My stunning victory in Friday night’s Computrainer race allowed me to receive a call-up to the start line in Saturday’s big race, the Athens Twilight Criterium. This gave me a huge leg up on the other 150 people in the race, because nearly the entire race is based upon your starting position and how well you can maintain that position. So to cut to the chase, I started on the front line, and never looked back. I ended up trying my hardest to help Rich England at the finish, who ended up 7th and I took 11th.

Far more interesting than the numbers regarding the race, the atmosphere of the thing was unreal! Every time I went under the big theater marquise at turn 1, I thought to myself, This is an absolute circus!

The race started around 9:30pm and was filled 3, 4, or 5 people deep for just about the entire 1km course. They were all rowdy drunk and deafeningly loud thereby creating the most insane scenario in which I’ve ever raced! It was crazy.

Next, we packed up the van and shipped off to Roswell, GA where we are now for the Nalley Roswell Historic Criterium. I don’t really have any idea what Nalley refers to, and I don’t know why it’s historic either. Skipping lots of details, Rich again lead the team with an 8th place finish, followed by bro-man Robbie in 12th, and Glen in 18th, thereby leaving plenty of room for improvement. In our defence, this is the first time the five of us are seriously racing together -as opposed to the big teams who’ve been together since mid-February - and we haven’t raced in 5 weeks, which is frustrating… so look for us to be winning everything in sight in no time!

The Cyclingnews race report omits a bunch of details from the race, like when Priority Health came to the front and hammered for a good long while to catch the four-man break of Davidenko, Candelario, Haedo, and Rapinski. Thankfully, the pictures do a bit of justice and show that we were in fact quite active and not silly pack fodder:

The most bizarre thing of the day happened at dinner tonight. So here we are in the heart of the south in Roswell, Georgia where football and guns and confederate flags reign high. We went out to dinner and met up with the Navigators team at the Olive Garden. This was unplanned, but the Olive Garden folks told us that dinner would be faster if we ate together, so down we sat since it was already 9pm (meanwhile, Robbie went out to dinner someplace else with his old high school roommate and his girlfriend). Looking around the table at the seven of us, I found it to be a rather international group. The Navigators consisted of Siro (Italian), Vassili (Russian), their massage man (Costa Rican), Rich and Tommy (both Australian), Glen (New Zealander), and me (American-o!). Yeah, nothing too exciting, but I thought it was cool at the time. Plus, my spaghetti dinner with meatballs and Italian sausage was tasty.

In other news, you can see an inadvertent picture of me from the Twilight Crit. I would copy and paste it, but it’s copywrited. I was seen here chatting up my buddy John Murphy, who I raced with last year on the national team, at the start line. You can see about 1/20th of my body. It’s awesome.

We’re now in Athens, GA for the Athens Twilight Criterium. This is my first time in town and it seems like a very cool place. The University of Georgia is located here, so there’s tons and tons of college students around, especially along the streets where we’ve been loitering. Our butter Hilton Gardens Inn is right along the crit course, just 2 blocks from the course. So backtracking, Tommy’s in heaven because of all these southern co-eds. Down Tommy, down!

We’ve had a bit of excitement since arriving in town. Firstly and sadly, I suffered a loss last Thursday… I shaved off my chops. Yup, they were pretty sweet they stacked up nicely in facial area against Tommy’s thicker chops in the “Priority Health Side Burn Showdown” but after about a month of hard work and precise touch-up work, they had to be removed. Bye guys, you’ll be missed.

Also on Thursday Rich, Tommy, and I went on a spin and had a little bit too much fun with our bikes, a road sign, and a camera. More than a few drivers pass us while we were setting up this scene in the farthern south parts of Lookout Mountain, and they looked at us like were were morons… which at the time is not that far from the truth.

Friday morning we left Eddy and Carlee’s after almost two awesome weeks of training to get to Athens. Our departure was a bit precarious, because about 100 yards from the Hilger’s house, the front brakes started locking up without warning and without being pressed! It was especially the front left brake, so our fully packed 15 passenger van was pulling hard to the left side of the road. Keep in mind, that the first 3 miles of driving immediately after leaving Eddy’s house are steep down hill. We had about 1500 vertical feet to descend and ever single one was scary. Luckily Robbie is a car guru, and he noticed that the stability control light was going on as well, so after driving down the mountain babying the brakes in 1st gear, we pulled into Blockbuster (where we had rented Jarhead - good flick) to fix the van. With Robbie as our fearless leader, we went through the fuse box in the engine and yanked fuse number 48 - the ABS and Stability Control. This alieved the problem, because between Lookout Mountain and Athens is all highway, so relatively little ABS would be necessary.

