Addicted to Biken

Andrew Gold 2012

2012-01-31T16:36:00.001-05:00

Andrew Gold 2012 from THESWPLACE.COM on Vimeo.

Tru Gold Roller Racing Starlight Bicycles Cup Invitational

2012-01-23T16:37:00.001-05:00

faces of pain from THESWPLACE.COM on Vimeo.

My Friend Adam

2012-01-17T10:17:00.001-05:00

KREM'S 22nd NEW YEAR'S DAY CYCLING CLASSIC

2012-01-09T16:30:00.000-05:00

Video of Race finish and interviews.

My race data

Top 10 Elite finishers in the 2012 Krem New Year’s Classic
1st	Geovanni Choto	Belize	Western Spirit	3:43:10	24.57 m.p.h.
2nd	Byron Pope	Belize National Champion	Benny’s Megabytes	3:43:41
3rd	Peter Choto	Belize	Western Spirit	3:43:43
4th	John Delong	USA	VeloShine Cycling Team	3:43:44
5th	Edward Reyes	Belize	D&D Cycling Team	3:43:45
6th	Marlon Castillo	Belize	Santino’s	3:43:49
7th	Leroy Casasola	Belize	Santino’s	3:44:56
8th	Gregory Lovell	Belize	Santino’s	3:45:01
9th	Allen Castillo	Belize	Benny’s Megabytes	3:45:01
10th	Christian McNish	Belize based Panamanian	Benny’s Megabytes	3:45:10

Race reports and interviews
http://www.krembz.com/index.php/tidbits/222-krems-22nd-new-years-day-cycling-classic

http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=21431

http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=426052

http://belize.com/blog/krem-2012-new-year-cycle-race/

http://www.plustvbelize.com/Featured/NewsDetails/tabid/63/ArticleId/1960/Krem-hosts-22nd-annual-New-Years-Day-Cycling-Classic.aspx

Photos
Training the day after the race

Video

Memories of Belize 2012 from THESWPLACE.COM on Vimeo.

East Coasters Cup Dec 12 2011

2011-12-13T16:44:00.000-05:00

Why I Ride on Vimeo

2011-11-22T11:54:00.001-05:00

Why I Ride on Vimeo, posted with vodpod Dreams are worth living for

New Yorker July 2011 Letter From Rwanda

2011-11-21T10:54:00.001-05:00

LETTER FROM RWANDA
CLIMBERS
A team of young cyclists tries to outrun the past.
by Philip Gourevitch JULY 11, 2011
“This is the land of second chances,” the coach of Team Rwanda says. The riders—Hutus and Tutsis—find that cycling gives suffering a purpose. Above, team members compete in the Tour of Rwanda, in November, 2010.

