The Exeter Seacoast Criterium was yesterday and I’d call it a success! I ended up finishing 9th out of a field of about 100 and 3rd in the field sprint. I was pleased with this, but had hopes of coming away the victor before I showed up at the race. Turns out that tons of hot shot teams decided to show up with Fitchburg taking place just 2 days later. Kodak/Sierra Nevada had a handful of riders, as did Nerac.com, TIAA-CREF, SouthAustralia.com, and a bunch of other hotshots. I initiated the winning break, but our group never worked well together (attack, sit up, attack, sit up…), so I decided to save a bit of energy and that’s when the winning move of seven went away.

The race was really great though, with the Teddy King cheering section taking up the majority of the course. It seemed like I heard my name shouted every 15 seconds! Plus my dad got a ride in the pace car with a big, neon green “TEDDY” banner in hand! The weather was great (a sunny day pinched between rain all week) and it was just a really good time. Thank you to everyone who showed up!

Pictures coming soon.

Hola Amigos,

Sooooo what are you doing tonight (by the way, it’s Tuesday July 27th today)? I’m pretty sure that you have nothing else to do, so I recommend coming to the Seacoast Criterium. For those of you outside of the cycling loop, a criterium is a bike race. They’re very spectator friendly since you’ll see us every minute or so for at least an hour. Criteriums are pretty much the best thing ever.

In other news, here’s a picture of our view from Squirrel Island. Niiiiice.

And here’s one of Mayo and me. She’s smacking a mosquito off her forehead. The mosquitoes are the worst I’ve ever seen, because of all the rain. That stinks.

See you at the crit tonight.

Hey dudes and dudemars,

There’s lots to cover, so I’ll be short and sweet, covering all subjects. Ding.

After our scenic tour of DC we made the trek to Philadelphia for the Philadelphia International. This was the biggest, baddest experience I’ve ever had on a bike in a one-day race with a reported 500,000+ spectators taking in the 156 mile race. I was sadly caught out of position on the second to last lap but still finished the race in 66th, simply for the sake of saying that I’ve completed Philly. Brent and Glen represented Priority Health like all-stars, by making the final split. It was butter.

I got a kick out of some dude on the Manyunk Wall who shouted, “Let’s go Ted King!!!!” and then proceded to shove a camera in my face. The pace wasn’t terribly balistic at that point, so I got a kick out this, but I didn’t know who it was. A few days later I got an email with the picture attached from my Middlebury riding buddy Nate Simms. Here’s the very professional picture he passed along.

With the Triple Crown series out of the way, just 2 days later we were scheduled to start the Tour de Beauce in Quebec, Canada. This is a tough as nails 6 day, 7 stage race featuring just about the most internationally diverse field I’ve ever seen. There were teams from Canada, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Columbia, Japan, and probably some more. I had one of my better stage races in Beauce, so I was psyched… at least for the first 5 stages. In that time, I was the 2nd highest American for a while and then just ousted to the 3rd highest by the always powerful Brent Bookwalter - that was no biggie, though ’cause he’s my teammate and he ended up smoking the best young rider competition. I ended up feeling a bit under the weather and developed a pretty gnarly saddle sore in the last 2 stages, so I put all my effort into getting Brent to the line safely with the jersey. The team slowly dwindled down to just 3 riders, but we rode really well throughout the week, which was awesome.

The drive to Quebec was just plain nuts, though! We finished Philly around 3pm, then packed the team car, team van, team trailer, and King family Honda Odyssey for the drive to the north country. We drove and drove and drove and drove that night and only made it to northern Connecticut. Sheesh. That took us to about midnight and then early the next morning (Monday) we drove to mid-Vermont to drop Mayo off for her trip home, and the team continued the venture to Quebec, finally getting in the early evening.

Mayo was a huge asset to the team the entire 2 week period. It was amazing having her at the races and she did a phenomenal job. It was pretty awesome that she did everything of which she was asked, from filling bottles, to running errands, to airport pickups, to setting up pre-race and pulling down post-race. Smooch, baby.

After Beauce, we a hard earned vacation at Squirrel Island. Robbie and I drove the butter Pontiac Vibe home from Beauce, picked up Mayo, and then she and I drove to Maine on Monday afternoon. I had three full days off the bike to clear the mind and pretty much just press my Reset button after 4 of the hardest weeks of racing I’ve ever had.

In other news, Tom Zirbel had an awesome start to his Tour de Nez by winning the opening time trial. It was a long time coming, but PH finally got it’s first NRC win. We’re pretty much planning on cleaning up now for the rest of the season. Why not, eh?

(I’ll finish by saying that I had the intention of adding lots of good pictures, but blogger is acting stupidly and won’t let me add pictures for no apparent reason. Sorry lads. Hopefully I’ll add them later.)

We drove from CSC (Arlington, VA) to Lancaster (Lancaster, PA) on June 5th, which allowed us the wonderfully cultural opportunity to see our nations capitol, via car. Personally, I found it rather exhilerating seeing these sights first hand… it even gave me goosebumps seeing them! So please sit back, relax, and enjoy the next few minutes of pictures as I take you on the wonderful Tour de DC.

