Come by next week on Wednesday evening for the next ride and check out the new digs at Tin Shed Sports!

Check out our ride on STRAVA 

Read more about SMBA and the upcoming event here

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Good luck in your next sporting endeavor Rose!

See you in the Olympics some day soon!

Im glad to have that race in the bank.  Pais Vasco was a rough week for me as I struggled with my typical seasonal allergies that always knock a notch off of my performance in April anywhere in the northern half of europe.  This race is touch enough as it is, with incessant climbing and rain soaked twisty roads.  It was all I could do to just fill in the pack and do my best to help out my team. I was happy to finish in one piece and looking forward to the form that will come of it.  Couldn’t train that hard on my own that’s for sure.  

The final stage Time Trial was pretty interesting.  I just cruised it on my regular road bike, but it was still an insande course.  The first and last kilometers should have been sponsored by Red Bull.  It was truly extreme road biking, both uphill and downhill.  Super narrow allyways on trashed pavement and cobblestones, straight up and down with twisty corners.  In the rain of course as well.  It was made all the better by the enormous crowds on the steep climbs.  The Basque fans were so thick you couldn’t even see the road in front of you as you raced through!  It was that way on the other critical climbing sections earlier in the race as well.  Super cool to see how passionate the fans are for cycling.  Even on the days with the most horrendous rainy weather they were out in full force!  Made slogging over the hills a little bit easier thankfully!

I had a nice mellow Easter back home in Girona to recover while watching my teammates race Paris-Roubaix on the TV.  No rest for the weary though because Im back up north to Belgium tomorrow for the Fleche Brabanconne and GP Denain this week, a couple hilly warm up races for the Ardennes Classics.

Happy Easter everyone and thanks for checking in!

The Vuelta Pais Vasco kicked off for us today with some rare sun and warm temperatures.  Unfortunately the forcast doesn’t look so peachy in the near future.  There is a reason it is so pretty and green here ha ha.

A race known for its insane concentration of climbs, and a stacked field of strong climbers, we went  So fast, in fact, that there were actually a couple crashes that happened on the curves in the middle of the climbs!  We went over like 7 categorized climbs today, just another day at Pais Vasco. One was only a kilometer long, but straight up and incredibly steep narrow road.  I wanted to get off and walk.  it was the kind of road that if it wasn’t on a hillside cow pasture, there would have been a staircase along side it.

Despite that and a few other kicks in the teeth, the race still finished in a sprint where our man of the day Daniele Ratto scored a top 5.

Ok, gotta go down and fuel up on iceburg lettuce, plain pasta, and boiled chicken

good night and thanks for checking in!

Well 2 for 2 this season on experiencing a little hypothermia in each stage race.  First in the rain and hail in Argentina in January, and then on wednesday during our idiotic excursion into the high Pyrenees during a spring snow/rain storm at the Volta Catalunya.  As it was absolutely dumping rain all night and then the morning of the stage, with the weather report calling for over a foot of snow on the tops of the mountains we were going to be going over, there was a lot of speculation over what the organizers were gonna do with the stage.  Amazingly, in my entire career I have seen a stage totally cancelled only once.  That was last year at the Tour of California under very similar snowy spring conditions.  Bike racing is truly a unique sport in that we run it off under almost any conditions.  If the laws of physics permit riding a bicycle that day, then the race is on. I think only Iditarod dog sledders and expedition mountaineers operate like that.  Well actually, the mountain climbers just hang out in the tent if its too nasty out I suppose.  Could you imagine baseball players in a torrential downpour?  Or golfers playing in gale-force winds?  I think that makes cycling cool in a bad-ass, hard-core kinda way, but it can easily turn into idiocy under certain conditions.  For example, stage 3 of Catalunya.  We raced the first 2 hours in pouring rain, and climbed up and up to 1800 meters, at which point it turned to snow, followed by a long frozen descent on slush covered roads while we are all soaking wet.  At the bottom of the descent I was well into survival mode, focusing on breathing and not crashing.  I couldn’t feel my hands enough to feel the brake levers, and was shaking so much I couldn’t really control my bike. I thought “this is just stupid".  Im not gonna risk my health, or maybe crashing because Im so cold.  this isnt bike racing, this is just survival.”  Where is the sport in a situation like that?  At that point, the race still had 120 km more to go, over another huge mountain with a long descent.  No way was I gonna do that.  So for the second time in my career, I abandoned in the middle of the stage race, albeit with about 40 of my colleagues.  It really takes a lot for me to quit in the middle of a race like that, and the situation of the day met the bill.  I voted for rider well being and safety by pulling the plug. 

Pretty sure that was the coldest Id ever been in my life.  After getting into the team car with Ivan Basso who had already stopped, and beginning the painful defrosting process, my teammate Christiano Salerno was looking about as F—ed as me and got in the car too.  For the next 20 min I was literally giving my teammate first aid for hypothermia in the back of the team car.  I took off all his wet clothes and pretty much just gave him a bear hug for as long as it took for my body heat to warm him up a bit.  At that point I think its pretty ridiculous that the organization chose to send the stage off as planned.  At the start they told us its not even snowing anywhere and that the whole stage is a go.  Ok then!  well it was definitely snowing on top of the first big climb.  As the riders began the penultimate climb, we were told over the radio “OK, were not doing the whole stage now.  The finish will be part way up this climb we are on right now, in only a few kilomters.”  What??!?! are you kidding me?  Its like a “choose your own adventure” story for the organizers.

So they modified the stage, mid stage, and apointed a “winner” even though the just placed an imaginary finish line on a moments notice.  They then nullified the GC results and kept the stage results.  Huge props to Janez Brakjovic for winning the most legendary stage Ive ever done, and to all the other riders who stuck to it and  “finished”.   But truly a pity to put us all through such conditions only to have it all not count and an asterisk next to the results.  

If the conditions are potentially dangerous, you gotta modify the stage for the safety of the riders.  They could easily have said on the starting line that the finish would be at the top of the climb where the snow was starting.  This is something that would be totally possible, still be a proper bike race, and not put everyone in danger.  Making the call mid stage is a recipe for disaster.  Not only are you unneccessarily risking everybodys safety, but you also have a big potential logistical problem when suddenly you cancel the stage mid race, were in the middle of nowhere, and you have 180 frozen we riders to transport to the hotel but theres not enough room in all the team cars and follow vehicles.  What do you do then? big disaster.

As much as it hurts to be watching the last couple days of the race in the sun and warmer temps,  I have no regrets about pulling out of the race.  Ive been frozen and broken at the same time before and that’s really not fun.