The Tour of America's Dairyland....

So as some of you may know, things have been going "less than well" for me out here at the Tour Of America's Dairyland. If you include Nature Valley, I have failed to finish my last ten races. Trust me, that doesn't feel good to say. It feels even worse to do. 

My post of last night entitled "Total Fucking Meltdown" was in reference to my perfromance at the TOAD. It was written hastily, right after pulling out of last night's Downer Ave. Criterium (read: getting dropped). The race was still going on (in fact there was still an hour on the clock!), and my teammate Nick Clayville had just established the winning breakaway, securing him a position in the top five. So yes, I wrote that while indulging in self-pity -- hell, I'v been downright wallowing in it all week. Yes, it may have been overly dramatic. For that, I apologize.

HOWEVER -- and this is a big however -- I'm still a bike racer, and bike racers know how to pick themselves up, and keep racing. Sure, I just had a rough three week trip through the midwest. I crashed; I got dropped; I lost my nerve. But honestly, I've been a lot lower thanks to cycling several times over the last few years -- you should have seen me in July of '06 right before I went to the Tour de Toona. Or the spring of '07 before the Tour of the Gila. If anything cycling is an excellent teacher: it shows you how to take your licks. It gives you innumerable obstacles to overcome. And it rewards you tenfold when you succeed, and those successes are all the more sweet thanks to the trials met along the way. 

There's still a lot of racing I'm excited to do this season. This thing's far from over...