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Taiwan

So we wrapped up Taiwan with a big team effort to maintain my yellow and green jersey.  With less then 10 seconds going into the last two days of racing it was a bit stressful.  It all worked out in the end though and I won the gc and the points competition.   I'm finally back in Athens trying to recover from the 12 hr time change.  I think I'm going back to sleep now...

Gritters wins Stage 6 of Tour of Taiwan!!!

After spending all day in the break, "TruGrit" got to the finish with only team type 1's Kobzerinko and Grit took the sprint by bike lengths. There were 3 breakaway remnants 25 seconds behind them for 3rd-5th. I took the field sprint for 6th and held onto yellow and green. The last two stages are 60k crits. Should be fun.

After stage 3. This is NON-alcoholic champaign... seriously

We just finished Stage 4. I won the 2nd and 3rd intermediate sprints to extend the points a bit. Finished 3rd so I got a few more valuable seconds for the overall.




Somewhere in Kaohsiung...
Overlooking Kaoihsung.
After Traveling halfway across the world to get to Taiwan, we had a good start to the race yesterday. With Gritters and I hitting the intermediate sprints hard I took the green jersey I tried to take O'bee to the win but couldn't catch the break with enough time to do it. The last 200 meters was tight and when we caught them there wasn't enough room to make the pass. so It was 6th and 7th with O'bee and me.

Racing Started

So racing officially got underway at the Tour of California a bit ago. I'm just settling enough to do an update about it. I'll just start off with saying that the conditions of ToC were REALLY hard. It was just not the sunny California that everyone was hoping for. At the prologue I had a good run at it holding the fastest time until Dave Z knocked me off. Then 18 others did too. I think if I hadn't had screwed up the Stanford oval(had to hit the brakes hard not to slam the barrier) I could have been a bit faster. But that's how it goes. Then from there on out it was just a suffer fest. All the days were tough. I had enough legs to try in a couple of the sprints, so that was pretty cool. Stage 4 was ridiculous. That's all I have to say about that.

I spent the following week recovering from the week long effort. I decided to head down to Albany GA for the first GA Cup of the year to push the legs again. It started with a 3.6k prologue. I had a good run at the 12 turn course and won it by two seconds with a time of 4:07. The crit I felt strong but the sprint was screwy and I was just glad I got out of it without going down with another guy. I was able to stay in the GC lead(yes it's a stage race) after the crit. Sunday was a 140k road race pretty flat. After a few attacks, I made a bit of a mistake by forgetting about the yellow line rule and got disqualified for attacking over it. I didn't get ONE warning or anything. Just disqualified. The official had complete disregard that I was leading the race and just wanted me out. I would have thought they could have at least given some sort of warning but nope! So that blew my WHOLE weekend.

I'm off to Taiwan on Thursday for the Tour of Taiwan. A good week stage race should be fun.

Health Net P/b Maxxis 2008

Getting Started
Starting a new season off is always an exciting time. Some new
teammates, staff, gear etc etc. For me as a returning rider things are
pretty simple; Most our sponsors are the same, only a few new teammates
(Collier, Cooke, and Zajicek) and a few staff changes. This makes it
much easier knowing what to expect at training camp and stuff. We are
wrapping the camp up now which was in Salvang, Ca. We got in some
quality kilometers on our new Super Six Cannondales which are fully
carbon awesomnous. We gave the bike some good testing up the local
"Figuroa" climb. We also got to set up our new Slice full carbon TT
rigs which are superfast. I'm hoping to improve on my TT'ing from last
year and this bike WILL help.For me this year is a big one. My training has been going pretty well
now since December. I'm doing ToC so I've been focused and the power
is good and continues to improve. The slightly smaller team this year
should open up more opportunities as well. A couple more weeks of
training and ToC will kick off the season.