yesterday was ridiculous.  i mean, woah.

 

so i did my tt heat and had a decent time.  but i was in heat 6 and there were 12 total.  still potential for me to not see the grand final.  anyway, i take it easy, get a nice pasta lunch, blog a bit, get a smoothie, then check out heat 10.  heat 10 is through, and where do i stand overall?  in 8th place.  (only 8 in the grand final)  huh.  watch heat 11 and 2 guys beat my time - this puts me in to 10th place now.  oh, well, no big deal, i guess i can just go home now - i'm not advancing, right?  but what do i do?  go eat some food, of course.  i mean, what else would i do?  so i go to this place and they have a 1/2 chicken special with mashed potatoes and rice w/ black-eyed peas mixed in.  big portions - sweet.  but then i do something i haven't done in years.  i'm 2/3 of the way through, and i decide to box it up to go.  the final tt heat was going to start, and i thought it would be nice to see how it shakes out and see where my final finish spot is.  ok, so that heat goes by and no one beats my time, so i'm 10th overall.  i get up to leave, but then the promoter pulls up an excel spreadsheet with all of the results, and sorts by time.  yep, there i am in 10th.  and then he sorts by winners of heats.  oh, now i'm in 7th...  yeah, in fact it was the top 8 *winning* times that advanced.  the 2 guys that were just a tiny bit faster than me were both 2nd in their heats, so they didn't advance...  holy shaka-laka, i guess i better start warming up...

 

so i get my warmup on, and i'm feeling ok, but not so special.  yeah, this is going to hurt.  roll down to the stage, and there's a whole big production going on.  final was touted at 8:30, but no one's ready to go.  i ask the promoter, and he's like, yeah, it's going to be a little different this time.  we're going to put your bikes up on the stage in advance, and then these number girls (with 1-8 placards) are going to escort you onto the stage.  if it gets here in time, we'll have a smoke machine too!  me - oh man, that's ridiculous...  i love it!  promoter - right on!

so it's like 20 minutes later and the smoke machine never showed up, but the girls were all ready to go, wearing mini-skirts and tanktops.  the escorts go, we mount the bikes, and we get going around 9:15 or so.  so much for the warm-up.  i proceed to suck, but not too badly.  there's like 3 of us battling to not be last spot.  i take last, but that's still worth payout, so there's nothing to worry about.  my time was 8:08 with around 378 watts or so and the winning spot was like 7:30 with 461 - pretty impressive by any standards...  so i was tired and that's that.

 

part 2 to ensue later - need to get on the road here...