update

Well I guess I've been a little MIA for the last two weeks. I put it down to laziness and a general lack of motivation. The motivation I still do have is being used to convince myself to go out every day and ride my bike. Yes, unlike most bike racers in the US who don't do cross, my season is not yet over. I am still in Denmark and I have two more weekends of racing. This coming weekend we are doing two basically flat races in south western Denmark, and then next week we do the UCI 1.1 ranked Münsterland Giro. This is going to be only my second 1.1 race ever and I hope it goes better then my first, which was the Hel van het Mergelland where I crashed and broke my bike after about 20km. So if I make it 21km, it will be better.

After USPro I went back to Denmark and spend a whole three days there getting used to the time zone before we left to do the 2.2 Tour of Hokkaido in Japan. It was a pretty sweet trip, got to see some beautiful landscapes, experience a bit of a new culture, stay at hotels with spas, oh and do a bike race too.
The race itself was a bit strange. First of all, I could see over the whole peleton without really trying to look up. Second, although there were some good climbs in the race no one but me and some guys who weren't very good wanted to really race up them, and they weren't steep enough that I could just ride away from everyone. Thirdly, although we went around an island, we somehow managed to have a headwind for the last 80km of every stage. All of this meant that every day was a field sprint, despite our team's best efforts.

Although I got the closest of anyone got to beating the peleton. On the third day I got off with a tiny Japanese guy about 110km into a 180km stage. We were given about 2 minutes after 20km of riding and then we basically stayed there. There was a really annoying climb from 30 to 25km to go that wasn't steep but had a massive headwind blowing. So we were just crawling up it and our gap fell to only 30 seconds. Still we didn't give up and we kept that 30 second gap from 25 km to go until a hill that wasn't on the profile with 5km to go. If it hadn't been for that hill, we still may have stayed away, apparently the guys working in the peleton were starting to crack.

Although I am generally really bad at taking photos, I did take some and I posted them to facebook, which can be found here.

We came back last Monday and I spent most of the next week trying to get over the jet lag. I did manage to do an SFR workout on Thursday, but since my SRM was getting its battery replaced I did it by feel and went way too hard. This managed to completely trash my legs for the next three days. So we did a Danish race on Sunday and my legs were still complete garbage. But my teammate Chris won, so it was a good day for the team. Although I didn't really do much to help them.

Life is easy in the laughing group.

After a million attacks in the first hour, 18 riders got up the road in small groups and then came together to form a new peleton. Five of our 8 riders were up there so the three of us who were left basically did nothing, and after a few people tried to chase for a little while, the rest of our group did nothing too. Out of boredom and a desire to be finished, I pulled most of the last 30km so we only finished 7 minutes behind the winner, not 15 or more.

Well I guess that about sums up the last two weeks. Perhaps I should do shorter posts more often, instead of these long ones every couple of weeks... hm....