Today we climbed up to the Tibetan Plateau where the actual Qinghai Lake is located at an altitude of 10,500ft. In fact, our hotel is nearly on the bank. Fun facts: it is the largest lake in China; it is salt water; there have been bird flu outbreaks here.
The whole climbing without descending afterwards made the race pretty rough. Once we were on the plateau for the last 50km, we were also blessed with a couple frigid rain showers. So how'd the race play out? We started gently uphill from the gun fir the firs 80km until the KOM climb began for another 5km to finally get us up to the lake. I was in a break from about 30min to 1.5hr into the race before being caught, during with time I picked up a 2sec time bonus at an intermediate sprint. Then I suffered my butt off on the KOM climb while Kiel attempted to singlehandedly follow every acceleration made by the Columbians and Iranians, a job too big for any one man. Over the climb the group was completely splintered, but I managed to chase back on to join Kiel's group (as did a handful of others) until it was about 40 strong. By the time I regained contact there were fourteen guys off the front, with a lead approaching 1.5min. Julien and I got to work in the windy conditions, along with a few others, to finally bring the gap down to 45sec with 20km to go. There were many teams in our group with more representation than our mere 3 guys, including the yellow jersey, so we backed off (plus, we were tired) , expecting there to be plenty of other people interested in giving chase. There kind of were, but between the altitude and their disorganized methods of chasing the gap went back out to 1.5min by the finish. Not what we wanted. That puts us in a pretty poor position on GC. It's going to be hard to even crack the top ten with 14 guys already having that kind of time advantage.
Between that early break, the climb, and then chasing, I felt pretty worked upon crossing the finish line. When I made it to my hotel room afterwards, it was all I could do to shower, put on my warmest clothes, climb in bed, and stare at the ceiling, breathing and feeling my heart beat. At one point I grabbed my Preston & Child book thinking I was going to read. All that happened was that I laid back down with the book in my hand, and continued to stare at the ceiling.
Whatever city we're in is actually pretty cool. It's really small which I find much more appealing than the Chinas big, dirty cities. I ventured out to a marketplace after dinner where many vendors were selling animal furs. By the looks of it they had skinned any animal they could get their hands on; yaks, cats, foxes, dogs, and other unidentifiables. The dog ones make me kinda sad. This one in particular looked like he was probably really cute:
That's all I've got. More climbing tomorrow! I can't imagine that my legs will feel good tomorrow, but I've still gotta try to get the job done.
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