Gasore Hategeka bought his first bicycle in 2008. It was a heavily used, Chinese-made single-speed, and it cost thirty-five thousand Rwandan francs—roughly sixty dollars. Gasore, who was about twenty years old, had worked for nearly half his life before he could afford it. His father had once owned a bicycle, and although Gasore told me that he could not remember much from when he was young, he said, “I liked how the bike worked, the device. I remember him carrying me on the bike to work the fields far from our village, and when my father died I thought of the bike.” So he felt a calling, or that is how he liked to explain himself. He said, “It was my dream always—it was always in my head, the bike.” When Gasore spoke of the bike, he meant something almost mystical: the embodiment of an ideal of self-propulsion.
Gasore isn’t sure exactly when he was born, so he doesn’t know if he was nine or ten in 1997, when his father died. His mother had died when he was an infant, and his father had remarried and had more children. Sometimes his father came home, and sometimes he brought food, but not most of the time. He was a hard drinker, who got so far gone that he couldn’t afford the next drink—and Gasore said that the thirst, plus tuberculosis, did him in. But Gasore didn’t sound sure about that, either. He kept qualifying his account of his father’s death with the words “I think.” The way he told his story, there was only one thing certain about his childhood. “I had to fend for myself, or else die,” he said.
In northwest Rwanda, in the wet, chilly foothills of the Virunga volcanoes, the soil is black from lava, and ideal for growing potatoes. As a small child, armed with a sack, Gasore began making the rounds of village trading centers to scavenge fallen bits of potato. On good days, he might find a banana or an onion, too. When he was orphaned, he became a maibobo, a street kid—one of hundreds of thousands of children in Rwanda without adults to shelter them. Amid the country’s general poverty and hardship, theirs was a particularly mean existence, but for Gasore it was not such a big change. As he grew, the potato dealers put him to work, filling the hundred-kilo sacks that they trucked out to the rest of Rwanda. He was paid a coin here, a coin there, and, because he knew how to live without money, whenever he saved five hundred francs (nearly a dollar) he hid it away.
In time, he began carting potatoes on wooden bikes—Flintstonean scooters made from machete-hewn planks and beams, and fitted with machete-whittled
wheels—and, when he was grown, he found his place among the labor gangs that loaded the potato sacks onto trucks. Now he could earn as much as five hundred francs a day. Still, he allowed himself only one expense that wasn’t strictly a necessity. “There were guys who had bikes you could rent by the hour to learn to ride,” he said. “When I had a little money, I went, and the owner of the bike would run behind and push me. Then I’d go back to work, and when I got paid I’d buy another lesson.” Like a lot of Rwandans, Gasore didn’t know how to read or write, but he could count his money. Ten thousand francs was the price of a hundred-kilo sack of potatoes, and when he had it he bought one. He planted the potatoes on a patch of land that his father had left him, and a few months later, when he sold his crop, he had multiplied his wealth fourfold. “Immediately, in my head, there was the bike,” he told me.
Rural Rwandans tend to spend their lives within a day’s walking distance—roughly a fifteen-mile radius—of their homes. In that limited geography, the bicycle is the prevalent form of mechanized transport. Few Rwandans can afford a bike, yet where there is one it can pay for itself. On the same day that Gasore bought his he used his remaining five thousand francs to join the local bike-taxi association. Gasore preferred hauling cargo to passengers, and the longer the trip the better: he liked to see the country, and he liked the workout. There isn’t much flat land in Rwanda, and the northwest is all peaks and troughs. Gasore’s village, Sashwara, sits at one of the highest points on the main road, a mile and a half above sea level. To the town of Gisenyi, on the border with Congo, is about forty miles, and downhill almost all the way. For Gasore, who frequently made the round trip in a day, the steep climb home was his favorite part. Although he could make as much as two thousand francs on the Gisenyi run, he took even greater pleasure in making good time.
When he told me his story, Gasore never brought up the defining cataclysms of recent Rwandan history: the genocide of 1994, or the civil war that preceded it and the renewed war that devastated the northwest in its aftermath. He had grown up in the midst of inescapable violence—at least eight hundred thousand people were exterminated in a hundred days, when the government mobilized mobs from the Hutu majority to exterminate the Tutsi minority. Millions more, most of them Hutus, were displaced from their homes or fled into exile. Gasore’s family was Hutu, but he didn’t speak about that. In accounting for himself, he told only of
private hardships, and of how he had pedalled away from them as fast as he could. His only interest in history was to make his mark in it as a cyclist. When he lived on the street as a boy, he had caught glimpses of the Tour of Rwanda, a gruelling, multi-stage bicycle race that winds through the country for a week every year, and, he told me, “I asked myself whether, one day, I would have the chance to do that.”
In 2007, a national cycling team was established, and shortly before Gasore began riding his taxi-bike the team set up its training camp twenty-five miles east of Sashwara, in the town of Ruhengeri. As he plied his trade routes, Gasore watched the helmeted racers whiz by, dazzling in their tight Team Rwanda jerseys and shorts—in the national colors of blue, yellow, and green—crouched over the curved handlebars of their slender road bikes, pedalling in close formation. “I would chase them,” he told me. “Even when I had a passenger, I would race after the racers.” On the long descent to Gisenyi, he could keep up for three minutes at a stretch. He began to train every morning before work, pushing himself up hills and down. He called out to the racers to ask when they’d be by again, and he’d lay in wait for them. Once, he stripped everything he could off his fat-tired taxi-bike—passenger seat, cargo racks, fenders, kickstand. “Then, when I joined them, we were really riding together,” Gasore said. For eight months, he trained alone, until, he said, “I told myself, ‘I can do it.’ ”
One of the Team Rwanda riders, Innocent Sibomana, was from Sashwara, too, and had also started as a taxi-biker. Sibo, as everyone called him, encouraged Gasore to enter some local races. Gasore qualified for the district competition, then the regional competition, and before long he turned up with his taxi-bike at a national race. He did well enough that the Team Rwanda coach took notice and gave him a racing bike. In June of 2009, he brought him onto the team. Gasore had been riding for about a year.
In February of 2010, Team Rwanda flew to West Africa, to ride in the Tour of Cameroon, against teams from across Africa and from Europe. Gasore didn’t do so well or so badly during the first stages. Early on the third day, he rode onto the gravel- and litter-strewn shoulder of the road, got a puncture, and lost time while he waited for the team’s follow car to screech up and replace his tire. He caught up with the peloton—the main pack of riders—then did it again: cut onto the shoulder and flatted out. This time, when he rejoined the pack, he got impatient with his teammates. It seemed to him they weren’t riding very ambitiously. The strategy
and the tactics of cycling in a team road race are devilishly complex. At the finish of each stage, riders are ranked both individually and by team, but the Tour is won by the sum of the daily rankings. Teamwork is essential, not only within a team but also among teams—to economize on wind drag, conserve energy, wear out opponents, attack and break away or fend off others’ attacks—and teams play off one another in a constant drama of shifting alliances. Gasore knew from his training that he was to hang in with the group, at least until the final stretch. But in the middle of the race, in the middle of the pack of nearly a hundred riders, he felt that the training made no sense.
“At a certain moment, I didn’t respect the rules,” Gasore said. During a steep climb, he took off and outstripped everyone. He was well out in the lead by the top of the hill, all alone. He looked back and hesitated, but he heard voices cheering—his coach was waving him on, shouting, “Go, go!”—and he redoubled his effort. He didn’t win the Tour, but, when he climbed onto the podium at the finish line that afternoon, Gasore was the first Rwandan cyclist ever to take first place in a stage in professional international competition.
Gasore is a quiet, watchful man, not large but physically powerful. In his presence, you can feel the feral solitude of the boy who held his own among other vagabond children. I met him in the spring of last year, at a one-story brick house in the shade of a pair of towering, fruit-laden avocado trees, off a dirt lane in Ruhengeri. This is where Team Rwanda’s coach, Jonathan Boyer, a fifty-five-year-old American whom everyone calls Jock, lives with his pets: Zulu the dog, Kongo the cat, and Jambo the pied crow. Every week, the team gathers in Ruhengeri for three or four days of training camp. Gasore, who lives nearby, had arrived early, but a number of his teammates had to pedal more than a hundred miles to get there. As they rolled in, they disappeared into the hot shower—a luxury that none have at home—then hung around, swapping news, getting their bikes tuned by the team mechanic, and updating their Facebook pages, or simply gazing at photographs of themselves in action on Jock’s computers. The mood was homey and easy, and, as his teammates gathered, Gasore seemed to relax and brighten; in the team, he said, he had a family.
Many of the riders speak of Jock as the team’s father, and he refers to them as his boys. Rwanda, of course, is best known for its fratricidal past, but Jock never inquires about the riders’ histories beyond what they wish to tell him. “I see them
as their potential and nothing else,” he told me. Seventeen years ago, during the genocide, the riders were young boys. They had no agency in the crimes that defined their nation. All of them, Hutu and Tutsi, had been scarred, and they knew each other’s stories. They knew how they had been divided by identity in the past, and that those divisions still figure in Rwandan life, but they wanted to be known for something else. “Rwanda needs heroes,” a sports fan in Kigali, the capital, told me, and by doing something that every Rwandan could identify with—riding bicycles—these young men were fulfilling that need.
Cycling is an excruciating sport—a rider’s power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain—and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose. Jock, who was one of America’s foremost cycling champions in the nineteen-eighties, told me that he got into racing to get out of the house after his parents divorced. “I relate to pain,” he said. Gasore’s home-town teammate, Sibo, told me much the same thing. When he bought his first bike (like Gasore, with earnings from growing potatoes), Sibo had gone joyriding. With the bike, he felt rich and tried to act accordingly, like a man of leisure and ease: “Every time I’d come to a beautiful place, I’d pedal around, checking it out.” Then he took up racing, and he found the hardship addictive. “The bike is good. I forgot all the pain I had before I joined the team,” Sibo told me. “Cycling is like a fatal drug. When you get into it, you don’t want to do anything else. You don’t look to one side or another.”
The Team Rwanda riders I met in Ruhengeri had all started out as taximen or cargo haulers, and that made sense to Sibo. “After the war, the people where I’m from really worked a lot,” he said, and added, “To get out of the past, I think the only way is to work.” A boom in the potato market had allowed many of his neighbors to buy pickup trucks and build new houses, and as they toiled in the fields, he said, he pedalled his bike. With his share of the team’s prizes, he had bought goats, hired field hands to work his potato patch, and installed electricity in his grandmother’s house, where he lived. Being on Team Rwanda made him a star to the people in his village—not because it made him different, he said, but because his effort made him familiar. “They know that I suffer a lot. It’s more like they have pity for me, and they know that if I’ve earned something it’s because I worked too hard.”
In the morning, in Ruhengeri, Jock and his girlfriend, Kimberly Coats, who helps manage the team, prepared breakfast, heaping a bowl for each rider with several pounds of food: a thick layer of porridge, topped with bread, scrambled eggs, an avocado or two, and a half-dozen bananas. Then everyone pedalled out to the main road to warm up with a ten-mile climb in the high mountain air. Jock rode alongside on a motorbike, and I sat behind him. After a while, he split the riders into three teams to race one another, almost entirely uphill, to a finish line about thirty miles away. Everyone on the winning team would get a prize of two thousand francs. In a country where the average daily wage is perhaps eight hundred francs, Jock said, “It’s enough to give them a good motivation.”
The race ran between shabby peasant villages, through tea plantations and fields planted with beans, carrots, and corn, past herdsmen with long staffs following cattle, a work gang of convicted génocidaires, roadside barbers, and schoolgirls skipping and singing in pleated smocks. It began to drizzle, and Jock urged the riders on as the pavement grew slick. At one point, a local cargo-bike rider found himself in the midst of the racers, and started cranking to keep up for a hundred feet, straining in his flip-flops, his rear fender laden with three bleating goats. Children on the road shoulders cheered and sprinted alongside till they got winded and fell away laughing. The riders from the northwest were familiar presences, often hailed by name. And yet the distance between the athletes—on their expensive road bikes, with their American coach following, iPhone stopwatch in hand—and the world that they tore through seemed as though it could be measured in centuries.
Five years ago, Jock Boyer lived with his mother in the house where he grew up, in Carmel, California, and ran a bike shop in Marina, just up the coast. As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a big-animal veterinarian in Africa. “That’s all I wanted to do,” he said. In his early twenties, he’d spent a month travelling through South Africa, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Lesotho, and, he said, “I absolutely adored it.” But, in early 2006, when his boyhood friend Tom Ritchey asked him to come along for a cycling adventure to Rwanda, Jock said no. Tom told him that was a mistake. He had recently returned from a mountain-biking trek there, and he described the journey as the most meaningful experience of his life. Tom was a celebrated bike designer and bike builder (he is known as an inventor of the mountain bike), and his work had made him wealthy. But his wife had just
left him, and he’d set off for the trip in despair. Rwanda snapped him out of it. A decade after the genocide, an influx of foreign visitors had come to Rwanda, and, like many of them, Tom was astonished to find that the country felt alive with belief in a better future. For Rwandans, existence meant forgiveness, or, at least, a capacity to endure the unforgivable; there was no choice. Tom, an evangelical Christian, wanted to serve, and he believed that he could serve Rwanda by doing what he did best: bikes.
The country’s chief export was coffee, and Tom had been introduced to Rwanda by an American businessman named Dan Cooper, who helped bring Costco and Starbucks into the local coffee market. But the harvest was still transported largely on foot, or balanced in small bundles on the ubiquitous Chinese and Indian one-speed bikes. In the absence of better transportation, crops rotted, and economic life stagnated. To make the process more efficient, Tom was designing an elongated cargo bike that could carry far larger loads. He and Dan were tapping their networks—influential businessmen, Christians, and cyclists—to get the bikes made and sent to Rwanda. They called their nonprofit organization Project Rwanda, and to help launch it they were organizing a national bike rally, the Wooden Bike Classic, where they would introduce mountain biking to Rwandans. Tom wanted Jock to be there.
Jock shared Tom’s passion for bicycles, and his Christian faith; he was a Seventh-Day Adventist, and a devoted reader of evangelical literature. But, he told me, “I didn’t know where Rwanda was. I didn’t really know much about the genocide, and wasn’t really interested in knowing. All my life, I’ve rarely looked at TV, never read magazines, never got newspapers, never listened to the radio. I knew what was going on in my world and that sufficed. I did my thing.”
Jock’s thing was cycling. In Moab, Utah, where he was born, his father worked as a surveyor and a prospector of gold and uranium. Jock, who shares something of Sam Shepard’s lean, wind-planed handsomeness, made him sound like the father in a Shepard play: a dreamer and wanderer, an unaccountable man, who would disappear to go prospecting in the desert or to follow a rumor of fortune to Mexico. Jock was six when his mother left the marriage and took her three kids to California. She came from the Swift family, of the Chicago meatpacking firm Swift & Company—her grandfather was the general manager of the Chicago Union Stock Yards when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle”—and there was
enough money in that inheritance to buy the house in Carmel and to pay tuition at the best private schools. Other people’s fathers taught Jock to ride a bike. He took to it immediately: the simultaneous sensations of escape and of pursuit. He began racing, and winning, when he was fourteen, and at seventeen he left for Europe, where he rode, mostly on French teams, for the next fifteen years. In 1981, he was the first American cyclist to compete in the Tour de France.
Jock completed the Tour five times, and at his best, in 1983, he finished twelfth. As an American abroad, he had no great following. He was a cyclist’s cyclist, and even among his own kind he was seen as solitary: a Bible reader, a teetotaller, and, even more eccentrically among the protein-mad carnivores on the circuit, a vegetarian, with ever-evolving theories of dietary purity. Nobody ever accused Boyer of doping. A French coach called him “un marginal,” but his sense of apartness was a source of strength. In 1985, he won the punishing Race Across America, pedalling more than three thousand miles in a little over nine days, including only twenty-seven hours of sleep. In all, he had won more than forty professional races by the age of thirty-two, when he retired from competition. He spent five years in Holland, exporting bicycle parts to America, before returning to Carmel in 1992 to take up the importing end of the trade.
A bad decade followed: his Dutch partners squeezed him out of his business; he made an unhappy marriage, cheated on his wife with a teen-ager, and wound up in jail for lewd acts with a minor. It was as if, in giving up racing and coming home, he had caused his life to come unstrung. In 2003, when he got out of jail, and got divorced, he got back on his bike. He rode at least fifty miles a day, and sometimes closer to a hundred. In his teens, he had been known as a “senior slayer,” for beating seasoned cyclists, and now he beat riders half his age. When he turned fifty, he announced that he would ride again in the Race Across America, in a new category of competition that required riders to take forty hours of rest. In the summer of 2006, despite a nasty crash, he won in ten days.
“That was when Tom Ritchey said, ‘I need you in Rwanda,’ ” Jock told me. He told Ritchey he couldn’t afford to leave his bike shop; he couldn’t even afford airfare. Ritchey said he’d get him the ticket. Jock studied a map of Africa; the little blotch labelled “Rwanda” meant nothing to him. But he went.
The Wooden Bike Classic was held in the town of Kibuye, which sits on the shore of Lake Kivu, amid a jigsaw puzzle of hillocked peninsulas and deeply
carved coves. The landscapes in Rwanda are unfailingly picturesque, and, among them, Kibuye is known as a place of uncommon natural enchantment. By contrast, the scores of cyclists rolling in from all over the country made for a motley company. They rode bikes welded and rewelded at the joints, with tires that exploded when fully inflated, and they wore unlikely uniforms: ski sweaters or button-down dress shirts, say, with tattered flannel trousers and shower sandals. In addition to the wooden-bike race, there was a taxi-bike road race and Rwanda’s first mountain-bike race. There were blowouts, and crashes—at least one rider had to be fished out of the lake—and there were displays of raw strength and determination. The rider who won the mountain-bike race, a quiet young man named Adrien Niyonshuti, particularly impressed Jock. But what could a cyclist aspire to in Rwanda? The Wooden Bike Classic was a far cry from the high-tech, corporate-sponsored world of international cycling. Then again, even the most cosseted professional is only as good as his will to accept hardship, and here was the sport stripped to its essence: human beings as engines striving against all that held them back. Before Jock went home, he told Adrien he’d come to see him again.
Adrien has a boyish, almost birdish bearing, and a shy, inward seriousness that gives no hint of his relentless force on a bicycle. He comes from a family that is now largely extinct but was known for generations for producing athletes. His maternal grandfather had been a great wrestler, who, according to family lore, grappled with Mwami Mutara Rudahigwa, Rwanda’s penultimate monarch, and pinned him; his uncle Emmanuel was a national cycling champion before the genocide. Adrien started racing at fifteen, when he won a radio in a one-speed competition in his home town of Rwamagana, in eastern Rwanda. Emmanual gave him coaching and encouragement. Then Emmanuel died, and Adrien inherited his steel racing bike, which the family had been able to recover after the genocide. One of Adrien’s older brothers, a long-haul trucker, took over as his mentor, but soon he died, too—tuberculosis, Adrien said. Still, by nineteen, Adrien was gaining recognition as the strongest young rider in Rwanda. The Wooden Bike Classic was the first race he won. His prize was the mountain bike that the Americans had loaned him to ride in the race. He loved the bike, but there was no use in being the only mountain biker in the country, so he resumed training on his
road bike. When Jock said he’d come back, Adrien didn’t trust him. Muzungus tended to come, create excitement, make promises, and disappear.
Adrien was seven at the time of the genocide. He was the youngest of his parents’ nine children, and the only one still living with them at their farm, just outside Rwamagana. His mother’s pet name for him was Dessert, because, she said, just when she thought she was through having children there was Adrien, “like a sweet after you’ve eaten your fill.” The family was Tutsi, and when the genocide began, in April of 1994, Adrien’s parents took him to hide among their banana trees. Sometimes he says he was too young to remember, but most of the time he says he remembers too much. His parents, who were Muslims, normally prayed five times a day, and during their first days in the bush Adrien knew that his father was scared because he seemed to be praying constantly.
One night, Adrien heard his parents arguing. His father wanted to flee; he thought they would be safer at Adrien’s grandmother’s house, on the other side of town. His mother said no; they would lose everything they owned. Their farm had abundant crops, chickens, goats, and, Adrien said, “a lot of cows,” the traditional measure of wealth in Rwanda. Adrien’s father didn’t think that the place was worth dying for, but his mother wouldn’t be budged, until a gang of Interahamwe—the civilian militia dedicated to the extermination of Tutsis—came hunting for the family. Then they ran. Adrien’s grandmother’s house now felt too far away, so they headed to town. “There’s a Swahili saying that the death of many is like a wedding,” Adrien’s mother told me, when I visited her in Rwamagana. The saying, she explained, meant that the members of a community live and die together: “They go where everyone else is. They don’t expect to survive.” She added, “It’s very cynical.”
In the years before the genocide, much of northern Rwanda was destabilized by civil war between the entrenched Hutu dictatorship and a predominately Tutsi rebel force called the Rwandan Patriotic Front. In 1992, the R.P.F., under the leadership of Paul Kagame (now Rwanda’s President), launched a major offensive in the northeast, causing tens of thousands of Hutu civilians to flee their homes. At that time, Adrien’s father gave refuge to a displaced Hutu family—fellow-Muslims—who had later settled in Rwamagana; and now, after running through the bush with his wife and son, he went to that family, and they were taken in. One of their hosts’ sons was a local Interahamwe chief, so it took a few days before the
neighbors began to suspect that the family was sheltering Tutsis. Still, within a week of their arrival, Adrien’s family looked out to find the house surrounded by the militia. “I remember perfectly that it was between eleven-thirty and noon when they arrived,” Adrien said. The killers had machetes and jugs of gasoline, and Adrien heard them say, “Let’s burn them alive.”
Then it began to pour. April is the height of the wet season in Rwanda, and the rain falls hard and loud. Against a roof, it is deafening, and even outdoors its roar so drowns all other hearing that, for many witnesses, whole scenes of the genocide played out like a silent movie: people killing and dying in a gloom, seen through bright veils of rain. Adrien watched his attackers bolt for shelter, and when the rain stopped he heard people shouting that the R.P.F. had attacked a bus at the edge of town. “The Interahamwe went to go see,” he said. “So that day we were not killed.”
There was nowhere else for Adrien’s family to go, and the next day the Interahamwe appeared again at noon. This time, as they arrived, there was shooting in the distance. The R.P.F. was taking the town. The killers fled, and the rebels moved through Rwamagana, escorting survivors to the hospital to wait for trucks to evacuate them to protection camps in Kayonza, behind the front lines. Adrien’s mother told me that all along the road they saw Tutsi corpses, and when they got to the camp there was a pushcart with the bodies of three young boys and two girls. “Ah!” she cried, waving a handkerchief in front of her eyes. “I’ll never be able to forget that image.” By the time the R.P.F. had gained control of the country, that July, six of her children—five sons and a daughter—had been killed.
The Interahamwe had attacked Adrien’s grandmother’s house, where Adrien’s sister and the baby she was carrying were maimed with a machete and left for dead. The two of them were the sole survivors of that massacre; later, the bodies of more than forty family members were found, stuffed into a shallow trough designed for fermenting banana mash to make beer. Adrien’s family never moved back to the farm; the house was destroyed, and these days a tenant farmer works the land. The family that protected Adrien’s in Rwamagana had fled with them to the camp, and returned with them, once again taking them into their home. “Even today,” Adrien said, “we are like two brother families.”
I spoke to Adrien for hours about the genocide, but, except for his description of the Interahamwe who came with the gasoline, he related his ordeal without any
visual detail. “He didn’t see much,” his mother told me. Then she said, “He saw some things. He was very young and I tried not to let him see all the dead.” But how could he not have? He told me that if he goes three days without riding his bicycle the memories come on so strong that he has disabling headaches.
Adrien trained hard enough in the months after the Wooden Bike Classic to put the Americans out of his mind. Then, in February of 2007, he got a call that Jock was back in Rwanda, and was recruiting a team. (This time, when Tom Ritchey and Dan Cooper had asked Jock to go to Rwanda, they didn’t have to ask twice. But just for three months, Jock said, on a trial basis.) In the course of a week, Jock tested some twenty cyclists on his CompuTrainer—a device that connects a stationary bike to a laptop to measure a rider’s power and speed—and selected the top ten for intensive training. He put them up at a local church hostel, fed them heartily, gave them a little pocket money, and worked them out so fiercely that when Adrien looked back on his past five years of riding he said, “Until now, I was just joking.” At the end of the month, Jock thanked half the riders and sent them home. He told the rest that they were now Team Rwanda. Adrien made the cut, and the next month Jock picked him and one other teammate to fly to South Africa to compete in the Cape Epic, the biggest professional mountain-bike race in the world.
Adrien had never seen a great modern city before Cape Town; he had never seen the ocean; and he had never imagined a competition like the Epic, an eight-stage race across the rugged, shifting terrain of the Western Cape, in which more than a thousand bikers, riding in teams of two, covered as many as eighty off-road miles a day. There were sand traps, stream crossings, and long stretches where you had to carry your bike over boulder fields. The logistics of the operation were on a military scale. At the finish line each day, the riders were met by twelve hundred individual tents, tractor trailers with hot showers, a field mess, and brigades of support staff: mechanics, masseurs, doctors, and television crews. Adrien didn’t speak English, just some schoolboy French, which allowed him to communicate with Jock. Beyond that, he could only stare.
He and Jock rode as a team, and when they finished the first stage in twenty-fourth place he heard someone ask about him, “Where’s this guy from?” Their Team Rwanda jerseys tended to attract curiosity. Wasn’t Rwanda just a killing field? Adrien didn’t mind; it felt good to respond by riding his bike. But his body
had never felt so destroyed. Just to climb the steps to the shower trailer was a torment. “Eesh,” Adrien said. “It’s no place for me.” He was sure he was finished. “I told Jock, ‘Please, coach, this is not my race. Why did you take me to this race, coach?’ ‘Nah,’ he told me. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a nice race.’ ”
Adrien liked Jock’s toughness. “He knows the suffering part of cycling better than us,” he told me. “You know, some people in my country don’t have anybody to push them. Like when I was in school, nobody was asking me anything. If you have somebody push you, you have to see, to use your mind. If I get strong, I help myself. I don’t help him.” Each day of the Epic, he rode with greater confidence. On the sixth day, he finished thirteenth, and at the end of the race he and Jock took thirty-third place over all in a field of six hundred and seven teams. (The other Rwandan rider, Rafiki Jean de Dieu Uwimana, and his teammate, another American, finished sixty-third.) Jock was astonished, but if Adrien was he didn’t show it. When he returned to Rwanda, he went straight back into training. “After that,” he said, “we were going to America.”
“The Americans—they were born before us,” Rafiki told me, when I asked him about the two months that Team Rwanda spent travelling around the American West, in the summer of 2007. Many of the riders hadn’t seen Kigali before they joined the team, but over the years they have got used to travelling. Jock has sent them to South Africa for intensive training at a camp run by the U.C.I. (Union Cycliste Internationale), the world bicycling federation, and flown them to U.C.I. races all over the continent. After competitions in West Africa and North Africa, the team is always full of stories of organizational chaos and corruption (fistfights with bike thieves, missed meals because caterers absconded with their fees, poorly marked routes with signs that sent half the riders off course). Rwanda, by contrast, is known for its strict social order, and the riders take pride in that. But in America, Rafiki said, “it’s another world—there’s no resemblance to things here.” Five Rwandan riders flew into San Francisco, loaded into Jock’s motor home, and rolled through Las Vegas, and on to Utah for a week of training, then down to New Mexico, to ride in the Tour of the Gila, and back to California for more races on the way to Hood River, Oregon, where they entered the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic.
Americans who encountered the team were impressed by the riders’ easy familiarity, but the Rwandans were constantly struck by the strangeness of
American ways. “When we left California for New Mexico, there were places where you find someone living in the middle of nowhere,” Rafiki said. “He has a house, a car, a motorbike, electricity, water—everything you need—but the guy lives all alone in the middle of a forest. You ask yourself why.” Rafiki had taken to counting the miles between homes: twenty, fifty, more. “In Rwanda, everyone lives clustered together to get along,” he said. “If someone can’t start a fire, he can ask for a match next door. If he doesn’t have a mortar for grinding, he can go borrow his neighbor’s mortar. But here’s this guy, living in the bush alone.”
Rafiki said that he had never known real cold until his first night in an air-conditioned hotel in California. All the riders complained that they were freezing, but when Jock went to their rooms in the morning he found the beds untouched. “They said they had never had sheets, so they slept on top of the covers,” he told me. Jock suggested that they take hot showers, and after that, he said, “the whole rooms would be like steam rooms. They’d go to sleep in the shower.” When the Rwandans saw horses, they had to ask what they were. Jock arranged for them to go riding. At Whole Foods, they took trophy photographs of one another in the aisles. Wherever they went, Americans invited them into their homes, and the Rwandans couldn’t stop laughing when they found their hosts living with animals: dogs, parrots, hamsters, fish.
Jock had brought them to America, in part, because a racer learns by racing against superior athletes. He wanted them to know what their sport could be, what they were up against. He believed that there might be a future Olympian among them, but he knew that was impossible unless they believed it, too. He asked them to ask a lot of themselves. And he brought them to America, too, because he wanted to show them off.
Tom Ritchey and Dan Cooper had hired Jock with the idea that Team Rwanda would help to promote Project Rwanda’s coffee-bike program and, more broadly, to boost Rwanda itself, as a country with a future and not just a past. But, while Project Rwanda was a not-for-profit, it was not a charity. “It’s not aid,” Jock insisted. Ritchey’s coffee-bikes were to be sold at cost, generally on credit against the income they would generate. And the team’s coach and athletes were recruited as professionals; although there was no prospect of turning a profit, the hope from the start was to attract corporate sponsorship. In the meantime, the budget—a
couple of hundred thousand dollars a year—was made up, more or less hand to mouth, from donations.
Cooper told me that when he was soliciting funds for Team Rwanda a prospective donor said, “That’s a lot of money for such a small number of people.” Cooper disagreed. “If you’re going to give,” he said, “you need to give eyeball to eyeball. The further out you get, where you can’t see the eyeballs you’re interacting with, the less impact you have, and the more danger of potentially having a negative effect. To me, Team Rwanda represents that ideology—investing in a few individuals who will hopefully affect many individuals.”
Jock worked the riders hard in America, but their inexperience showed. They dropped out of a stage in their first race, in New Mexico, and in later competitions they straggled at the back of the pack. Adrien and Rafiki felt the failure acutely. The Americans had training, technical expertise, and technique. They knew how to work together and against one another in a race. They understood gear ratios, ergonomics, and aerodynamics, while Jock struggled to impress on the Rwandans the simplest things, like not to stop pedalling when they ate or drank as they rode. In Rwanda, he kept losing riders for weeks at a time to malaria. He fussed over their diets, and pleaded with them to drink purified water, but on any given day, he said, “ninety per cent have intestinal parasites.” That was easy to cure. “One pill, one day, gone,” he said. “Except then you drink bad water again, and they’re back.”
To Jock, “the total frustration of dealing with people who have no habits of strategic thinking” was a great part of the appeal of working with the Rwandan riders, equal only to “the exhilaration of their raw power and ability.” He’d lower a rider’s seat an inch and a half, and explain how this would increase the power of his pedal strokes by five or six per cent, and the next day the seat was back at the old level. Jock saw the problem as rooted in poverty: “You might be dead tomorrow, so why think about it?” On their return from America, the Rwandans felt that they had disappointed him with their constant losses, and assumed that he would leave. But Jock had the opposite reaction. The trip made him understand how important it was for the Rwandans to win. When they got home, he put them on salary—a hundred dollars a month (more than twice the average national income), plus a small bonus each time they came to training camp—and he gave them all new bikes.
A week before the Tour of Rwanda, last November, the African Continental Championships were held in Kigali. The big event for Team Rwanda was the final road race, because the first two riders to finish would be qualified for the 2012 Olympic Games, in London. Only seven African road racers are allowed to enter the Olympics, and teams had made their way to Kigali from twenty African countries. At the starting line, there was a minute of silence to commemorate a young Rwandan spectator who had been struck and killed, a few days earlier, by the Ivory Coast team car. Then the riders were off. Adrien was Rwanda’s hope, but for the first half of the ninety-mile race Gasore took and held the lead. When at last he tired, and fell back, Adrien made his move to break away on a steep hill. But as he stood up on his pedals his chain snapped. Gasore promptly swapped bikes with Adrien, so that Adrien could keep going, but although he made up much of his lost time, it was not enough to qualify him for the Olympics.
Still, the team had begun to come together. In 2008, Adrien rode again in the Cape Epic, this time with a Rwandan teammate, and they finished twenty-sixth; then he came home and won the Tour of Rwanda; and soon afterward he was signed on to ride for Africa’s top professional bike team, M.T.N. Cycling, in South Africa. Gasore’s stage win in Cameroon had so inspired his teammates that another rider won two later stages of the same tour. The team had grown; now as many as sixteen riders showed up at training camp each week. The money still came mostly from America (Amway and Walmart both contributed), but Rwanda’s Ministry of Youth, Sports, and Culture now paid for some of the foreign travel, and helped to underwrite the Tour of Rwanda.
The Tour had become a big deal. In 2009, the U.C.I. made it an official race on the international circuit, increasing its prize purses and its draw. The Tour that year included teams from twelve countries in Africa and Europe, and Rwandans lined the roads to watch and cheer. At the finish, in Kigali, Adrien came in third, behind a pair of Moroccans. The city was so crowded with spectators that the police presence had to be tripled to secure the cyclists a clear path. In all, Jock said, it was estimated that some three million Rwandans had seen the race. By contrast, Project Rwanda’s coffee-bike project was stalled. Although a Harvard study had found that Tom Ritchey’s bikes hugely increased profits for cargo haulers, the price of getting the bikes to landlocked Rwanda (one of the most expensive destinations on earth to ship a container of freight, perhaps second only
to Antarctica) made the bikes unaffordable on the local market. Cycling as a sport had become an end in itself, and the team’s cyclists were becoming famous in Rwanda. Their names were on the radio, and their jerseys were recognized everywhere. “The team is working,” Jock told me. “I’m flabbergasted.”
Rwanda’s high birth rate—five to six children in an average family—combined with a public-health revolution that helps far more of those children survive, has resulted in a population explosion. The government says that there are eleven million Rwandans, an increase of as much as a hundred per cent since the genocide, and more than half of them are under the age of twenty. Against such numbers, the success of a handful of bicyclists may seem paltry. But the team’s riders were aware of their power to inspire. When they went riding at home, young men and boys would try to tag along.
Adrien had effectively adopted a street kid in Rwamagana, a genocide orphan named Godfrey Gahemba. He joined the team at sixteen, and a year later, in 2008, he finished third in the Tour of Rwanda. Adrien loved Godfrey; everybody did. Jock thought there was no limit to where he might go. Not long after that 2008 Tour, Adrien was in South Africa when he got a call that his father was severely ill. By the time he got home, his father was dead. Adrien stuck around for a few weeks to help his mother and to ride with Godfrey. One day, they rode alongside a local race in Rwamagana. They were passing out water bottles when Godfrey’s handlebars locked with another rider’s and he toppled into the road, where he was crushed by a follow car.
“I went to the funeral of this kid and it looked like every person in a hundred miles came, most of them under fifteen,” Jock told me, when we met, in Kigali, in April of last year. “I asked the mayor if he’d ever seen such a crowd. The mayor said, ‘This kid gave hope to so many people.’ ” Jock nodded at a television, which was playing footage of genocide massacre sites and survivor testimonies. “I mean, look what they’re coming out of. Nothing—or worse than nothing.”
April is the anniversary of the genocide, a month of resurgent memories for Rwandans, and of official commemorations. “How can a team emerge out of all that?” Jock said. “How can you change identities?” It was a good question, and for Jock it seemed personal. Tom Ritchey knew Jock’s criminal record when he hired him to coach the Rwandan riders, and, as Dan Cooper said, “The more Team Rwanda gets famous and successful, the more Jock’s scarlet letter ends up
shining.” When I met Jock, all he said about the period before he came to Rwanda was “I had a really bad time of my life then, just made some really poor decisions.” The girl was sixteen in 2002, when she told police that Jock had groped her on multiple occasions in a three-year period, beginning when she was twelve. He admitted it at once, and faced the possibility of twenty years in prison. After he pleaded guilty, he was given a one-year sentence, because he was judged to be of no further threat to anyone, including the girl; he served nine months in the Monterey County jail before he was released on probation.
Jock’s girlfriend, Kimberly Coats, who is forty-five, had come to work for Project Rwanda after she lost her home in Las Vegas’s real-estate crash. She knew Jock’s story before she met him. What’s more, she had been a volunteer for fifteen years for an advocacy group for abused and neglected children. She said that when she and Jock became a couple he asked her, “If you know my past, why did you come?” She told him, “You know what I think? I think you were really stupid, you put yourself in a bad situation, and you didn’t think. That’s what it was.” She said, “It’s just so obvious to me that he’s not a predator.”
Jock was less forgiving of himself. Last November, we sat on a veranda at a Kigali hotel as a tremendous storm blew over the city. The sky blackened, wind bent the treetops flat, and for more than an hour rain pummelled down. Spray blew over us, till we were dripping and shivering. Jock showed no desire to move. “I totally love it,” he said. “Every hurricane, I want to be in it.” I asked him how, as a man in his forties, he had gone for a girl thirty years younger, not just once but repeatedly. He said that he knew her family, so they began innocently, and he said, “It was an emotional attachment, you know, best-friend attachment. We did a lot together, just normal stuff.” Was he telling me that he had fallen in love with the child? You don’t go to jail for being best friends. “We were always fully clothed,” he said. Did he consider her a victim? “Of course. Yeah. You have to.” He said, “I totally went out of the realm of what I should have done, and the trust that was put in me.”
He never spoke to the girl again, and has refused to reveal her identity. “When I look back, it’s just so foreign to me,” he said. “It was an anomaly in my whole character. I just can’t relate to any of it.” He still has to register, once a year in California, as a sex offender. In the eyes of the world, he said at one point, “it would have been better if I had killed somebody.” But there was nothing to be
done: some wrongs cannot be made right. “I decided that I’m just going to go forward, and the past is marred,” he said. Christianity was his great solace. He was born again in 1980 and baptized as an Adventist twelve years later. “I totally depend on it,” he said. “Just knowing God’s always there.”
The American professional cyclist Scott Nydam told me that when Jock’s name comes up among colleagues it never takes long before his crime is discussed. “No one understands it,” he said. Nydam was raised in the Christian Reformed Church, but he is skeptical of redemption narratives. Last year, while recovering from brain injuries sustained in bike crashes, Nydam volunteered to help coach Team Rwanda for several months, and he told me this story about Jock: “We walk into the office one time, and he’s sobbing. He’s watching a video, with Muhammad Ali talking about ‘I’m so fast, I turn out the light and I’m in bed before it’s dark. I murdered a rock.’ And then there’s this quote about our biggest fear is not that we’re inadequate; it’s that we’re powerful beyond measure. And then there’s an image of the movie with Brad Pitt as a boxer, and he’s getting beaten to shit. And then there’s Muhammad Ali, like, ‘I’m the greatest, I’m the greatest.’ ” Nydam wondered why those flashes of footage brought Jock to tears. “He was a great cyclist,” he said. “And, shit, if you fall from grace, he fucking fell from grace. I mean, how do you reconcile that? I know he was a good cyclist, but I also know he’s on that watch list. How do you deal with that, other than move to Africa?”
Jock bridles at the notion that he fled to Rwanda to do penance. “I was O.K. with being where I was,” he said. “I had incredible support from family and friends there. I had a business that was going. I raced. I rode. It wasn’t like, you know, I need to do this humanitarian thing now.” He allowed that it was “almost ironic” that Rwanda was where he had anchored. “This is the land of second chances,” he said. “Murderers are walking around here all over the place. The government let them out of their prisons as they admitted to what they did, and a lot of them are building homes for the widows of families that they slaughtered.” Yet he told me that was just a coincidence: “I could never have picked this place. I didn’t even know the history.”
A lot of Rwandans, Hutu and Tutsi, tell you that they wish that they could forget their country’s history—that they could account for their own lives without having to account for the genocide and the civil wars. The urgent question in the
aftermath of the genocide was: How can a people divided by such extreme and intimate bloodshed live together again? President Kagame’s R.P.F., which has been the country’s ruling party since 1994, proposed a seemingly simple answer: We are all Rwandans now, first and foremost. This was the founding doctrine of the new Rwandan state, to which all its institutions and practices were to be dedicated. The extermination of close to a million people by their fellow-citizens is bound to define the country’s history for generations to come. The idea, then, was to contain a hideously broken nation in a collective identity. That identity has the advantage of being significantly true—whatever subcategories you may carve them into, all Rwandans share the same nationality and language—and it has the disadvantage of any universalist diktat, that many other truths have to be suppressed, blurred, and ignored in order for it to take hold. The paradox is that in the name of putting the genocide behind them Rwandans have had it held constantly in front of them, as a warning of the perils of divided identity. And for a young generation that is scarred by its historical inheritance, but free of any direct accountability, it is not enough simply to coexist and to bury the memory of the slaughter; there is a need to make the idea of being Rwandan have greater value.
When Adrien went to South Africa to try out for M.T.N. Cycling, he went with Nathan Byukusenge, a Rwandan teammate. Early in 2009, armed thugs broke into the team house near Johannesburg. Adrien hid in his clothes closet while Nathan was beaten, and a Zambian rider was stabbed. When the thieves left, Adrien found Nathan crying, “No, no, I have to go back to my country. This country is very bad. I don’t want to die in this country.” Nathan was also a genocide survivor, and during the attack he felt as if it was 1994 again. Adrien, too, had endured flashbacks as he lay in his closet, but he thought that Nathan was wrong to quit the M.T.N. team. “I told Nathan, Don’t think like this,” he said. “This is the time to focus on training. Don’t think that back there is a nice situation and you can’t die.” After all, not every moment of violence was historically significant: Adrien’s young protégé, Godfrey, had just been killed in an entirely meaningless accident. And yet, when Nathan went home, and Adrien stayed in South Africa, they both explained the decision in terms of being a genocide survivor.
It is far easier for Tutsis, like Adrien and Nathan, to speak openly about their memories than it is for Hutus. After all, surviving genocide is Rwanda’s official story, and a few years ago the government formally began referring to the
extermination as “the genocide against the Tutsis.” (The traumas of the civil wars that preceded and followed the genocide are hardly acknowledged in recent official commemorations, and there has been no public accounting for the many casualties of those wars, Hutu and Tutsi.) Meanwhile, the government has promulgated uncommonly broad laws that forbid “divisionist” speech by proscribing any form of expression that a court might interpret as pitting Hutu against Tutsi; and those laws, combined with the unspoken taboo that arises from an external perception of collective Hutu blame and an internal sense of collective shame, have stifled the expression of Hutu historical trauma. The fear is that any equation of Hutu and Tutsi experience amounts to a sort of genocide negation. That concern is real: Hutu Power ideology is far from extinguished in the broad Rwandan polity. But the policies of ethnic neutrality have created a new set of confusions.
In Rwanda, it has always been uncouth to ask who is Hutu and who is Tutsi, but these days it is widely considered taboo, if not downright illegal. Rwandans, of course, know who is who, and, as a Presidential aide told me, “You’d probably have to arrest everyone in the country every night for ethnic divisionism, if you could hear how we talk about each other in our homes.” Even outsiders often don’t need to ask about people’s ethnicity: if you talk to Rwandans who were in the country in 1994 about their family and they don’t tell you that they are genocide survivors, it’s a pretty sure bet that they are Hutus. That was the case for most of the riders on Team Rwanda. In the day-to-day life of the team, ethnic identity seemed irrelevant. But, when it came to reckoning with the inescapable past, the ease with which the Tutsi survivors expressed the obvious connection of their ordeals to the present was in sharp contrast to the reticence of their Hutu teammates.
When I asked Gasore if he remembered the genocide and the wars, which had been entirely absent in his account of his origins, he told me, “No, no—I was too young in that time. I was really young.” But he was the same age as Adrien. After the genocide, much of the Hutu population of the northwest had fled into Congo (then still known as Zaire), and stayed there until the end of 1996, when Kagame sent his Army to drive them home and to hunt down those who resisted. Gasore said that he had no memories of that, either. In the years that followed, remnant forces of the Hutu Power army and genocidal militias returned from Congo to
Rwanda to wage a war of terror in the northwest. The Army responded with characteristic fury, and the war raged for nearly two years before the insurgency was effectively suppressed, at terrible cost to the civilians caught in the middle of it, who were accused of collaboration by both sides. Tens of thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes. Gasore’s village was in the middle of the war zone, and I wondered if his father’s death, in 1997, might have had any connection to the conflict. No, he said: “Tuberculosis—I think.”
Three other riders on the team had grown up as Hutus in the northwest at the same time as Gasore, and they did not hesitate to tell me how their families had suffered. Sibo, his neighbor in Sashwara who had brought him onto the team, recalled being displaced in 1994, and walking to Congo, carrying nothing but a gallon jug of cooking oil. Another rider spent two years with his family in the Mugunga camp, outside Goma, then returned to his village, only to flee again during the second war. He had lost a brother in the wars. The third rider from the northwest said that Hutu insurgents had killed his father in 1997, and his family then found refuge with the government soldiers on the main road. “There were many deaths in this region,” he said. “I know many people who died.”
Only Gasore claimed to have been untouched by history, and yet he was the only one on the team to have lost everything, to have grown up totally unschooled and alone. I was curious to see the home he had made for himself, and one day last November he arranged for his friend and roommate, a high-school boy named Janvier, to show me the place. It was a day when the Tour of Rwanda passed through Sashwara, and by late morning thousands of spectators had massed there along the road’s shoulders. When the first rider appeared, women began ululating, and the crowd let out a roar that grew wilder when he was recognized as Gasore. He had fought his way up a long climb to the front of the pack, and as he blew through the village, where a year and a half earlier he had been hustling taxi-bike fares, he smiled and flashed a victory sign.
I found Janvier as the throng broke up, and he took me to see the house where Sibo was raised by his grandmother, a tidy rectangle of whitewashed brick. Sibo’s grandmother invited us into the parlor and found a few small wooden chairs. As we talked, she said nothing of the genocide, only that in 1994 nearly everyone she knew fled to Congo. Gasore, too, she said. Janvier agreed: they weren’t there together—Janvier had come home quickly, and Gasore only later—but he was
sure of it. When they returned, Sibo’s grandmother said, her family was diminished: a son and a daughter and both of her sons-in-law died in Congo. And back in Rwanda they had to run again, when the infiltrators came killing and pillaging. She had taken her family to hide in the forest, but there was shooting from all sides, and government helicopters dropping bombs, so they returned after a few months, and found protection with the government soldiers. “Now it’s very safe, thank God. If it continues like this until my death, I will die happy. Before, you know, we could sit here like this and you’d see everybody knocked down by bullets.”
“Gasore’s father died here during the second war,” I said.
“I discussed it with him one time,” Janvier replied. “Gasore told me that government soldiers came once, and took his father on a motorbike to Mutura, on the road to Gisenyi. They gave him a bad beating. The evening he came back, he was almost dead. And a couple of days later he died.” Janvier didn’t know why the soldiers had taken him. He told me that Gasore had said, “Maybe there was a problem.”
Janvier led me through the town to Gasore’s place. Along the way, we passed ragged young men, doubled over as they lugged hundred-kilo sacks of potatoes. A blind man with a cane, sporting a fedora, worked his way up a rough path of volcanic earth. Drying laundry was strewn on the hedges, and a radio somewhere played country blues.
We entered Gasore’s home through a low, ill-fitting wooden door. There was a tiny mud-floored anteroom, dark and bare except for a pair of shoes that hung, soles out, on a peg beside a bike helmet. Another door opened into a chamber just big enough for a double bed, with a little space to stand at its foot and on one side. This was where Gasore and Janvier lived together, a normal sleeping arrangement in Rwanda, even a generous one—with a proper bed frame and a mattress for just two people. Until a few years ago, Gasore had lived in a less spacious house—it had no anteroom—and the upgrade had increased his rent from five dollars a month to nine. Janvier and I sat on the bed. Overhead, just beneath a roof of iron sheeting, a clothesline sagged under a load of clean clothing, serving as Gasore’s closet. The walls of the room were hung with cycling medals and race tags and snapshots of the team, and papered with clippings and posters: a Crucifixion scene, a tribute to the slain South African reggae star Lucky Philip Dube, a news
photo of President Kagame, an M.T.N. Cycling postcard of Adrien, a portrait of Alicia Keys. By the head of the bed hung a large sheet of white paper, on which Gasore had begun to practice writing. Big, uneven capital letters ran across the bottom, and higher up were words he had copied: “PEN,” “PULLEY,” “MENU,” “GO TO,” “RWANDA.”
The next morning, I told Gasore about my visit, and asked him if it was true that he’d gone to Congo as a boy. “Yes,” he said, without any change of tone or manner. And his father? “My father was taken by soldiers. They took him to the military camp at Bigogwe, not far from where we lived. They kept him there a few days. They beat him—really beat him up seriously. He came back, and two days later he was dead.”
“Were you there when he died?”
“Yes, I was there.”
Gasore didn’t know why his father was taken. He didn’t seem to care, either; he gave no acknowledgment that he had changed his story. He seemed to be saying, What difference does it really make? The history that he had obscured had literally given him nothing. It had rendered him a wild boy, and he had chosen not to be annihilated. By riding his bike, he had made good on that choice, and that was the story he wanted to tell. The way he had told it was untrue, and at the same time full of truth. Gasore was no less a victim of his history than Adrien was of his, but what they had more deeply in common was a horror of victimhood. “That history—that’s the history of the older generation,” Gasore said, speaking of the genocide and the wars. “It’s the older generation who made that whole story, and we’re turning the page to make a new Rwanda. I have no problem with people. For instance, the guy you saw there, Janvier, he’s a Tutsi. You saw, he lives at my place, and he’s a Tutsi.”
Cycling is not an obvious spectator sport. On the descents, the riders knife by at fifty miles an hour, which is thrilling to behold, unless you think about their bodily integrity, in which case it seems impossible that any of them will survive. Even on the climbs, there is no way to know what is happening in the race by standing still along the way as the riders churn by. But throughout the Tour of Rwanda last November the roadside throngs appeared endless, and, judging by the noise they made when the bikes were before them, they were not disappointed by the spectacle. I had asked Adrien’s mother if she would come out to see him on the
first day of the Tour, when the route ran east from Kigali and passed through Rwamagana. She said no: “He would ride by so quickly, I wouldn’t even recognize him.” In fact, she hadn’t seen him in a year. He’d been in Rwanda for two weeks already, but they’d only spoken on the phone.
“I came for the competition,” Adrien said. “And if I do the competition amid family life I will not concentrate well. So I prefer to finish the competition and then I will see the family afterward.” He was very strict. And he was fragile. When we spoke before the Tour on the veranda at the team’s hotel, he told me that he was not looking forward to the Rwamagana run. “It’s hard when I go to the east,” he said. “I see the house of my grandmother, where everyone was killed, and all the memories come back.” He’d gone out that way on a training ride, and saw that his grandmother’s house had long since been destroyed. He said, “I begin to think about it all again, and I try to pedal very quickly to get away. But it never leaves my head.” Adrien stopped talking, and after a moment he said, “The problem I have, especially when I win a race, and everyone else is there with their family, I have no one with me.” He hung his head, sobbed, and ran from the veranda and into the hotel.
Adrien finished fifth the first day of the Tour, and the next day he rose to third place over all. The fourth stage was the long, hard mountain run from Kigali to Gisenyi. In the first hour, a Kenyan rider’s bike broke on a fast descent, launching him over the handlebars to slam into one of the Rwandans, and when they disentangled they found that the Rwandan’s ankle was broken. A little later, Gasore, who’d fallen behind the peloton, crashed on a patch of gravel, and skinned his right forearm and left hand. “When I am at the rear of a race, I always fall,” he said.
I was riding on the back of a motorbike, and I caught up to Adrien just past Ruhengeri, where the heaviest climbing begins. The first time he’d attempted the Tour, seven years earlier, he had felt like dropping out at this point. Now it looked as though he were leading the Tour. Then the hills ahead of us lined up a little differently and I could see three cyclists cresting a rise about a mile ahead. There were no other Rwandan riders in sight, but as I cruised alongside Adrien he slowly started to separate from the peloton. He wasn’t straining; he didn’t even appear to be trying to break away. For miles, he climbed like that, floating alone between the front group and the main pack, until he had enough of a lead on those behind
him that it would have been very hard for them to catch him. Then he unleashed his power, and for nearly twenty minutes he climbed alone, at full speed, until he caught the three riders at the front. One of them fell back, and Adrien moved into the lead position.
In the rough little villages along the road, the crowds were thick and loud, and time and again a look of ecstatic astonishment would ignite a face as someone recognized the Rwandan jersey in the lead. The air got colder as we rode past the volcanoes, and the sky got lower and darker. At midday, the light was black, and the ceiling seemed to hover almost within reach. When it began to drizzle, I thought we were passing through a cloud. Then, just as we began the long final descent to Gisenyi, a drop of three thousand feet in elevation over eighteen and a half miles, the rain crashed down.
At thirty miles an hour, the rain stung. At fifty miles an hour, I was sure it was raising welts—and I was wearing long pants and a windbreaker, with a face shield on my helmet. Adrien was as good as naked in his racing togs. He should not have been able to see a thing. The rain filled my shoes, and the drops bounced like tiny Ping-Pong balls on the tarmac; each time the road swung around the next curve, it seemed that all of us—the three riders I was chasing, and my motorbike—would go straight off into the abyss. And Adrien was trying to go faster still.
Having led the two other riders to the gates of Gisenyi, he got left seconds behind at the finish line, but he crossed it with his arms held high, fists pumping. He knew the various riders’ cumulative times for all the stages so far, and thought he’d topped them. The officials had to do the math, so he waded through the downpour to sit beneath an awning. The math took a long time, and the rain would not let up. But, when the P.A. system crackled to life, Adrien was right. He’d won the yellow jersey. He leaped from his seat, straight up, with a radiant smile, and Kimberly whipped out her phone to take a picture. But, in the second that it took her to get it in position, his face collapsed into a mask of absolute loneliness.
The next day, on the return to Kigali, Adrien held on to the yellow jersey. The fans were beside themselves, and his smile held strong. But he was not happy with his teammates. Two days in a row, he had won for them, and they had not been there to help. And as the Tour progressed they did not rally. Adrien fell to second place, then seventh, then eighth, which is where he finished, five minutes behind the Eritrean champion. Now, with the races over, Adrien had to go home to visit
his mother. But she didn’t get to see much of him. From the minute he arrived, there was a swarm of visitors, people he knew and people he didn’t know, smiling and scraping, and insisting on an audience, to explain their troubles and to tell him how he should help. Adrien retreated swiftly to the home he keeps in Kigali, a small place, enclosed by a warren of other houses. He felt much better there. “People don’t know where I go, what I do, or where I live,” he said. “When I stay in my home town, people ask a lot of questions and ask for money. Here I feel safe and there is no trouble.”
“The poor do not like when a poor person gets somewhere,” Jock said. “When riders go to America, go to Cameroon, go to South Africa, and come home, they are bombarded so much by a multitude of people, mostly family members, for money.” The pressure played havoc with the team’s concentration. “My riders are threatened all the time: ‘Just give me money,’ ” Jock said. “When they’re at a race: ‘I need money, you’ve got to give me money.’ It’s a battle for them.”
By local standards, the riders did make a lot of money. To encourage teamwork at races, Jock pooled prizes and shared them among those who took part; between that and their salaries, and sports ministry bonuses for representing Rwanda in international races, he said, solid team members make at least six thousand dollars a year—more than ten times what they earned before joining the team. By custom, a Rwandan who prospers, however modestly, is obliged to look after his needier relatives, and the self-definition of family can become absurdly extended. Get ahead in Rwanda, and suddenly everyone is calling you brother, or uncle, or cousin, or, to really make the point, muzungu.
Between paying for school fees, food, clothing, and shelter, and dealing with the perpetual health crises and deaths in their family orbits, the riders operated like the heads of small private foundations. To protect their capital, they invested in small businesses—taxi-bikes or motorbikes to lease, or farmland for others to work—and, at the same time, they started building new homes, where they could have families of their own. Four of the five original team members have new houses, and even so, Jock said, a rider had recently told him, “No matter how much we earn, no matter how much you give us, we will always be in the same position.” Jock often said of his cyclists, “Rwandans are great climbers.” But poverty’s downward drag could make the climb out of it feel Sisyphean.
One afternoon, in Kigali, I went to see Rafiki, who had built himself a house at the edge of town. In the early years of Team Rwanda, Rafiki had been a star: articulate, funny, full of confidence. But then he had a girlfriend, and then the girlfriend had a baby, and then the girlfriend took off. Rafiki showed me the baby, Jonathan, named for Jock. He was sitting on the dirt floor of Rafiki’s outdoor kitchen, and he looked worryingly small for his age. Rafiki was proud of his house, which had electricity, and was near the road. But it was only two spare concrete rooms, and it sat right over a malarial wetland. I had the impression that this might be as good as it was going to get for Rafiki. Already, life was tugging him away from the bike, while younger riders like Adrien and Gasore, who had a monomania and a drive that he could no longer muster, outstripped him.
Ask Adrien who his girlfriend is, and he will tell you, “My bike.” He loves his country, too, he says, but he does not want to live there again until he’s done with cycling. “If I live in Rwanda, there are too many problems,” he said. “When I have money, I try to send it back to help my family. But, if I come, there’s this family drama, there’s everything I saw in Rwanda, there are memories that come back, my mind is not tranquil. When I am far from my country, then I can concentrate on my biking. When I am finished, I will return to live in Rwanda. But, for now, I need my concentration and to advance in the world.”
In February, in a competition in South Africa, Adrien qualified for the Olympics as a mountain biker. He got that far by shutting everything else out, and that’s how he intends to keep going: “All that I am interested in, today, is bicycling. Even if I think of other things, I can’t do anything about them for now. All that I see before me is the sport.”
Gasore, of course, doesn’t have to shut anybody out to concentrate. “I’m the result of a very difficult situation,” he said. “When I earn my money, it’s because I work very hard. There’s no person there to push me. I have to use my strength. So if anyone came to ask me for money, imagine!” He was happy to help poor or sick people in his community, and anyone who wanted to ride a bike as hard as he rode his. Young men were forever asking to train with him, he said, but they never came back for more than a day or two. So I was surprised to get an e-mail from Jock a few weeks ago, saying that he had just taken a powerful new rider onto the team, a kid named Janvier Hadi, who kept winning single-speed races, and who tested spectacularly on the CompuTrainer. It was the same Janvier who had
showed me around Sashwara. “When fitting his bike today I was asking him questions about where he lived and stuff,” Jock wrote. “I find out that he lives with Gasore!”
Gasore, meanwhile, went to Switzerland this summer, to train at the U.C.I. World Cycling Center, in Aigle. Unlike Adrien, he was not worried about how his success would be perceived when he returned home. “There’s nobody who can come and say, Listen, I helped you, now you’re nationally famous,” he told me. “There’s nobody can do that. It’s me myself who struggled, and here I am.” ♦
PHOTOGRAPH: DOMINIC NAHR
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_gourevitch?printable=true#ixzz1Tfmp3sKj

