Saturday, July 21, 2012

Cascade Bicycle Tournament

This past week I've been in Bend, Oregon racing the Cascade Cycling Classic. Racing is a generally loose term unfortunately, and boy have I had some good group rides in a great city on cool roads. I'm pretty bummed with how I'm riding so I'll probably avoid extremely detailed race reports highlighting various breakaways that I did or didn't get into and I'll try to avoid talking about how I've had a strange headwind following me around all race when everyone else had tailwinds and I won't mention how many other Feillu's I have.

Short story that will probably turn long (because this way Kennett thinks I'm typing a phenom of a post since whenever we host house together we race with blog posts and then I always find embarrassing grammar errors. To bad) (LoL).

So I'll highlight stages 0-4 of Cascade, since it's Saturday night and there is still the Awbrey Butte circuit race tomorrow.

Prologue: Ride on the road for an hour. Ride the trainer for 45 minutes. Start on a downhill. Spin a 55x11 at 45mph for 2 minutes. Turn and climb back up for 3.5 minutes. Feel sick the rest of the evening. Don't sleep because of that extra cup of coffee.

Stage 1: Start on a downhill. Coast for an hour. Dodge a 40 rider, across the road crash. Smile thinking my luck is changing (oops). Get dropped on the big climb. Ride in grupetto. Eat a snickers.

Stage 2 TT: So far the racing highlight of the week. Predict morning of that I would get 88th place. Ride briskly on the race course for 35 minutes. Get 87th. Savant! Then, Kristin Armstrong rode fast enough to get somewhere around 60th in the men. Which made me 88th overall. SAVANT!

Stage 3: Start on a downhill (pattern?). 45 and drizzling at ski-resort starting/finish line. Freeze for an hour of coasting downhill. Then go 30 mph for 3 hours, then dodge 4 crashes (luck is changing??!?!), then go hard up the finish climb and lose a couple minutes. Then eat a snickers.

Stage 4: Crit. Dodge first crash! 20 minutes later, come around a corner, powerslide into a guy on the ground, go over the bars at 7 mph, luck continues, slam my knee into my stem, ride a couple more laps, remove myself from the bike race. Ate a snickers.

So that's that. One more stage to go. Maybe if I didn't eat so many snickers I'd have different stories to share.

BUT WAIT! Let's change things up a bit and end with a smile. Here is how Kennett and I spent the morning before our crit today.


I'm accepting/expecting some offers from NBA teams based on this. I'd love to be an 8th stringer and make 1.7 billion dollars a year. To never play.

Also, I'm taking suggestions for my streetball name. I'm going for CraneBraniac Da Professor


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