Hollywood

Hey all,

So last update was catching you up with what has gone on for a long while.

Now I am in Spain doing 2 stages races, the first one; Vuelta Zamora went well. Had a solid opening prologue to get 4th, the 4th again on day 2, the finish wasn't exactly what we all thought but that is how the dice rolls. The next 2 days of the race were a day for the boys that go up hill. I felt good on the first climbing day and was more or less with the front group. Our rocket climber had a mishap on the first big down hill and got some road rash, I road with a group of 8 just behind the lead group to wait for him to come from dead last on the road to my group at the top if the second climb. He had some awesome help from Austin and Cole to get him to the bottom of the 2nd climb and he flew up that to catch myself and Travis at the top. Once he was on I put the wood down to close a huge gap to the front group, a full team was on the front drilling it to make it as hard as possible. But they couldn't stop us! haha. Once we got there we had 5 guys, Me, Chris, Travis, Larry and Carson. My job was now to look after those guys and get them whatever they needed to stay fresh. I got popped on the next climb and road in with the middle group some 10min later. The next climbing day was rough, a windy ride into the bottom of the first Cat 1 climb, and then two Cat 2's to finish off the day. Road in with the groupetto to save as much as I could for the last day. The last day on paper looked to be all down hill, but we were fooled. A ton of rollers popped up and made the day harder than expected, but the boys road another great day and I got 2nd only because the finish was 100m sooner than the info we were told. USA had a great race overall, never outside the top 10 on the stages and Butler got the best young rider jersey, and 6th on GC. With everything that happened in Zamora I was fired up to do well in Palencia.

We had 3 days in between races to relax and see Zamora a little bit. Austin and I went on some cool easy rides to check out the city and got to see some cool views from the top of some big rollers.

Day 1 of Palencia went super. The team road great to make every big split in the cross winds to have 2 or more guys in it and then in the end killed it to bring back the break. On a long windy freeway climb another team put the hammer down towards the top and one of the teammates let open a gap to let his 4 teammates TTT away, since the team kept me fresh all day it was time for me to do my job. It was all instinct to jump across, but half I freaked a little and said to myself "WTF, your crazy! your trying to catch 4 guys doing an all out TTT!" "NO!! you have to make it, your team didn't do all that work for you to be a pussy" and like Jim Miller told me, "See stars! and you can rest when you get there". Once I was on the wheel it was pretty much a free ride, with one more small Cat3 all I had to do was play it smart. Over the top it went from 4 on 1, to 1 on 1, back to 2 on 1 for the last 5k. The 3 of us worked well for the first couple K and then one guy started to sit on, I wasn't keen on that so I opened the gap and then jumped him so he had to work. Now with both of them working to have to catch me inside 3k I road 80% into the block head wind. With 2k to go you could see the field right behind us and the left hand turn with 1k to go right up the road. I got us to the left hand turn and knew as soon as we got the cross tail one of the guys was going to jump me, luckily the weaker one jumped and didn't get so far. I took a sec to recover and take a deep breath, with 500 or so I hit out super hard and gapped his teammate and passed him at +or- 100m. I had plenty of time to enjoy the W, and point at USA across the line.

At the end of the day I took home 4 jerseys and Big Check. Yellow, Special Sprint, Combo Jersey, and Finish line points Jersey. I will do all I can to hang on to the Yellow the next couple days in the Hills, I know I can climb with the front 20 here; all I have to do is ride smart and most of all SUFFER!

I will try and do some video stuff as it is a bit quicker for me and maybe a little more funny. I think it gives some different insight on myself and the team. Hope you all will enjoy it. Now on to day 2.