Tru Gold Event 1

2011-11-15T15:18:00.000-05:00

Tru Gold has Arrived

2011-11-10T13:02:00.000-05:00

Ronde van DeLongen

2011-10-25T09:03:00.001-05:00

Time	Saturday, October 29 · 10:00am - 1:00pm

Location	Bollo's Coffe 206 Draper Rd Blacksburg, VA


More Info	Ronde van DeLongen A fall classic, a chance for the VT cycling road team to get out and sort out things before the winter training season. The route will be technically and physically challenging but hopefully will be fun and a chance those in town that race road bikes and are planning on racing road to get to know each other. Start Time: 10:00am Saturday, October 29, 2011 Start Location: Bollo's Coffee, downtown Blacksburg The Ronde Van DeLongen is a Handicap race This event is for the current VT cycling team members to help sort out what category you would like to race come the spring road season. The event will have alumni and riders from around the Blacksburg area and even some special guests that will travel in for the event. This should be a great chance for newer riders to meet the cycling community, learn some racing tactics, etiquette, and see who will be taking the spring road race season seriously. To level the playing field and give everyone of the different levels a chance at the win, the event will be a Handicap race . The slowest cyclist starts the earliest and the fastest starts the latest, making the end of the race really close. An ideal handicap race is one in which all participants finish at the same time. Don’t forget to work together to out run the groups chasing. Handicap starting 15min head start for the C – D men and B – C women 5min head start for the Men B and women A A men chase for the win Champions 2009 Ben King 2010 John DeLong Other info: The ride out of town will be parade style on the same route as Wednesday worlds. No attacking or riding fast. Parade route is down Draper, right turn on Airport Rd, cross S Main St onto Ellet Rd. Follow Ellet Rd down the Cedar Run decent, at the bottom of the decent you will be on Lusters Gate Rd, follow this to the corner of Harding rd. At that point, open racing will begin. The Route: Start Corner of Lusters gate Rd and Harding Rd Catawabba Rd 5.5 miles Left Dry run Rd 1.3 miles Right Mt Tabor Rd 8 miles Right Sandy Ridge Rd 1.5 miles Right Blacksburg Rd 1.2 miles Right Gravel Hill Rd 1.2 miles Right Mt Tabor Rd 2.8 miles Right Sandy Ridge Rd 1.5 miles Right Blacksburg Rd 2.8 miles Right Gallion Ridge Rd 1.5 miles Left Mt Tabor Rd 9.3 miles Left Happy Hollow Rd 1.8 miles Left Harding Rd 1.4 miles Right Lusters Gate Rd 3.8 miles Right Ellett Rd 2 miles Finish Top of Cedar run climb where the pavement changes from State to town. Strava GPS map of John DeLongs 2010 ride http://app.strava.com/rides/211980 Other important things to keep in mind: 1. The road is open. Keep your head up and eyes open. 2. Do not crowd the yellow line. 3. Be careful at all turns and at the one stop sign on Mt. Tabor. 4. This is intended to be fun. Make it so. Blacksburg Classics Pre season Andrew Gold Started in 2007, as a warm up for the Owen Cup, held the weekend before. Owen Cup Virginia Tech Cycling team started a tradition in 2006 where they gather to test their road racing skills and endurance and this test was named the Owen Cup. The Owen Cup is held each year the weekend before the first collegiate race of the season. Fall season Ronde van DeLongen New in 2009, a fall classic, a chance for the VT cycling road team to get out and sort out things before the winter training season. The route will be technically and physically challenging but hopefully will be fun and a chance those in town that race road bikes and are planning on racing road to get to know each other.

RONDE VAN DELONGEN from THESWPLACE.COM on Vimeo.

Ronde van DeLongen T-shirts @ TheSW Place

Blacksburg to Boone via Blue Ridge Parkway

2011-10-24T16:14:00.000-05:00

Boone Ride 2011 (PART 1) from THESWPLACE.COM on Vimeo.

Its coming 2011 Ronde van DeLongen

2011-10-05T15:49:00.001-05:00

RONDE VAN DELONGEN from THESWPLACE.COM on Vimeo.

39th Carolina Cup 2011

2011-10-03T13:23:00.010-05:00

Mid-race chase

Finish

Finish close up

Results Pre-Reg

Results USA cycling
39th Carolina Cup
Greensboro, NC
(Event Information)


Criterium on 09/11/2011
Men - Pro 1/2 - 00-99
Place	Name	City, State	Bib	Team
1	John DeLong	Blacksburg, VA	37	Hincapie/ Green Creation Cycling Team
2	Travis Livermon	Winterville, NC	50	Team Mountain Khakis p/b SmartStop
3	David Flynn		16	Hincapie/Green Creation Cycling Team
4	Spencer Gaddy	Charlotte, NC	44	KENDA Pro Cycling presented by GEARGRINDER
5	Justin Lowe	Columbia, KY	25	Hincapie Development team
6	Andrea Ciacchini		35
7	Branden Russell (1 - Cat2)	Roswell, GA	31	Devo Team Type1
8	Rich Harper	Raleigh, NC	45	Cleveland Clinic � RGF Cycling Team p/b Felt Bicyc
9	Christopher Monteleone	Winston Salem, NC	46	KENDA Pro Cycling presented by GEARGRINDER
10	Aaron Frahm	Mebane, NC	22	Chemstar
11	Nick Fishbein (2 - Cat2)	Mooresville, NC	23	Hincapie/ Green Creation
12	Ricky Gargiulo	Summit, NJ	33	Colavita Racing
13	Cory Scott	Richmond, VA	14	College of William and Mary
14	Aaron Johnston (3 - Cat2)	Pawleys Island, SC	167
15	Andrew Baker		49	Bissell Pro Cycling Team
16	Christopher Zieman (4 - Cat2)	Chapel Hill, NC	47	team unattached
17	Aaron Shaw		21	HSP
18	Isaac Enderline (5 - Cat2)	Cary, NC	38	Hincapie Development team
19	Matthew Brooks (6 - Cat2)	Pickerington, OH	30	Devo Team Type1
20	Nathaniel Ward	Winston-salem, NC	53	Embrocation Cycling Journal
21	Dave Mabe (7 - Cat2)	Carrboro, NC	51	n/a
22	Patrick Weddell	West Jefferson, NC	43	Cleveland Clinic Sports Health Cycling
23	Parker Kyzer (8 - Cat2)	Spartanburg, SC	27	Hincapie Development team
24	Curtis Winsor	Harrisonburg, VA	40	Chemstar
25	jason marshall		57	Velo 16 BSG
26	Matthew Rinehart (9 - Cat2)	Durham, NC	34	Duke University Cycling
27	Matthew Howe	Raleigh, NC	54	Happy Tooth/Bandwidth.com
28	David LeDuc (10 - Cat2)	Willow Springs, NC	41	Atlantic Velo-Virginia p/b Walt's Racing
29	Michael Lanham	Alpharetta, GA	15	Globalbike pb. Catoma
30	Mark Warno	Fairfax, VA	11	AVC/Team Hagerstown
31	Andrew Olson		36	Hincapie/Green Creation Cycling Team
32	John Cox		52	Mock Orange Racing
33	Jonathan Hamblen	Winston Salem, NC	8	Unattached
34	Walter Bixby	Burlington, NC	39	Chemstar
35	Christopher Harkey	Mt Pleasant, NC	24	Hincapie/Green Creation Cycling Team
36	Patrick Barnett (11 - Cat2)	Columbia, SC	9	Carolina Velo/Cycle Center
37	Benjamin Zawacki	Weare, NH	48	Team Mountain Khakis p/b SmartStop
38	Daniel Rudalev (12 - Cat2)	Alpharetta, GA	28	Unattached
39	Walker Owen		20	Happy Tooth/Bandwidth.com
DNS	Daniel Holt		0	Devo Team Type1
DNP	Ross Barnhardt	Raleigh, NC	18	Happy Tooth/Bandwidth.com
DNP	Evan Fader	Morrisville, NC	56	Kelly Benefit Strategies/LSV
DNP	Trey Miller	Charlotte, NC	13	Team Globalbike p/b Catoma
DNP	David Chernosky	Rocky River, OH	17	Cleveland Clinic Sports Health â€“ RGF Cyclin
DNP	Stradford Helms	Greenville, SC	29	Devo Team Type1
DNP	Ryan Byars		19	Bitter Dose Cycling
DNP	Scotland Leman	Blacksburg, VA	32
DNP	John Hart		12	Friends Great Smokies (Team FGS)
DNP	Bruce Humphries	Gaffney, SC	26	Hincapie/Green Creation Cycling Team
DNP	Curtis Staples	Cary, NC	42	Hincapie Sports / Green Creations
DNP	Richard Kirby		10	Pre-Reg.com
DNP	Brian Dalton		187	Clif Bar

The Assault on Mt. Mitchell® 2011

2011-05-17T15:50:00.004-05:00

The Assault on Mt Mitchell

2011 results

The Assault on Mt Mitchell History

Photos

Start

Green train forming
almost up to speed

Bill's Hill

my finish

2011 83rd Holy Saturday Cross Country Cycling Classic, Belize

2011-04-27T10:25:00.008-05:00

Stating to collect links about the race

Race history and background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Country_Cycling_Classic

Photos I took during the trip

Strava
My 7th place ride
http://app.strava.com/rides/479935

Race reports

Channel 7
http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=19520

Channel 5
http://edition.channel5belize.com/archives/53244

Belize Blog
http://belize.com/blog/guatemala-rider-wins-belize-cross-country-cycle-race/

Video

Spectator clip form mile 8 on Western highway 10miles from the finish
http://youtu.be/V_k5143SuK4

Pre-Race commercial, for flavor of the hype
http://youtu.be/GP8sdXsxPzo
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Pre-race interviews
http://youtu.be/elZsMeGTchs

Donalsdosn Center Greenville Training Series 2/27/2011

2011-03-01T15:43:00.006-05:00

wind + watts + echelon = awesome suffering

Results

Hincapie / Green Creations team weekend race report

TOUR OF RWANDA 2010 - CYCLISME

2011-01-11T16:58:00.000-05:00

Tour of Rwanda

2010-12-10T09:46:00.006-05:00

Tour of Rwanda
Cyclingnews Race coverage, with photos of the race. I slipped in a couple photos they posted. My teammate won Stage 3.

Here are some links form my trip

Sim's Tour of Rwanda Photos, I used his camera, once I was out of the race, to get shots from the team car. They are most of the photos I took of the trip

Strava GPS/Power
First week of the tour

Second week of the tour

Owen Cup 2010

2010-11-04T13:08:00.000-05:00

Strava

Burkes Garden Century

2010-08-23T11:23:00.001-05:00

Strava

Riding with Scottie

2010-08-16T10:20:00.000-05:00

Race to The Watering Hole... from THESWPLACE on Vimeo.

Assault on Mount Mitchell 2010

2010-06-01T10:10:00.004-05:00

Assault on Mount Mitchell
Results
Strava

NAME	CITY/STATE	Team	Final Time
1	JOHN DELONG	BLACKSBURG VA	SUBARU GARY FISHER ELITE	05:02:53
2	BOYD JOHNSON	GREENVILLE SC		05:08:01
3	GEORGE MEYER	WELLFORD SC		05:19:41
4	JOHNNY MITCHELL	DILLON SC		05:28:06
5	DAVID MORKEN	CHAPEL HILL NC		05:28:39
6	MARK HILL	CHARLOTTE NC		05:29:38
7	JOEL PRICE	GAFFNEY SC		05:30:03
8	JOSHUA OXENDINE	RUTHERFORDTON NC		05:30:23
9	BRANDON HIGHSMITH	FLETCHER NC		05:32:17
10	DAN JOHNSON	CARY NC		05:32:47
11	TIM YOUNG	EVANS GA		05:34:28
12	A.J. MEYER	COHUTTA GA	SUBARU GARY FISHER ELITE	05:36:59
13	JEREMY WALDROP	GREENSBORO NC		05:39:17
14	THOMAS BALL	BOILING SPRINGS SC	SPINX MASTER'S TEAM	05:39:25
15	ANDY APPLEGATE	BLACK MOUNTAIN NC	TREK/LIBERTY BICYCLES	05:40:35

Mountains of Misery

2010-05-01T11:25:00.001-05:00

Strava

2010 82nd Holy Saturday Cross Country Cycling Classic, Belize

2010-04-30T13:03:00.009-05:00

Below are some links that have been sent to me.

2010 results
http://www.belizecycling.com/results/77-holy-saturday-cross-country-results-2010.html

Station prize results
http://www.belizecycling.com/holysat2010stationprizes.pdf

Race history and background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Country_Cycling_Classic

Strava

Race reports
http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=16624
Play by play of my finish

http://edition.channel5belize.com/?p=30583
Good coverage of the begining of the race

Race Photos; Finish
http://pollardmediapro.smugmug.com/Belize/cross-country-2010/11714309_2Kttr#827051548_AstEf

Race video live

The finish of the race starts 34min in to the feed, I finish 3rd around the 35:30min mark, My teammate and previous champion Chris Harkey finishes 9th around 36:30min mark

Video Race Preview

My favriot part is around the 1:29:00min mark.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Spectator video of me in the break from maybe 10miles out
http://youtu.be/33zQ0Jk_ulc

Blacksburg Wensday Worlds

2010-04-10T10:22:00.001-05:00

Wensday Training Race (part 1) from THESWPLACE on Vimeo.

Wensday Training Race (part 2) THE RETURN from THESWPLACE on Vimeo.

