Twitter

I just made a twitter this morning, so feel free to follow me on that. We just got done with the first day of the Nature Vally Grand Prix, and it lasts til Sunday so I'll probably just wait til then to do a little recap/race report. I will be keeping up with the days events on twitter cause that's much quicker. Its www.twitter.com/joeyrosskopf

Tour of High Bridge.....again

Because the 100 degree heat and painfully steep hill that we experienced last year at this race wasn't enough to scare us away, we returned to New Jersey to do the Tour of High Bridge just as we had done one year ago. It wasn't quite so hot this time but the hill was just as hellish as I remember. The 3 mile circuit features a 2 step hill, the first of which has got to be over 20% and 2 or 3 hundred meters long. After that, the road winds down a driveway width alley that is so torn up and patched that a dirt road would be much smoother. I felt great poundin it out over the torn up road, but I think that kind of hill ain't really my thang.

I got in a break again after 2 or 3 laps and eventually, with 2 to go I couldn't follow an attack on the steep section. Two guys got away from us and the rest of us didn't have much left in the tank to chase. When it became clear that trying to work with the rest of the guys in the break wasn't gaining us any ground on the lead 2, I attacked the little group, taking one tag-along who had been saying he was way too dead to ever pull through....if you can follow an attack, you can rotate through a dang paceline..... After a bit of yelling I got him to pull through once or twice but we never caught up. I beat him in the sprint for third place.

I'm a wiener! (Race Ave)

Opting out of the time trial that Oscar and I were supposed to do Saturday morning, the four of us instead went to Lancaster to do a crit called Race Avenue. For a local race, I was actually impressed with some of the guys that showed up. Not wasting much time, I found myself following a couple wheels and off the front after maybe 15 min of racing. It was sorta exciting when I realized that I was off the front with Chad Gerlach, among 3 others (5 of us total). Four of us worked pretty well together til Gerlack attacked with 2 to go. We looked at each other until I jumped to bridge the gap. We regrouped with about half a lap to go and then I won the sprint, waiting a while before I came around (it was a really long sprint and I think everyone went a bit early). It felt really good to get a win under my belt before heading to Nature Valley this week where I'm in for some killer suffering.

After a good lead out effort by Oscar and Anthony, Thomas took third in the field sprint for 8th in the race. With a Wawa stop on the way home, it was a great day.

Back at "home"

I feel as if I never left this little town. I'm back in Kutztown, Pennsylvania in the house on Whiteoak St just as I was last summer. This is where we'll be based out of for the remainder of the summer.

The house had nothing when we showed up but since then we furnished it real nice with a couch from an alley nearby, and silverwear, a pot, and bowls from dollar general. We still dont have a table but we're working on that. No internet either so I'm at a coffee shop right now and this lady is trying to set up for a drum circle so i gotta get out the way!

Tulsa was tough

Tulsa came and went with no real surprises. The races had big money, lots of teams, and were hard. No one really did better than expected, or worse, for that matter. I placed 25th, 18th, and 29th in the three crits, in that order. I was pretty disappointed with how I finished and wanted to do a little better, but I guess that's part of bike racing; you get beat by people that are faster than you. For whatever reason, I just felt sketchy and not confident in the first two days and then in the third race when I was actually feeling pretty good each time we crested the steep hill, I just lost my legs (and my position went with it) in the last couple laps.

The third race (Sunday) does deserve a little talking about, however, because it was quite a spectacle. It was a river-front course that looped a block inland into a neighborhood every lap. Turning off of the riverfront immediately took riders up a short, steep hill that lead to another right turn. The steep grade of the hill continued through the corner and onto the backside of the course for another block or so. It was a real leg buster, but what made the hill bearable was the incredible fans lining the street on that hill. It was an absolute scorcher of a day (like 92 degrees or something) and despite the fact that the race started at 3 pm (a little early to be drinking, in my opinion) there was a full fledged party going on on this hill on the backside of the course. Someone had a band in their front yard, many were stripped down to just bathing suits in an effort to stay cool, there was beer everywhere, and the majority of the crowd was standing in the street cheering their brains out, only leaving a gap that might have been just wide enough for a small car to squeeze through very cautiously. Every fan was also armed with water. Whether it was plastic bottle feeds for us to dump over our heads, garden hoses, or squirt guns, it seemed like everyone had some form of water. Once I got over the initial shock of being nailed in the face by one stream of water or another every lap, I started to look forward to the cooling sensation it provided. Basically, it felt like we were reenacting a very short segment of a grand tour climb over and over again in the midst of this criterium. The fact that once and a while I would glance over and see Floyd Landis riding next to me even seemed furthered the reality of my imaginary Tour experience.