After a crappy Battenkill and two lackluster Smackdowns I’ll take 55:58 on the climbing circuit. (This is the new one, not the old one with Wilbur Hill.) That’s about 30 seconds faster than my fastest time on the course last year (I think I’ve only done it about 4-5 times). And it’s a full 3:00 minutes faster than the time I did it earlier this year. So, I’m not noticeably slower than last year or anything like that.

Hopefully next week will go better on the Smack Down. Three weeks ago I rode with Brown riders Eddy and Peng, and Kirk from our team. Kirk has been riding less than me and got dropped, while I was only barely hanging on to Eddy, who was doing most of the work. The next week I skipped because of crappy weather. This week I hadn’t ridden for 8 days going into the smack down so I knew it wouldn’t be pretty. I felt good on Greenville Ave and put it what felt like a hard pull, but I’m not sure how hard it was for anyone else. Going up Austin, I was third wheel behind Curtis S and Nate. Curtis pulled off about 3/4 up, and then Nate took over pace making. Since we moved the sprint point up a bit, I jumped just before the turn, but Paul Curtis and a couple Brown riders all came up past me and that was that. Going into the next sprint I was drifting off the back, which is not a good place to be, and as a result I never caught back on until the regroup point in Chepatchet. And then I couldn’t hold anyone’s wheel going up Tourtellot, so it was a bad day all around.