You can see exACTly where I said, “yup, uh, miss me with this” and headed back to the house

What is the origin of the term “Boxing Day” anyway

Annual tradition of flying in the face of Matteo Trentin's holiday philosophy

Actividad nocturna

Rain? In this economy???

Yo who is picking these hills man…

I'm retroactively adding in these race recaps almost a week later, but that is because I have been spending the early parts of this week (next week?) crawling out of a coffin that Valenciana buried me in. 

Every day, our team goes into these races with the aspirations of getting into the break. For .Pro races like these, it's pretty much most of what I think we can hope to achieve; some way to animate the race in one way or another. Which is why I went fucking ballistic to try to get into the move, BUT ALAS. 'Twas not to be. However, I felt like I was actually racing my bike and floating in the front well, but it was the classic case of one move too early and on the first power climb of the day starting at around 20km in, the move went, the big teams closed off the roads, and even after a couple attempts to break out from the group after a cheeky weaseling around the side of the WorldTour wall, the racing was soon shut down again and the move was gone. 

After we descended and hit the coastal highway, it was a loooooooooong slog before we would turn up back into the mountains, which meant a lot of nervous rolling along the coast before it went INSANE. The roads would narrow as we turned away from the coast, and I was trying to ride as best a position as I could to get ready for the first major climb, the famous Coll de Rates, but being on a continental team and being American, we are automatically relegated to the back, and any time we want to be anywhere that isn't that, we have to expend a crazy amount of energy rendering any position gains almost pointless. Consequently, when we entered the climb and reached this pinch point across a bridge, a compression crash forced a heap of folks to unclip and literally wait for maybe 30 seconds as folks untangled themselves from each other before we could get rolling. I would absolutely nut myself trying to catch onto a group in the hopes that maybe there would be some kind of coming together, but no dice. My goose was cooked and I would be relegated to a gruppetto that would finish 18 minutes down. 

There isn't much else to say because it was a lot of nothing followed by a lot of stress, followed by a little more nothing. I will say the finish of this race was kinda insane with just how steep that finishing climb was. It's similar to last year, but WOW they sure know how to pick 'em round here. 

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Sam Boardman

Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana: Stage 2

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You can see exACTly where I said, “yup, uh, miss me with this” and headed back to the house

What is the origin of the term “Boxing Day” anyway

Annual tradition of flying in the face of Matteo Trentin's holiday philosophy

Actividad nocturna

Rain? In this economy???

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