A positive I can start off with… Last week I raced at the Tour of the Battenkill in upstate NY and came away really happy with my ride. I did this race two years ago and remember barely clinging onto the back of the front group for the last two hours of the race, fighting with every ounce of energy I had to finish 27th place. This year was different. I started every dirt section and hill safely tucked in the front of the bunch, made the original break of 15 riders, survived the whittling down of the lead group, and sprinted to 4th place after the 3 leaders rode clear of us on the final climb. It gave me a lot of encouragement to see how my form was coming along and made me really excited to get to some more races underway.
Now, a week later I find myself in Analya, Turkey about to start the Presidential Cycling Tour (Tour of Turkey). Theoretically my form should still be ok, but with all the change of scenery and lack of sleep in the last few days, Battenkill feels like it was a month ago. Not to mention the travel delays and being hit by a car since then.
Travel nightmares first… I thought we had a pretty sweet setup flying straight from Chicago to Istanbul, but it was the connection to Antalya that through wrench in my plans for a relatively easy travel. Turns out we had a 5hr layover, in Istanbul. Layovers seem kinda cool at first, gives you some time to look around and get some food, but pretty soon it gets as boring as a flight, except worse cause no forward progress is being made. When we have long ones like that I’m always consumed by the feeling/fear that I am completely wasting precious moments of my life. So we get on the plane, sit on the ground for at least an hour as I drift in and out of sleep, take off, and land in Antalya at 10:30pm. Thankfully our travel is almost over. Wrong. It becomes apparent that there’s no one from the race there to pick us up, so swanny Ronnie starts making some calls to the promoters and gets a shuttle set up. It takes an hour for them to show up and we board the bus with hopes of soon crawling into our hotel beds. We don’t even leave the parking lot for another hour and a half because the driver wants to wait until more flights come in so he can fill up his bus. At 1:15am we finally roll out. No one had any idea where the hotel was. Over two lovely hours later, we’re absolutely hysterical by the time we arrive at the Grand Kaptan Hotel. I shower and collapse into bed at 4am, 31hrs after I left my house in Athens, GA. For a place that’s practically in Europe, that travel was way to long.
Oh yeah and Kiel’s bag was lost for three days, he received it the morning of the first stage. In the mean time I lent him a shirt, underwear, and kit. After talking to other teams, we found out that our team as a whole was one of the least affected by this little luggage crisis. Misplacing so many bags looks kinda bad for this airline which is also a big sponsor of the race.
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First thing I’ve noticed on while riding here: The roads are rough. They’re made of some sort of chip seal that’s not quite as smooth as ours. This week will require a lot of chamois cream, lower tire pressure, and double wrapped bars wouldn’t be a bad idea (I don’t think I’ll go to that extreme, but if I had to train on this stuff, it’d be a necessity). The plus side to this is that on our first ride when my bowels were still all locked up from traveling, the road vibrations reverberated the poo right outta me! I walked straight to the bathroom upon returning from this ride.
Second thing I’ve noticed, watch for cars, they have a little Chinese flavor to their driving (tho they mostly obey traffic lights here). Kiel and I were just on our way back from a ride that took us up this awesome cobbled climb that lead up to some castle ruins on a cliff by the sea. We were riding through town, minding our own when all of a sudden I feel metal on my left side, and we’re violently pushed right. I’m not sure if this car’s driver had it out for us or if he sincerely didn’t notice us, but there was no chance of evading this one. I think he began his right turn when I was about equal with his passenger side window and kinda accelerated into it. Before I knew it, I was completely leaned on the car, sliding towards the rear, being forced right. Kiel was leaning on me, and I think our bikes ended up tangled, holding each other up until the car finally finished the turn and stopped. To my surprise, the driver was raving mad that we hit his car. What a moron. My only consolation was that I think I broke the side of his taillight with my knee cause I noticed it had some good cracks in it, and my knee got cut by something. Glad we both escaped with no serious injuries.
