Slackin'

Yep... totally slackin' on the posts.

This past weekend was the Salida Omnium. Salida is a surprisingly cool little town, out towards the middle of Colorado. Just ignore the occasional angry redneck, and you'll be fine. Really, it's gorgeous there.

Even the view right from the hotel was really cool.

Typically, Salida is a hot, hot race. Instead, this year it was incredibly wet. The TT went alright for me. I switched from my unlucky shoe covers, to a pair from a couple years ago, and it seemed to do the trick. I had a decent TT - even though I was racin' blind on a brand-new course, my warm-up suffered due to thunderstorms, and the start was delayed 15 minutes. I wish I could have pre-ridden the course, I know I could have shaved a healthy amount of time off the ride, if I knew what to expect going in. It didn't rain much during the actual race, but there was no shortage of dangerous lightning very close by.

Saturday was the road race, and it went okay. I don't know about this race, I never seem to ride well here. I was determined to finish, and was happily plodding along, but I had dropped out of the points for the omnium, and had two laps to go, when some nasty black clouds and lightning rolled in. I decided it wasn't worth it, and my energy would be better served in the crit for Sunday, so I pulled the plug. It basically rained most of the rest of the evening.

Sunday was the crit. Actually, it was mostly waiting around all day for the crit to start. Dan and I got out for a nice ride in the morning, and the weather was perfect. In fact it was nice all day, right up till about 10 minutes before our race when the wind started howling away. I was on the rivet from the word "go" in the crit. 20 minutes in, and the wind got crazy, and this storm just absolutely dropped down on us. It poured, like I haven't seen it pour in quite some time! Salida is pretty flat, and right on the river, so they don't really have sewers - just those gutters running along the curbs of the roads. These quickly turned into 10 inch deep rivers of gushing water, on all 8 turns of the course! It was epic, with zero-visability, cracking lightning overhead, and pouring rain. But damn it, I stuck it out and finished the race. After thirty seconds of riding in that storm, it's not like I was going to get any wetter, so what the hell?

Jessica and Sara were real troopers this weekend, working the feed zone in the rain, traveling with smelly, bike-racin' boys, and working the radios and cheering during the rainstorm that they called a crit.