Written Friday night:
I’m a little drunk right now. Not drunk, but tipsy. I just had a FULL beer. A Guinness, so yeah. Feelin pretty darn good actually. I’m in the process of making a Ride With GPS route for Steve F. right now. It’s been snowing ever since he got to Boulder with Chris except for like two days, so I need to vicariously live through them and take them out on, or show them via the internet, one of my favorite rides with 15,000-foots of climbing. I just had to zoom in to 150% on Microsoft Word right now because my vision is a little hazy. I’m not going to check for spelline errors BTW. Wow, that wasn’t on purpose. Ima leave it like it is. That beer is hitting me hard as shit right now. And no, I don’t care about the graffiti language. That’s not the right word…bad language. There we go. PARAGRAPH!
Okay, just saved the ride on ride with gps. It’s not working actually. Uggghhh, today was the second stage of Sea Otter. I just lost all motivation to right any more, especially about the race. Here’s a picture for you:
Ciabatta bread, roast beef, provolone cheese, regular mustard, honey mustard, mayo, banana peppers, pickles, tomato, onion, lettuce. Photo credit KP
After the race I went into a grocery store for some peanut butter and a toothbrush because I forgot my toothbrush at home even though I currently own like four toothbrushes, which is three more than I’ve ever owned before. I just noticed that I forgot my toothbrush this morning. I left on Wednesday. Does this mean I only brush my teeth every three days? No, I swear I brush twice a day. I just have a hard time remembering while traveling sometimes. Wow, getting side tracked a bit. Anyways, while I was in the grocery store I also got that massive sandwich and beer. I started getting in an argument with the woman who was building my sandwich, which was 14 inches…I measured with my mini Kennett…multiplied by four just kidding! Oh man I’m going to regret righting all this tomorrow.
Wow sidetracked again. News that the Boston Marathon bomber had been caught just broke in Salinas. So the woman was getting in a big fuss about foreigners and letting them into “our” country—meaning the country especially for white Western Europeans and no one else. I held back on telling her that if it was anyone’s country it’s the Native Americans’, but couldn’t resist when she started saying that the government should do a better job checking “people like that” when the let them in. She and one customer said they should “torture the bastard.” All I said was that there are plenty of messed up people who grew up in this country and that I found it strange that so much extra hate occurs when it’s a non-native. Wasn’t that recent school shooting caused by a true, red-blooded American, not a Chechnyan? He was crazy though so it’s okay. These bombers…they weren’t crazy. No. They were terrorists. And foreign terrorists at that. Sure…just as crazy in my book.
Now of course I think whoever did the bombing is an evil fuck, though I also believe the US war machine is an evil fuck too. So is Philip Morris but that manhunt wouldn’t be as entertaining I guess.
Most countries are full of racists, nationalists, and closed-minded people. A lot are much worse than the US, even parts of the Utopia of Europe. Depending on the region, Americans are actually pretty welcoming (rich white man’s guilt). But there’s still a long way for us to go.
A few moments into the somewhat heated discussion, I realized that the woman I was stupidly arguing with was in the midst of constructing what could possibly be the best damn sandwich of my entire fucking life. When I realized this I immediately shut my big dumb mouth and began nodding in agreement. The sandwich was saved. I think there must have been a full two pounds of roast beef on the thing! I continued agreeing with her, nodding, smiling…salivating at the sight of my growing sandwich. “Yes, they SHOULD check those damn foreigners more thoroughly. Yes America IS the land of the free, home of the brave…the BEST country in the world!!!! Torture the bastard!!! My sandwich is HUGE! Freedom of speech doesn’t mean a thing, nor should it, when there’s a monstrous sub on the line.
Now onto the race: holy mackerel I smashed it today. Not in terms of results so to speak, but in terms of brute power. Total race time was 3 hours, excluding the long neutral section. I was in the pack for 10 minutes of that. In the breakaway I averaged 334 watts for 2 hrs and 50 minutes, while the normalized power was 371. Hot dang! Is the power meter off?
I didn’t want to be in the breakaway, but I accidentally found myself up there when I went for the first KOM points of the day, which turned out to not be KOM points. The KOM points were on every other lap, not that first one. But anyways, me and one other guy, Zack Noonan of Bikereg.com, got away together on that climb by accident. We got bridged to pretty soon afterwards by Conner McCutcheon of Get Crackin. The course was short, at just under 70 miles with eight hilly laps and 7K feet of climbing.
I asked the two guys if it was okay if I took all the KOM points, since that’s what I decided I was going for. They said yes. Man, I’m already bored with this. I want to go pee and watch a crappy ache bay ohhh movie instead (HBO in Spanish).
So I pulled quite a bit and never really got that tired until the last 10 minutes of the race. I think it must have been somewhat slow and boring back in the field since no one ever bridged up to us. We dropped Conner on the seventh lap since he’d been pulling quite a bit more than Zack, who’d been sitting on a fair amount…very wisely I might add. No sense in dropping oneself out of the break. I’ve done that one before.
Breakaway. Photo credit Cyclingnews.com
The cohesion in the break was good though, don’t get me wrong. This writing doesn’t sound like me at all. I never say stupid cliché things like that (don’t get me wrong). One dumb saying that I hate is when someone says, “it is what it is.” Yeah no shit. Thanks for that sage advice you twat. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it was still a somewhat unsaid saying like it was three years ago. Now everyone says it, like all the damn time.
Anyways, with two laps to go when we were the three of us were still all together we heard that we had a whopping 1:50 on the field. That meant that we’d stay away for sure. It turned out we only had 40 or 50 seconds though. I didn’t know this until after the race, so I’d been dreaming of glory and began to conserve a tiny bit, just to make sure I could drop anyone on my wheel on the last 2-mile, stair-stepped climb to the finish line.
Anyways, on the last lap with five mile left we saw the field behind us at 20 seconds. I continued pulling, then dropped Zack at the base of the final climb and went on my own, knowing I’d likely get caught by the diminished field since the 1K to go sign was still way up the road. I got caught with about a mile left, stuck in the field for a while, which was down to like 40 guys or less at this point, then got popped with 800 meters and the rul steep section to go.
As I hovered a few seconds behind the 20-man lead group with 500 meters left, I realized I’d completely blown the race. I could have won, or at least been on the podium if I’d just sat in, been smart, and smashed the climb instead of blowing myself all over the course in the break. I still managed 19th, finishing 35 seconds behind THE MAN Alex Hageman. Well done sir, and well deserved. Guy’s a champ.
Finishing climb. Photo credit Geoff
Matt Cooke…shit I should have taken your advice! Next time though. It did feel good knowing that a lot of guys had to work hard and suffer to bring me back. Take that you mother bitches! Thanks Zack for the Cliff Blocks. And it was cool seeing my roommates Kim and Geoff, and also Kim’s dad for coming out to watch. Oh, and I won the KOM jersey and got to go up on the podium and get kissed by the podium girl (sorry Adelaide), so all in all the day was a success. I’m currently 15th on GC and will make sure to go home with the KOM shirt on Sunday after the circuit race. Later.
KENNETT PETERSON 