A biking weekend....

I am watching the tour while Craig still sleeps. I have no idea how he can sleep so late on the weekends. It baffles me! Yesterday I went and got new road tires (not the super, super thin ones, but some tires that are a lot thinner than what I currently had) for my mountain bike. I think that we are going to go and ride a pretty long ride on the bike trails today. This should help me to be a little faster with not as much work...at least that is the idea!

I also think that I forgot to mention it but a while back I bought a vintage huffy cruiser off of craigslist. The idea was that we would fix it up, repaint it and I would have a cute little cruiser that was like new :-). Yesterday while I ran errands Craig took apart the entire bike. When I came back it was just a frame on the garage floor with all the pieces around it. It looked sort of sad but I am excited to start getting it fixed up. I am hoping that with my crazy travel schedule coming up he will work on it a bit while I am gone.

For the Lance watch 2009, he is 8 seconds from the rider in the yellow jersey. His teammate Contador is 6 seconds behind. So, Lance is in 3rd. He would be in first except that Contador attacked on a climb two days ago and since they are on the same team, Lance didn't chase. The attack was stupid and Contador basically attacked his own team...a VERY big no-no in cycling and I think that it pissed Lance off. He refused to really comment on it (which is rare for him) but Levi (another American and teammate) said that Contador did if on his own without the team. That is not good for Contador. In case you aren't familiar with cycling, here is the one paragraph version of how it works.

Each team has 9 riders at the start of the race. Most teams have a leader and who you would consider the General Classification guy (meaning he is good enough to win it all). Then the other 8 guys or so are either good sprinters, good climbers, or pretty good all around but not necessarily fast enough to win. On the tour there are some stages that are flat and you want your sprinters to win, some are mountains and you want you climbers to win, and then some are just same old same old stages and a random guy will win the stage but then will suck all the other stages. So, all the team members work to get their guy at the front (sprinters to the front on flat stages, climbers and GC on mountains, etc). The good teams will ride at the front and keep the pace of the race going. If they want people to drop off they will go faster than they know the other teams can go, if they just want to rest a little they will set the pace lower. The team with the yellow jersey is supposed to set the pace by riding at the front but that doesn't happen as much in the first couple stages because teams will have good sprinters that they want to win the stage but who can't have the yellow overall so they want to be at the front. They will block everyone out at the end and then split so their sprinter can get through and win. ANYWAY, in Astana's case (Lance's team) they really have about 4 guys who are good enough to be GC guys and if they were on different teams they would be the lead of their respective teams, but because they are all on the same team, there is no really clear leader. They put Contador in the lead number (21) but it was still sort of on the table as to who it would be. Then, Lance got in a breakaway that Contador didn't and was 19 seconds up on him....looking like Lance would take over the leadership. Contador didn't like it so he attacked his team the other day and Lance didn't chase. The reason that is not cool is because the other 7 guys carried Contador all day (and Lance). By riding right behind someone you save 30% of your energy, so they do the work, you ride on their wheel. Most of those 7 guys can only lead for a stage or two and then they rest and someone else steps up. Or they will take turns during the stage in the head position but the lead guy rests a lot and rarely takes a turn at the front (though Lance likes to) so he can be at the front through all stages by saving his energy. When Contador just attacked on his own, it was like giving a big finger to the guys that are going to have to carry him in future stages if he wants to win. Since most of the guys really wanted Lance to win anyway (a lot of them have ridden with him before and were on US Postal with him) it didn't really get Contador and team points. Plus, there was no point in him doing that....he wasn't going to get yellow so all he accomplished was getting 2 second above Lance and pissing his team off.

Ok, geekiness over...really the tour will not be decided until the last week which is still two weeks away so we will have to see. Lance looks great on all the rides and doesn't seem to be hurting. I wish Contador was on a different team so I could have seen how Lance would have done on a counterattack on that mountain but I guess I will have to wait until they get into the Alps.