We arrived in Athens around 1pm, meaning Tommy had to get ready quickly for his CompuTrainer race. This is an all day event in which 8 racers are on stage at a time in 12 heats throughout the day. We race a 6km time trial hooked up to computerized trainers that add more or less resistance depending on the “hills” we’re climbing or descending. There are 2 TVs - one in front of each group of four - and one bigger screen behind us so that the crowd can see what we’re doing.

The screens show: our name, our position, a map of the course, the profile of the course, our current power output, and how many feet we are in front or behind our competitors. All in all, it’s pretty cool.

So Tommy won his heat with relative ease, as compared to Gordon McCauley as seen by the picture. Next Robbie won his heat, although I didn’t catch it because I was busy riding the trainer in my hotel room trying to sweat off a few more pounds (we were weighed in right before our start, because the computer program inputs our weight to find a power-to-weight ratio).

I was our last rider to go and qualified with the 2nd fastest time of the day right behind Matty Rice. That was for the team tough because Glen Mitchell was flying in from California at 8:50pm and our final showdown was at 9pm. One of us was supposed to not qualify so that we could head back to Atlanta to pick up Glen. Unfortunately we were all too fast for the competition and so Glen would just have to wait (it turned out that he caught a shuttle to the hotel here in Athens, saving us from 3 hours of late night driving).

Anywho, with three Priority Health guys in the final, we were easily the most represented team, all the while looking stunningly good. The same 6k race course was followed as before and once again I finished with the exact same time of 7:30. Only this time, rather than having to deal with the second-place stigma, I beat my next closest competitor by 7 seconds! The cool part of this deal is that I get a call up for tonight’s tonight’s Twilight Criterium. Booya!

Here are some pictures that I think you’ll find amusing. We all got a kick out of Tommy’s facial expressions, because he appeared to be fully amused at everything going on around him and not at all concerned with the race itself. Meanwhile, as you can see in this picture, Robbie looks as terrified as I’ve ever seen him! He’s apparently just seen a ghost.

Next it’s the glory shot of me taking first place over Matty Rice to the left and my teammate from last year, John Murphy. Yea me.

This past February, I finished up college at beautiful Middlebury College in Vermont. I assume that if you’re reading this, you know a thing or two about me, and therefore you know that I was a Feb. If not, this distinguished title simply means that I started my college days in February of 2002 and four years later I ended my undergraduate career. More to the point, my last semester at Middlebury was the one month long J-term, where students study just one class rather extensively, but typically in a topic that one would normally not study. My class was called Place Through Popular Culture and among the areas of America that we studied was the rather ambiguous region of the eastern United States, Appalachia. Appalachia generally gets… umm… well a poor reputation and so we studied whether the reputation is deserved or not.

I’m giving too many pre-story details, but the point here is that among the places in Appalachia we studied turns out to be on Lookout Mountain in Georgia, where we are now. This rather bizarre establishment is called Rock City. The actual description from the website reads as follows:
Located atop Lookout Mountain, just 6 miles from downtown Chattanooga, Rock City is a truemarvel of nature featuring massive ancient rockformations, gardens with over 400 native plant species,and breathtaking “See 7 States” panoramic views. Take anunforgettable journey along the Enchanted Trail where eachstep reveals natural beauty and wonders along the woodland path. Experience fairytale magic at Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Village. Gift shops and restaurant on site. Splendid year-round! Each season there’s a new reason to visit!

