Yesterday didn’t go at all like I had expected it to go. I love that about life, but not in this instance. Like I posted already, both Catherine and I didn’t have good outcomes to our respective “bad luck”. Catherine is staying for 3 full days in a hospital and I am mulling over different scenarios of what I should do.

Catherine can’t race in Louisville in 3 weeks. She’d been told this by more than one professional. I, on the other hand, I am in a different situation. I need surgery on my shoulder, but I don’t see any reason I have to do it immediately. That being said, my right arm is hardly functioning. Not even close to good enough to race a cross race. I plan to keep training for the next couple weeks and see if the swelling goes down and I can get some usage out of it. Enough to race for 45 minutes at least. I didn’t realize how bad it was until trying to ride yesterday.

It was the weirdest thing. I rode my bike back to the hotel from the MRI place and could barely hold onto the bars. Trying to move from the brake levers to the tops wasn’t possible. I remember having problems doing just that in the race the day before, but it must be the endorphins or something, but I didn’t remember it being anywhere nearly as painful as it was yesterday. I only slept about 30 minutes all night, but got some painkillers, so slept more last night.

Matt Gilhausen and Kent Eriksen both showed up yesterday separately. Matt is racing this morning at 9:30 and Kent is just hanging with me and watching before he heads back to Steamboat.

Anyway, Catherine isn’t getting discharged until Monday, so we’re here until then. I can’t and wouldn’t race on Sunday now. I hate to say it, but they should never award the cyclocross nationals to an place like Madison again. The weather is way too unpredictable and if it was, the prediction would be icy frozen ruts. Just look at my car. Two racers with enormous medical bills. 10’s of thousands of dollars for sure. I’d bet more people are hurt at this Nationals than ever before. And we haven’t even gotten to Sunday, which I predict, is going to be a nightmare. I hope the temperatures remain over 32 most of today, or it is going to get real ugly.

Okay, it is super late and I haven’t slept forever. I want to be over to the course by 8:30 to help some friends prepare for the 9:30 race. Should be an interesting weekend over cyclocross.

I started wearing this St. Christopher medal my mother gave me last week again after the string broke. I thought it was bringing me good luck, but it doesn’t seem that way. Had to take it off for the MRI yesterday.

Catherine rode herself over to the emergency medical place this morning.

And here she was at midnight after having a tube stuck into her chest.

We ate dinner last night at Graze. These are fried pickles.

Graze has one of the best views of any restaurants I’ve been.

The guys up here are going to do their best to make sure the course is good for the Elite races tomorrow. And, hopefully, I’m going to have to eat my previous words. I think that the course might be fine for the races tomorrow. Today, for the majority of races, the course was just a grind. Not super deep, but pretty deep, sticky mud. But, the last race of the day, won by local Matt Shiver, Trek, the course started drying up pretty good. The temperatures were dropping and the wind was blowing hard, drying up the ruts, while the guys were riding in a line. I left just before dark and they had a Bobcat out trying removing the ruts before they froze up hard. I’m not going to 2nd guess this. I was all for it this afternoon, but I didn’t expect it to dry up as much as it did. There was a good line pretty much around the whole course at dark. We’ll see what it looks like in the morning at 15 degrees.

The afternoon prep team meeting -Tom Schuler and Tommy Matush

Backing the Bobcat to flatten the ruts.

Matt Shiver on his way to winning the final race of the day.