Journal of professional cyclists Ian MacGregor and Timmy Duggan

Super random rambling post from Georgia

Already we’re two days into the race and Timmy is one-up on me in the blog entry department. So here goes my super-long, rambling story to make up for it.

I’ve drank 24 Nuun’s in the past two days to make up for my salt loss. And it’s not even hot out. Yet, somehow, I’m like a white salt lick everyday. If you’re not familiar with Nuun, it’s a portable electrolyte, kind of like Alka Seltzer.

My roommate, Fabio Calabria, almost broke his new priceless one-of-only-two-in-the-world ‘Navigator’ today when he crashed in the feed zone. The FreeStyle Navigator is a device that helps him constantly monitor his blood glucose. It looks like a little PDA.

Other than that bit of excitement. it’s a boring race so far. The first day was short, but that’s a good thing because the same thing is going to happen after riding 200k as it would after riding 100k.

Today was boring because it was the same thing. We should have just ridden 100k again. But I felt sorry for the Slipstream guys. They tried to ride the front on the circuit, thinking it was going to be technical and twisty and the hill was going to be harder than it was. Instead, it was a four-lane wide straight open road and everyone sat behind them coasting.

In fact, it was really easy when Timmy was on the front (haha just kidding.)  I didn’t bother to wave at him as he drifted through the group, sorry, Timmy.

It seems about half the field here has a broken wrist. Matt Cooke has one. Matt Wilson  on our team has one. Even the guy who won today – CSC’s JJ Haedo – has one. Fabio nearly joined the club with his crash (be sure and check out the picture of him on VeloNews.com).

On the climb on the circuit today, I followed Danny Pate up a sidewalk. The pack was spread across the road, but the sidewalk was completely open, so we just went up the side – past everyone. I’ve done enough European neutral starts to know how to race on the sidewalk. So when the sidewalk ended, Pate and I hopped back into the street. But the guy behind me must not have seen what was coming. He didn’t jump off and ended up in someone’s driveway and not on the race course anymore.

Another unusual thing happened today during our neutral start. The Gerolsteiner team bus was too tall to fit under the banner across the road. It was stopped right in the middle of the road. So the whole field just locked it up and then we had to squeeze by in a two or three-foot space between the barriers. It was pretty funny.

It was Mike Lange’s birthday Monday. Mike lives in my house in Golden. He races for Jelly Belly and his parents are down watching the race. So they took us out to dinner at this cool dockyard diner. We ate on a pier (along with the bugs that were biting us). I had some real Southern gumbo. If you don’t know what gumbo is, look it up on Wikipedia.

Tonight I have a king-size bed all to myself while my roommate is on a rollaway. He’s trying to figure out who I paid off to get that arranged. Fabio was also asking me how I make the elk jerky that I made and have been eating before bedtime each night.

All right, off to bed. My fingers are tired from all this typing.