First stop: inside the car! I placed the camera on it’s wicked advanced timer feature on the dashboard and took this picture of the Honda Odyssey’s occupants. Robbie is at the helm, I’m that handsome gentlemen in the passenger seat, and Mayo is in the back looking sharp. The car is actually filled to about 75% capacity, because in addition to us, we have three bikes, food, luggage, and tons of other crap. You can see the bikes nestled nicely against the rear left wall of the car. We had them safely seatbelted in. Smart.

Okay, now we’re rolling! Our hotel in Arlington was really close to all these sights, so the 2+ hour drive to Lancaster featured all the culture you could possibly absorb in the first 10 minutes, and then a pretty boring drive for the next 2 hours. The first sight was the Pentagon. This place is so flippin’ large, that you hardly know what it is as you drive by. It mostly looked like an enormous building, which makes sense because that’s what it is. See the black fence around the outside…? That’s national security at its finest.

The Arlington National Cemetary came soon after. This was a bit eerie since it stretches on and on, pretty much beyond anything imagineable. It’s huge! I should point out that this picture looks so darn professional because I used the handy photoshop editing features on my new laptop to cut out the person running on the right and the cyclist on the left. Very professional, indeed.

One of the last sights is a “TwoFor” (pronounced: too-fer), meaning two-for-the-price-of-one. This is the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial in the same picture! Once again, fancy editing is on display, as I cut out the car and highway in the foreground and then added the words in the sky. I know that because the words are white and are in the sky, they look like clouds… but they’re not. Plus I shortened the words, which sounds kind of cool: Wash Mon and Jeff Mem. Neat, huh?

Lastly, I should point out that throughout this trip, Mayo has been suffering from some pretty severe allergies. Her nose has been a faucet leaking all the time, while still maintaining it’s uncanny ability be fully clogged, too. It really is fascinating. Anyway, during our scenic tour, she was complaining about her leaky nose, so she jammed a wad of tissues up there to stop the spout. Isn’t she beautiful!

That’s all for the tour. Bye bye.

My third big road trip of the year is underway, with a group drive down to Virginia from Vermont. Mayo’s birthday on May 30th was a blast – Robbie and I were at her family’s house in VT, so given that we had the day off the bikes, we went to the Fujii’s gallery in hoppin’ downtown Weston in the morning to cash in on the internet and espresso. Next, we returned to the Fujii’s and set up the badminton net (or in Mayo’s case, the full on badminton court; she brought out the tape measure to make sure it was legal), which was followed by a trip to their pond, which was freshly stocked with trout. Even though it was just late May, the water was surprisingly warm and downright manageable for a nice long swim!

Family, Mayo’s friends, and Mayo’s family’s friends were at the party that night, which was highlighted by Annie and Nobu’s phenomenal dinner. We had a deliciously fresh potato salad, a very tasty coleslaw, and amazingly succulent pork ribs. Yum.

Wednesday was filled with a long drive south, with Mom’s sweet Honda Odyssey packed and rolling by 8:30am. A mere 10 hours later we arrived in Richmond, VA for the CapTech classic. We were greeted at our host house by the indescribably enthusiastic brothers, Spencer (2 years old) and Hayden (4 years old). Our host parents, Nelson and Nicole, showed us around the house before we grabbed dinner and went to bed, with a big day of racing to follow.

Our team was spread about Richmond at 4 of 5 host houses, which is really a great experience and way to meet the people in the different parts of the country. Furthermore, one of our hosts was Matt Marchal, who is CapTech’s overall host house coordinator (that is, he had something like 90 cyclists for which he had to find housing!). We went on a group ride with him the morning of the race and he’s an amazing guy; in addition to being the head of housing, he’s also an MD and is the medical director of the race! Talk about a busy guy. This made for some media recognition for Priority Health in the local paper: check this out.

The best way to describe CapTech is hard. Or wicked hard. Perhaps stupid hard. The race is 52 laps of 1.2 miles each. What makes the race so danged hard is that the pitch is either up or down and hardly ever just flat. After the start, you sprint hard into the first 90 degree right turn, then there’s a steep climb for one block, 90 degrees left and up three blocks, then 90 degree right for a flattish block. Then you bomb down to the start finish with four more 90 degree turns. Moreover, the pavement looks like a minefield, which makes for some sketchy racing. Priority Health had a great showing in the early part of the race, as we sat comfortably at the front of the field, and with Brent Bookwalter taking honors with the first KOM. However, as the race wore on, we slapped on our suffer face. Robbie was our sole finisher, garnering a bit of respect for PH by placing 32nd. The other seven of us who didn’t finish were plenty bummed with our result, but remained in good company: there were only 36 finishers out of a large 150 starters!

We’ll hit the road Friday and drive north to Arlington for the CSC Invitational. This race is always a doozey because it’s only 1km and therefore flippin’ fast. Plus when the ProTour teams are racing (like the namesake CSC), the pace has no where to go but up.