Strava

Adam

2010-03-20T10:27:00.000-05:00

Suffer from THESWPLACE on Vimeo.

Andrew Gold 2010

2010-02-10T10:25:00.002-05:00

My winter bike post ride

Scottie's 2009 Kenda Pro team bike post ride

Andrew GOLD 2010 from THESWPLACE on Vimeo.

Scotties video of training for Battenkill 2009

2009-11-30T16:35:00.002-05:00

Dirt Roads (HQ) from THESWPLACE on Vimeo.

Thanksgiving Day MTB Ride 2009 on Vimeo

2009-11-30T16:17:00.002-05:00

Too much fun Thanksgiving day.

Thanks Geronimo

more about "Thanksgiving Day MTB Ride 2009 on Vimeo", posted with vodpod

Training with Scottie and Reid

2009-08-14T20:47:00.005-05:00

Reid and I met up with Scottie and rolled to Floyd, touched the Blue Ridge Parkway. 87 miles 4:48 ride time. A good start to a weekend training camp to get us rolling for the fall races.

Photo links

2009-07-20T06:03:00.006-05:00

My Blogging is lacking I tend to tire myself out to much to think about blogging. Here are some links.

Pictures and some results of the races

Zele 7/12/2009

Photos http://www.cyclingnews.nu/fotopaginas%202009/ZeleHeikant12-07-2009.htm#Zondag

Results http://www.cyclingnews.nu/uitslagen/2009/Zele12-07-2009.pdf

Sinaai 7/13/ 2009

Photos http://www.cyclingnews.nu/wedstrijdverslagen%20weg%202009/Sinaai13-07-2009.htm#13

Wachtebeke 7/14/2009

Photos http://www.cyclingnews.nu/wedstrijdverslagen%20weg%202009/Wachtebeke14-07-2009.htm#14

Results http://www.cyclingnews.nu/uitslagen/2009/WachtebekeOudeSluis14-07-2009.pdf

My Pictures from to and from Wachtebeke

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?aid=2394795&id=6228845&ref=mf

Borsbeke 7/19/2009

Photos http://www.cyclingnews.nu/fotopaginas%202009/Borsbeke19-07-2009.htm#Zondag

Strijpen 7/20/2009

Results http://www.cyclingnews.nu/uitslagen/2009/Strijpen20-07-2009.pdf

Reid’s blog he I keeping up with the daily reports

http://bigwatts.blogspot.com/

Belgium 2009

2009-07-13T15:47:00.005-05:00

So last year I was going to blog about my 2008 week to Belgium. I posted one blog after my first race and then contacted my friend Kenneth and went out until 4am. The week of 2008 was full of great results, late nights, drinking and good times.

Maybe this year I will blog about my 2009 Belgian trip, it is the same week that I came last year so a chance at the same races. So far, it is a different trip. I am staying at Kenneth’s new apartment in Balegem, Be. It is located just north of the Flemish hills, perfect for exploring and training on the RvV (Tour of Flanders) hills and course. The town is a lot quieter than Gent.

Kenneth and his girlfriend have been taking care of us and it is an amazing trip, strait into the culture of the country. Catching up with Kenneth’s family has been great; they are some of the most generous people I have ever met.

Last year I was returning form my suspension and had been putting some huge endurance training, and I put out some strong results for my one week in Belgium. In the past, it took me two weeks to finish a Belgian race. I love racing in Belgium I feel the strongest rider always wins.

This year I have been going well in the USA, so the races in Belgium I felt would go better but the styles are to different and I am missing the fire I had last year. The weeks leading up to the 2009 Belgian trip were very stressful and my training was not as I would have liked. I thought I would be okay.

So far, I have been tired. The lacks of training and mistakes have delivered what I see as poor performances. Sunday we raced in Zele, Be. We left late to the race and I jammed up there. Then once in Zele I was unable to find the race and it demoralized me. We found the race 30min after I thought I started but they said we had 10min until the start. In the race I felt great and made, what I thought would be the break to the finish but I weakened due to lack of water because of not preparing correctly after being late. My final group was going for something in the teens but I did not contest due to the disappointment.

Monday I returned to Sinaai for the same course I place 7^th the year before, Kenneth drove us to the race so I felt the pressure was on but my mind was not in it and I was feeling the 140miles that I did on Sunday. I sat last wheel for the first four laps and then moved up to just miss the move. I rode until two laps to finish and I thought my group was going for something in the 20s so I quit. I was a bit upset with myself. The race was won by Guy Smet winner of the 2008 Tour de Faso, I would have been lucky to hold his wheel on a good day. Last year at this race, I had a norm power of 304 and average of 284. This year my power meter broke in the race due to the rough roads but it would have been lucky to have an average power of 240.

Tomorrow is another day

Sanofi-aventis Omnium, Roan Groan Road Race, Time Trial, Crit

2009-06-10T10:50:00.010-05:00

Blue Plumb bike race weekend

Photo: Dave Boyd

So I was nervous about the road race and wanted to get in the early move and make it a hard day, mission accomplished. I am not good at short time trials, but I made a go at it, and somehow finished in 6th place. Did the masters crit and it was a nice preview. Pro crit, team hit it hard winning primes, and then an opportunity presented itself on the final lap and I took it to the line. The weekend was full of great team riding, tough competition

Sanofi-aventis Omnium Weekend video overview Johnson City Press

Sanofi-aventis Omnium Roan Groan preview Johnson City Press

Roan Groan Road Race write up Johnson City Press

Pictures by Bart Nave
My Roan Groan road race finish on top of Roan Mt.

Crit win Johnson City, TN

Crit Pictures by Dave Boyd Johnson City Press

Blue Plum Crit youtube video

Reid's blog of the weekend

Battenkill Training

2009-04-14T08:25:00.005-05:00

Didn't make it to Belize for the 81st Cross Country, but Scottie and I had a great time batteling on some gravel and recording with his new video camera. Here is a picture he has clipped out of the video and tuned up.

Photos I took at Battenkill 2009

NY MA 2009

Preview - Owen Cup Saturday, February 07, 2009

2009-02-04T17:15:00.000-05:00

Preview - Owen Cup Saturday, February 07, 2009

Owen Cup Course

The Owen Cup Course is on open road so all traffic rules must be followed. Never cross the yellow line and if there is not a yellow line do not use the left half of the road, this must be left open for oncoming traffic.

Owen Cup is made to be fun, it is a race ride where the collegiate riders come out to test there strengths against the local cyclist. Gaining group riding experience and safety are the two main goals.

The group will gather at Bollo’s café and bakery and then proceed down N Main Street to Mt Tabor Rd. The group will pause in the parking lot of Slusser’s Chapel Church of God‎. The USA Cycling categories: Pro, 1, 2, 3 and equivalents will give everyone else a 5min head start. Mt Tabor Rd is one of the tougher sections of the course with large rollers that consist of varying inclines and ripping descents. Right turn Sandyridge Rd watch out for gravel in the turn, the road descends and there are blind turns so don’t cut the turns. Right turn onto Blacksburg Rd, in this direction it is slightly down hill with rollers this time of year there is normally a head wind. Continue onto Harding Rd up the climb to Blacksburg. Right turn on to Happy Hollow Rd this is a screaming decent followed by a steep climb. Right turn back onto Mt Tabor Rd this completes a lap. Repeat as many laps as needed. For your final lap continue on Harding Rd past Happy Hollow Rd and the course finishes at the Blacksburg town limit sign.

Players

The namesake Owen Nielsen, graduated from Virginia Tech after being part of VT cycling for five seasons, two of those season he also raced professionally. After graduation Owen started a “real job” and had to give up cycling training for running. He may be missing some cycling endurance but his fitness should be good and if he is with you and the finish line is sight watch out.

Owen Cup Champions

Owen Cup Champion 2006, Mark Hardman earned his bachelor degree at VT and continued his education to get a law degree at some other school. While at this other school Mark won colligate national road race and the overall omnium twice. Mark has been working hard as a lawyer and unable to train at his previous level. He was recently spotted at the Repella Sport Spectacular where he won the Sandyridge sprint. He then put Facebook statuses up that made it seem like he was training in Ecuador at altitude and visiting his South American doctor. Mark could possibly deliver a repeat performance of his 2006 win.

Owen Cup champion 2007, Aaron Snyder has represented VT at colligate mountain bike national where he delivers VT’s best performances. Currently he is racing Mountain bike professionally. Last year he focused on 24hr events but this year he is focusing on qualifying for world cup XC events. Aaron is reported to be bring some of his mountain bike training partners for backup to help defend his title at the 2009 event

Owen Cup Champion 2008 Ben King is just a sophomore at VT and might be the most talented rider to come through the VT program. He has raced professionally in the United States, represented the US national team at world cup junior events and the world championships. Currently Ben is training with the Live strong U23 team managed by Axel Merckx. Since the end of the 2008 fall semester Ben has spent time training with Lance Armstrong and living in his guest house. Lance may have taught Ben the secret of maintain 18mph through the Harding notch. Ben has been the most secretive about his Owen Cup plans and we will find out on race day if he will arrive to unleash some watts.

Teams

Rogues Racing the local Blacksburg road racing team, just finished up the spring training camp. They worked on their team strategy while based in Dalonega, GA. Where the scouted the Tour de Georgia climb Brass Town Bald, it is rumored that they practiced some kind of team time trial that they plan to use to deliver Jon Webb to the base of Harding Rd where he can blast the strength he honed in Georgia.

Virginia Tech cycling 2009 held a team training camp over Christmas break in Daytona, FL. The riders in attendance pumped out some big miles and may have come back with strength equal to the redness of their sunburn.

Others

Steven Gordon graduated early from VT after winning the ACCC individual championship while being part of the strongest road teams to represent VT. Steven is working on his MBA at another school and will be racing the 2009 season professionally. Andrew Olson has developed himself as the Blacksburg local legend, locally he is known as the world’s strongest category 2 racer. Myself John Delong well I am not good at tooting my own horn but I have been training and plan on delivering some watts to the roads on the day of the Owen Cup.

Cup Format

In the past the Owen cup has started as a large group, and sorted itself on the road. The USA Cycling categories: Pro, 1, 2, 3, women 1, 2, and equivalents would do 3 laps. USA Cycling categories 3, 4, women 3, and equivalents would do 2 laps. USA Cycling categories 4, 5 women 4, and equivalents would do 1 lap.

Handicap Race
Then handicap race is something we practice some on Wednesday worlds. It is a race style where the slower or less experienced riders get a head start. On Wednesday worlds we practice this so that newer riders can gain experience of riding longer with a larger group and getting a chance to see the more experienced guys in action.

This past Monday at the VT Cycling meeting I proposed that we try a handicap style race for the 2009 Owen cup. The proposal was approved. The USA Cycling categories: Pro, 1, 2, 3 and equivalents would give everyone else a 5min head start. If you are or were a professional, ex-national champion, Category, 1, 2 and think you should also get a head start you can apply by sending a 500 word essay, about why you need a head start, to the VT cycling list serve. On Saturday morning there will be a vote on the starting position of the riders that applied for head start.

Polar Bear Ride

2009-01-12T15:24:00.002-05:00

Polar Bear Ride 2009
Saturday was my fourth year at the Polar bear ride. Normally I attend the ride so Missy and I can catch up and ride with her friends and teammates, but she had other plans riding from Knoxville, TN towards D.C. via KY, WV, and Virginia. She and her friend Sam are collecting letters and signatures against mountain top removal. Check out their website it is a very impressive cause http://lookoutdoornews.com/voices/

This year I went down by myself to catch up with my new team and Missy’s friends, and good times were had। My goal for the 2009 Polar Bear ride was to not tow everyone around and pump out some solid watts. I was stuck in the peloton for the first 45min trying to move to the front without crossing the yellow line. It bothered me that so many people on the ride had little concern for others as the rode on the wrong side of the yellow line, luckily nothing happened, there is a lot of risk on an open road. Once I made it to the front I rolled off easily just to take off my vest. I started to wait for the group but they weren’t coming so I started to time trial. One rider decided to come up to me and we started to hit it. We picked up another rider that had been riding backwards on the course. The three of us drilled the tailwind sections and worked and nice echelon in the cross wind. During the cross wind section my teammate Reid Beloni bridged up and the attempt to out run the peloton began. We were making great time and the peloton was out of sight. About 15miles from the finish into a direct headwind on some long false flats our group of 4 became 2 hard working riders with 2 sitting on. Reid and I drove hard but kept it in check so we could stay at the front once we were caught. The catch happened on a hill with 8miles to go, Chris Harkey hit it and Reid and I countered, there was lots of firing off but luckily once the road quality deteriorated the racing slowed and the ride was completed. I spent about 1.75 hours rotating with a small group and was able to rack up the watts I wanted. I put out my second best 1 hour watt average and some strong numbers for 30min to 150min efforts.

Sunday was a team ride; it was a great time to get to know some new teammates। Even though I have been dreaming about race wheels with 80mm rims I was convinced mostly by price to go with some 50mm rims। I think they will be a solid choice and quench some of my need for speed.

Final Derby of 2008

2008-12-29T15:07:00.002-05:00

Final Derby of 2008

Made it home for Christmas and one of my favorite group ride happened to be on my birthday. The derby is a short hammer ride out of the Lehigh Country Velodrome. There has been some strong talent coming out of the area over the years. Some of the current strong men were in the area, and hitting it on Sunday, but the legend Paul Person handled them as always. Check out the sweet video Stephan Kincaid took and put together.

Trexlertown Derby December 28 2008 from Geronimok on Vimeo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULEUHF2dizc&feature=channel_page

Third race of the year

2008-07-14T15:55:00.001-05:00

F inished my first race in Belgium, it was a kermesse in Sinaai, Belgium. I was nervous at the start. After three of 14, 8km laps I bridged a couple gaps after the tail wind cobbled section. As I caught the leaders, I kept on driving into the head wind. Only one followed and we dug in, seven more bridged up, and the rotations began. Three of the guys could really drive it at parts. I felt supper but with four 8km laps to go I got the bonk and was dropped form the group with Two laps to go. We had put so much time on the rest of the race the officials had finished them a few laps early. Therefore, I crept around for another lap and the officials felt bad for me and let me finish a lap early. Matt finished with the main pack on lap nine. On the ride home, Dan drilled it into the headwind.

2008-07-13T17:39:00.001-05:00

Made it to Gent today and it is just as it was. Got nice and lost and rode some sweet roads in good temps. Maybe I try a race tomorrow and we will see how it goes

Back to racing

2008-07-11T11:23:00.002-05:00

It has been a while since I posted on my own blog maybe specifically for the blog since the fall of 2003. I was unmotivated. After living in Gent, Belgium and racing for Royal Antwerp cycling club I could not motivate myself to write much while racing in the states, even though I may have squeezed something out while on Snow Valley and Rite Aid.

So last year was a little rough racing wise it started out great and I was slowly improving. Unfortunately one of my big goals didn’t go my way the tour of Virginia. The tour of VA was going great until I bent a link in my chain on stage four while I was bridging to the break. After getting a chain swap form Sram I was way behind the field and Ian Ayers was yelling out of the broom wagon for me to get in so I did. Ian had stopped to wait on his team leader who also broke a chain but Ian did not grab onto the team car when they gave the team leader a ride back to the race. It is interesting how the officials look the other way for certain people. The rest of the week was not a big deal. Until once the last stage was over and the fatigue and high emotions got the best of everyone and an altercation occurred. I don’t currently feel like going into detail but about the altercation but the real trouble started about a hour after the altercation when the first race official arrived on the scene and promised someone would be punished for the altercation he did not see. So this guy made it his personal intention to give a year break form racing. It all worked out because I was able to focus on my job and it is rock solid and now I have money in my pocket.

I got a 2008 racing license on July 1^st and started of racing Saturday night at the 4th Annual Iron Hill Twilight Criterium. Sunday at a Circuit race in Blacksburg, VA. I survived them both and they felt t like early season training races where I couldn’t turn well and things hurt at times and I felt great at times.

Saturday I am heading for a week in Gent, Belgium. I am hoping to race three times in a week an ride the RvV course while riding and drinking the rest of the time.

2007 News

2007-09-14T12:39:00.000-05:00

Jame Carney requests USAC hearing for Tour of Virginia brawl
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2007/jun07/jun11news
Jame tries to deal with USA cycling

DeLong tries to put Virginia Tech horror behind him
http://www.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=43143
Reading Eagle article

Travieso, Van Gilder rule Raleigh
http://www.velonews.com/race/dom/articles/12332.0.html
My strong ride at the Raleigh twilight crit

Virginia concludes with 'aggressive violence'
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2007/may07/may01news3
The start of false statements, thanks to poor officiating. that caused USA cycling to suspend me on rumors and gossip paraded as some kind of fact.

Tour of Virginia Stage 5 Waynesboro to Staunton

2007-04-28T15:26:00.000-05:00

4/27 - Stage #5 Waynesboro to Staunton– 105 miles

Today’s was the first inclement weather. The earlier start guaranteed that we would be starting at 40 degrees and in the rain, but sun was forecasted for the afternoon. Over the first climb everything was fine, the rain was intense at time, the field was moving fast. We covered the first 45 miles at about 28 mph.

It was at this point Team Alliance’s days started going really bad. Joe was struggling to stay on the back. Mike was doing team work carrying, bottles and clothes, back and forth to the car. Just before we started the ascent of the day’s only “categorized” climb John Delong pulled to the side of the road. Miller stopped immediately to help. John had a bent chain and a flat tire. We assume from one of the gravel roads we rode over. John told us to leave him. This was a tough decision because he was our highest placed rider, but the fact is that this mechanical was probably terminal. John did get a wheel from our car and a chain from the SRAM car. He rode another ten miles, but never made up ground. John jumped into the broom wagon.

Joe struggled at the back for a long time. He was having his bad day today. He tried staying in the caravan, but the race really sped up in the final 35 miles. With 20 kilometers to go the race was full speed. Rite Aid’s Stephen Kincaid (PA) was chasing hard most of the day. A small group was up the rode. The break contained some high GC riders. So Stephen and his teammates had to chase.

Coming into the finish Team Alliance was trying to set up Jame Carney for a sprint win. But again luck was not on our side. Jame flatted as we passed the 3 kilometer sign. This kept him in the GC position, but ruined the chance for a win. Boyd and Mike rolled in with the field.

We all waited hoping Joe would make the time cut. After 14 minutes Joe rolled in safely, giving him the opportunity to fight again another day.

Race time 4:10 h:m

Tour of Virgina Stage 4 - Douthat State Park to Wayneboro

2007-04-27T15:25:00.000-05:00

4/26 - Stage #4 - Douthat State Park to Wayneboro – 108 miles

This is another beautiful day in the Tour of Virginia, sunny and mid low 70’s. Today’s stage is the queen stage of the Tour of Virginia, starting with one category 3 and then two category 1’s and countless uncategorized climbs, that really deserve KOM points. We all agree that this is the hardest stage. The two category 1’s are Montebello (better known as Vesuvius) and Reed’s Gap (the top is 1.5 miles past the Wintergreen Resort). These two climbs are epic; many riders from PA know these climbs from training camps and touring the parkway.

In today’s report we will start with the bad news first. Boyd Johnson(SC) who started the day sitting 24th GC flatted after cresting the cat 3. Chris Ernst(NC) stopped and gave him his wheel. Joe Whitman and Mike Miller went back to bring Boyd back to the pack. Chris never made it back to the field. Chris abandoned in the next feed zone. Joe and Mike got Boyd safely back into the pack.

Soon after getting Boyd back, Miller started having trouble. Mike was barely able to stay in contact on the flats, let alone the small climbs. This was not a good day to have a bad day. Later we found out Mike was having severe stomach problems. After the first category one he was able to “stop” for a natural break. He soldiered on, catching dropped riders and finishing inside the time limit.

The good news was John Delong and Boyd had great days. John and Boyd went over the top of the final climb 30 or 40 seconds behind the leaders. John and Boyd led the chase on the descent. They came close to bringing it back, but the leaders were racing for time bonuses so they pushed it all the way to the line. John used Boyd’s leadout to out sprint the group for 16th place. Boyd finished 21st. Jame finished 31st. Joe finished in the 50’s. Mike finished about 30 minutes back, but not last place.

At the end of the day John is 21st, Boyd is 24th Jame is 32nd in GC.

The winning time was +/- 4:40 h:m

Tour of Virginia Stage 3 – Bedford to Covington

2007-04-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

4/25 – Stage #3 – Bedford to Covington– 107.6 miles (closer to 110 miles)

Today was the first big day of the ToV. The race started at noon, it was sunny, and temperatures climbed throughout the day. We started at the D-Day Memorial site in Bedford, completing one loop around the memorial before officially starting the race. Today’s race consisted of two Cat 3 climbs, and a big Cat 1 climb starting at mile 85, along with numerous uncategorized climbs throughout the race.

The pace was fast from the start, averaging 30mph through the rolling hills leading to the first Cat 3 climb at mile 27. Jame got into a break of about 25 that lasted the next 40 miles, over the second Cat 3 climb, and to the final climb of the day, a monstrous 7-mile Cat 1 climb. The break away dissipated during this last climb, with a group of 20 guys from the peleton joining the break as they wound their way up the big hill. John and Boyd were in this group, with Joe not too far behind. A contingent of Colombians from the Caico Team led the pace through the hills and their big climber crested the KOM first.

The finish was at the bottom of a 10-mile-long insane descent. John and Boyd were in a group of 11, chasing 2 small groups ahead of them. Boyd was on the front driving the pace through the bottom stretch before the finish, putting John in a good position to sprint for 16th place overall on the day. Winning time was 4 hours and 33 minutes. John and Boyd finished about 5 minutes back, Joe came in a few minutes later finishing 34th day, Mike finished 57th and Chris finished 73rd. Overall, a very successful day for Team Alliance.

On a side note, Team Alliance was also representing in the team car caravan today. Bill was driving, Dana was getting bottles ready for the feeds, but most importantly we were the only team to have a team dog along for support. Check out Buster on cyclingnews.com

http://www.cyclingnews.com/photos.php?id=/photos/2007/diaries/timefactory/time0706/IMG_9400

Tour of Virginia Stage 2 Criterium

2007-04-25T15:17:00.000-05:00

4/24/2007
Tonight was the criterium. This was an absolutely crazy course. There was a 50 mph left hand turn onto a really narrow road. There was also a hill that took the racers through the last two turns and it was about an 8% grade. With 175 riders starting this made the hill even harder. As the front of the group would hit the hill the back of the group would have to slow way down and then re-accelerate on the hill.

After call ups where done the race was on. Jame stayed on or near the front the entire first half of the race. This appeared to be the safest place in the pack. The rest of the team stayed in the front half of the pack for the entire race. The only crash that we where involved in was Joe. He wasn’t hurt. He went down on the hill when another rider crashed into him.

For the most part the race was pretty uneventful. All the guy’s finished with the same time as the pack. Tomorrow is when the real racing start’s.

Tour of Virginia Stage 1 Time Trial

2007-04-25T15:16:00.000-05:00

April 24, 2007

Today was the start of the Tour of Virginia for Alliance Environmental. Attending the race was: Jame Carney, John DeLong, Boyd Johnson, Mike Miller, Joe Whitman, and Chris Ernst. Team manager is Bill Short and assisting him is Missy Petty (John’s girlfriend) and Dana Cumo (Joe’s girlfriend).

This morning was the Time Trial. It was an out and back course on a hill. Basically you up the hill, down the backside, make a 180 degree turn and do it again. This was definitely not a stage that was going to decide the GC, so we won’t talk much about it.

All of the guy’s came in with respectable times. Boyd was almost eliminated as he crossed the finish line. It seems that one of the course marshals thought it would be a good idea to park his car over the finish line. Boyd buzzed him going 40mph.

Tonight is the crit. It should be very interesting.

