Tour of Utah 1.1: Wow....Already?

And that's it folks -- stage one of the 2010 Tour of Utah is in the books. I didn't go very fast. Still haven't seen the results, but I suffered a mechanical problem on my TT bike, so I doubt that my time (40 seconds off Tsaylor Phinney on a 6-minute course) even got me inside the top 70. I started the race in my small chain ring, and couldn't get the front derailleur to shift. I spent half the race freaking out and totally thrown out of my groove. Picture me spastically looking down at my gears, riding with my knees cocked out, and soft pedaling a lot (hoping that a drop in chain tension would allow the shift to happen). It shifted fine under load on the trainer, so I just don't know what happened. The funny thing is that normally my Blue Triad is totally problem-free, and I used the same setup during Cascade and shifted four times in that TT with no problems. In fact, I've never had a problem shifting my front derailleur since I got this bike two years ago -- pity it had to happen at the biggest race I've ever done!

Apparently, choosing a moose as a power animal was not the wisest thing I could have done. I should have done more research; it turns out that despite their immense power, moose are so large that they have a low Vo2 Max, and a horrible Watts/Kg. They also can't corner for beans due to their gangly, knobby knees. Moose are awful prologue racers.

In order to cheer myself up, I spent the last few minutes imagining what it must feel like to be Nathan O'Neil, who crashed in the prologue and broke his collarbone for the umpteenth time. Or to be one of the poor guys who just got time-cut by Taylor Phinney's outrageously fast time. To those of you who got cut, I think that's bullshit! It's a friggin' prologue, and "America's Toughest Stage Race" or not, cutting guys on a stage like today hurts the race. I understand cutting at something like the TT at Nature Valley where the top 10 guys are separated by a minute or so, but that won't be the case here.

Then I watched this, and it actually did cheer me up.


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