Breaking in the New Team Bike

Wisconsin's Race was this past weekend, which was really exciting because it went really well for me last year. This year was the polar opposite.

First of all let me offer up a small piece of advice, do not race a bike that was build four days prior, or more importantly, don't mess with your set up while rolling up to the start line. Which is exactly what I did. Anyone who has switched bikes knows that there is a small adjustment period where you dial in your position to the new bike, for me this period extended up until the start of an eighty mile road race. This was a terrible idea, and apparently I don't learn practical lessons very well, because a similar indecent happened last year where I strapped on my brand spanking new shoes minutes before the Wisconsin regional road race and my left cleat came loose in the last lap. Anyway about five laps out of eight laps into the race I noticed that my stem bolts had come loose and I had to really work on turning with my hips and not my hands. After asking probably every person in the A's field, including the wheel car, if they had a multi-tool, I got one in the feed zone from my teammates and fixed it in the subsequent lap.
An unintentional side effect of this was that for the lap and a half that I was messing/freaking out with my stem, I drank no water. That, combined with the fact that it was the first warm race of the season resulted in me cramping up in the finish because of some pretty intense dehydration. After the race I felt like I had drank my weight in beer the night before.

So on to the crit, I won it last year, so it was another race I felt I could perform well in. In short it was another shitty race, It started racing about halfway through and the course turned into a slip and slide, I went into the back of a pile up and on the way back to get my free lap saw about ten other riders eat it. Anyway I jumped back in and was feeling pretty good, and got into a little rotation with Will Nowak and Steve S, looking in the back of the group I noticed that the usual contenders apparently could not ride in the rain and got pretty psyched up, then with four laps to go I flatted...no free lap for me. After the race I found out that they shortened the race because they figured no one wanted to race in the rain...
AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGG
oh well
On a completely un related note check out the video of Theo Boss totally screwing Daryl Impey in the last stage of Tour of Turkey:


Theo says it was a reflex because of the un-even barriers, you can watch the video and convince yourself of pretty much anything you want, even the existence of UFO's. However Lance Armstrong, the Emperor of Cycling, says Theo should be kicked out of the sport. With Lance being the Emperor and all, Theo should probably just commit ritualistic career suicide by re-focusing all his training on doing RAIN.