Joe Reporst on Belize 140 mile Cross Country Classic

2007-04-10T08:54:00.000-05:00

Hey all-
It was a crazy weekend for Boyd and I in Belize. We flew in Thursday night were we stayed at the nicest resort in town. Sheffield met us at the airport and immediately catered to us. After getting settled in Boyd and I went out on the town for a quick hour and a half ride where I flatted. Not a good sign.
Friday was our rest day, but we managed to get out for a 2 hour ride where we ended up meeting the Santinos team. This team is like the Darth Vader of Belizean Cycling. It's the New York Yankees of baseball-all big hitters and all bought but the 'rich" guy of the country. They are super nice guys, but the team is not well liked by the cycling fans. After our ride we laid around the hotel, went for a swim and watched a few movies. Boyd makes for a great date! In the evening we met up with Western Spirit, the team we were going to be racing for. We were brought down in hopes to help Shane Vasquez defend his title from last year. Although our plans included a plan B of either Boyd or myself going for the win if Shane couldn't get into a solo break-away.
Saturday quickly came. We were up at 4:30am to eat some wet pasta. I was feeling like shit with a major head cold and I don't know if Boyd was feeling at the top of his game either. The race kicked off though at around 5:50 am and the crowd was already intense. The roads were lined up already, everyone chanting for Shane.
The first few hours were pretty fast. The 140 mile race started out at about 25-30 miles per hour and Boyd and I were chasing down a few people who kept trying to go up the road. I looked at Boyd at one point and he looked like he was suffering...so was I. After about 65 miles, I think we both started to feel better and the legs were loosening up. Plus we were coming into San Ignacio where the crowd was 6-10 people deep!! Everyone was chanting Shane's name by now and Boyd and I quick made our way to the front because the turn around was going to be real crazy.
80 miles into it and two Santinos guys got to the front. These two were shipped in for the day, like us, from Guatemala to work for the powerhouse team and that they did. They got to the front and hammered for about 20 miles making the field of about 140 guys down to about 40. Boyd and I were sitting about 5 and 6 guys back, perfect tempo for us.
The race was starting to heat up as Shane got away in a break. He got about a minute on the field, but he was a marked man. They quickly brought him back. Plan B-sprint finish. Our "domestiques" weren't doing any work so I started to go back for grub and bottles for us. I didn't mind though, I was feeling good. At mile 100 Boyd says to me "I can win this"-rockin' I'll take second place. The podium is big enough for the two of us.
With about 15 miles to go, some dude literally falls over right in front of me nearly taking Boyd out. I went down hard, but used the Mike Miller technique-fall on something soft. I hurt my back pretty bad and was very slow to get up. My day was over. Boyd and Shane kept it upright and went on with 6 other guys. The race was in the bag for us. The crash took out the leading sprinter, Greg Lovell so I was told to quit chasing. That's bike racing-I finished in the back of the chasing group at about 17th. Boyd though was led out by Shane for an easy sprint victory.
The crowd coming into town was absolutely incredible. It was lined up about 5 miles out of town. By the time I finished Boyd had about 15 reports with mics in his face. There were people all around giving him praise. Our team was ecstatic with the victory and the $5000US cash prize. We are literally rock stars in Belize.
Again, awesome weekend with great results. I can't believe how catered we were. Boyd i think is still down there signing autographs and taking pictures with people's grandparents. Also, one more thing-there is an 11 by 14 picture in the Bakadeer Inn of "Environmental Alliance International Cycling Team" Pretty cool.
Stay tuned for Boyd version of the race in a day or two. Also, I apologize for any typos in the email. I still zoned out from the traveling.

Joe

Bill Reports on Record Braking Ride

2007-04-05T08:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Boyd and myself attended the Lowes Motor Speedway time trial series in Charlotte, NC. This is a 10 mile time trial around the same track that cars go 200mph around. While we didn't hit these kind of speeds we did fly.

For this event you can enter categories depending on your ability or the bike you are riding. Boyd entered the cat 1 race and I entered the fixed gear category. The front stretch is slightly up hill and into the wind and the back stretch is slightly downhill with a tail wind.
I started first. Let me start by saying that I only did this because Boyd said that he thought I could break the track record for fixed gear. That's 21 min 53 sec. I also haven't been riding much because of work. I started out and right away my legs felt like they were going to fall off. There are about 500 people at this event of all different abilities. It's kinda nice because you are always catching people. After about the first lap and a half I settled down and found a good rhythm.

A couple of people who were spectating knew that I was there to try and break the record. My friend Holli is standing on the side of the track yelling my lap times to me. The only problem is that I don't know if they are good or bad. So now i'm hammering down the track talking to myself. Is that a good time or a bad time? Should I speed up or slow down? I feel like i'm going fast? How far is it all the way around? I have'nt been caught yet! I must be going good! ( This is why I don't do very many time trials ) Finally I just told myself to shut up and go all out. Well, I did. I blew up with about a mile and a half to go. Luckily I was just about to hit the tailwind section and on a fixed gear bike it's pretty easy to carry your speed.

As I came around the final turn onto pit road I was breathing like someone had kicked me in the stomach. As i crossed the line I couldn't even see straight. People are trying to get me to stop to take off my timing chip and I just rode past them like they weren't even there. At least I knew I gave it my all.

I did end up breaking the record:

Old record: 21 min 53 secNew record: 20 min 32 sec

Thankfully I didn't see Boyd the entire time I was out there. He had a really good ride with a time of 20 min 40 sec. I'm not exactly sure where this put him in the standings, I think 4th.
T
his is a really fun series. I'm really glad that Boyd talked me into it and I look forward to breaking the new record.

Missy's Mussles

2007-04-03T13:35:00.000-05:00

Mussle Video Starting Missy

Dirty Dawg MTB Race Report

2007-04-02T13:20:00.000-05:00

Dirty Dawg Mountain Bike Race Mountain Lake, Virginia
April 1 2007

After missing registration it into the Tour of Walkersville race because I was in Belize I decided to stay in Blacksburg and train. When I realized it was going to rain all weekend and my power tap was still getting a rim put on it I started to think about what kind of training I could do to make it fun and then I realized that their was the Dirty Dawg mountain bike race in town.

To convince myself to attempt the mountain bike race I talked to local mountain biking blogger, friend and workmate Ashwin about the course. He assured me it wasn’t to rocky and I shouldn’t have a problem with my lack of technical riding skills. My girlfriend Missy was not so pleased and told me I was going to hurt myself bad and waste all the training I have been doing for this up coming season.

As the Rabbit crested the top of Mountain Lake I was committed to participating even though I was having regrets. The weather on top of the mountain was foggy but not as rainy as it had been back in Blacksburg. The course started in front of the Mountain Lake lodge and went up a fire road and then looped back to the Mountain Lake lodge where the finish would be. I took it easy off the starting line and then was forced to use my road skills to squeeze through none existent gaps in-between riders that were blocking my way. I caught my Friend from west Virginia University Geff Moy and told him I was going to follow him through the technical sections because I have not Mt bike skills and need to follow some on more experienced to make it through the rocky sections. Geff and I swapped spot for the first half the race until I realized we were doing mostly smooth trail for the first half a lap and then I took off with my road power. The course reentered the woods and down the mountain we went. It was steep and rocky at parts and I got out of the way of the faster riders. Geff passed me and told me to float and 100 meters later he got a flat. I finished the lap by catching some riders with better technical skills then me because of the long up hill.. I then gave it the gas for the smooth sections at the beginning of the lap but was forced to creep down the decent since I was all alone at this point. Two riders I had passed at the beginning of the lap shot passed and I didn’t see them till I finished.

I was pleased with my mountain bike race since I didn’t crash or hurt myself. I rode very strong on all the Open Sections. Another road rider Jon Hamblen attended the race but I didn’t recognize him until after ward mostly because he took the hole shot and kept on going to win the race by 5 min.

Kirkwood Report By Jamie

2007-04-01T12:42:00.000-05:00

It was a fun hard day. I knew I wanted to dial it up a bit and test my base miles out but from the gun was not the plan. I could tell right away that an early break was going to go. Everyone seemed a little scared of the extended distance from last year (51 to 84). The race blew a part last year (with Bill winning) at the shorter distance. I wanted in the long bomb move if it was happening so I just punched it over a steep roller and they let me go. I got joined by 3 other dudes after a few miles and I was happy to see 3 riders from three other Teams (Cervelo, GPOA and Mengoni). All of the Teams had multiple teammates in the field so I knew the chase would be messed up. We eventually got caught by a chase group (7 riders?) with about 30 miles to go but as soon as we were, they stopped working together so I attacked and went solo for another half lap. After they caught me again, the group was down to a smaller size, maybe 8 from 11. We went for about 3 miles before they started not working smooth together again. Scott Z tried to put it in the gutter and put the hurt on us but that just pissed me off because he really wasn't really rotating through before that from what I could see so I stood up and attacked him as he was going hard in the crosswind like he was standing still. He immediately stopped and reevaluated his maneuver or as I call it, his mistake. They could have just rotated nice and all would have been fine and dandy. I would have preferred that. It was about 18 miles to go and I knew I was going to have a tough time pulling this off alone with all of the effort that I had already put in so I had a quick check to look at my 20 second gap to evaluate and to my luck John Loner was in-between me and the chase. I waited for him and that was the done deal. I thought I was going to crack but somehow I held it together and pulled out the 84 mile Team Time Trial. I am happy. I had about a B grade on my base miles (March) after taking 3 weeks completely off from Australia so this is a good sign. I am accepting my training well. Joe was surprised that when I say "COMPLETELY OFF", I mean that I don't touch a bike at all. I don't even like looking at it. When I take time off, it is off off. Joe's ride was very impressive. I am happy for him too. He looked very fresh and together after the race and believe me, no one was looking pretty after that race. For him to bridge to that group that was chasing me and Loner on his own is awesome. I am impressed.

Two weeks to the NRC Race in Florida. I'm hoping everything keeps on track. I would race tomorrow but even though I looked pretty good today, I'd be horrible tomorrow. I may have seemed very strong today but it wasn't easy. I spent almost 4 hours in Zone 4 today. There is a price to pay for that. Plus, it looks like rain and I am already on antibiotics for this sinus/ear thing that I couldn't shake on my own. Maybe I should race on antibiotics more often?

Kirkwood Road Race Report By Joe

2007-04-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

today was the Kirkwood road race and Alliance fielded a small team of three guys; myself, Karl, and Jame. It was a relatively small field of probably 65 guys and the race was about 85 miles. So far, this has been by far the hardest race I've done all year. Although the field was small there were some high quality guys such as Scott Z from Priority Health Pro and numerous guys from Rite-Aid Pro.
The gun went off and within the first mile Jame was gone with a small group.
little did we know that that was the end of the race right there. Jame stayed away the entire day and was able to beat out his one and only competitor in an easy sprint finish. Because of the race conditions(mainly cool and windy) the field was torn apart. I actually found myself straggling behind the field only two laps into it having to chase back on for a mile or two. There were also a million attacks making people just completely suffer.
Everytime I saw Stephan or Scott attacked, I had a small feeling of hatred for them because I knew that this was going to be the hardest 20 seconds of my life trying to hold onto their wheels.
With 2 laps to go, the field had relaxed for just a bit as a small chase group had formed up the road from the previous few laps. I wanted up there so I tried a few attacks myself, but ended up dragging the whole field with me, until my final attack up a small hill in which everyone let me go. It took me about 5-6 miles to finally catch the chase group of about 7-8 guys.
By this time Jame and one other dude had a good lead. Scott Z then threw in yet another attack and blew up the chase group even more. There were only 4 of us coming into the finish(one guy got away and took 3rd because we were all playing games) where I easily took the sprint from Scott to take 4th.
Alliance domination with few numbers-how sweet.

Jefferson Cup Repport By John

2007-03-30T12:38:00.000-05:00

Jefferson Cup, Charlottesville, VA
March 25, 2007

The most competitive thing about the 2007 Jeff Cup was the online registration period. It seemed the negative racing was the strategy for all the large teams in the race. The race started out fast, but after the first trip up the hill Rite Aid hit the front and started slowing things down. Joe and I were aggressive for the first third of the race trying to keep the race speed up. I was able to drive a few groups away Rite Aid always slipped some dead weight in the group, and the surges from the peleton would bring my group. During lap three I pulled the eyelets through the rim of my power tap wheel. I did not notice till after the race. I went from feeling great and racing fast to feeling great and not having the longer power surges I had earlier in the race. The race got really lame after a large group slipped off the front with three Rite Aid and riders from just about every other big team. The large break just dangled 20 seconds off the front for the final two laps. The only team chasing was the Seigler team. Joe and I chatted about the finish, since there were just two of us we would have to play it smart. We counted on the break coming back and waited for the finish. I was working out a deal with some friends from Blacksburg, VA to help out Joe and I in the sprint when people just started falling down around us and my friends were taken out of the race. For the finish Joe positioned himself with the sprinters. The false flat heading into the sprint slows down any lead out train but no worry this year Rite Aid was just blocking from curb to curb to save their hope of taking the win from the break that was quickly coming back. With 250 meters to go the front of the race slowed dramatically as Rite Aid sat up to attempt to crash the rest of the race. Joe got caught up in this mess and I had to start pushing people out of the way so I could take it off road and pop around the slowing riders. I sprinted with 200 meters and was gaining quickly but I couldn’t squeeze between two wobbling riders and shut down the sprint with 50 meters left. I was pleased that I finished 9th place after pulling the eyelets through the rim and attempting a sprint. Joe came in 17th and expressed that the Jeff cup was the most dangerous race he had ever participated in. I believe with one more Alliance rider attending the race we could have affected the out come of the finishing sprint and come up with a stronger result.

Miller Reports on Greenville, SC and Fogelsville, PA weekends

2007-03-19T09:58:00.000-05:00

South Carolina weekend 3/10&11 was a huge success.

The races were sponsored by our clothing sponsor Rich Hinpcapie. It seems like every team in SC is riding Hincapie clothes and Bianchi bikes. I thought this would be good news for us. We would fit in and get some support from the other teams. I was wrong. Bill told us that all of the teams in that area heard we were coming and wanted to see what we were made of.

The roads were narrow and the moto officials were unforgiving about the yellow line rule which made tactics very negative.

In Saturday's 75 mile race we helped keep some of the breaks in check and marked some of the strong men. It was tough attacking and staying in position, nobody wanted to over extend themselves on the rolling 15 mile course. With just few laps to go a small group got away. It was not an attack, as much as a "roll off the front while my team mates sit up" type of move. With five miles to go, after the last big hill all of the other teams seemed content to allow the break to go. They only had 30-40 seconds. So Team Alliance Environmental went to the front. It started with John and Boyd ramping up the speed. Then Miller and Whitman joined in. Chris Ernst had flatted out. Bill Short was in tow waiting for the sprint. The chase was not an easy one. It was all head wind. With one mile to go the wind got the best of us and other teams started to swarm. Bill and Joe were able to stay near the front. The break was in sight and the field was closing fast. Boyd and Miller were slowed by a mid-field crash. John stayed in the field. With the field closing fast on the breakaway, there was only one right hand bend and a 200 meter downhill finish to go. Bill sprinted past the field leaders to take the field sprint for fourth and Joe was right in there for third in the field and sixth overall.

Narrowly missing the win

Sunday's 60 mile race was much more aggressive and steady. The pace and pressure were constant. Again the course was rolling and the yellow line rule was in effect, but the roads were much wider leaving room to pass, attack and chase. Throughout the race we had most moves covered. Joe Whitman made it into the eventual winning break. Again we had some tough decisions to make. Bill Short had an opportunity to win the series overall or we let Joe race for upgrade points. The decision was easy as long as Joe was in it for the win, we would race for him. The rest of the field was confused and waited for us to do something, but we were content.

Jittery Joe’s had a rider on the front chasing all by himself for three laps at one point with three laps to go he had closed the gap to 22 seconds. Team Alliance Environmental was prepared for the counters. It was a really cool sight. Chris, John, Mike, Boyd and Bill all sitting 4th thru 8th respectively waiting to pounce. But nobody would help Jittery Joe’s out, so the gap grew again out to 40 seconds with just one lap to go.

At three miles to go the gap was still 25-30 seconds, at point those of us in the field saw three guys get away and Joe was not in the move. We decided to take over. Boyd took a monstrous pull for about 1-1.5 miles, stretching the field into a long single file line into the headwind. Then Miller pulled thru from taking the field about halfway up the final rise to the 1K mark. Then John Delong pulled for the next 700 meters all out, guys popping left and right. Finally Chris pulled through taking from 300 to 150 meters at full speed, pulling off for Bill. All Bill had to do was take two pedal strokes and coast across the line for an easy field sprint.

Bill ended up 9th on the day. I know it wasn't the win but boy it felt good. Joe rode to a great 5th place finish (we never did catch his group, we came close)

The simple fact is wins do not come easy. Practice like this and good solid tactics will eventually payoff. I am very proud of what we have accomplished this spring. We have race hard, we are gelling as a team and we are learning the necessary tactics and thought processes that will pay huge dividend during the "Real" season.

This past Sunday March 18 I raced did the Fleetwood derby before the Allentown training criteriums. There were only eight of us. Myself and Mike Norton (Rite Aid pro) did most of the pulling. I then rode the training races. There I raced against Bill E, Stephan K and Ryan D. (all Rite Aid pros), Bill E and I lapped the "B race" field twice and then Stephan, Bill, Jackie Simes and I lapped the "A race" twice as well.

I also heard that Bill raced in TN. I was told he was 3rd. We need to confirm that.

"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." Vince Lombardi

"Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: A desire, a dream, a vision." Muhammad Ali

We are showing that desire, the wins will come!

Mike

Short's Report: Tour of Belize Stage 9

2007-02-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Stage 9 - The Final Day - 90 miles

When we woke up this morning you could tell that we were tired. We were also not looking forward to racing on the pot hole infested roads either. Today’s stage took us from San Ignacio to the Guatemalan border, back through San Ignacio and on to Belize City. This is what happened:

As we started the race you could tell that we didn’t have the same go get’m attitude as usual. John, Joe, and I all rode at the very back, sometimes off the back to avoid any possibility of hitting the holes. It worked. After we hit the town of Belmopan the roads got much better and we started moving up. The entire last half of the race was windy and in the gutter. This wasn’t as hard as it was annoying. The closer you got to the edge of the road the worse the road got. The team that had the race leader (Santinos/AEG Toshiba) had seven riders on the front protecting the race leader. Most of the race was pretty uneventful. Boyd rode close to the front and Mike had a shadow from the guy in second place for the master’s jersey. I guess he thought that he could get back 10 min. on Mike on the last stage. Not a chance.

As the race got closer to town (15 miles) two riders got away. The team leading the charge was down to four and they were not gaining ground on the break (Dave Wiswell and Shane Weaver). About 10 miles out I looked around and I had Boyd, Mike, Joe, and Chris around me. We decided to take over the chase. It was a little far out but if we wanted to try and win the stage we needed to get this back. As our four guys’ went to the front the pace increased by about 4-5 mph. These guys were flying. I was sitting on the back of the train hoping that I could hold on and pull something off in the sprint. You could visibly see the gap coming down to the break. Now there is no doubt that we are going to catch them.

As we approached the Belize City, city limits we had the honor of bringing the race into town. Honestly, they didn’t have a choice. By this point Alliance Environmental had split the pack into about 3 groups. Coming into the final circuits we got word that the race leader flatted. Out of respect we shut the lead out down. Now the Guatemalan team took over. I jumped across to their lead out behind the Belizean sprinter Gregory Lovell. With one lap to go of the circuits I was sitting pretty. The only problem was that I wasn’t feeling pretty. As we hit the last round about I got tangled up with Dave Wiswell. From there it was about 750meters to the line. Everyone took off like rockets. I had no snap in my legs. My only choice was to slowly wind it up. I tried and tried. I just couldn’t get there. That was it. Lovell won and the race was finally over. We did get a nice thank you for the hard work from Gregory Lovell for keeping it strung out coming into town and bringing the break back. After all, his team wasn’t able to.

As a team we feel like this was a great learning experience. I think that we grew as riders and more importantly we grew as a team. The really neat thing is that today before we left for the airport Mike, Joe, and I went walking through the streets of Belize City to eat lunch. Everyone was cheering for us, waving at us. This entire country now knows who the Alliance Environmental Cycling Team is. Everywhere we went people would ask us who we rode for. As soon as we told them they were star struck.

We have started making plans to return in October for an end of the year celebration. NO BIKES ALLOWED. We would like to have the entire team come down and just hang out on one of the islands for a few days, family’s invited.

I hope that everyone enjoyed the race reports. I have been told by someone on the team (I’m not going to name names, but he won the masters jersey) that I have to do the race reports for the rest of the year in third person. I tell you, he’s letting this old guy thing go to his head.

Short's Report:Tour of Belize Stage 8

2007-02-18T12:43:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Stage 8

Where do I start? I can barley sit here to type this. Today was definitely the hardest day. The stage was 112 miles through the mountains. We completed it in 4:45. The finishing climb, which we had to go up twice, was very, very steep. Things didn’t quite go as we had planned. It went something like this….

We started at the Guatemalan border at 10am. It was really nice sleeping in. This was the last good thing that happened. The race started out blazing fast. I’m not really sure what people were thinking with such a long race. With John sitting in 3rd place overall I was determined to be at his side the entire day. I didn’t know that it would start 3 miles into the race. We were going pretty fast down the road and one of the Hincapie riders hit a huge hole (which I pointed out) and went down, really hard. His bike flipped and took John out. The fall wasn’t so bad. It was the rider who wasn’t paying attention and ran into him that hurt. As soon as I heard the crash I turned around because I knew that John was right behind me. I saw John go down and immediately turned around and raced to him. He had the wind knocked out of him and banged his knee and elbow really hard, he also had a flat front tire. I took my front wheel off and got it onto John’s bike. While I was straitening his bars and shifters Randy got a new wheel onto my bike. Now John and I are chasing a field that’s going 30mph. It took us a while but we made it back. As all this was happening Mike got away with a small group. I spent the next 30 miles riding off to the side of John making sure that he knew were every pot hole was. It was crazy. Everyone’s IQ drops when they see a pot hole.

As we got into the mountains the hammer dropped. Again I stayed at John’s side to make sure everything went smooth. I was amazed at the speed that we were going up the side of the mountain. As we crested the top of the first climb some counter attacks went. We didn’t chase because we wanted the race leader too. This was a mistake. This guy was already falling apart. Small groups kept getting away. Chris got away with a small group and made it across to Mike. As we started going up to the top of the steepest mtn in Gap I was having a lot of trouble. I came off the back to keep from completely blowing up. I was in severe pain and turning myself inside out to keep from loosing contact. I went over the top with Dave Wiswell and we worked together to chase back on. Once we got there Boyd got away with a group. Now it’s down to Joe and I to watch after John. Our team car came by to go check on the guys up the road. As soon as they got out of sight I flatted my rear wheel. I went to the back of our group to tell the head official to radio up to our car and tell them to come back. I was determined to ride the flat until they came got there. I had forgotten that we had two cars for this stage. I turned around and there they were waving me down. I pulled over got a really quick wheel changed and started to chase the pack which was single file (this means they are going really fast). The only thing I kept telling myself is that I needed to get back up there for John.

As the chase started to slow we noticed that we need to try and bring this back together even though we have guys off the front. I went to the front and started pulling with Frank Trevisio and a few other guys. It didn’t take long for guys to starting sitting on. By this point we are getting very frustrated. The race leader was cracking. As we came into the next town we made a u-turn at a round about and headed back to Gap. We could see the break at this point. We knew the gap and we knew that we needed to get it under control. The only problem was that the Guatemalans new this as well and they were driving the break. Around the round about John and Joe went to the front and started chasing. I would have tried to but I was beginning to fall apart. All the chasing back on started to get to me. Once it was obvious no one was going to help them chase John attacked. He got away for a while and then the race leader brought him back. As soon as he saw that we were all back on he took off again. This time he had Frank Trevisio with him. Frank only lasted for a little while and decided to go back to the pack. Honestly I don’t think that he could go pull for pull with John. I kept a close eye on John as he rode off into the distance. It was clear that we wouldn’t see him again until the finish. That’s thirty miles.

The next attack that went included Joe. He and several other riders rode away. I was happy for this because I knew that they could catch John and help him. I just went straight to the back of the group and tried to hang on. I was bonking and out of water. I had a car there but within the last 20 miles there is no more service allowed from team cars. My legs are now starting to cramp. By this point I’m really starting to dislike this sport. Why do I do this to myself?

As we approached the base of the climb I couldn’t do it anymore. I got dropped. Then the official’s car came by and said that there was 2k to go. I thought that I could make it that far. I shifted to my big ring and flew back up to the group as soon as the climb kicked up to 10+ percent. Now I’m done. I could see the finish at the top but I just couldn’t go anymore. I was in my easiest gear just grinding up this climb. I finished just off the back of the pack by about 10 seconds, I think.

We are not sure about the results right now. We do know that John is no longer in 3rd overall. However, Mike got his jersey back. We will wait until the morning to come up with a plan for tomorrow. I might be pointless. Locals tell us that it always comes down to a field sprint. I’m not sure that I’m up to this, especially after another 90 miles.

Everyone is exhausted tonight. John’s knee is really sore and I’m barley able to stay awake as I write this.

We’ll talk tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s stage: 90 miles

Short's Report: Tour of Belize Stage 7

2007-02-17T12:41:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Stage 7 – 80 miles

Today was a great day for many reasons. The number one reason is that we don’t have to wake up at 3:30 in the morning anymoreJ. The number two reason is that today ended up being one of the easiest days of the Tour, at least for me.

We started in Belize City and raced to the western border by Guatemala. The race started out pretty calm. I think that everyone was dreading the mtns. Before the race Dave Wiswell of Sun Digital asked if I would help him with the bonus sprints today. He is only one point ahead of the Belizean sprinter Gregory Lovell. If Dave could win the sprint and I took second it would help him increase his lead. I know what you’re thinking. Why help the other team? The next couple of days are going to be hard and we may need some help moving John up in GC, moving Joe closer the U23 jersey (which he lost because of the TT), and help Mike get the 38+ jersey back.

As we approached the first sprint Wiswell was tucked in on Lovell’s wheel and I was on Wiswells wheel. Dave came around Lovell and I sprinted just off to the side bumping Lovell and blocking him in. The plan worked. Dave took the sprint and I took second. Sun Digital is very happy and willing to work with us in the next couple of stages.

As the race continued we all rode close to the front, except for John. He was staying out of trouble and was only going to come out and play if needed. About half way through the race John flatted. He got a great wheel change from Randy and quickly made his was through the caravan. As he came up to one of the Guatemalan team cars they stopped in the road to pick up bottles. This is probably one of the stupidest moves we have seen in the caravan so far. John had to come to a complete stop and go around the car. Mike noticed that John hadn’t made it back up so he dropped off the back to help him catch back on. As soon as he was on they both went straight to the front.

