BCBR Stage 3: It's Only a Flesh Wound

Stage races may be an amazing way to sample a region's riding, and they're obviously effective at boosting one's fitness, but they're definitely NOT a good way to meet women. Like the majority of sporting events, BC Bike race is a sausage fest, so much so that all the normal annoyances that typically haunt the ladies like queues at the washroom and the shower are reversed, leaving the men frustrated and covetous of the empty stalls behind the doors labeled with a skirt.

You know you're starved for the company of the better smelling sex when the most enjoyable part of your day is getting gravel picked out of your face by the MASH nurse. Granted, the insertion of gravel into your face probably put a damper on the earlier part of the day by comparison, but we all know ho much the scrubby thing hurts...

So to begin: Shout out to Sharon for not being gentle. My future career in modeling thanks you.

On the theme of yesterday's post, if there are THREE things one learns from stage racing, the third is that in the game of flesh rock scissors, flesh never wins. The story isn't really that important, let's just say certain incidents could have been avoided with a little better attention (Don't worry mom, it got stitched up real nice).
Today's stage was 60km, 1600m of climbing (mostly on road), and tons of twisty rhythm singletrack of both the fast and the technical variety. Eric proved himself to be a true athlete, coming out stronger today than on days 1 or 2 and broke out everythnig he learned at Otis and on the road to both time trial the bejeezus out of the open flats sections and cruise the technical singletrack with a grace that left at least two teams soundly in the dust.

Stan's also came in handy in the last km, sealing a sizeable gash in Eric's rear tire (after the addition of CO2) well enough to keep us rolling to the finish without losing any places.

Overall Finish time was just a smidge over four hours for a week-best 25th on the day, bumping us to 27th(?) overall (unoffical results). Injuries clearly make us ride faster. If only the first aid didn't take 15min we would have been top 20.

I was pretty convinced up to an hour ago that we were pretty bad-@#$ dudes, with my crashing on my face doing 25 cents in km's and then making a monster team comeback, but then my ER doc offhandedly mentioned that he crashed his bike doing 200kph last week. He also puts out 104,398 watts at the track.

4:30 am wake up tomorrow, with much more racing to come.