Final Week of '05 Racing
It's here. The last week of racing for the 2005 season. Most people who know me would probably be thinking that I would be happy this year is over. I've been hit with both ends of the stick...some great successes along with a whole lot of pain. Now that the skin is back and my shoulderblade and ribs don't hurt when I breathe anymore, I can look back and think that it wasn't really that bad. Nevertheless, I am a little worried about not racing next week. I mean how can I go for one week without some incident that either semi-threatens my life or more importantly, threatens the overall lead in the criterium series. Saturday night at the Ogden Criterium--which by the way is a great race/course made even better by the likes of Louder and Swindlehurst showing up to rip our legs off while they hardly break a sweat--the stick smacked me around a bit with some pain. Fortunately, the pain was running to the pit to see if someone could either rip my front derailleur off of my bike or somehow have a bike with Dura Ace pedals and hopefully Campy in my size sitting there waiting for me to use. Sidenote: how many times have you ran flat out pushing a broken bike in carbon soled and cleated cycling shoes? I was about to yell for someone to give me a set of pliers so I could pull of the derailleur when Dennis Porter said to use his bike...an Eddy Merckx MXM/Dura Ace pedals/Campy Record setup. What luck! The only problem was that I didn't feel as stretched out. The race still ended up being a lot of fun, but this has got to STOP!!! I keep hearing people say that adversity builds character and that I have loaded up the Karma bank. Maybe it's good that '05 is finished. If I don't touch the bikes until November, maybe that bad juju will find another home. We'll see. In the meantime, it's one more week of the crit series and the beginning of looking forward to another season already.