The next several miles attacks started going like crazy. Now it’s starting to rain as well. Chris got away with a good group and had a minute on the pack. I was riding on the right side of the road and hit a small hole. I must have hit this thing just right because my front carbon wheel exploded. I quickly stopped and Randy was right there with a new wheel and I was back on the pack in no time. I felt great! NOTE: Just because we are having problems with our wheels does not mean that these wheels are bad. The roads are just really rough. I LOVE CANE CREEK!!

After chasing back on I went straight to the front. The rain is really coming down now. The chase is on. Chris’s breakaway is starting to pose a threat. Teams get to the front and start to chase. The really weren’t making any ground. As we rolled into the town of San Ignacio we went across a really narrow, metal grate bridge. After the bridge we hung a left at a round about and went straight up. This hill was as steep as the steepest part of the Manuyunk (spelling?)Wall, all the way up. It was about 500m in length. This was defiantly the hardest part of the course. Crazy me, I went up it in my big ring. At the top of the climb the race leader (an unbelievable Swede) went to the front and single handily brought back the break. This was the plan. We need to make this happen a lot tomorrow. That’s the only way we are going to wear this guy down.

As we came into town I was on Gregory Lovell’s wheel. I figured that he has won three stages because he knows the finishes really well, so I followed him. As we came up the last little rise I could see the line about 1k away. I had no idea that it was coming up. There were no signs on the course (usually they have 5k, 2k, and 1k to go signs). We are way too far back to sprint. We both shoot through a couple of small gaps to try and get there but we then get shut down by guys who can’t go anymore. I guess that today won’t be my day.

After the race we rode 12 miles to our hotel. This felt really good. Our hotel is amazing. It’s at the top of a hill above a rain forest. It’s so beautiful!! Our room actually has 4 bedrooms, two bathrooms, and hard wood floors. We really needed this before the 112 mile stage tomorrow.

After we got to the hotel we showered up and went to downtown for lunch. We ate until we couldn’t move. After lunch we decided we wanted to see some sights. So we all hopped in the car and drove to the Guatemalan border. We got our passports stamped and went into Guatemala and got something to drink. We then got our passports stamped from Guatemala and came back to Belize. That was exciting!

After our passport stamping expedition we went to see the Mayan Ruins. This was amazing. We climbed all the way to the top of a 13 story stone ruin. We also found out that Mike and Joe are scared of heights. This is not the group that they wanted to reveal this too. We still have not stopped teasing them. After all, they are grown men.

Now we are just lying in our hotel getting ready for bed.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Short's Report: Tour of Belize Stage 7

2007-02-16T12:45:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Stage 6

Today was the individual time trial. I felt horrible today and without my tt bike I was destine to have a slow time because of the wind.

There is not really a lot to write about. The conditions were cool and the course was covered in fog. Everyone had a good ride. We are not sure of results at this time. We do know that we heard the announcer on the radio say that John got 4th place. This means several things. One, John should move up in the overall. Two, John had the best tt of his life today. When he came across the line he was flying. It was really good to see and John is very happy with it.

Tonight we have to pack and prepare to leave this hotel in the morning for a couple of days. Tomorrow’s stage heads to the mountains. It’s going to be really hard.

I will try and send an update later today as we find out results.

Never mind:

TT Results

John – 5th
Mike – 7th
Joe – 9th
Chris – 13th
Boyd – 19th
Bill – 60th YeeeeeeeHaaaaaaaaa.

Overall Results

John – 3rd
Joe – 10th
Mike – 14th
Chris – 17th
Boyd – 18th
Bill – 35th

Short's Report Tour of Belize Stage 5

2007-02-15T12:46:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Stage 5

Well, this morning was the hardest of all, in terms of waking up. Same old thing, up at 3:45, down to breakfast, get dressed and head to the 6 am start. They only thing that was different was that at the breakfast table two words were barely spoken. I think that we spent a little too much time at Caye Caulker Island in the Caribbean yesterday afternoon. We had lunch, swam in the crystal clear water, and just laid around and relaxed. Now we are feeling the effects.

Today’s stage was 50 miles. The course was the same as yesterday for the first 12 miles. Then we turned onto the TT course and did another 13 miles and turned around and came back. The good part about this was that we did the same finish stretch yesterday. I know the finish!

We decided as a team that we are tired of towing everyone around all day. Joe, Mike and John stayed near the back for most the day to stay out of trouble. Mike and Joe came to the front a few times to stretch their legs and cover a couple of moves. Boyd, again riding like he does this for a living rode near the front and got away in a couple of moves. Chris floated around the pack making sure everyone was ok. I stayed near the back for the first half nursing my broken toe and destroyed toe nail. My legs felt the worse today out of all stages.

As we hit the turn around a break got away and I think that everyone was waiting for the Alliance train to hit the front. We refused! I had guys coming up to me asking if we would help with the chase. I had one word, NO. We needed our GC guys to stay fresh for the TT tomorrow. Besides, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are going to be really hard and decide the race.

The run into town from about 5 miles out was as crazy as ever. After all, we have been controlling this the last several days, now its complete chaos. I’ve been a little disappointed with my finishes so I moved up into the middle of the battle zone. I don’t think that I’ve thrown this many hooks since the last time I went fishing. Guys are bumping and bouncing off each other at 35+ mph. 2k out there was still a small break up the road. At this point Sun Digital got organized and started to chase, finally they look like a team. I’m moving up the right side of the group and with 1k out I’m sitting about 15th wheel. I look to my right and Ryan Dewald tries to make a move but he’s not on the road. He flats. J At this point we are going 40mph and things are really getting dicey. We catch the break about 700m from the line. Most the group goes left but a few had to stay right, including me. As we passed the break I could see the big yellow inflatable banner which covers the finish line. I swing left to try and find some resemblance of a draft. Too late. I have to go. I start my sprint from about 7 back. There are 4 guys who have a small gap. With my head down, bike being thrown side to side like I am mad at it (I usually sprint sitting down) I somehow make it to those guys and get Frank Trevisio (AEG/Toshiba) by half a wheel for 4th place.

Tomorrow is the individual TT. John, Mike, Boyd, and Joe need to go as fast as possible. Chris and I are going to just go out and ride a hard tempo. Again, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are going to be the hardest days. The promoter has been putting us up in a hotel here in Belize City which we are very appreciative of. But Saturday and Sunday are too far away. So we decided to put our prize money together and get a room by the western border where those stages start. I’m not sure if I am going to get internet access there. You may have to wait until Sunday night to hear how those stages go. The suspense will be good.

Hope you enjoyed this stage. I’m going back to bed.

And oh, Happy Valentines Day J

Just wanted to give everyone a quick update. Joe is now in the white leaders jersey. This is for the top 23 and under rider. That's two jersey's that the team currently holds.

On another note. These guys here cheat like a 3rd grader on a test that they didn't study for, I know, I did this. BASTARDS!! They have been trying to screw us every single day out of something. Good thing that we brought the best lawyer in the state of Texas with us. Randy has them eating out of his hands. Of course they are still going to try and screw us over.

One more thing. I think that I just broke my big toe on my right foot. I was walking to the store to get some wine for Randy and stubbed my toe on a curb. My toenail bent all the way back. I actually had to reach down and push it back down to stop the bleeding. Good thing that we are sitting in tomorrow.

I encourage each of you to go to http://www.tourofbelize.com/ and go to the radio link. Listen to the stage tomorrow morning. We are going for the win.

We just found out that our 2nd place in the TT has put John into 4th overall and Joe in 10th. The remaining riders have moved into 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th places. They also have a jersey for the top rider who is 38+. Mike is now that rider. We finally have a jersey and are getting closer to a final podium spot. The race isn't over by any means, but things are starting to go our way.

The race starts at 6am central time. I'm not sure if they have the entire stage. Tomorrow will be short, 50 miles in 1.5 hours.

Short's Report: Tour of Belize: Stage 3 Team Time Trial

2007-02-13T12:52:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Stage 3 – Team Time Trial

Well, today is a day that we were looking forward to. We woke up at 3:45 to get to breakfast at 4. After breakfast Sheffield and Curtis were here to pick us up. We got to the start of the TTT and started to get our stuff ready. The race started in the parking lot of a prison. It was actually the Prison Gift shop. I’m not kidding. That’s what the sign said. We were told that the guys in prison make things and they sell it here.

Today John is our new GC guy. He is sitting 8th overall. While we still might go for a stage win our big concern is getting him on the podium on Sunday. We need to have a good race today so that nobody of importance gains time on him. We were a little out numbered since we only had 6 guys and most teams had 9. With Chris, Mike, and Joe riding TT bikes and John, Boyd, and I riding our road bikes with clip-on’s that put us at a bit of a disadvantage as well. We knew that last year the winning time was around 52:30. This was our goal.

Off we went. The course was really flat and really windy. I’m not sure that we ever had the wind at our back. There were two 180 degree turns. One was a round about so it was pretty smooth. The other was a stop sign.

Today we had no follow vehicle so we sent Randy out on the course on his bike with his camera. That way if one of us flatted we could at least ride the flat tire to him and take his wheel. He brought his camera with him because there have been accusations about team cars motor pacing their riders when nobody is looking. I guess that we are starting to win some people over here. I looked back at one point and we had a follow vehicle. After the race the guy driving it said that he didn’t want us to be out there without help. He also couldn’t believe how fast we were going. I couldn’t either. I almost got dropped about ¾ of the way through. I recovered near the end as we brought the speed up around 38-39 mph. Goal one accomplished, we all finished together. Goal two: our time: 50:20. We crushed the winning time from last year. The only team we had to worry about was Santinos (the team all the AEG-Aerospace guys are riding for). They all had full TT bikes with disc wheels. They come in with a time around 49:45.

We are all really pumped about our ride today. Our main concern was to beat the Sun Digital team. They had 9 guys in the TTT and two of them were in the break with John yesterday.

We should all move up nicely in the overall today. We wanted a podium finish and now we have two, and it’s only Monday.

I love this team!!!

Tomorrow: 50 miles 6 am start

Short's Report: Tour of Belize Stage 2

2007-02-12T12:53:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Stage 2 - 90 miles

Today started out a little stressful. Sheffield (one of the guy’s helping us out here) car broke down on the way to the race. John, Joe, and I got there and didn’t have any bikes or clothes. Luckily the guys where able to catch a passing bus, throw all of the equipment on and get to the start. They made it in plenty of time. Once they got there we got dressed, signed in and started over to the start. You’ll never guess what happened next. It started to rain. Now the roads are really slick again.

The race started neutralized because of the slick conditions. As soon as we got to the edge of town the rain was gone and we started racing. Today the racing started like everyone was shot out of a cannon. Unfortunately, Boyd flatted right away and got to motor pace at 40mph for about 3 miles. I got word that Boyd was back on and it was time to go to work. The first points sprint was about 20 miles into the race and with me sitting 8th in GC I could benefit from the 3 sec. time bonus. Mike got away in a small break and it really put the pressure on the other teams to chase. Once we caught them the team was back at it again on the front. We had 5 guys lined out on the front with Frank Travesio (AEG-Aerospace) on their wheel, me on his and the race leader glued to mine. We were flying!! 200m out from the sprint we still had 4 guys on the front. We would have had 5 but Chris flatted. At this point I had to go. I left Frank like he threw an anchor out. The race leader came around me but it was a long, slightly uphill, into a head wind sprint. I took a 2 sec break on his wheel, came back around and got him on the line.

After the points sprint people started attacking like crazy. We covered as many as we could but we didn’t want to drive it anymore since we knew that Chris was trying to chase back on after his flat. A fairly large group got away again and I went across with a couple of other guys. Of course when we got there nobody wanted to work since the Americans made the break. So we go caught. What happened next was amazing. We made a right hand turn and John (aka Cool Hand Luke) attacked. He then spent the 20 miles solo off the front. Later we found out that this was the longest solo break in the history of the Tour of Belize. A group came up to him with several American riders and they where gone!! Joe, Boyd, Chris and I sat near the front to discourage any organized chase. Mike was doing an awesome job keeping us filled up with water. These roads were wide open and incredibly windy. The group spent most of the time strung out single file in the gutter. Teams would go to the front and try to chase but they would wind it up to 35+ mph for a while and then blow up. I got away with two riders and we got about 45 sec on the pack. I wasn’t willing to work since I had John off the front. Besides these guys haven’t been willing to work with us so far and even if (BIG “IF”) we got there I would have been totally useless from exhaustion. So they got frustrated and went back to the pack.

It felt like we had been riding for 2 days non-stop. Things that happened early on in the stage were beginning to feel like they happened yesterday. My computer wasn’t working so I asked Joe how far we had to go because I was beginning to crack. 25 MILES!!! Please tell me that’s not right. Then it started to rain again. The roads got really slick but it felt really good. This was just what I needed. Now I feel good again.
As we started to reach the finish Joe got away with a group that gained some time on the pack. The best part about this was that took all the sprint points for the finish (in the final sprint top 15 get points). As we came to town I made sure that Chris and Boyd knew to just stay out of trouble until we crossed the line. No need to sprint for no reason.

Today was a great day for the team. So far each day we have stepped it up a notch and every single person is pulling their own weight, plus some. We can’t wait until the Team TT tomorrow.

John finished 5th on the stage and Joe 12th. One comment the tv announcer said after the stage was “It seems that Alliance Environmental really turned up the heat today”. John also got an incredible amount of radio time during the race. Our follow car said that they were going crazy. They couldn’t believe that John was holding off the entire pack by himself. Honestly, I couldn’t either.

Tomorrow: Team Time Trial 6am start

Short's Report: Tour of Belize: Stage 1

2007-02-11T12:55:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize – Day 1

Flat tires – 1
Broken Wheels – 3
Crashes – 0 – Thank God
# of miles Alliance Environmental had all 6 riders on the front – 40

Today’s stage was 80 miles from a town called Orange Walk to the Mexican border and back. The roads where pretty rough, chip seal at its worst. There where also speed bumps in every town we came through. The speed bumps never really created a problem; it was the rain that made everything scary.

We had to drive this morning to where the race started. This made for an early morning. Once we got there we got all our stuff on, signed in and headed to the start line. The race started out pretty aggressive. We covered most moves and tried to put at least two riders in each break. We quickly learned that nobody was willing to work with us. Why? We don’t know? A break of two guys’ went up the road and was later joined by 5 others. By the time we got to the turn around it was clear that we needed to chase. At first Mike and Chris went to the front and started the chase. They where quickly joined by Boyd and Joe. As soon as they had it pinned there was a huge crash right in front of me. I went into the grass, around two cars and back onto the road. I went to the front after that to play gate keeper so that the chase would stay organized and I could stay safe. John was at the back doing his best to try and get each of us bottles. After about 10-15 miles of chasing I flatted, I could tell that this was not going to be my day. As I pulled off to get a wheel John stopped (still waiting for water) and gave me his rear wheel. Since my team were the ones setting the pace the entire group slowed down when I flatted. A couple of guys tried to attack but Boyd put them off the road. After that everyone was willing to wait. I was back in a couple of min. and the team went back to work on the front.

As we drew near to the break we had all 6 riders on the front. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have seen. The guys in our team car said that there where guys getting dropped like flies. We had the entire field strung out single file. What happened next wasn’t so pretty. It started to rain. This was REALLY bad. Imagine diesel fuel, oil, and water all mixed together. Then try and ride on it. This disrupted our chase a little. Our back wheels were going about 4-8 inches side to side with the grooves on the road. Despite the rain slick roads the team caught the break just before the point sprint. It wasn’t much of a sprint since we couldn’t stand because of the slick roads. My bike was literally going sideways during the sprint. I took second and quickly stopped pedaling in fear of crashing.

The rain stopped not long after and another break went. This was my first of two mistakes today. I didn’t go with it. Now there are six guys blazing up the road and guess who takes up chase? Alliance Environmental! Again we have all six guys on the front trying to bring back yet another break and lead me out for the sprint all at the same time. This time there was absolute carnage at the back of the field. Our team had it nailed coming into town with me in tow. One by one each rider pulled off in exhaustion. As we approached the 2k to go sign the break had about 20 sec on us and it was John leading the charge with Chris, Joe, and myself behind. We are not going to catch the break. Now John’s done. Chris takes over. As Chris starts to wind it up he hits a hole. Since Joe and I are tucked in right behind him we hit it as well. Joe’s rear wheel is gone and he moves out of the way. I move up to behind Chris and encourage him up the last little rise. As we crest the rise the Sun Digital Photo team (Ryan Dewald and Dave Wiswell) attack. I quickly jump over to Dave’s wheel and I’m sure that I’ve got the sprint. Ryan pulls off and Dave lights it up. As I pass Dave I realize that this wasn’t the correct finish line. The real one was about 150 meters away. I’m completely done at this point and roll across the line somewhere in the top 20. Luckily I got second in the sprint out on the road and got a time bonus. I should be around 10th overall going into tomorrow.

I wish that all of you could have seen our team today. We literally had it pegged for the last 40 miles. Even though we didn’t win, we earned the respect from every team and official out there.

As far as my allergies go, I’m still fighting them. However, I don’t think that I can use that as an excuse for my boneheaded moves today.
Tomorrow is 90+ miles. I think that we are going to turn it back a notch.

Short's Report: Warmin up for Tour of Belize

2007-02-10T12:56:00.000-05:00

Tour of Belize: Day before the start.

Hello everyone. We just got to Belize yesterday and I have three words to describe it, HOT, HOT, and HOT! We went for a ride today with the Guatemala National Team for about 2 ½ hours. The roads are really rough and super flat. I know what you are thinking. Flat? That’s good! NO. You never get to coast. It’s like riding a trainer all of the time. The good thing is that most days will have some hills in it (I never thought that those words would come out of my mouth).
The team is all in good spirits and looking forward to the start tomorrow. That is except for me. I’ve been fighting allergies and had a hard time on the ride today. Hopefully I will feel better tomorrow.
The plan for tomorrow is to try and take the stage win. We are going to make sure that we all make the final selection and then with about 4-5 miles out take over the lead. The plan will be to try and get me to 200m.
Tonight we have a team presentation and managers meeting. After that it will we come back to the hotel, get dinner and go to bed.
Thanks to all of our sponsors (Bob, Trey, Dean, Marvin, Hearn’s Cycling & Fitness, Shirks Bike Shop, Bianchi, Hincapie Sportswear, Rudy Project, Cane Creek, and Power Cordz. We would also like to thanks Randy Tinney for being our Director Sportif.
We will have a full report of tomorrow’s stage as well as photos.

Stay Tuned:

Joe Martin Stage Race

2006-05-24T12:02:00.000-05:00

Fifty miles into the first stage of the professional cycling event Joe Martin Stage race, that tours the surrounding area of Fayetteville Arkansas, I crashed when a rider was unable to control his bike over some rough rail road tracks and causes a major pile up of about 20 riders. I was the first rider to hit the crashed rider and some how landed on my feet but my bike was not so lucky and all the crashers seemed to have landed on it. The pressure form the crashing riders broke my bikes fork and I was in a situation where I was questioning whether I would continue the race.

Luckily, Jose from Sram Neutral support pulled up with his spare bikes. I asked him if I could borrow one since my bike was in a bad way. He quickly got a bike down for me and asked one of his support staff to change my pedals while he attended to the other riders involved in the crash. I was quickly on my way and pushed myself hard over the next 50 miles in an attempt to not be eliminated by the time cut. This was my first ride with the new Sram Force road group. I quickly got used to the rear derailleur shifter and really found the double tap design to be very fast and responsive. The front derailleur shifter caused me a bit more trouble and I found myself stuck in the big ring going into climbs. After complaining to other racers, they got me to relax and helped me realize that I was getting to excited going into the hills and was over shifting causing the double tap to release the front derailleur and the reengage it all in the same shift.

Jose allowed me to use the Sram neutral bike for the rest of the stage race. I found the bike and the Sram road group very satisfactory. I would return the bike to Jose after every stage and he would clean the bike and have it ready for me at the beginning of each stage. After the stage race was over, I missed the professional level treatment Jose had afforded me.

At the Tri-Peaks, stage race in Russellville Arkansas the next week I went to thank Jose for helping me the previous week. My team had mailed me a new fork and I was able to replace it with the verbal instructions Jose had given me. I had not been able to true my wheels so about one hour before the start of the first stage of the Tri-Peaks stage race Jose once again saved me and brought my wheels back in true and they have been solid ever since.

Thank you Sram and Jose for supporting road cycling and events like Joe Martin, Tri-Peaks.

Snow Valley Grand Prix

2005-06-12T12:09:00.000-05:00

Bethesda, MD, June 12, 2005 – Snow Valley Grand Prix of Bethesda, part of the highly contested Mid-Atlantic Bicycle Racing Association (MABRA) season long Best All Around Rider (BAR) series. The Snow Valley Professional Cycling team Presented by Seal-On was represented by all of its professional members and also members of the under 23 team and club members. The field was the top riders from the Mid-Atlantic region with a few of the top amateurs from the surrounding regions.

The race was controlled by Snow Valley Professional Cycling Presented by Seal-On with their constant attacks. About midway through the race a ten-man group had formed with Ryan Oelkers and Kyle Wamsley representing Snow Valley. Unfortunately Ryan’s tire blew out in the 120-degree turn and his mishap brought him and Kyle to the ground. After a free lap they reintegrated into the race and with 23 laps to go Kyle followed John DeLong on a counter attack to a four-man move containing Brad Viera. Kyle, John and a US Armed Forces team member were able to quickly gain a large lead and with eight laps remaining they lapped the field. Kyle and John were escorted to the front of the field by their teammates and were able to finish first and second respectively. Brad Viera rode off the front of the group to finish fourth and Russ Langley held off the sprinting field for a sixth place finish.

Iorn Hilll Twilitght Criterium

2005-06-11T12:08:00.000-05:00

West Chester, PA, June 11, 2005 – Iron Hill Twilight Criterium, a new race for the 2005 season. The .9 mile four corner course blasted down the classy main strip of West Chester and the start finish was located in front of the race sponsoring Iron Hill Brew Pub and Restaurant. The Snow Valley Professional Cycling Presented by Seal-On team was represented by Jon Wirsing, Russ Langley, Ryan DeWald, John DeLong, Mike Beers, Ben Lindsey, Cam Holland, Ryan Oelkers, Christoph Herby, and Brad Viera. Their job was to battle Navigators, Colavita/Sutter Home, and Joe Papp’s America’s Cycling Team for the win.

The first half the race was driven by Navigators, Aerospace Engineering, and Snow Valley Professional Cycling Presented by Seal-On. With about 27 laps remaining in the race the winning break formed and Christoph Herby and Russ Langley were the Snow Valley Presented by Seal-On representatives. The break lapped the main field with six laps remaining and the race officials committed a blunder by deciding to pull the main field after the leaders had already integrated. Christoph was able to power in with the leaders for a seventh place finish and Russ won a two-up sprint just behind the leaders for eighth place.

Wachovia Cycling Series

2005-05-31T12:07:00.000-05:00

Lancaster, PA, May 31, 2005 – Wachovia cycling series first stop in downtown Lancaster. A brimming crowd gathered to watch 200 international cyclists battle it out over 13 laps of the rolling and twisty seven-mile course. It was Snow Valley Professional Cycling Presented by Seal-On’s first chance to compare their fitness to that of the top European and National teams. The team consisted of Josh Taylor, Peter Baker, Ryan DeWald, John DeLong, Russ Langley, and Ben Lindsey.

The race accelerated up to top race speed from the gun and an early three man break formed. Ryan DeWald tried a solo move through the start finish line to chase after the break. After a half a lap of exciting his local fan base he was reabsorbed into the peleton. With five laps remaining the race kicked into another gear and Peter Baker was able to show that he is strong enough to be in the right place at the right time as the 200 man peleton disintegrated under the pressure of the European teams. Peter was able to represent Snow Valley Presented by Seal-On with a respectable 60th place finish.

Turkey Hill Cycling Classic

2005-04-08T12:11:00.000-05:00

Lancaster, PA April 8th 2005 - Along the Susquehanna river and up into the farming fields and pastures of Lancaster County Pennsylvania the Turkey Hill Cycling Classic drew out another strong performance form the Snow Valley Pro Cycling Team presented by Seal-On. The race was a 78 mile event over a 6-7 mile lap, which descended down to the shores of the Susquehanna only to climb to the finish. The Gamber wall a steep pitch on Gamber road was added for the last five laps of the race.

The race began at a peaceful pace controlled by the Snow Valley Pro Cycling Team presented by Seal-On. On Lap six and seven the race started to accelerate and then broke with a big push from Four Snow Valley riders attacking through the start finish area. They then continued to drive a group of about fifteen riders until they were clear of the field and then race tactics came into play. A group of four lead by Bobby lea of ---Mortgage jumped away form the fifteen man group on the Gamber wall. Snow Valley rider Ryan DeWald monitored the Lea groups’ performance. As the rest of the fifteen man group disassembled behind, Josh Taylor and John DeLong were able to join a group of six that kept close tabs on the lead group. John Wirsing was in a three man group just behind that group and Peter Baker was monitoring the lead pack.

