Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Getting back in the swing of things at the Tour de Toona

The new locale...


Kuota Kalibur TT

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Starting to give it some stick again
I took my mid-season break after the five week stint that began with the RAS in Ireland and finished with the Beauce in Canada. It was nice to have some time to finally go up in the mountains have a few picnics with Sarah and enjoy our new locale here in Colorado, I even joined in at a few happy hours with her co-workers... cocktails... yep.

I quickly got into the routine again of training, and was sure nice to have warm weather here which made the long mountain training rides bit easier than battling with frost bite, as I endured earlier in the season. I spent quite a lot of time on the TT bike, getting used to riding the position and taking full advantage of having one at home. The Kuota Kalibur TT machine is quite the ride.

The Toona was soon on the horizon and I felt ambitious about the race and hoped to ride well in it for the GC. Things began well for us in the team time trial where we limited our losses to the big horse power teams and finished 5th. It's not often we race TTT, so even though it hurt it was rather fun. I managed to finish in the front group on the second stage where we were hit with a nasty rain storm with 20km to go, which in addition to the many climbs on in the short distance stage it added to splitting the field in a few groups. The next few day, I just was not able to follow in the key moments of the race and slowly began to drift away at any chance of a high GC finish. I think I attribute it to my time off of racing and simply loosing a bit of that aggression. I was disappointed of course but tugged along and continued on with the race. Once Walters got the Green Sprint jersey it gave us some specific work to help him in the sprints which got the fire started again under mi arse. On the 6th stage I went off in a breakaway early on to try to steal some sprint points to help out. On Sunday's last stage We kept aggressive trying to create breakaways but the pace set by Healthy Nuts said no to those ideas. I kept good position coming into the final and made a good sprint for 4th place on the last stage.

So... hopefully the Tour de Toona was getting my engine back on and will be back to full speed for the big crits in Chicago and the rest of the season. See you soon!