I’m not sure what happened a few hours ago at the Gateway UCI race. I wasn’t going that bad, but finished pretty horrible. I have an idea of what was wrong, but I’ll never know. I’m not sure I’m that recovered from Chequamegon, plus the 10 hour drive back Monday and standing on my feet most of Tuesday assembling bikes. That’s the best I’m going to come up with.

I finished more than 5 minutes behind Jeremy Powers, the winner, but that wasn’t reflective of how bad I was going. Or how good, depending on how you look at it. I lost more than a minute the last couple laps, riding easy and collecting 1 dollar bills that were scattered about the course. I was consistently losing about 25 seconds every lap. I’d guess that was about 1/2 from shitty bike handling and 1/2 from lack of power.

Like I said above, I felt pretty okay riding. I had two problems. Actually three. I wasn’t having a good vision day. I’m not sure if that is because of this eye infection thing I have going on or just because I’m not seeing that great nowadays, but it was a problem, which exacerbated bad bike handling. Problems 2 and 3 were maybe only one problem. I had a bad side stitch and my lower back was seized. I don’t know if one of those things brought on the other or not, but it was pretty uncomfortable. They both kind of went away with about 10 minutes to go, but by then it was too late.

I rode 10 miles back to the hotel at midnight, through the St. Louis neighborhoods. I love it. It felt good riding back, loosening up my legs. It started raining with a few miles to go. It was the best part of the whole evening by far.

It is now 2 am and I’m not even close to sleepy. I entered the USGP races up in Madison this weekend. The registration closed at 9 pm, the start time of the race last night, so I just went ahead and did it. I wasn’t really planning on driving up to Madison, but since racing bikes is what I do, I really didn’t have much of a choice. I’m glad there are more than 30 riders up in Madison racing. It will give me a higher chance of beating more guys.

So, later this morning, a few hours from now, Trudi and I are going to drive up to Mt. Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, and stay a night with her mom. Then maybe go up to Delavan, by Lake Geneva on Friday and head over to Madison on Saturday morning. Hopefully I’ll be better by Saturday and it won’t be such a shock to my system. I definitely wasn’t ready for that exertion tonight.

Here are the results from Cyclingnews.com.

And here’s a link to a video from the race showing me collecting some $$$ the last lap. It was a pretty crazy atmosphere, as cross usually is.

An artsy photo Trudi took.

My pile of cash from the last couple laps, $14.

Prize money for 19th. If I add the $14 I picked up during the race, I made total 2 cents more than $45 entry. Can you believe they actually put the 2 pennies in the envelope?

I guess I’m going to drive up to Madison later this morning and check out the course for the races this weekend. I’m always much more tired 2 days after a race than the first day. I’ve never really figured that out. I didn’t race the Madison races last year, but I’ve raced there in the past. Lots of turns and kind of dusty.

Lots of stuff is going on in the news that is pretty interesting all the way up to super interesting.

The super interesting stuff, at least to me is the discovery at CERN that something can move faster than the speed of light. They measured neutrinos moving significantly faster that the 186,000 miles/per second of light. If proven true, that throws a gigantic wrench into Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I don’t know how long it is going to take Fermilab or the Japanese to prove or disprove this discovery, but if true, physics might be back at square one.

Lance and a few others seem to be in more trouble with money laudering. Denis Menchov and Michele Scarponi are in the same boat. Here is the link at Cyclingnews for the article.

Chequamegon Area Trails got grant to improve the trails and maybe add some single track at the end of the race? This article at Cyclingnews says they are putting a little single track in on the North End that is going to be used in the race. I’ve been an advocate for adding singletrack for sometime. Hopefully it is going to happen now.

And finally, today is officially the first day of fall. It is the autumnal equinox today, the day when night are equal times. It is only the first day of fall in the Northern Hemisphere BTW. Fall is for cyclo-x. Actually, this year, with Nationals being in Madison, winter is for cyclo-x.

On the way up from St. Louis, we stopped in Bloomington, Illinois, at a great coffeeshop, the Coffee Hound. Super good coffee and a great atmospher.

The floor at the Coffee Hound was awesome.

And nothing beats the smell of fresh roasted coffee.

Most the suburbs in Northwest Chicago plant trees on the city easements. I think it is a great idea. It makes the neighborhoods seems so much more like neighborhoods.

Here is a great photo of Lucy Garner, Great Britain, winning the Junior Worlds today. Congratulations! More photos and article.

Here’s how not to dismount quickly.