If I were a hard-core blogger, this post would have gone up last night, but I’ve got a family and all that goes with it, so this was my best opportunity. Within 24 hours is not too bad in my book.
Dave Kascht and I rode up Foothill Expressway to Stanford to watch the Tour of California Prologue yesterday. There were a bunch of cyclists headed that way as well and we got in a little group of 6-7 riders. It was very strange riding so close to other people as I spend 99% of my riding time on my own; I was nervous about banging into someone next to me or colliding into the guy in front of me, but nothing happened. We got on campus and headed to the loop on Palm Drive. The place was packed! No surprise.
Dave took my picture next to the barriers. A month ago I accidentally snapped my regular cycling glasses in half (they’d been sitting out in a freezing cold garage all night and I flexed them too far… doh!) so I’m wearing my very stylish “Super-Cyclops” glasses here. Man, I’ve gotta get some new glasses asap. I look like a super-dork:
We hung out at this spot for 10 minutes or so. I got a few pictures of riders coming through, but we had no idea who they were. Here’s a random Astana rider:
We wandered through the crowd a little, saw Frankie Andreau doing some commentary for TV or a webcast? We went down to the finish line, but it was pretty packed there; couldn’t see much. I took a picture of Dave and the “Un-LeMond”:
We didn’t spend too much time here and headed back up to cross into the middle of the loop where there were fewer people on the barriers. Mario Cippolini went by. I got a picture of him, but it wasn’t that good. Ah well. We got into our new spot where we had a front row spot on the barriers and a good view of the big screen to see who was coming down the road. Dave was a happy man:
This was our hang-out for the rest of the time trial. We saw about 50 riders from this spot, including Oscar Friere, Paolo Bettini, Jens Voight, Bobby Julich, etc. We saw Thomas Voekler go by at least 4 times. lol. Seriously, these guys were going by our barricades so fast that we only saw them for a split second. Some of the bikes would have collided with Dave’s head in that picture above. They were that close. Every time a Bouygues Telecom rider went by, I would say, “That was Thomas Voekler. Oh no, wait.. THAT was Thomas Voekler.” I took about a dozen shots from this spot, but other than one rider spitting the exact moment I took his picture, the rest all look identical except for the team colors. Here’s Fabian Cancellara, world TT champion, followed by George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer. I have to say that when Fabian went by his bike sounded faster than everyone else’s.
So after Levi pulled into the finish line it was time to go. It was pretty easy to get out of there. So many people came on bikes that the crowd dispersed really quickly. We got in an even bigger peleton on the way home, fluctuating from 8-12 people. I wasn’t comfortable riding too close to the wheel in front of me, I tended to leave at least a 3-4 foot gap. Eventually we got to downtown Los Altos and somehow I was leading the group. We were coming up on a red light at a T-intersection and I thought Dave was right behind me so I asked him, “Are we stopping here or what?” and a totally different voice responded, “It’s a protected intersection, we can just go on through.” There were a half-dozen new riders in our group I hadn’t even realized were there and as I found out later… Dave was at the back of the pack! I pulled off and let these guys go through. I was really glad I’d asked instead of just putting on the brakes and causing a pile-up.
Oh, that reminds me. Apparently cyclists have some kind of secret hand-signal language for pulling up to red lights, ’cause when I was in the middle of the group, some of the more hard-core riders were making signs for the riders behind. I had no frickin’ clue what they were supposed to mean, but I just copied them for the benefit of whoever was behind me. Afterwards I asked Dave about it and he said, “This means slow down, this means we’re stopping, this means look out for that pothole/pinecone/dog poop.” Good to know.
Later that night, I combed through the TV footage from Versus and found myself in the crowd. I’m a greyish blur in a 10th of a second of a shot, but… cool!
So, we got in 21 miles on Sunday and I went out today and did another 30 with 2100 feet of climbing. That’s 101 miles over the last 3 days with 4500+ total climbing. Not too shabby and I forgot to mention that I’ve been sick all weekend. Actually the only times when I haven’t felt like a zombie was when I was out riding, so it’s good I got out so much!
Last shot from the prologue. This guy was riding around a crowd of pedestrians, bikes, kids, dogs, skateboards, etc. on a 7-foot unicycle. Crazy. He also had massive calf muscles.
Thanks for reading. I’ll post again soon!
