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I missed Fabian’s ride that day, had an appointment or soccer game or something…video has last few min, in belgian, even seeing tha last 10 min or so you get a sense for how dominant a day it was for Switzerland. FC’s rhythm and body control are locked in while the other riders clearly falter at times and are hunting through their internal transmissions to find the right tempo, fighting with their bikes the whole way. I sort of half love that FC sat up for the last 50 yards or so, he must have been pretty confident in his splits (ok…and passing his 2 min man would have been a good indication)…but at the same time, it is his race, on his turf and the joy of putting in such a focused, perfect effort in front of his peeps must have been pretty amazing.

Deep into fall, here along the coast…the leaves have not fallen off of most of our tress and some are only just starting to change. The street we live on is lined with rows of huge Maples which are just now turning yellow.

Last night a front wandered through, a classic October storm bringing monsoon like rains followed by a still brilliant blue sky that is so intense a blue that the leaves and branches pop-off the blue ground.

Also in my head a sort of interesting article about Jackson Pollock’s mural for Peggy Guggenhiem claiming that there is a substructure to the work made out of Pollock’s signature…interesting? Yes, I guess…crucial, probably not…it is still an amazing painting. What if Pollock had used the tree branches in this image as the underlying framework….would we complain?

The calendar says it is October but there might as well be feet of snow outside, it is too cold to ride without major clothing intervention and that is just too moist by the end of the day so. The good thing about winter is that it is already time to start to plot next year’s racing schedule and start to visualize success. I have been running through the kanc course in my head and on my ipod….yes, I have a video of the course. I really, really want to kick the kanc next year.  Hit me, hurt me. call me Irene, make me write bad checks…oh yes.. take no prisoners and leave no tip.

I think a tee-shirt may have to happen….

In the mean time I saw Race Across the Sky the other day…great race, great movie…can’t say that I would not LOVE to do it for all the reasons made clear in the movie. The accomplishment, check, the format…cool..out and back, everybody gets to have a relationship, even if fleeting…with everyone else. On the other hand I live at about, maybe, 20 feet above sea level…I don’t think anything about that prepares me to ride at 10,000 feet…where the race starts…and goes up….so…in the mean time. Thinking of Lance on the Columbine Mine summit…the image of him riding alone along the ridge line is such a perfect image of hyper focused, relentless power, what it means to feed the rat…unstoppable, inexorable …a force of nature.

Wow…we had a huge squall come through in the late afternoon, I came out of the Dr.’s office as the front moved up the coast…and I followed the clearing line of clouds home. This is what October is all about…pretty amazing.

I Love the shape of the sand spit in the steel blue water….the shadows are the bridge behind me