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May 15, 2005
Hey everyone! After nearly three months, I am finally home. I have been trying to get rested up to prepare for philly week, which is pretty much, the biggest reason that I race bikes. After a tough early season of racing I needed some recovery and to get over a sore throat that had been clinging on since the Tour of Georgia. Being able to relax back home has been just what the doctor ordered. So I thought that I would just give you a quick summary of what I have been doing this year.
As most of you know, I signed with a new team for 2005, Kodak Easyshare Gallery/Sierra Nevada. So I was very motivated this winter to train and get ready for a season of kicking butt with my new team. The team’s is based in California so I needed to get prepared to race all the early season National Racing Calendar (NRC) races in California, starting at the beginning of March. As you all know, winter in Pennsylvania is not very good for training outside on a road bike, so I spent most of February training in Clemson, SC. I drove back home from there to park my car and fly out to team training camp in Napa, CA at the end of February. Napa has some great climbs as well as plenty of flat roads, so you can go on easy flat ride or go out and hit up 5-10km climbs all day if you like. So it’s a great place for training. Here’s something you may not know about Napa, they make wine there. That’s right, there are vineyards everywhere you look. I didn’t have anytime to partake is any wine tasting, because I was busy training. It was great meeting the new team, and putting in lots of good rides on our cool new Serotta Ottrott SL bikes. While in Napa, we met a guy that we named Mike ‘Blue Man’ Hutchinson. Dominique named him blue man because of his blue arm and leg warmers, and because he was tearing our legs off on training rides…the name stuck.
With this diary, it was suggested to me that maybe I should try to compare things I encounter racing and training to how they might be similar or different to PA Bar racing. Here is my first comparison. Blue Man is a lot like Dave Black. He is a master’s guy who is really fast and will tear your legs off all week long and then appear out of nowhere in the break at the weekend race and whoop your butt there too. Like Dave, Blue Man also lives by himself and he was gracious enough to rent out one of his extra bedrooms to me. Now I had a place to call home for about 5 weeks before the team headed back to the east coast. That was real nice, one thing that is really tough when you are on the road for a while to be moving ALL your stuff from house to hotel to host house week to week and day to day, so it was real nice to have somewhere to plant your bags and just travel to the races with what you need for the race. No couch surfing or living out of the team van! So a big thanks goes out to Blue Man.
After camp was over, racing started in March. Even though I was more fit this year heading into the early racing, I suffered just as much as I did in the early season racing last year, my first season as a professional. My role for the early season was basically to do any work I can to help my teammates who were all already in great race shape. So no real cool stories of long breakaways or race wins, at least not yet. I was just working hard and finishing in the pack. Then April was one of the busiest months of racing that I have ever had. The hard part of April was doing Sea Otter stage race, then having just 2 days off before the Tour of Georgia started. One of those days off was spent flying to Atlanta and then driving a couple of hours to Augusta, where the race started. After feeling great racing at Sea Otter, I guess that I didn’t recover as well as I could have with just one day of real rest and I struggled at the Tour of Georgia. Georgia was a much higher level this year with 6 pro tour teams in the race. The higher quality of the field really made a difference. My race was cut short, after stage 4 because I was time cut, I can tell you more about that in another entry. The following week three teammates (Glen, Hayden and Jackson), and myself stayed in the south to race the Heritage Series crits in SC and Athens and Roswell crits in GA. I experienced more bad luck at these races, going down pretty hard in a crash in Greenwood, SC and picking up the sore throat that I mentioned before.
There is a real rough summary of my season so far. Now I am home, I have taken a few days totally off from riding, trying to rejuvenate my legs and get them ready for the Tour of Connecticut and then Philly coming a couple weeks after that. I will be doing a diary over the season here on www.pacycling.org. My future entries will hopefully be a bit more detailed. I hope to give you a feel for what racing on the pro circuit is like for me. I am going to try to keep my diary interesting and try to not just make it bike race play by play, so wish me luck.
Talk to you later,
Scott
www.kgsncycling.com
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