In Turkey, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some ancient ruins. 
Per usual my adrenaline spikes in those first few moments of the crit and I'm sprinting through the first couple of corners and dragging a few other opportunists with me, away from the field. Within one lap, we had the gap which was maintained all the way to the end- about 15-20 seconds. Regrettably, I felt weak and tired after the first three laps and had to either sit up or risk an irreversible implosion. I feel very jetlagged and the cold I caught while in Turkey is still working me over, not fully cleared up yet. On a better day, I would have been fine in this break- the speed wasn't mind-blowing. It's been a recurring theme though. I'm terrible at grinding it out at a steady pace, and favor repeated hard accelerations and quick recoveries. I handle it better. All season long I've been putting myself in the breaks which end up winning, but always lack the experience/power to survive for more than 5-6 minutes. As team mate Rick Kotch commented afterwards, maybe I'm burning too many matches, pulling through too hard, or for too long. Maybe it's nerves or maybe it's an overly ambitious desire to be a big contributor to the break. I'm kind of fearful of being fingered as a weak link, so I try to hard to avoid a deliberate "let's drop the dead weight" attack. It ends up costing me. Needless to say, my five team mates were astonished and pissed that I didn't stay up there (rightly so, but this is a training race, and I have team mates who encourage us to chase them when they're in a break). One team mate even promised never to block for me again, which is fine because I've never asked or expected that of anyone. I put myself out there, gave it my best shot (all things considered) and came up short. Where were they at the start? Nothing stops them from co-attacking with me from the gun, right? Oh well.. bygones I guess. I'll continue to do this- get into breaks as much as possible and work on this weakness until it's eliminated. I just need to succeed once and prove to myself I can do it. After that I'm sure that success will breed success. After surrendering from the break, I started to get a little dizzy and a nuisance cramp in my lower right abdomen was really bothering me. With about 12-15 laps to go I took a lap to check myself, catch my breath and refocus. The light headedness might be from the bio clock being all messed up. Racing at 6:00 pm Eastern is like racing at 1:00 am for me right now.. Couple more days and I hope to be back to my former self. I've put on 2-3 pounds since before traveling to Turkey, and it's pretty obvious that this trip- even with all the form-preserving rides I did while over there- has taken something out of me. Shouldn't expect to be 100% for a little while. As for Bob Beal- I hope to simply have lots of fun in the RR and Crit, but I plan to hit the TT with guns blazing and leave everything I have out on the course. There's a 40 ouncer at stake.. and I'm not really sure who is supposed to chug it if they win the bet, which is against me beating last year's time by 40 seconds. If it rains as predicted, the bet's off. We should change the terms to a top ten finish instead. (21st last year) Thanks for reading.
