Bakersfield Day 2

Hi all,

Here are the day 2 highlights. Susie is doing awesome!

Susie and I had a good road race this morning. We were both able to
collect some bonus points on the intermediate lap sprints, and Susie
finished 2nd. I had a great position going into the final climb, and
had a ton of momentum going into the sprint, but I got pinched off, and
don't quite have my normal sprint aggression going, so I had to sit up
and be content with 6th. Knowing we had the hillclimb in the afternoon,
no one went crazy. We protected our positions in GC and were still 1st
and 4th.

The hillclimb was just plain hard. It was the main selector of this
race. As most of you know, I'm not really a climber, especially this
year, and it showed. It was over 100 at the start of the climb, again
today (someone said yesterday's TT was 112 degrees), and so that didn't
help. Susie had a great climb, but unfortunately the girl who was 2nd
in GC after stage 2, who is 18 and wears a kit advertising Dewars (I
found that amusing), was superfast and managed to win by enough to put
Susie in 2nd in both the stage and GC. I got 7th, and am now in 6th in
GC. Did I mention I wasn't a climber this year??? Thankfully we
didn't get heatstroke (there was at least one victim of heatstroke at
the top of the climb, shivering and lying by the side of the
road--although I heard later she did recover fully), and managed to keep
pretty hydrated.

Anyway, we have tomorrow's hilly road race tomorrow...so we'll see how
that goes. I'm hoping I feel better after a night of sleep! Susie has
over 5 minutes on the girl in 3rd (did I mention how fast Susie is on
the uphill?), so we shouldn't have to do anything too heroic to protect
her GC spot, and maybe we can work on moving her back into 1st.

Ciao,
now relegated to domestique, Kimberly