How did someone realize that a simple little portal, where one can tweet, would redefine a word and start a new craze that has spread like wildfire.  Your young children, when they grow a bit older, when asked what a tweet is, won’t say that it is a sound a bird makes, they will instead log onto www.twitter.com.

It amazes me sometimes the perception the general public has of people on the stage.  I have been lucky in a certain way during my career that I have never gotten too much media attention.  I am not saying I wouldn’t want more, most human beings have that level of ego where they like a certain amount of attention, but with that, comes a certain amount of invasion of privacy and whichever way the media want to portray you, is the way you people out there judge that person’s character.  I am not saying that society’s thoughts are always wrong, of course there are some bad seeds around on occasion, but it’s amazing how people can be so judgmental of another human being, when we all are fallible and none of us are perfect.  Since they’re in the limelight, they are expected to be perfect.

In an effort to keep my regular readers coming back for more, I hung out on the west coast this week to ride the Long Beach Bicycle Grand Prix criterium.  I went there expecting our team’s classy crit riders, such as Jono C and Bernie S to be there to work for, but those boys are spending quality time with their loved ones for the moment.  Instead, we lined up with Michael Grabbo Grabinger, Ben King, myself, and the Tour of California hard nut – Curtis Smoking Gunn in his first team race back from injury. 

Our goal was to be aggressive as the race had the fast sprinters, Bahaati, Williams, Cruz, Murphy, Borrajo to name just a few.  We didn’t want a bunch sprint with these guys and so we went on the attack hard, with each of our four guys getting up the road in breakaways.  Eventually I found one that stuck and I was able to use some of the good form I have had in the past few weeks to drive them to the finish.  I was joined in the front by Grabbo, two Rock Racing guys marking for the sprinters in the peloton, two Colavita riders including Borrajo, John Murphy and two others….a little like Noah’s Ark.

Ahhhhh, the come down!  After 4 days of incredibly tough racing, being amongst the action for the most part, here I am on Monday morning with legs that don’t feel like they were on the verge of cramping at the end of 150km yesterday.

The Sunset Loop at the Redlands Bicycle Classic is quite an epic.  In the guts of the race is 12 laps of a 10km circuit through curvaceous (apparently windy, as in windy road, isn’t grammatically correct?!), undulating and somewhat steep roads.  To think we averaged 40kmh over this hard terrain is phenomenal and it went to show how aggressive the race was, but also, how strong team BMC were with their leader, Jeff Louder.

I threw everything I could at them.  I don’t know how many times I attacked, but each and every time I was brought back.  The climb was hard, but it just wasn’t hard enough for long enough to really split everything apart.

Through a few misfortunes in the closing laps, our crit specialists, Bazz, Dionne, Cantwell and Sulzberger were unable to get up for the win.  With 160 guys fighting for the same spot at the front, any misfortune and it’s hard to come out on top.  That’s the joy of cycling.  It’s not the strongest man who wins….although that does help.