Velovera

El Race Reporto

HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT...

I thought to myself as I stood at the back of the group and watched the call up. Oh my, I am racing them??? I then spotted Kristin from Team Flatlandia. I raced her everyday at Superweek and it was nice to see her as Virginia was up front living the pro life.

We took off, HOLY SHIT... 32 mph. I actually think that the OLMO is sort of the Dul-Mo at this point and I found it hard to race the aluminum bike that I used to love. After 27 minutes I started to really feel awful and did the yo-yo off the back. I then started to totally lose the field and decided that I wasn't going to give up that quickly. I took the turn after the start finish very quickly and plowed around the second turn to run into a group of about ten girls who had crashed. I hit a bike, I tried to run out of it, I took of my cleat and all my carbon fiber on my right shoe and then landed smack on my butt and bounced. My race was over. (Olmo has quite a few battle scars.)

In a very odd way, I have been trying to determine if I actually tried to avoid the ladies or if I thought that this was a respectable way to end my race. I have convinced myself that I did nothing to avoid the bike, but in retrospect, I don't think I could avoid it.

I have not shared such fabulous news of the huge black and purple bruise on my leg (don't know how I got it) because I am in contract for a house (escrow in CA terms) and have been running around crazy trying to work, get a mortgage and train. I also made it down to Pasadena for the end of the TOC. The Rock Racing team was in my hotel. I had another meaningful conversation with Floyd and he showed me some road rash. According to him, he raced 5 tours and never crashed and then last week was out on the open road alone and went down. I thought it was pretty amusing.

posted by Velovera @ 5:39 PM