ups and downs

sorry for not posting lately, I have been a bit busy and the whole Spanish daily schedule has thrown us a few curveballs. We are starting our races at 3:30-4:00 normally and not even getting back to our hotel until 9 at night. Needless to say, our normal schedule has been thrown way off. Where do I start? Headed out on a nice little ride on Monday up to a cool church in the mountains. It is so hard to describe how amazingly beautiful it was. This church was nestled quite precariously on a perch. And yes, that is the Mediterranean Sea in the background.
















However, on said ride none of us could imagine the heat. Coming from cold Belgium where I was wearing a sweater to amazing Spain where its 100 degrees has taken some getting used to. Having long hair has been great in the cold regions, but down here it is quite hot and well...





I am now quite cool in the crazy hot temperatures. Now on to the racing. Where to start? We are super pumped as a team and felt great coming into this race. My first stage started out as nothing special. Breakaway is up the road and being hot, we are going through a ton of bottles. So, I head back to the team car to load up on some more bottles for the guys and well shit, somehow another wreck. Somehow while stuffing bottles down the back of my jersey with both hands off the bars I either hit the car mirror with my handless bars or hit a pothole or something, but I went down so quick I had no time to even think about it. Fortunately I did not go under the car, a major plus and normally when you wreck going above 30 miles an hour there is a bit of damage normally, but I really lucked out. A sore shoulder now with limited mobility and a bit of road rash. It really should have been worse. And I even finished with the peloton after a fun chase back on with the team car.

And today, we won! Andrew Talansky, who is having the year of his life took the stage win out of the breakaway today. As an added bonus he took the leaders jersey and with 4 more stages to go we are going to work our butts off to keep him in that. Super pumped and excited to keep on helping out.