Today in Germany

Forecast for Sunday October 23rd-
Generally fast, with short periods of intense ass kicking.

So things went well today. I finally got a decent start position, had some legs for once, and actually managed to pilot my bike like a champ. Didn't get the win, but I felt strong enough. Sometimes being professional you can't ride when you'd like to. I didn't make it directly into the front group and since it contained some teammates, I couldn't ride in the chase group so I contented myself with riding second wheel for the first few laps. Eventually all but two riders got shelled out of the lead, leaving my teammate Rene up there with Sebastian Hannover. I was riding shotgun in a group of 8 about 15 seconds back and really feeling like I could ride across the gap - the only downside being that I was likely to drag the other 7 guys across with me. Didn't like those numbers. Eventually the chase shattered under pressure from some guy who did a nice job of towing me around for another couple laps, then he threw me the chicken-wing and I was like "Can't ride, teammate up front", him "OK, well only a bit, they're not coming back" me (looking back down the course) "well, alright". So I pulled for a lap and was really starting to feel the groove. We were running into a lot of lapped traffic at that point and a few key passes at good places on the course got me a gap over my companion and I was away. At some point I decided to drill it for a bit and in doing so blew past Hannover like he was standing still (I was as surprised as him, I think), leaving me in second. Nice. I wasn't closing the gap on Birke and I had a pretty big advantage over third so I flipped over to cruise mode for the last three laps, but lit up the afterburners on the climb every lap for a bit of interval training.

Stevens 1,2.
2nd place in a Deutschland Cup ain't bad.

Oh baby, the form is coming!
GReain