crappy luck and robot wisdom

Quite the morning in LA. The sun's strugling to get through the brown sky, but still managing to get everything up to a nice 85 degrees. Huge cannonball run Sunday night at top speed to get to LA before the sun rises and the track opens. Saw nothing but torrential rains and white lines until we rolled through Sacramento. Finally arrived in LA around 4:30am. Driving in Los Angeles is like running the Indy 500 in a Toyota van. Same amount of cars as Portland rush hour, but spread across 6 lanes, everybody doing at least 90mph, and everyone using at least 3 lanes at a time.

stupid gates...

Had a rough morning in the standing 250tt yesterday. Legs felt great, bike felt great, everything was going well until I sat down in front of the gate. This start is crucial. I have one lap to prove that I can start fast enough to ride second behind Blatchford in the team sprint. So the countdown begins, gets down to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, GO and I'm sideways. Not sure if I jumped too fast and got ahead of the gates or if one of the gate arms didn't release completely, but either way, I avoided going down by a whisker and ended up aimed uptrack. Not so good. Got back on it and after that everything fired perfectly, but Des said I lost between 3 and 4 tenths because of the horrible start. Ended up with a 19.1, same time as last year. So had I not missed the start, maybe would have ended up around 18.7 or 18.8, good for third. Either way, fast enough to stay in the team sprint, so Saturday's the big day.

Seemed like a tough day for most of the NW contingent. Heather wasn't happy with her 500, Beardsley didn't like his kilo, The Mantis' team pursuit team fell to Rock and Republic for the silver after one of the four riders drops off only halfway in. Good thing this is only the first day. Plenty of events left to go.

Sprints are today. Gambling a bit on the gear, riding something relatively small, so we'll see how that one goes.

DT