Day #1, Crash #1, Failed breakaway attempts #1-307604, successful chase group #1, and hill #1-62..... Place #18

That can pretty much sum up the stat line for the beverly hills race.  Of course it was fast, 8 kelly benifits riders pulled into my nice shady area 10 minutes after i paid $650 registration for the 17 days of superweek. Kahala la-grange is back along with some rock racing guy named bahati, i hear hes good and has a hard last name to spell.  SO there were some fast guys there.  In pure WCA fashion i started out the race way too hard and learned a quick lesson about the abilities of just about every guy in the pack, they are all pretty strong.  So i wasted alot of unnecessairy energy (i can hear my entire team groaning their "i told you so" right now, i can hear it all the way from milwaukee where you all are, hey, the racing is in illinois, didnt know if you knew that judging by the lack of presence in the field the past 2 days, just saying....).  As you saw in the stats earlier, there was my first crash of the year.  At the top of the hill i was not paying attention about half way through the race and hooked up a wheel with a guy who stood up and i went down real fast.  I hurt my hand pretty good and i am nice and bloody in all the pictures, but i got back on after a check for broken things and waited to join back up.  While i was waiting i got to see a 10 man breakaway absoluetly fly around the corner and then i got to wait a good minute and a half until the pack meandered on by.... thats discouraging to see.  5 laps later an attack went off and i hopped kindly on the back of it and luckily a bunch of other people missed it, so for the next 25 miles 12 of us took turns at the front essentially just trying to stay away from the lapped pack, which we did and i guess i got 8th in the sprint after attacking with 3 to go with 2 other guys.... dumb all around on my part.

So, i signed some kids helmate after the race which made me feel really cool and i am sure dissapointed the kind in a big way when he found out that its actually a bad thing to be bleeding from just about everywhere after a bike race, and dizzy, i had to ask him what my name was so i could sign it.  I went to a hotel after finding the lack of air conditioning in my sisters apartment because i am a huge baby, and i found out that my sleep number is 35. Whats yours?

Day 2, blue island.  After putting new bar tape on before day one, it only took me an hour to completly tear off the entire left side in the crash, so i set out to find bar tape.  Got that taken care of, got a good yelling at by my coach about my tactics or lack-there-of, and had my 5th subway sandwich of superweek, 6th still to come later that day.  I set out to actually race this race with what i learned the day before which was basically dont be so stupid this time around.  This includes watching breakaways go off the front and trusting other guys will bring it back. This works famously.  I did bridge 2 that i thought had a chance, they didnt, more lessons learned.  So while we are keeping count of things thats about 600 lessons learned so far.  The race itself was fast (ha, why is it i feel i have to tell you that, as if it validates my not winning or something) especially the leadout by kelly benifits starting with 4 to go.  I suprisingly had some good energy left after doing some hardcore pack-foddering and finding out a bunch of different guys' sleep numbers.  I had no problem moving up on the leadout and positioning myself in the top 10 with 2 to go (no problem is a relative term, it took just about everything i had.... so i guess it was a huge problem).  The leadout was fast enough that in the first corner of the last lap i felt my back wheel drifting out from under me, but i didnt die, thank god.  That did scare me off a bit and i fell back to about 15th in the line of guys so fast i impressed myself even.  I passed a few leadout men that were going backwards in the sprint but i didnt actually pass anyone trying hard, which points out the following obvious fact; better positioning means better placing for me, my sprint is more of a light jog compared to bahati. thats ok, hes a nice guy so its not too bad getting hammered by him.  I got 12th with confidence i can do better in the days to come (especially if it comes down to a field sprint).

After day 1 i felt alittle overwhelmed with the amount of effort it required to race at this level, but after day 2 i have alot more confidence in my ability to get in the top 10 of these races because of my ability to ride the last laps hard and near the front.  Where i sit in the last turn will most likely be where i finish so i need to keep that in mind today at Olympia.

Aside from all that i am feeling good about my goal and i am leaning every second of the race from the pros there how to ride.  i am also learning that anything said to anyone in the race has to be taken with caution because everyone is so jacked up on adreneline you should divide its intensity by about 10 to get how they are actually feeling about the situation. 

This morning i made my way to the Danskin triathalon where i must have seen 2000 women get out of the water, and thats not even half of the amount of people in the race.  5000 overall participated, 5000.  So, bike racers, you think your sport is a big deal? thats 50 times the amount of people in our race today, so relax a bit, turns out bike racers arent the end-all-be-all of the endurance world. 

The starbucks i am in is about 55 degrees inside and i am shivering.  I am off to olympia and hopefully another sleep number bed is in my future.  I should be able to update this daily now thanks to my t-mobile hot-spot subscription which is unbelievably expensive, the things i do for my ginormous fanbase hitting refresh on my blog page in hopes i updated it in the last 30 seconds..... thanks mom

talk to you tomorrow.

jim "i put the best western out of buisness with the amount of continential breakfast i ate this morning" stemper