constantly on edge. I've given more strangers the bird in the last 48 hours than I have in the last 3 months combined. Everything sucks.

Rx.

I need to get this behind me. I need to go to the proverbial airport and drop off my baggage and this fucking monkey. First step is to get these race reports out of the way. Second step is to sweat. Get on the bike and hammer until my headset seizes up into a salty mess of corrosion. The final step is to start tearing off legs.

Cyclesmart, Day one.

Who cares? There was a crash at the start. I slowed, put a foot down, and got around it. From there on I climbed from group to group. Pass. Sit in and recover. Pass. Recover. Hammer for 2 minutes to the next group. Recover. Pass. Recover. Hammer for 2 minutes. Repeat until you get to Chris Hamlin's wheel. Watch that wheel disappear. Either Chris saves gobs of power for the last 10 minutes of the race, or I was out of gas. Who cares?

I'm shaving my arms tonight. (photo: df53x12)

Either way, aside from getting caught behind the crash, I rode the race exactly how I wanted to. I thought I had a really good race. Then I looked at the results and learned that I merely had a good race. The 15 racers on the bottom of the results read like a checklist of the racers I slowly moved up through. I though I was working my through the mid-pack and into the points. Turns out I was actually working my way up from tail-gunner to mid-pack.

In Summary

Either way, 29th. I'll take it. Sure, I might have been able to pick up 5 of 10 spots if I didn't get caught behind the crash, but there were also 5 or 10 DNFs that would have beat me if they didn't get caught in the middle of the crash.

This post sucks. Everything sucks.