One Down . . .

. . . rest of the season's races to go. I got the first real effort of the season out of the way on Sunday, hitting up the Promontory Park Crit up in scenic Greeley, CO. Nothing like jumping in with both feet for the first race of the year. The field was pretty stacked with nothing going on really on the national calendar, so all of the Boulder pros were in town with nothing better to do besides ride out, race, and then ride back to Boulder. I'll be the first to admit that crits aren't always my favorite and this one has four roundabouts on the course to keep it exciting.

I put in some efforts early on to chase things down and to try to get in the mix. After the first 20 minutes, I wasn't sure I was going to last the whole race, but eventually I relaxed into it a bit and didn't have the feeling I was going to implode. Chuck and I were representing the team for Sunday's race. Knowing who was there and who to watch, we decided to go for some man to man coverage on who we though would be the primary instigators. Unfortunately we got signals crossed and doubled up on subject A and subject B got into the break of the day. In the end, Chuck found the right wheel in the pack and took the field sprint for 8th place. I slotted myself somewhere in the top 20 I think, but honestly for the first effort of the season, I was just happy to finish in the pack.

On Saturday, I got a mini-leg speed trial, doing the Chatfield Worlds ride. With most people racing in circles in Boulder or in a church parking lot in Denver, the group was somewhat small, but with Mike Carter, Joey Brenner, and others, we split the group pretty quickly and went into quasi team time trial mode, but not the friendly kind. It was more the kind of effort where you hoped you didn't blow up on your pull because you sure weren't recovering sitting in behind anybody else. We headed up the hill after the sprint to the guard shack again, just hanging on for deal life riding behind Mike hammering away in the 53x17. It was nice to get out of the training rut of the past few months and really hit it hard, dust off the cobwebs, blah, blah, blah. This month will mark the end of grinding away at threshold and I'll be introducing the legs to more speed.

Last night, after the race, Pinkerton, Matt and I made the most of my trashy back yard, doing some work on the truck and dining al fresco, sitting on recycling bins and buckets, enjoying delicacies from Hebrew National and Ore-Ida. Once again, grilled Tater Tots rule! They are even better when served as a condiment on a hot dog . . . dog in bun, kraut on one side, tots on the other, mustard on the kraut, ketchup on the tots . . . delicious! We ran the truck through phase two of testing, sort of. We decided not to check the timing since it has to be done from the underside of the vehicle, so far as we could determine. We skipped to the KOER test and only a few codes came up surprisingly. I'll be buying an oxygen sensor today and then we'll retest. Emissions testing is coming up soon . . .