First Two Stages Done - Tour del Sol

This morning I awoke before dawn and began preparing for the first stage, the Individual Time Trial.  Back in the day, we didn't have special time trial bikes with special wheels, special clothes, and special helmets.  We took our road bikes, maybe put lighter tires (the adventuresome would glue track tires on their road wheels), took off our bottle cages, maybe took off the inner chain ring.  Some would remove the grease from their hubs and bottom brackets and put in oil instead.  But basically, you rode your road bike as hard as you possibly could.  I'd wear a track jersey, use 28 spoke wheels with light rims, stripped the bike of bottle cages, and that was about it.  Now it's a whole production.  Well, my TT bike is just my training Soloist (it's at least aero) with clip on aero bars and a pair of Reynolds deep dish carbon wheels.  I did take off my water bottle cages.  So off I go at 8:39:30 a.m. Mountain Time (to me it was really 7:39:30 a.m.) under cloudy skies and cool and breezy conditions.  I finished 7th in the 20 km ITT (12.5 miles, give or take).  That makes the 4th time in a row I've come in 7th (all three stages of the Callville Bay race, and of course, 7th overall).  Vic Miera took 1st and took 3:25.9 out of me.  My team took 1st, 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th, and 9th.

The criterium was held in the afternoon on a high bluff that what is now the "old" airport is on.  We used a pair of parallel runways joined by two swooping turns.  It was a short little thing, just 30 minutes.   We started off under cloudy skies and a stiff crosswind coming in from the west.  We hadn't gone more than a couple of laps before it began breaking up.  If you didn't get a good position coming out of the turn you would be out in the wind on your own, so I always took a line that would put me in the shelter of other riders when the crosswind would hit.  About half way through the race Dirk Cowley rode off the front (he was 4th going into the crit).  Mike MacDonald (from Capitol Reef days, a person I really wanted to beat in this race) went with him.  Since there were five of us in the race, we went to the front and controlled the race completely.  I wanted the gap to hold for Dirk's sake, but not to get so far that MacDonald would be out of reach if he cracked.  As it turned out, he did.  So I was motivated to chase as much as I could to bring MacDonald back into the field.  He only had one team mate in our group, and although he tried a variety of maneuvers to break up the chase, it was inevitable that we'd catch him.  He was blown, and squirted out the back pretty quickly.    He wasn't seen again.  Coming into the sprint I was on his team mate's wheel, a guy named Hunsaker who was second in the TT.  I sprinted by him and it looked like I had second sewn up when Charles Palmer (third in the TT) from my club nipped me at the line.  So we took first, second, third, and fifth in the second stage.  I'm thinking unofficially I've moved up to 5th going into tomorrow's road race, where the distance and the hills will be in my favor.  Official results to follow as I get them.

OK, it's official.  I'm 5th going into the road stage.