Holy smokes! After reading that, I just had to pay Rock City a visit. It’s less than 2 miles from Eddy’s house, so after a nice 2 hours spin around the top of Lookout Mountain, I paid R.C. a visit. Initially I was intregued because I came from along the ridge where one can see Rock City hanging off a cliff in the distance, just like you can see in the above picture. Looks pretty good, huh? Sadly, seeing it from the distance turns out to be the highlight of the place. I rolled up on my bike hoping to make it all the way to the cliff but was put off by the gate and the TWENTY-SIX DOLLAR ENTRY FEE! Sheesh, dude, I can go in my back yard and see rocks and nature for free! I can make my own “Enchanted Trail” by chopping down some big ol’ trees and see that for free, too! $26 for rocks?! I suppose the coolest part is where you can supposedly see seven states from the rocky bluff, but probably equally cool is the Four Corners - where you can be in four states at one time. I’m pretty sure four corners is free, and furthermore it’s so humid and foggy here that you can hardly see as far as Chattanooga just 6 miles away.

Perhaps the most amusing part is the way this place is advertised. Throughout this area, there are red barns with black roofs with”SEE ROCK CITY” plastered across the top. Plus they’ve really marketed this well, because you see this icon everywhere, from cars to trucks to bird houses. This is actually the only feature of Rock City that I remember from my J-term class. Here’s a pretty cool car I saw the other day.

So next time you’re in the area, be sure to See Rock City.

Now that we’ve been at Eddy and Carlee’s for more than one week, we’re pretty much in a set groove that keeps us trucking day after day. Here it is: wake up by 9, go downstairs and use the Starbucks espresso machine, sip something caffeinated while I check emails, if the TVs on, catch up on SportsCenter. Generally by 11 we’re on our bikes riding somewhere around Lookout Mountain. You can either stay up on the ridge, or descend the 1500 feet to “town-level” as I’ll call it, which just means roughly the elevation of Chattanooga and the nearby river. We’re typically back at the Hilger’s house by mid afternoon where we shower/eat/stretch/etc. and hang out with Jackson and Kenzie - two up-and-comers on the Priority Health Team. Just kidding, they’re the Hilger’s 3 year old and 1+ year old kids. They’re absolutely adorable, and while I’ve never been one to go out of my way to hang out with little kids, but this pair is irresistable. They’re incredibly well behaved and I’ve only heard them emit tears from their eyes about one time each. Angels, I tell you.

Continuing on the topic of the Hilgers, the word from recent emails from our team management is that Eddy won today’s 100+ mile road race at the Tour of Shenandoah! (Thereby bringing the number of team victories to two out of three stages.) I’m really not surprised about this stellar performance, because I figured Eddy was fit in California when I first met him, but now that he’s had more training time in early April, the guy is RIPPED! He’s a living, muscular anatomy class! Yeah, Eddy’s pretty much the man. Right out of college he started an ice cream parlor, thereby more or less paralleling my non-cycling dream. I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I would really like to do something related to food. So at some point in my life, I’d love to start my own business in some facet of the food industry. For Eddy it was ice cream and for me it’d be chocolate or coffee or some combination of the two… yummmmm mochaaaaaaa.

I apologize, I’ve digressed a bit from telling the story of what we do day-to-day. Next, we hang out with the two youngest Hilgers for most of the afternoon, or if they’re busy napping we can be found reading, or more likely perusing sweet sites like Cyclingnews or eBay. Dinner has been a mix of eating delicious meals from Carlee or fending for ourselves. Then post-dinner we’ve been watching a lot playoff hockey and basketball. Basketball is a pretty lame sport (oh neat another layup), and thankfully our resident Aussie sprinter Tommy Nankervis likes hockey, so we’re slowly spreading the word that a puck beats a big orange ball any day of the week.

Alright, make like a tree and leave. I’m out.

IamTedKing is up-and-at-em! HoooAH.

Okidokie friends, it turns out that people are actually checking this site out. I first signed up on this Blogspot-dealie the other day to keep up with the rest of my team. It seems that most people on the illustrious Priority Health Cycling team are maintaining their Blogspots. Blast, I gotta keep up.

Well news of the day so far is that if you check out the Weather Channel, you’d be soaked and in risk of being struck by a bolt of lightening if you stuck your head out the door. However, if you look out the window, besides the mandatory fog in this part of the country, it looks mostly dry and clear. So we’ve mostly squandered the morning with TV watching and computer using.

The other important news of the day is that Tom Zirbel is leading the Tour of Shenandoah after two of seven stages. He smoked the opening prologue, followed closely by Brent Bookwalter in 3rd. This is important because it shows that our team isn’t just about looking really really good, signing autographs, and presenting ourselves at media events with the utmost class.