Cycling is all about making sacrifices.  Cyclists will tell you that you have to sacrifice time with friends and family, drinking, eating out, making money, etc.  There are so many sacrifices that you have to make in order to be a successful cyclist.  But I am here to tell you that they are all wrong.  It’s not about sacrificing your time or relationships, it’s about sacrificing to the race gods.  And where do the race gods live you might ask?  Well, they inhabit the depths of race porta-potties, and in order to win races, you don’t have to train hard or race smart or have natural talent, you have to sacrifice to the race gods.

Scene One: I sit down in a porta-potty before a hillclimb.  I take a poo (yes, girls poo, too).  Then I turn around to look at the poo, and notice my nice gloves bedded in a poo sandwich. Poo beneath them, poo on top of them.  I burst out of the porta-potty and tell everyone in hearing distance that I s**t on my gloves.  I win the hillclimb.

Scene Two: I’m about to start a crit at the Tour of El Paso.  I go into the porta-potty and ask Kyle to take my seatbag off my bike.  Being the great guy that he is, he complies, and then walks into the adjacent porta-potty, seatbag in hand.  Kyle trips and falls towards the porta-potty.  He releases the seatbag into the depths of the porta-potty.  I win the crit.

Scene Three:  I pre-ride the last NORBA National course at Deer Valley, UT last Friday morning.  After the pre-ride, I go back to Kyle’s car to change.  Then I put the keys in one pocket and my cell-phone in the other.  I get on my bike to spin back to the team tent.  En route, I use the porta-potty.  About thirty minutes later, I need to make a phone call and realize I can’t find my phone.  Kyle and I search the tent, the car, my bag, the ground.  We call the phone, but it is nowhere to be found.  Suddenly, I realize where it is.  I go back to the porta-potty and stare into the murky depths.  There is no phone.  I peel back some toilet paper to look for the phone.  I am desperate because I have hundreds of phone numbers on that phone that I am too lazy to have recorded anywhere else.  I NEED those phone numbers.  There is the phone, in the porta-potty, looking up at me.  The phone is removed from the porta-potty and place on the ground in the sun for two days to dry out.  Hands are washed thoroughly.  On Saturday, I get 15th place at the NORBA - my second best NORBA result ever.  Needless to say, the phone numbers were not retrived, but it’s about the race result anyways.

So this is how you become a successful cyclist.  You must make sacrifices to the race gods.  But the sacrifices have to be unintentional.  You can’t just drop stuff in the porta-potty and expect to have a good race.  The greater the sacrifice, the better the result.  Hard work, training, whatever.  You must sacrifice to the race gods.

Texas.  Yup, I went to Texas.  El Paso is extra special, because as we were driving into town on Friday night staring off into the distance, we realized we were staring right into Ciudad Juarez.  It looks totally different from the US side at night, and I-10 pretty much serves as the border.  To the left, we have the United States.  Oh look, there’s a Starbucks.  To the right, we have a Mexico border town.  Nuf said.

So I was in El Paso to do some racin’.  Saturday started out with an uphill TT at 8 am, and when the alarm rang, I really didn’t want to get out of my oh-so-comfy bed at the Hilton.  I love down bedding.  Anyways, Starbucks was callin’ my name, so I pulled myself out of bed for my daily fix.  Then to the racin’ part.  They forgot to bring the porta-jons to the morning venue, so after we registered, it was down to McDonalds for a potty stop.  I can’t begin to describe how wonderful this experience was.  By the time I started climbing up Trans Mountain, I was ready for a little action.  Did I mention I went to El Paso because the prize purse for the women was the same as the men?  Bling bling, baby.  So anyways, I got third in the TT.  The day was off to a good start.

Next, the crit.  Now, I am no fan of short track racin’ on the MTB and not much of a fan of crits on the road.  “Just give it time,” people tell me, “You’ll get better.”  Hmmmm, maybe, but will I ever like it better?  So the crit course was literally on the border.  If you forgot to make a turn, which would have been hard since there were only four of them, you would have ridden straight into Mexico.  It started out slow, then there were some attacks, shocking really, but the whole group stayed together - Cat 1 -4.  With about 25 minutes of a 30 minute plus 2 lap race done, I was getting buggered.  I’m definitely no sprinter.  So when I came around to the starting line for the two laps to go, I shouted at Hightower, “What do I do?”  Attack???  Ok!  So there I go, sitting on the front, attacking off the front, with two laps to go.  I turned around a no one was following me, so I put my head down and gave it everything.  By the time I was coming down the finishing stretch, I thought my head was going to explode, and I was weaving all over the road.  Hightower said it looked like I was searching for a draft.  I couldn’t seem to find one out there.  Anyways, I won.  Weird.

So I asked Daffodil - I raced for one hour total today - 20 min. in the TT and 40 min. in the crit - and I made $650 total, so how much did I make per hour?  Daffodil pulls out his cell phone to calculate my hourly earnings.  He soon realized his mistake.

The road race was a fiasco.  I got dropped on the first climb from blowing myself to bits in the crit.  However, I was in the chase group right behind the leaders coming off of Trans Mountain when the wheel car decides to drive around us and go with the leaders.  Let me emphasize that the leaders were IN MY SIGHT.  Close, not far.  Let me also say that I was tied for 1st in GC.  $1000.  Nuf said.  So were chasing the front group down the mountain, when a car pulls onto the road ahead of it.  We are about to pass the guy when he comes to a complete stop.  There are three of us, and we slam on our brakes.  Bikes and girls are skidding across the tarmac, and somehow we all end up in a row, and I am in the middle heading straight for the bumper of the car.  I come to a stop just as I tap the bumper of the car ever so slightly, but the girl on my left slams into my rear wheel and it breaks.  Did I already mention that the wheel car had gone with the break just up the road?  The visible break?  The catch-able break?  My race was over, and so were my chances of winning big dollars.  Oh well, I’m not in the El Paso ICU, and I did come home richer than I left, so I’m actually not too bothered…just a little.  Some really nice Mexican dudes gave me a ride back to the start around the course.  There were doing a sag vehicle for their buddy racing Cat 5 for the first time.  They had a radio for him and everything.  They kept telling him to “Go mas rapido, puto.”  I have no idea what that means…