On the last lap DeWald was tag teamed by Josh Beck and Lea who were able to finish one two.

Teams first rendezvous, and presentation to the Snow Valley Club

2005-01-18T13:06:00.000-05:00

9:00AM Fitness Concepts Fairfax, VA
In a cramped weight room in the Fitness Concepts complex the team gathered to establish a common starting point for the 2005 season. First introductions. As members introduced themselves gaps were filled in my database about my fiercest competitors. I am very excited to be on a team that consists of most of my local rivalries, it can only mean that we will help each other improve instead of battling amongst each other to be the best rider from our region at the national events.
The second topic of the day was; what is Seal-ON? Of course every one already knows about the team original sponsor Snow Valley; a bottled water company that serves the Washington D.C. Baltimore area. Not many know what about the team’s newest sponsor Seal-On. Team Director Jamie Davis quickly broke Seal-On’s image down for the team. Seal-On is a product line of stop bleeding medical products to be sold over the counter. Seal-On is a company based out of Dublin Ireland and they are very excited about using a cycling team to help introduce their product to the United States Market.

10:30AM Get the Ride on
Heading out the W.O.&D. Bike path on an icy cold day. It was catching up time with the new team members. Normally I only get a few chances a year to catch up with some of these guys. I spent most of the ride talking to Josh Taylor and catching up to the details of what each other had been up to since the days when Josh’s training partner Jeff Rutter what my coach and we used to bang out some tough training rides together. In between our small talk I shouted out some directions since I grew up in Chantilly, VA I knew a way to get off the W.O.&D. bike trail and enjoy some of the steep hills that pepper the northern Virginia area. It was great to be out on the bike with a few members of the new team. Unfortunate the enjoyable out door riding had to come to an end as we headed back to test our VO2 and do some team bonding on a challenge course that team Manager/Captain Jon Wirsing put together the previous day.

7:00 PM Ellicott City MD Club Party
The Snow Valley Club party was located in a pub in the cozy town of Ellicott City MD. At the club party the new Pro team would be presented. It was inspirational event; sharing the beginning of the pro team with a club who has been strongly representing the Snow Valley name. Club president and pro team director Arch Mckown revealed that the Pro team was a dream that had been developing over the past couple seasons. To launch the pro team Jon Wirsing introduced each pro team rider and each rider would present one of the team’s sponsors. This introduced the club to both the Pro riders and the team’s sponsors. The best introduction and presentation was Kyle Wamsley who presented team sunglasses sponsor Rudy Project and used them to look in to the team’s bright future. The night ran long and the Pub staff had to ask for the event to end so their regular customers could get to their normal socializing.

West Virginia University Race Weekend

2004-04-04T11:58:00.000-05:00

West Virginia University Race Weekend
April 3 & 4, 2004

Race Review by: John DeLong

Morgantown West Virginia, “Wild and Wonderful” may describe Virginia Tech’s Cycling Teams experience this past weekend. It started out as a beautiful spring weekend, with potential for some great racing in the beautiful hills of northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. The Tech team travel to the race with about 15 riders prepared to take on the tough collegiate completion.

Day one Saturday 3rd WVU Road Race. The race was in the shape of a lollypop, where we would ride out the handle to the course to do laps. The thirteen-mile course consisted of two climbs. Climb number one was long and gradual steadily getting steeper before coming out to a false flat on the top. Climb number two was a shorter switchback climb that could really ramp the heart rate up quickly. After a hearty team breakfast at Bob Evans the team was fueled and ready to rip some legs off with the exception of Mark Hardman who suck away from the team to eat at McDonalds because he was not used to eating semi healthy food.

The First race of the day was the men’s C race and then the Woman’s B race both about 30 miles. As the C’s and B women rolled out to the course Mother Nature threw her hand into the race. A tree had fallen across the course about five minutes before they arrived at a sweeping turn. Only in WV could this happen, the race organizers took matters in their own hands and knocked on the local residents doors looking for chain saws. Before you knew it we had a pack of cyclists, four locals, two chain saws, and a pick up truck working on clearing the road. After about 30 minutes of clearing one lane of the road could be ridden in and the races finally started. The C’s did on lap of the course and The VT riders’ rode strong tearing apart the field with their aggressive racing style. Colin Beaber and Matt Janeway finished 2nd and 3rd only because they didn’t know where the finish line was.

The Men’s A race and the Men’s B with the Women’s A race riding with the B’s started at noon. The VT A team consisting of seven riders for the weekend unleashed their top secret plan of team time trial from the gun plan. This consisted of every member riding pace line as hard ass we could until the race blew apart and then we would see what was left and try to form another plan to maybe win the race. The plan went flawlessly until the top of the first climb. By the top of the first climb most people were on the rivet and any one who was not in shape was dropped or about to be. The plan broke down over the top of the climb when the stronger riders in the field rode away with out any VT riders. Luckily these fit riders were not ready to race so early in longer road race and about 5 of the VT riders were able to scramble back to the front. As soon as the group was starting to form back together VT started sending riders up the road again. Te goal was to make the race as hard as possible so the strongest may win. For the next four laps the VT team rode aggressively if they were not attacking or driving the pace every one was wondering when and where the pain train would start chugging again. The final came down to nine riders, the Tech riders were pretty shot from the aggressive racing, most everyone else was hurting from covering moves but the two racers looking the smoothest were from NC state and UVA, not only may they have been in the best form for the day but they had been abusing a couple other riders to chase down the VT attacks. Mark Hardman with the McDonalds fuel was the last hope for VT and tried an attack with three miles to go but his lack of experience, this being his first year racing got him disqualified when he crossed the center line of the road. The race finished with the two strongest sprinting for the win an every one else suffering up the final climb. I do believe I heard a rider admit that the race was the hardest effort he had every ridden on his bike. To me that was more gratifying than a win.

The men’s B Race and woman’s A races went well for VT also. Michele Lindsay drove in for a strong second place after hanging with the men’s B field for part of the race. The Men’s B race was also a strong battle with VT coming in with some strong results. The B race consisted of a long all day breakaway that was caught about one mile from the finish. The sprint came down to a sprint and Brian Baitis of VT was able to take third.

Day Two, WVU circuit race. The course was a four-mile loop with three short climbs on small narrow roads. It would have been a beautiful race but due do snow the race was canceled. I know I am looking forward to this course next year. Keep riding and ill see you at the races.

New Goals, back in America

2003-11-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

Welcome back to the United States of America; it is a big change to be home. Life in Europe is very different to that of life in the United States. It feels good to be home, but I miss Europe very much. My trip to Europe to race my bike was an amazing experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. The trip did not accomplish the cycling goals I was hoping for. The broken collarbone and other set backs kept me from reaching my goals and peak potential. At some points it was very difficult to be in races that normally I would love and excel at to only be struggling to hold onto the group. The trip did teach me a lot about life and the importance of patience and the ability to pick yourself up when your down. I made many new friends that hopefully I will keep in touch for life.
Let me catch you up with what I have been up to since I last updated my web page. This week I started with The Atlas Funding Company, a full service mortgage provider specializing in residential, commercial purchases, refinance, and second mortgages. I am hoping to be able to be able to train and earn money with this commission-based job to support my cycling lifestyle. The new job is an exciting opportunity and I hope it is able to work out for me.
I have been very busy since I have been home, catching up with old and new friends. I have been working a lot for Mack Employment in the hospitality temp department. I have fun working all the different catering events and they were happy when I called to tell them I was coming home. I tried to give up cycling for a bit when I arrived home so I would have time for other opportunities in my life. I am now back training for next year with a goal of qualifying to ride the Olympic trials. It is unfortunate now that professional cyclists are now able to ride the Olympics; it takes away the main focus amateur athletes like myself used to strive to obtain.

Tearin up Paris

2003-10-01T14:10:00.000-05:00

Paris was awesome, it was super buisy and I believe I saw all the important sights. 5 in the morning as I was about to leave for the Paris train I got e-mail from my fiend Alison. It had contact info for our high school friends that were living in Paris Claire and Chris Natale’s. I sent then both a message. Then raced off for the train. I was one minute late for the train in Damport and two minutes late for the train in Saint Peters. Luckily there was another train leaving at 6:30 that would arrive at 7:00 in Brussels Midi. My TGV left at 7:10 for Paris Nord. I met Marc at the train station and the adventure began. We found a cheap but nice hotel near the Bastille and dropped off our stuff. We then checked e-mail and contacted his friends. Luckily Claire had e-mailed me back. It was especially lucky because the e-mail I had sent didn’t go to her but a work mate who forwarded it to her. Amazing and she wanted to meet us at the Pantheon at 6:45. Marc’s French girls that he had met while in New Zealand were to meet us at 8:45. We then went sight seeing and saw the Luve the Plastecondorde the Arc de Triumph and the Champsilyse. It was tiring so we went home for a nap and then went out to meet our friends.

Dam Bike

2003-09-23T14:03:00.000-05:00

I am ready for the season to be over and to be back in the US. The weather here has been acting strange. It was 25 C yesterday and now it is windy and cooler. I am really burnt of racing and just want to relax and sight see the rest of the trip. I have decided I hate my team bike and can’t wait to give it back. Tomorrow I am going to Antwerp with Brian and Miska. My friend Marc is coming up from France to spend the night and also head to Antwerp. It should be a fun and relaxing trip. I race with the team in a PRO Kermess on Thursday and will hopefully find a good time to return my bike. Friday I will travel to Paris and hang with Marc and hopefully do so good sight seeing. It should be a buisy last couple of weeks.

Team Snow Valley enjoys Belgium racing

2003-09-22T11:08:00.000-05:00

My guests have gone back to the United States. I believe they enjoyed their trip and accomplished most of there goals. I had an enjoyable time showing them around and helping them out. This past month has been moving incredibly fast, I only have two weeks left before I am home. I am looking forward to arriving home and seeing everyone but I know I will miss Europe. Someday I will find my way back to but at this point I am not sure when.
While my guests were here we mostly did kermesse racing. My team from Antwerp was hoping to be racing in France but they are also having a disappointing year of bad results and may not have gotten the invites.
The last kermesse I did with Scott was in Merelbeke. The race started aggressively with everyone marking Scott, after two weeks they had found out how strong he is. Unfortunately 1/3 of the way into the race Scott’s frame cracked on the down tube at the cable bosses, causing him to abandon the race. Also during this race I felt a small hint of my old form and raced aggressively but since I seem to be missing acceleration I was not able to drop the people marking me. At the finish of the race I was pleased with my performance but the back of my right arm felt like it was being stung by bees, I think it was a nerves and muscles that are rebuilding because of my broken collarbone. I still do not trust my right arm to do what I want because of the sharp pains that come out of nowhere.
The other races that my guests and I did were not so exciting for me. I would try to play an aggressive role early and when I would see the strong break go up the road I would tell Scott and he would attack with me on his wheel and I would let a gap so he was able to cross alone and then ride away with the stronger riders. Since I have been here all season riders tend to mark me because they know sometimes I ride strong. Since they didn’t know Scott yet they wouldn’t follow him so closely. Scott rode well while he was here with his worse place being an 12th and best being a 4th. I think the best and most successful way to come to race in Europe is a quick planned trip where you are in shape and focused.
Finding junior races for Adam was interesting. At first I was not sure what he would be able to do but I talked to my Antwerp teammates and found out that he could only race junior races. Luckily the first junior race I found was near Gent. At race sign in we quickly found out that there was more to a junior racing than elite. In Belgium juniors are only aloud to race twice a week; to enter you must have a calendar card that gets stamped at each race. Luckily the officials knew me from the elite races and they found away for Adam to enter since he was only staying of 10 days. Please check out my friend’s journal entries to see what Adam thought of European racing

Healthy Lungs

2003-09-17T14:02:00.000-05:00

I have just had visitors for two weeks. It was a good time. I finally felt healthy in the sinus and lungs around the time the arrived. The racing went well while they were here with some constant results and a hint of my old strengths. It is really a shame that my form is coming around now. The season is over I am not sure if my team will be doing any more races. I guess I will do kermesses but I can’t seem to take too many of them seriously. I am just making the most of the trip. It is really a shame that my racing didn’t work out and the trip was difficult. I learned a lot from all the difficulties. I feel I see the world from a different view and hopefully it will help me make better decisions in my life. I really enjoyed my time here and I hope I can come back some day.

Scott Zwizanski learns some Flemish

2003-09-17T11:28:00.000-05:00

Belgium Diary, one entry for the whole thing.

Let me just start by saying John Delong is a super nice guy. He showed me the ropes, what to do, who to follow and all things that were needed to race successfully. I was here for just two weeks, not a super long time but I learned a lot and hope to maybe race in Belgium for a longer period of time in the future. The racing went very well, until my last planned race when my frame couldn’t hang with the rough concrete roads over here and cracked on the down tube. Luckily I stopped racing before the frame failed and I was able to ride home on it from the race. John is so well prepared for guests that he even has spare bikes for us to use when ours break. What a guy. I got to ride a Team Issue Cannondale CAAD 5 for my final three days in Belgium. Well I am not going to give you play by play of my races, I did well and finished in the top 12 in four out of five of the races I did. Most of the time I spent here I was being a typical bike racer, training, sleeping, eating and doing some good resting. To finish this up I think that I might just list out some Belgian food that I had here during my brief stay.

Pita’s, just kidding, but I did eat some.
Frits with mayo, sounds gross, but you should try it.
Warm waffle, mmm mmm good. They serve it like a soft pretzel.
Frits with curry ketchup.
Beer, that’s right beer. Did you know that Belgium has great beer? Well they do. Nuff said.
Frits with mayo.

Not a real good variety there but I hit all the important ones. Later, eh.

Adam Steelman Junior eye Opener

2003-09-10T11:26:00.000-05:00

Hi, my name is Adam Steelman and I have been staying with John for the last two weeks. The training here has not been so hard but I have been putting a lot of miles in. The amount of what I have learned in these two weeks is amazing even with me having only raced twice. Belgium is full of roads to train on and races to kill your self in. The races are fast and on some really fun and exciting roads. Back home Junior races may only have about 12 on a local level and maybe 60 on a national level, however here just a small Junior race will have at least 70 to 90 starters. The races are always fast and “sitting in” is never easy to do. My first race I learned a lot about being smart about how much energy I put out in the early part of the race, I went in a early move and pushed the breaks speed and when we got swept up I had nothing left and was dropped. The next day I was not so happy about racing again and was ready to pack it in but John’s friend Brian gave me a ride to a junior race and I did much better. I stayed at the front and attacked twice but only at 80% and it never got me away so I sat at the front and waited. On the last lap of my race I took the inside of the course and went much faster in the corners then the racers here do and that gave me a nice spot in the top ten at the last corner, I got 12th in the sprint. I can’t thank John enough for giving me this chance to find a path for what I want to do with cycling. I’m not sure still what I am going to try and do with the sport but this trip has really opened my eyes.

Pickle Thanks Kings North

2003-09-08T11:24:00.000-05:00

Hi Everyone, It is Dan "PICKLE" Bonora again writing a follow up entry on John's journal now that I have been back in the states for about a month. I feel the gains I have made as a racer from my three-week trip in Belgium are primarily mental. I have a much greater understanding of a race and the way it evolves as well as how to read it. I feel the physical gains one can hope for are minimal. Granted I learned how to suffer for a little longer and harder which is still primarily mental. To obtain significantly greater speed or physical strength in only three weeks is difficult and almost any coach will tell you that. Yes I have gained some of both speed and strength. I feel this is because I learned more about how to train and opened my eyes to other techniques which has allowed me to assist my coach more in identifying my own personal strengths and weakness and coming up with programs to suit me. So again we are back to the mental gain of my trip rather than a physical. The only thing I feel I may have lost is some ability to climb. Belgium is very flat and there for it is difficult to improve or maintain one's abilty to climb. All though you can try just sucking it up and suffering a little longer and harder until the climb is over. I would like to thank John for helping my trip to be a success as well as everyone else especially the sponsors of Kings North (Belgium Team) and World Cup Ski and Cycle (US team). Dan " PICKLE" Bonora

Team Snow Valley Visits Belgium

2003-09-06T11:01:00.000-05:00

I have two friends visiting from the States for the next week. They are both members of the Snow Valley armature team based out of Maryland. The first to arrive here in Belgium was Adam Steelman, he is 18 and resides in Manassas Virginia. His training area in Northern Virginia is where I first found my love of road biking. Finding junior races here for him has been a little challenging but hopefully he will benefit from the experience. My second guest Is Scott Zwizanski, hi is 26 and resides in West Chester Pennsylvania. I know Scott from my college racing days. He attended West Virginia University. I am enjoying exposing them to Belgian culture and racing.
My last race was a stage race in South East Flanders. The race was very challenging. The first day I felt strong and finished in the main pack in the morning road race that went over 6 major burgs. The afternoon time trial went well also. This time I chose not to use a one of my team’s time trial bikes. No need for a mechanical with a bike I am not used to. I felt strong on my road bike and was pleased because I caught the rider that started one minute in front of me. The second day of racing did not go so well. It was an intense race that went up a burg almost every 6 km. With the rainy weather my nerves were not daring enough to risk another crash and I soon found myself at the back because I was using my brakes too much.

The Muur de Gramont

2003-08-27T10:59:00.000-05:00

Today I raced against Peter Van Peteghem of Lotto Domo, Andreas Klier of Team Telekom and Geert Omloop of Collstrop the Belgiam professional champion. It was a tough race that blazed through the center of Geraardsbergen. Up the paved lower section of the Muur de Gramont a famous hill in Flanders. It was beautiful race and I just wish I could get some condition, many of the riders that were attacking and making the race were ones that I consider myself equal to when I am in form. I have been training hard my body just doesn’t seem to want to respond in a positive way. My chiropractor noticed on Monday that my heart was beating a little odd. I listened to it and it was strange; maybe I am fatigued and need some time off the bike but I will deal with them once I am home in the States.
Sunday I raced my teams race Vlaamse Havenpiljs, a race through all of the major Flemish ports here in Belgium. Starting in seaport of Zeebruge and going past the seaport in Gent and finishing at the seaport in Antwerp. It was a beautiful point-to-point race and went with in one Kilometer of where I am living in Gent. It entered Antwerp under the Schelde through a tunnel that is only open to bike traffic for this race. It was an amazing feeling to race past all the cars waiting for the tunnel. The passengers of the cars wee making the best of it and cheering us on and seemed to be having a good time. I really enjoyed the race and felt strong riding over the cobbled section in the top ten of the pack chasing and closing in on the break away. Unfortunately my luck was not good and I seemed to always be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was stuck in the last pack no matter how hard I tried.
Thursday the 21st I raced the Wondelgem Kermes. This race is close to where I live and also races past the Boone farm where I spent my time in Belgium last year. It is a race of the foreigners. The Boone brothers have two very different teams Staf runs an English speaking team and his brother runs a team consisting of eastern Europeans. In this race the teams compete and the race is nicknamed the Boone World Championships. I fortunately followed the few Belgian in the race and we rode away from the wheel sucking foreigners and I was able to get an eighth place, my first top ten of the season.

Smelling the Poppies on the Kemmelburg

2003-08-20T10:57:00.000-05:00

The Kemmelburg is a tough climb and doing it twice doesn’t make it any easier. I raced with my team Royal Antwerp Bicycling Club the oldest bicycling club in Belgium. The race was in West Flanders through the part were much of the World War I battles were fought. I didn’t have much time to look at the scenery and battle monuments because the race was strait to business. A 30-man group rolled away on the small roads and the chase was erratic. Two of my teammate made the move. A Belgian teammate Jan and my friend Brian, the group gained one minute thirty by the time the reached the Kemmel burg for the first pass. Brian tells me the front group attacked the climb hard and his pneumonia caught up with him and he was not able to recover over the top. The main packs assent of the Kemmel burg was a slower and guys were falling off their bike because of the steepness and rough terrain. The race was single file after the climb and the descent was the scariest part. The downhill is shorter and steeper than the way up and is also cobbled. Looking down the top of the decent of the Kemmel burg is like being o top of the big roller coaster hill and it is a wild ride down also. The race was over rolling terrain for the rest of the course. We ascended the Kemmel burg a second time and then finished in Wervik. I did not feel good the whole race and was just happy with my fitness. It has been very difficult since I broke my collarbone I seem to be hitting a lot of little problems that are keeping me from having a successful come back this year.

Euro Heat Wave

2003-08-16T10:55:00.000-05:00

I have crashed again, on Friday in a 1.6 UCI race Antwerp Tielen. It was a silly crash; a few riders got their bikes stuck together and fell over. It was the kind of crash I have gone around many times. I tapped my breaks and swerved around the fallen riders, unfortunately one of the bikes flew up and hit me in the side knocking me over. I landed on my right side where I had broken my collarbone. Luckily I landed safely and only received some scrapes and bruises but I didn’t feel like chasing down the 60-km/hr pack so my race was over.
I have been having a tough time sleeping during the heat wave here. I have to wait until late at night when it has cooled off and I am not sweating so much to fall asleep. It is not so bad to fall asleep at that time because I get to fall asleep to the sweet smell of baking bread thanks to the two bakeries on my street.

Racing Van Petegram and Tom Steels in a Professional Kermesse

2003-08-12T10:53:00.000-05:00

Speed is the name of the game. Today I raced a professional kermesse in Heusden just outside of Gent. The race was full of big time professionals. The race was single file from the start and with the heat beaming down it was only a matter of time until the weak cracked. The streets were lined with fans such an atmosphere made it inspiring to race. I unfortunately was pulled out of the race early but still finished about 60th out of 150 starters. The remaining field of about 30 riders had all the some of the big hitters still remaining. Riders like Mario Willems and the others I face in kermesses were driving the pace and inflicting pain on to riders like Peter Van Petegram and Tom Steels. Tom Steels won the sprint finish.
The past week has been very rough. I have had a head cold and it has really made my racing suffer It seems like this year is full of a lot of small problems that are really making it difficult. My friend Dan headed home last Wednesday, it was good to have him here. We had some really fun times and his three-week visit seemed to go very quickly. Dan had a local college student roommate living in Staf Boone’s house while he was there. She did not know anything about the bike racing culture here in Belgium and got a crash course from the riders. My favorite observation that she made was about how strange it was in a house full of guys they though about bikes more than girls.

Pickle Canned Belgium

2003-08-02T11:23:00.000-05:00

Hello, I am Dan “Pickle” Bonora from the Reading and Lehigh Valley area in Pennsylvania. I am a cat 3 rider in the states and a semi-pro XC Mt Biker. I am currently visiting John in Belgium; unfortunately I am approaching the end of my three-week stay. My time here has been an excellent experience in more ways than one. I came to Belgium to race and visit John. I wanted to experience the best amateur racing in the world and learn what it takes to become better. Of course coming to Europe for such a short visit to race is hard because there are so many distractions. It is the first time I have left the continent and the culture, sights, and the style of racing have easily distracted me. The Kermesse’s are usually a 120 K long (15 laps) and last about 2 hours and 45 minutes. The field tends to split by the start of the second lap as the Belgium’s put it in their 53 x12 and hammer out of every turn after they just finished breaking harder than ever going into it. Personally they can’t corner or climb. Climbing I can understand because there are no hills here. The way they muscle that 12 out of a 90 degree turn is almost frightening they don’t have the snap of a US criterium rider, rather this long slow acceleration up to 35 mph or more, and they just hold it for the entire race except for in the turns. Not to mention these races are taking place on cement roads barely wide enough for one car much less a pack of 70 plus riders launching attack after attack…no double yellow line rule. The Belgium’s are also known for chopping wheels so you must ride with extra caution and defense. The towns and atmosphere at the race are amazing. Small little towns in the middle of nowhere playing music and drinking beer in smoked filled pubs that we must register in. Although I am suffering greatly on the bike during the races I feel I will benefit greatly from the experience and look forward to racing in the states again soon. The learning curve for adjusting to the style of racing is normally about 3 to 4 weeks or 10 races I am approaching both of those marks stilling hoping to make it the distance with out being pulled or popped. Wish me luck!!!

Miss Belgium

2003-07-31T10:51:00.000-05:00

Today I started my first kermesse in a few weeks. A Miss Belgian finalist was there handing out our start numbers. With 150 starters at the race I felt pretty strong. When the main break rolled up the road without me I decided to bridge across. I couldn’t believe the small group I was with made it across. My head has not been in the racing game lately; I have been distracted by other problem and a little fear of getting crushed by the tough Belgian racers. I quit the race at the 2-hour mark. With only 30 minutes left in the race I am sure I will be finishing soon.
Today I went to see a chiropractor about a popping hip I have been ignoring since December. I believe he will be able to fix it with the information he gave me and the quick back straitening felt good since my back gets quite compacted from the rough Belgian roads.
I would also like to thanks Ruben, Rein and Rein’s family for being so supportive of me here in Belgium. I would also like to thank all my friends for helping me get through a troubled time.

