Tuesday, March 04, 2008

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.