TTT Championships. And what a crappy week

This week kind of sucked.  I began getting a cough and sore throat on Tuesday, and by Friday night, I began hacking up a lot of mucus.  This was not good, for I had the TTT today and Silverton RR tomorrow (which I am not doing because of the cough).  But wait, there’s more.  Getting sick wasn’t the only problem I had this week.  On Wednesday’s ride, I found out that my rear wheel was messed up, so I headed back to town and swapped it out for a spare from Life Cycle, only to get two flats half an hour later.  I didn’t have a co2 inflator, so I had to call my roommate, Erich, to come bring a floor pump.  I got the second flat 15 minutes later and I had to call Tony for a ride home.  Plus it rained on me for the entire ride.

The next day, while on my morning ride, I lost my power tap CPU while descending Fox Hollow.  Luckily I found it on the pavement about 15′ later, but the holster was broken.  

Later that day, I blew out another tire on my afternoon ride.  I fixed it and continued on my doomed trip.  I was going to meet the Hutches crew at 6 for our TTT practice.  But first I was going to do 4X6′ intervals at the crit course.  I finished my second interval, and then my chain came off into my wheel and got stuck between the cassette and spokes.  After a lot of swearing and yanking on my chain, I gave up and waited until the Hutches guys got there to help with the tools that I was hoping they’d have with them.  

Paul arrived 10 minutes later and we fiddled with the now broken parts.  No luck.  Danny and Nick showed up shortly afterwards and we ended up having to break into Comotion to scavenge up a new chain and rear derailuer.  Because of the mechanical, our practice sesh was shortened to about 5 miles.  

I went to bed that night hacking away with my throat closing up as well, I was NOT getting down with the sickness.  Next morning I woke up to the same bad cough and sore throat.  Not looking good.  I cursed that freakin son of a bitch virus that was living in my nose and throat.  It laughed at me and sent another green glob of snot out my mouth to show its complete lack of respect.  

“Oh yeah, you want to play tough huh?” I said.  “Well how about a little dose of Albuterol, followed up with a couple decongestant pills?”

I stopped coughing by about 10AM, and Paul came by to pick me up at 10:45 for the TTT up in Corvallis.  

THE RACE:

I got a great warm up, and my lungs were actually feeling OK.  But by lap 2 I was definitely feeling a lot worse than I should have.  Sitting behind Paul, which is equally hard as drafting off David Kuhns (very difficult because of height), made things worse.  By lap 3, we dropped Danny, who had been struggling to pull through.  By this point, my pulls began to shorten as my lungs and legs burned more and more.  With each pull, it was a fight get back on the train as it went by.  The constant 30 mph was hurting like a husky.

Paul and Nick (Pretty Boy) did the most work, but even the power of those two Clydesdales wasn’t enough to get the win.  Our time brought us to 3rd place.  57:14 for the four-lap, 27 mile course.  Average speed was 29 mph.  We lost to Midtown by 9 seconds.  CMG took second by four seconds, but only rode with 3 riders, plus they lost over a minute because of a flat.  Damn.  If I was feeling better, we would have won.  But there’s not much that could have been done about that.  

Now it’s time to sleep for the next day and a half to get over this cold before it turns into something serious.