Pickle and I Visit Wild Bill in Amsterdam

2003-07-29T10:49:00.000-05:00

The new season starts now. I have just returned form a short trip to Amsterdam. I traveled up to Amsterdam to visit my friend Wild Bill and show another friend Dan the sights. I feel the trip was very relaxing mentally because I started my racing season last year with a plane flight to Amsterdam and a train ride to Gent. I just hope the rest of the season here can be successful as last year and the small reenactment of last year season start may help me get past the mental block that has formed from the injury and lack of racing.
Dan is a friend from Reading; I helped him find a place to stay here in Gent so he could try the European racing scene for three weeks. He is enjoying his time here. I have tried to ride him to some of the famous sights around Gent. It is really good to see people from home.
Racing and training is tough when you are alone. My long time girlfriend Kathryn Ruscio has finally broken away from me. We have been fading apart since I started this crazy cycling adventure in the spring of 2001. It is tough to be training hard and preparing like normal when everything is not. Kathryn was very special to me but our paths in life did not go the same way. I am glad she has the strength to be on her own; I just wish I were so strong. Good luck Kathryn be safe and travel wisely.

Training with the Flemish Cycling School and CSC in Luxembourg

2003-07-25T10:47:00.000-05:00

I’m back; almost I spent last week training hard. I was in Luxembourg camping with some friends Kenneth, Dina and Jimmy at Dina’s family campsite. Jimmy and I were training with the Flemish cycling school, where Kenneth’s father is a coach. It was an incredible week. We would ride twice a day over rolling train. The hills felt so good after spending all this time in east Flanders where it is flat terrain. I learned a look and improved my fitness greatly while in Luxembourg. The last day of the camp we rode with the CSC professional cycling team the riders that were not participating in the Tour de France. One of the coaches of the cycling school had ridden for CSC so he knew they were in town and arranged for us to ride with them. We met up with them while they were already training. They were training in two groups of five doing long individual efforts while the cycling school did a rotating pace line behind. We were unable to meet the riders but some of the more famous ones there where Andre Taffi, Tristian Hoffman and Julian Dean. It was amazing to see how the team trained.
On Friday the 18th I meet up with my Royal Antwerp team to start a Stage race in the Ardennes. Tour de La Province de Liege, what a tough race and I went into it tired. I was hoping to finish and gain some good fitness from it. The first day I was dropped on the second climb 40 km into the race but I was able to organized my group and we caught back up to the main pack with 15 km to go. The second stage I was able to hang in until the finishing circuits where the big team turned up the speed and “put the race in the gutter”. The single file riding at speed was to much and I couldn’t hold on with 22 km to go. The third day the race was fast and was in a single file line for most of the day I made it 85 km before I ended my race. I was disappointed with not finishing but after a hard week of training in the hills what should I expect when every one else is fresh. The final day of the race I trained for one hour and rode up the famous climb La Radoute. It was amazing to ride up a climb where many Liege – Bastone - Liege classic races have been decided.
I have returned home to Gent feeling tired and fit. Gentse Fest is also happening in gent and I have taken some rest time to see it. The Belgians really know how to party. I have never seen anything like it. a 24 hour party for 10 days, it is something that must be seen with your own eyes. I hope to be racing well soon but this coming back from injury is really tough on the brain and I am having a tough time mentally believing I will ride well again this year.

Biken to the Tour de France

2003-07-09T10:45:00.000-05:00

Everything is well it was 230 km just to the Charleville – Mèziéres and I did not make it to the Finish in Sedan. I arrived in Charleville – Mèziéres just as Bradley MeGee the Yellow Jersey was walking into his hotel. I snapped a few shots of him drinking a beer and then explored the town. They were already setting up for the next morning. I found a quiet place to sleep for the night since all the hotels were taken up by the race.
Sundays race also went smoothly, it was a good course. I felt strong the whole time I raced. I completed one hour of racing because that was my small goal and it also started to rain a little and I did not want to risk crashing. The race was fast just like all races here and I was able to sit in with no problem I even tried a few jumps and turns at the front. The only problem had was standing up to sprint up hill my collarbone just did not feel solid enough. I was pleased with my performance and look forward to improving into some good results for the end of the season.
I awoke at 5:30 in Charlevill – Mèziéres and started to watch the start of the stage unfold. Already the town was quite buisy. By 10:30 the streets were packed for the 1:30 start. The Tour de France is serious business. The amount of work that goes into a stage start is amazing. a small city was built in the center of the towns main square just to feed the staff that was to work the race. Companies that sponsor the Tour us ever possible promotional scheme giving away free product, newspapers about their product, floats blaring music and flashy dancers. The riders are protected from the fans by barriers so they can prepare for the race in some kind of peace. When the riders roll up to sign in the crowd screams for autographs and there favorite riders. The Yellow Jersey gets the biggest cheer and then Lance and Jan Ulrich. A whisper goes through the crowd “it’s Richard, it’s Richard” and then a big cheer when it is Richard Virenque. The 1:30 start came quickly and before I knew it the riders were off. At 2:00 I started my ride back to Gent Belgium. the trip was worth while just to see the tour and the long rides were excellent training. I now have some great base miles I just have to get my race speed and confidence back and I will be ready to go.

Back from Injury

2003-07-06T10:44:00.000-05:00

This morning I noticed a marker on my block, marking the spot where a V1 bomb hit during world War II. I found it really interesting that a small bit of history like that is remembered so close to where I am staying here in Gent. I am starting my first race back from injury this afternoon in Merelbeke a 117 km kermesse. I hope my legs don’t explode like the V1 bomb. Actually I feel really good I have been training hard for a little over two weeks. On Monday I am going to ride down to the Belgian border to watch the Tour de France stage finish in Sedan and then find somewhere to sleep so I can watch the stat the next day. I think this will be good training since it is some where’s around 200 km each way. wish me luck.

Family Time While Seeing the Sights

2003-06-29T10:42:00.000-05:00

Four weeks since my crash and I am almost fully healed I am just waiting for the doctor to say I am ready to go. I have been running and riding lightly to keep myself in shape. Time away from racing is hard since I came to Europe just to race. Fortunately my parents came to visit at just the right time. They arrived two weeks after my injury just as I was starting to feel better. I was able to do a lot of touristy things with my parents that I would not have been able to do if I had been racing. We had a very buisy but relaxing vacation. We did a whirlwind tour of the Ben-Lux countries with a little excursion into Germany and a small part of France. It took my mind away from the boredom of thinking, when I can race next.

The Crash

2003-06-02T13:58:00.000-05:00

Monday, June 02, 2003
I have been sitting in Ruben and Rein’s house for 4 days now with my broken collarbone. It is very boring to be in a country to race and not be able to ride a bike. I would love to travel also but it is just too hard to move and it is also hard to shower. On Wednesday I will see the doctor again and hopefully he will say I am healing fast
On Thursday at Hasselt spa Hasselt I was racing well and felt really good my legs were just starting to come around. I had made the front group. I was very thirsty and wanted a feed bad. I left a lot of space between my teammate and I in the break. Other riders were doing very strange things in the feed swerving every which way and looking backwards. It is hard to find my soginer Tom because he always seems to be hiding while giving out feeds. I spotted him just as my teammate Paul was receiving his feed. Paul had almost stopped to get the feed. I didn’t want to have to chase after the feed so I was moving fast. Tom watched as Paul rode away and didn’t look for me so I yelled his name so maybe I would get the feed. Tom had the feedbags in his left hand near the ground. He grabbed one and moved it quickly from left to right. It looked to me that it was ether going in my wheel or hitting my handle bars. I thought I could save myself by grabbing it and razing it above my bars. But Tom had the bag so low that I grabbed the top of the string and could not raise it fast enough. it slammed my bars and I lost control landing on my head and shoulder breaking the collar bone and scrapping up my right side. It was a horrible day.

Fallin Down and a Broken Collar Bone

2003-06-02T10:41:00.000-05:00

It has been four days since I broke my collarbone. It is very hard not being active like normal. The pain is not that great any more and the road rash is healing quickly. On Wednesday I see the doctor again to get my harness adjusted and a real prediction for when i can be back on the bike. I am hoping to be training outside in about 2 weeks. My parents are arriving in a little over a week so it will be good to see the family.
This all happened last Thursday the 29th at Hasselt Spa Hasselt a very good race. I had been near the front of the race for most of the day when I came into the feed zone at 120 km of the 166 km race. People were doing strange things in the feed zone this day I think it may have been because of the heat. I left a big gap between my teammate and I so we both could get our bags. I spotted our team soungier just as he was passing the muset to my teammate. Tom our soungier watched my teammate ride off and didn’t look down the road for me so I shouted his name. To pass the bags the soungier is supposed to hold the bags in his right hand high in the air so we can grab the sting where we need to while at high speed. Tom still had all the bags in his left hand while I was coming and he quickly switched one from left to right and it was swinging right for my front wheel or handle bars I though my only hope was to grab the bag and lift it up so it would miss. I was not fast enough and ended up on my head and shoulder breaking my collarbone and looking very stupid. This is the first bone I have ever broken so it is very an unknown recovery for me I hope it goes smoothly. so far it has been boring. I do not like sitting around and doing nothing. I hope I will be back racing soon.

Running form Pneumonia

2003-05-27T13:56:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, May 27, 2003
I am in Antwerp visiting Brian in the hospital. He has pneumonia and has been in the hospital for 1 week. They have drained 8 liters of fluid out of his lungs. I have been racing hard and time has been going by fast. I have been consistently up front but I just can’t seem to make the correct moves. I bought running shoes yesterday and have started running again I feel really sore in my calf muscles but that is exactly what I wanted. I want to run for the intensity packed into a short work out.

Jake Stephens Pulaski Bike Jam

2003-05-26T11:21:00.000-05:00

Jake Stephens took the picture of the finish of the Wondelgem Kermess that he attended with my roomates and cousin, to watch me suffer.

Jake Stephens
Back from Abroad
PULASKI BIKE JAM. SATURDAY.Mostly I just couldn't believe how slow it was. I'd spent the entire morning kicking around the house, trying to talk myself into and out of doing the 123 race, which today was Before the 3/4, and I wanted to Win the 3/4. But just 20 miles? I mean, that's not even and hour. Finally I'd forced myself to stall leaving the house for Baltimore long enough to keep myself from being able change my mind later and register for the 123. Fat chance I'd be able to beat my teammates in that race anyways, so better save it. But after all that, here we are. Going like 3 mph around a swooping asphalt loop, with no corners except for some contrived wire bender affair that robbed the course of what could have been it's coolest feature -- a grand sweeping turn left, then high speed counter-swerve right. Anyways, we're going slow. We've got a full six-man squad though. Jon Hansen is the designated sprinter, Steve Soltes the back up, or lead out man if Jon has it. I'm going to try to breakaway. The 3 juniors are going to control the pace and cover attacks as necessary. They all trade some work, and I have them floor it a couple times to string things out. Anyways, I wait until I see both of the other breakaway threats at the front, Nick Johnson and Brian Butts, and then I attack, figuring they'll come with me, and then we'll have a strong 3-man break. Zoom, I'm off the front. Way off the front. Doo-do-dooo. Still off the front. Nobody coming across. Ah well, all the slowness and a poor warm up, so I decide to open the legs a little bit. I roll a mile lap with the HR at about 182 -- pushing a bit, but not trashing myself. Meanwhile Nick and Brian are swinging pulls on the front and the field is strung out like a chopped pasta noodle. I'm not soloing, so I chill a bit and roll back a bit after the prime bell rings "A new pair SOCKS!!" Woo-hoo. As they catch me I look at them and smile, and say "A really nice pair of socks!!" and attack again (softly, a false attack to fire it up and intimidate). The field gets fired again, instead of resting like it wanted to, and then I put the juniors back on the front. People need to suffer a little. This slow roll to a sprint shit doesn't cut it. Steve gets on and drives a bit too -- getting other people to do it when he can, intelligent-like -- and just being there. I sit about ten back, and after Belgium this is like a friggin' pleasure cruise. No problem. I've got some gear left. I can lead it out Hard for my boy Jon. (I've got some heavy wheels on, and accelerating on the uphill finish doesn't seem likely; plus my sprint is trashed anyways after not using it Ever in Belgium.) Right about then, Jon rolls up and says his legs are flat. The juniors look pretty spent. Steve has been on the front. Three laps to go, nobody is coming to the front for the lead out, and I start thinking -- but not too much avail. Finally, 1-lap-to-go. Exactly then Patrick Gellineau and Aubrey Gordon roll up to the front. Gordon won last year, and so they are the sprint threat. Over 50, but still a threat. A soft lead out by them starts, sweeping up the stragglers off-the-front, and then they slow up to let the field play for a while before starting the lead out. The field surges out of the stupid-corner, and then everything pauses. Gellineau's not going to lead it out from here. They're waiting for the stupid guy, or the other organized team (none) to start driving it. Nobody comes through. A big hesitation.I see the opportunity and react instinctively. By the time I have the gap in, I know this is it. I may not have a shotgun sprint at the moment, but I've still got jump, and I put 30 meters in before they even know what hit them. By then I'm pushing the 53x14 up the hill gradient, pouring it on, legs hurting -- don't look yet -- still hurting.... At the 200m mark I look back, in mid-stroke, still carrying the big gear, and I barely even see them coming. I'm so happy I almost laugh. Me, who has never soloed off anything, out way in front of the field, cruising in easy over the line. 1st place.Gordon won the sprint, and my boy Steve takes ~5th. Party on Wayne

Triptyque Ardennais

2003-05-26T10:39:00.000-05:00

May 26, 2003 Finally some nice weather in Belgium. The Ardennes was a tough challenge I am pleased but yet upset with my performance. I was able to finish this year’s race but seemed to always be a little behind when it mattered most. Since steep climbs used to be my specialty and they are where I suffered most during this race I feel very disappointed. I felt very strong the whole race and was able to accomplish my goal of finishing.
Triptyque Ardennais started on Friday with a 159 km stage. This year’s first stage was a far cry from the hard charging race from the year before. It seemed like we were waiting for someone to take charge all day and riders were doing crazy things to get to the front of the pack. On thin finishing circuit the race finally started breaking up. I was unfortunately at the back because I didn’t feel like risking my life to hold my position. I was not able to close all the gaps that opened in front of me. By the top of the hill a 200-meter gap had opened between my group and the front 66 riders and no one seemed to want to chase. it was a very uneventful ride to the finish for me.
Stage 2 started in the rain and I was very nervous because after the dangerous riding I had seen the day before I was sure there would be a lot of crashes in the rain. The 102 km course was an eventful race with short steep climbs throughout the course and sprint and climbing points available every 10 km or so. I tried to stay near the front to avoid the same mistake that had taken me out of the overall race contention the day before. I stayed in the top r\twenty for most of the day except for the final sprint where I decided to save my energy for the afternoon individual time trial.
Stage 3 was a 13 km individual time trial it was also raining for my ride. the team had given me the full Time trial kit consisting of aero bike, aero helmet and long sleeve skin suit. I started the time trial fast but soon realized the bike was to small and I broke the handlebars when my knees slammed them while standing to sprint out of the turns. it was a neat experience to race such a technical course with such nice equipment but I felt I had not prepared correctly and hopefully in the future I will not make such mistakes.
Stage 4 the final stage, was the toughest day of racing with a very tough and long course. Triptyque Ardennais overall classification is always decided on the final stage because it is so tough. I felt good and tried to stay near the front but it was hard, everyone wanted to finish knew that it was important to stay at the front. the race went up some twisting accents that I rode very well and then down some wicked decent that pushed our handling skills to the limit on the narrow roads. I hit a top speed of 105 km/h on one of the decent. every thing was going well until we hit a climb that the race was to go over twice and was located just 8 km from the finish. I rode the steep part of the climb well but the 2 km gradual climb to the top cracked me and I was chasing the rest of the way but I was able to finish.
The race was perfect training and I feel very strong now ready to tackle anything.

Derny Racing

2003-05-12T10:35:00.000-05:00

Things must be going well since time seems to be moving quickly. I picked up team bike, a Riddley, from the factory here in Belgium. Riddley is a Belgian bike manufacturer and hopefully built this bike for the Belgian cobbles. The Riddley seems to move fluidly around the Belgian roads; it is nice to be on a new bike. I really notice the difference in how smooth the new parts are. The parts on my Cannondale must have been really worn. I would like to thank my parents for sponsoring my new bike; without them I would not be able to afford such an expense. Thursday I also raced at Wondelgem. The race started well and I was active for most of the race but I got caught behind a crash. An American from the Cycling Center in Hertsberge, Belgium overlapped wheels and met the pavement. Unfortunately I was the first rider behind him and had to completely stop. The single file group shot by and I jumped into the line as soon as I could get up to speed. The race stayed single file and at a speed of 52 km/hr for about three laps. I knew I was in trouble because the race was being made while I was stuck in the back. I tried to make up for the mistake but was not able to accomplish much. Friday I put my new bike together and was able to do a short test ride but could not tell much from such a short ride. Friday evening Rein, Ruben, Vicky, Niko and I went bowling. I wanted to see if it was similar to American bowling and of course it was exactly the same.
Derny racing is a blast. The derny is a motorcycle that is custom built for motor pacing road bikes. The derny looks like an old style bike with a motor built in. The derny has pedals and a huge chain ring so the derny drivers can pedal along with the motor. Racing behind the derny is a very interesting experience; the derny driver navigates the course and the rider behind him regulates the speed with voice commands. Allez Allez, is the command to go faster but don’t get too aggressive because the derny can reach 75 km very quickly. Ow Ow, is the command for the derny to slow.
On Sunday my teammate Brian Fagin and I participated in our first derny race. The race was in Rotterdam, Holland around an oval shaped go-cart course. It consisted of three races for points and the one with the most overall points won. It was a perfect place for Brian and I to have a crash course in derny racing. Walter and Luk were our derny drivers and were the perfect teachers for Brian and I. Walter is from Antwerp and was Brian’s driver. He taught us a lot about the racing and also happened to ask if I knew a Jack Simes. Walter had raced against Jack about 30 years ago when Jack was a strong sprinter racing here in Belgium. I know Jack as one of the local cycling fixtures at the Lehigh County Velodrome. Luk is from Gent and owns a bowling alley, which happens to be the one I was at Friday night. He motor paces professional riders like Mathew Gilmore and Frank Vanderbroke and also does a lot of work with riders at the Gent velodromes. The races were hard and fast and Walter and Luk took care of Brian and I, placing us well and giving us a good work out. It was a very strange feeling to be racing with the motorbikes. We hit tops speeds of 60 km/hr and battled it out for the finish. Of course our finishing places helped with myself coming in 4th and Brian placed on the podium with a third place finish. We are looking forward to future derny races. Sometimes they go down roads and over long distances. I would love to get a chance at one of those.
Monday I raced a kermesse in Puivelde, Belgium. Since the Belgians had their local championship races over the weekend Monday’s race was full of foreign riders that hadn’t raced all weekend. The race started off quick but had a strange twist. About 30 minutes into the race, we were stopped because we had caught up to a police car that was blocking our race. I am not sure what the police car was doing but the race was restarted. The break that was away was allowed to get its gap back and then the race was on once again. Storms were blowing across the area and it seemed like no one wanted to race in the rain because the pace would slow whenever it started to rain. I was trying to race aggressively but it seemed like no one could pull through but they could attach and crack into the wind. The race was not very hard because of the strange tactics but the rain made it miserable. The most interesting thing about this race was the drug test after the race. This is the first kermesse that I heard of having drug testing. My friend Jake Stephens, an American who is here just for three weeks, was selected for the testing. I can’t wait to hear about the test from a personal point of view. I hope every one is enjoying hearing about my Belgian adventure and please keep in touch.

Sucking Wind at a Drongen Kermess

2003-05-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

When things are going well, time flies. You don’t realize how good things are. When things are going bad, time seems to stop. All you can think about is how you want another chance as soon as possible. I raced well at Hoboken, even though it is only a couple days ago it seems like a long time. My mini stage race of kermesses did not go so well. Sometimes it is hard to read your body early in the season. The feeling of a need to race overwhelms you and you end up doing too much. The weekend started out well with an under 25-age race in Zwijnaarde just south of Gent. I felt good and was racing hard when I went to cross a gap and a friend of mine, Reno, flew past, smiling at me, to finish closing the gap. I jumped into the single file line of the race and just gritted my teeth in the hope that no other gaps would form but when the pace eased too soon I knew I was stuck in the second group. My team mate Brian Fagin and I rode aggressively trying to free ourselves from this group. Brian was able to form his own group and finish 24th. I finally got free with a lap to go and came in about 36th. My smiling friend Reno was able to just miss first place by a bike length. I am very happy for him and hopefully someday I can smile at him as I race past. Sunday at Drongen, there was a tough crosswind and the race just blew apart from the start. I missed the move and my day ended early. My teammate Brian made the group and pushed himself to the limit with an avg. heart rate of 184 for the race to finish 11th, a satisfactory result for so early in the season since we both have not been in Belgium for long. Monday I rode two hours to a kermesse in Denderhoutem. I was hoping to go well since this course had a cobbled hill but the cobbles proved to rough for my tired legs and I cracked early. It was a depressing ride home because I hate when I don’t finish races but I guess my body realizes when I need rest even when my mind thinks I can do it. This next week should be very fun; I am resting hard today so I can be back on top for the Staf Boone World Championships on Thursday in Wondelgem. Also Thursday morning I will be picking up my new team bike, which I am really looking forward to since I cannot get my Cannondale to stop having small problems. Then on Sunday I will be racing in Holland in a derny race. This race is like a time trial behind a motorcycle and I am looking forward to this new kind of racing. Wish me luck on this new style. Thanks

Kermess Racing

2003-05-02T10:30:00.000-05:00

Two weeks have passed since I have first stepped into Belgium. It has been one adventure after another. Tuesday I launched a hot air balloon with Ruben, Rein, Ruben’s brother Dieter and their friend Jürgen who owns the balloon. We launched the balloon after dinner on one of the most peaceful evenings. There was a light wind that was blowing from the southwest. The balloon traveled from Gent to the Holland border, where we packed the balloon up in a grassy field. The evening was so relaxing and peaceful. Ruben got to be the passenger in the balloon for the flight, seeing the peaceful Belgian villages from above. I can only imagine how Ruben must have enjoyed the flight. April 30th was and is Ruben’s birthday, happy birthday Ruben.
Belgian rainbows are beautiful; unfortunately they mean it is raining somewhere and that somewhere is usually where I am riding. The UCI 1.5 race in Hoboken went well. At the race I met the core of the Royal Antwerp club since the race was just outside Antwerp. They were happy to have me on the team; the positive feeling I received helps me feel more at home and able to focus on my training. The race started as soon as it started raining. The course stared with three large laps of sliding chaos through twisting roads and traffic islands. The smooth flowing European peloton was able to survive without any major mishaps. The rain stopped for the eight finishing laps. The finishing laps were small roads with lots of turns and a long tail wind section followed by some rough cobbles and a very short up hill. Luckily most Belgians can’t go up hills. The tail wind section was so fast we would be spinning out our biggest gear; the group would fly onto the cobbles. The cobbles would bring us to a stop and the course would u-turn onto a short hill and then turn into a head wind. This section was very tough but luckily most people were exhausted and I was able to leave my group with two laps to go. A small chase group formed around me including two of my teammates. We held off the field and almost caught a large group in front of us. My teammates in my group placed well in the sprint to finish 24th and 28th; I was drained and came in 31st, one place out of a small result. Two other of my teammates rode well placing sixth and sixteenth. It was a good day in Hoboken with my new team riding aggressively; hopefully it will be a successful season for my team and myself. This weekend I am racing for three straight days making my own mini stage race of kermesses, to help me train for up coming challenges.

First Interclube races in Flanders Mountains

2003-04-28T10:27:00.000-05:00

Time has flown by once again, I can’t believe I have been in Belgium for more than a week. Everything is well, I still feel very lucky to be living with Ruben and Rein; they have been very nice and supportive, coming to my races when they have time. The Belgian weather has also realized I am here, greeting me with a downpour during Sunday’s race. I have raced twice since my last entry both with about 180 starters and Gordon McCauley coming in second. Gordon is a very strong rider and some how always forces the final move. Sundays race was an invitation only kermesse so it was a very big, racing us over some of the Tour of Flanders climbs. First we went up the Berendries with cartoon pictures of a few professional riders at the bottom. The steep grade of the Berendries just seemed to keep coming, making it a great climb. The race then went up a no cobbled climb of the Muur de Gramont; it was also long and steep. The Bosberg quickly followed the Muur. The Bosberg is a lot harder than it looks on TV. The wet cobbles forced the riders to sit and power the Bosberg because if you stood up you were not getting up the climb. The race finished around 10 km circuit that was very tough consisting of many tight turns and a down hill cobbled road that really broke things up. I felt good the whole race but just didn’t seem to have the power to be there for the finish but I know that will come with some more racing. Racing with my Royal Antwerp team was very professional. I know I will have to perform with support like this. Thursday May 1st is my next team race, a 1.5 UCI event in Hoboken near Antwerp. Please everyone keep in touch.

200 starters at Kermess

2003-04-24T13:54:00.000-05:00

Finished my first large kermesse yesterday and it was very hard. The race had 200 starters and some ex-professional riders; it averaged 43 km per hours and people just dying to hold on. I feel that I have a lot of space to improve. After the race Ruben, Rein, Niko, Vicky and I had dinner at Niko’s parent’s house and it was a lot of fun. We joked around and relaxed and I also went into the pool and just relaxed. I was so tired last night and slept in a little this morning. The national team was already out training when I called so I guess I will not meet them.