Seattle

This past weekend, I went with the Montana State Cycling team to race a circuit race and TTT at WWU and a criterium at UW. The weekend started out nice enough, with nice weather upon departure, and figuring out how many bikes I can get in my truck. You can see from the picture that we got five bikes in the bed and four on the hitch rack. The value of the bikes was about three times the value of my car.

Other than a lot of wind, the first part of the drive was pretty uneventful. Then two miles from the Idaho border, on top of Lookout Pass, my tire blew out. The picture says it all with this one. Well, not all of it. When we got the jack and spare tire out, we realized that the spare was riddled with holes and cracks because of serious dry rot. Oh, and the jack was too short, and the tire iron is too big. Luckily, the flat occurred right in front of a rest stop, because none of us had service. So we used the payphone to call for a tow truck, which took us to the nearest city with a tire service place, which was 40 minutes away. In the end, we made it to Seattle with only about a 2.5 hour delay.


The race on Saturday was a 6 lap, 50 mile circuit race. I got dropped halfway through, so I did a sweet solo break off the back for the last half of the race. I ended up pulling my calf during the race, so when I tried to race the TTT later that day, I made it about a mile before getting dropped by the team. I ended up not racing Sunday because my calf was hurting so bad.

But the weekend wasn't over yet. On the way back, down the mountain passes, my truck started making a weird noise whenever I was coasting. So that worried me all the way back to Bozeman. But we did make it.

Now its snowing for the rest of this week.