six packs

I'd like to give the full recap of this past weekend in TN, but it would just be too much to recap. Instead if you want the full story you'll have to join John and I at Backgammon on Monday nights. But I'll give you something long enough that you'll wonder what else could have happened?

John and I are the two on the team who want to get away early because we probably have a good chance at climbing and finishing that way. I hit it out of the parking lot. John attacks, he gets away with five others but then puts his 56 chain-ring to work and drops all but one of them by mile 5. They get 5 min on the field by the base of the climb. Later, I try to get away too and build up some time before the climb. No one else is interested in doing that with me. We catch the folks that John had dropped. He climbs well and stays away for second.

The TT was sort of a soup sandwich. Neither of us really wanted to do it, but he had aspirations of the omnium, and we both wanted to put our TT bikes to use. John did 4:08, I did 4:11. He was 6th, I was the second cat2.

After that our moral was low and we were both pretty waxed. We went to Texas Roadhouse. We drank some beer, eat a bunch of rolls, had some peanuts, and a salad... then we ate dinner. We were pretty stuffed. We decided to go check out the crit course, but there was a downtown festival going on, called Blue Plumb. It was called Blue Plumb because Johnson City use to be called Blue Plumb, but they changed the name, bad call.

We walked around Blue Plumb for a bit, trying to figure out how to buy beer. Beer was $4, but you had to also buy a $3 wrist band. $7 was too much. So after some people watching we went back to the hotel. We stopped off at Kroger to buy two six packs. One six pack of Guinness, one of Big Wheels. If you don't know what a Big Wheel is, then you should go to Kroger's freezer aisle and buy a six pack and split it with a friend, you will ride faster the next day... we sure did.

We didn't want to pay for breakfast. After cruzing into the Best Western that we didn't stay at, playing off our lack of necessary meal tickets, sneaking out the back door; we had ourselves a free meal. Gotcha! Then Starbucks was out of coffee, more free food. Can we keep it going?

John was hungry after having raced the masters race in the morning. He spent his last minutes before the crit pounding some more food from Taste Budz. When John writes his book, "It's Not About the Watts" (actually I'm going to go ahead and claim that title as my own), it's going to include an aside about how before some important crits he would spend his warm up eating a good volume of food. Rewriting the three hour rule to a 5min rule.

I spent a larger percentage of the crit then I would have liked just moving up. It was technical and blowing the start could blow your race. When I got to the front John and Chris had me do some pace setting. I did that for a bit till with 4 to go and I was blown. I went backwards, tried to hang on but pulled the plug at one to go and took a people watching lap. While I was screwing around; on the other side of the course John was attacking the field and winning the crit. In doing so he also fuddled up the plans of the our Myogenesis rivals and won the omnium. Good job John. He won some sweet shit: flowers, beer, two engraved rail road spikes and a good chunk of cash.

Starbucks screwed us out of coffee on the way home. Instead of giving us free coffee like they did in the morning, they made us pay for the coffee that we didn't even want. Well guess what? I'm making my own espresso tomorrow morning, I'll see ya later!