What a wild month

Sooo . . . wow. July's almost over, August's almost here. July is usually my favorite month - my birthday's on the 10th, it's beautiful and warm outside and I log lots of time at the river, mountain bike trails start opening up . . .

I think my cosmic order was off this time around, though. Things just didn't go quite as planned. Where to start?

• Davis 4th of July Crit - umm . . . wtf happened? Went into it excited to attack and race hard for our sprinters, and ended up trailing off the back the whole damn time. I suffered in the heat, and I later realized, struggled in the corners. Subconsciously I was freaking myself out and letting myself get punked going into every last one of them. Undoubtedly fall-out from my TdN crash. Lame. Anyway, pulled out with 5 to go, tried to explain it, just sounded like lame ass excuses . . . moving on.
• Geiger Grade HCTT - I averaged 14 watts lower than my last time trial up Geiger, yet I was 1:20 faster. Umm . . . another WTF moment. Still failed to break 40:00, still managed to get 2nd, still holding the lead in the SNHCTT series. At least until the Mt. Rose TT . . . that one's gonna hurt.
• And finally . . . . drumroll please? Cascade! Holy shit, what just happened?! Oh yeah, I crashed out on the 1st stage (not counting the prologue, which isn't really a stage, just a whole day of sitting around, 1 hr of warm up, and 4 minutes of racing). Yeah, 1st stage. 18 miles in. We were on a descent, going pretty damn fast. It hurt. I tried to keep going, but my body said no. Now that I'm healing up I fine myself berating myself for not finishing. But I listened to my body and made a decision. In retrospect it's easy to say, "oh, I'm such a wimp, I should have kept going", but the truth is that my left leg was nearly useless and I had 54 miles and 6000 feet of climbing to go. I'm pissed, I want vengeance, I got lucky. Instead of being out for the rest of the season, I was just out for the week. And I even got in a couple hours of ripping up some sick Bend singletrack. Hells yeah. Make the best of a bad situation. Anyway, my totally radical teammate got 9th in the GC. So it was a good week, even though it was a crummy week.

So what now? Despite my lousy week, I find myself mentally recommitted to road racing, at least for another year. I'm going to go race Winters, Vacaville, Challenge and the Giro de SF. As much as the thought of racing a full season of cyclocross makes me all weak in the knees, I'm going to take a break this fall. If only to come back to Cascade next year for personal vindication. I honestly have NO IDEA where we'll be living next summer, or even 6 weeks from now, but I'll make it back to Bend for that damn race one way or another.