Some Pictures for Y'all

How Y'all doing folks? That's what we've been asked a few times down here in The South. Finally I have found some time in my busy schedule to post some photos so you can see the team gear, bikes, and whatever else...

Here is my classy steed, complete with new race wheels, ridden for the first time today. I can tell that these wheels and this bike are going to carry me to a few wins this year... or at least I am hoping! It looks pretty flash, even if the pilot doesn't!
Someone who does look the goods is Brent 'Brentmeister General' Bookwalter, our youngest rider, who is going to be a superstar. He has made himself the perfect model to show you how our outfit looks. I couldn't get a picture of me in action in the new gear, so Brent is the next best thing. The green and black looks wicked good together, and you can also see our cool Bell helmets and Axley sunnies.

We have DMT shoes, the Flash model, and they are made out of this cool shiny material that seems to be clean all the time, and if they do get dirty, its just a simple wipe down with a rag and they look as good as new again, which is handy considering we have white shoes!

We are lucky to be using the bees knees of everything when it comes to equipment, and full credit goes to our management for organising that! It does make riding a pleasure when you know there is not much room for improvement in the stuff you are using.

This is a photo of all our team bikes ready for us to ride into the team presentation. I did my best to line them up neat for their photo shoot, and they did their best to stay still. Everyone had new white bar tape, and Benno the Bear did a great job cleaning them all the night before to have them looking great. There is a few dollars worth of Ridleys sitting there!

There was another event inside our team presentation, and that was the 'sideburn battle' being waged by team mate Teddy King and myself. As you can see, I am the clear winner, as i have greater thickness in mine, although Teddy has more area. We had different ideas of whether the contest was about thickness or area, so the judges called it a tie. Teddy has persisted with his, however I removed mine later that day after the comparison was made. I thought it best not to keep them once we got to warmer weather so as to avoid the silly tan lines they would leave.

Currently we are staying in Georgia, about 500 meters from the Tennessee border, atop Lookout Mountain, which is hard climbing to the finish of our training rides! We are staying with Eddy 'The Body' Hilger, who as mentioned in a previous post has lived up to his nickname, and he has a great house, and wife Carlee, and the two cutest kids going around. Jackson is three, and Kenzie is 18 months, and they are so much fun. Jackson is running around saying "G'day mate" in his Southern, three-year-old accent, and Kenzie is tiny and has this fluffy hair that stands up. Eddy sure is lucky to have them, they are so cute. The main reason for including these photos is so mum can see what she is missing out on! (Mum if you click on the photos they should enlarge)

So anyway dudes, I hope this gives you a bit of reading and viewing pleasure, and I will try and keep the photos coming each week. We are finally going to race again this coming weekend, and everyone is raring to go after such a long lay-off. Some of the team are starting a tour on Tuesday, while the crit dudes, which I am part of, start on Saturday. We will have some tough competition with a number of teams coming off the Tour of Georgia who will be strong, although we will be hoping they are tired!

Also, a couple of other team mates have started blogs of their own, so feel free to check out their sites too, as you may get to see some photos that I don't have. They will also be an interesting read - just click on the links to the right. If there is anything anyone wants me to write about, please leave comments so I can address that issue!

Stay cool y'all, and keep making comments in the comments section... I like reading them.

Team Presentation, then off to Georgia

Hey dudes, sorry i haven't posted an update for a while, have not had access to the net, and wanted to have some cool photos to post for you to look at.
After the initial cold snap in Michigan, things started to warm up to somewhat bearable temperatures, and i was able to start working on a much needed tan, before it got cold again two days later. I was able to take some good form to our team presentation which was good, as we got to ride about 500m while people watched! The presentation went really well, and it was a chance for Priority Health to show us off a bit. You can check out our team website which has now been launched at www.teampriorityhealth.com so you can see team stuff and read about all of our riders.
We have been able to get some decent rides in with the local guys, and in the above photo you can see the biggest bunch ride we have had from Bob's house. We do around four hours as a group and Bob is our sprinter, after beating me in our mini sprint series, so i have my work cut out keeping him out of the wind and pushing him up the hills to ensure he is in prime condition leading up to the sprints.
We have had an absolute ball staying at Bob's and i don't think we have stopped laughing until i had to leave and head to Georgia. Bob and Heather are so much fun, and have been great entertainers and hosts. I am already looking forward to getting back to Grand Rapids, and hopefully there will be a few more leaves on trees, and warmer weather next time. One of the other things that is hopefully going to be in better condition is the road surface. You can see here in the photo that we have a number of pot holes to contend with while out training. The roads can be quite vicious, and Thor Zirbel found out the hard way by suffering a puncture, and in the process dinged his rim.
Back to the team presentation. After the event, we had a group ride from Bob's (as you may have gathered, its our only meeting place) and I was talented enough to have a tumble in his driveway and tear myself up pretty good! After the ride we had a party at Bob's palace, and got a heap of team issue stuff, like polo shirts, t-shirts, fleeces, hoodies, and cap. The best thing though was trader cards with our photo and profile on them, and boy have they been a hit since. I think i have given out somewhere around 50 so far, and most of them have been signed, incuding my phone number on the back! We went out for dinner on Saturday night, and big Thor Zirbel wanted to see if he could catch a photo of myself handing out a trader card to any chicks. He was sure i wouldn't be able to pull it off, but i proved him wrong, and the accent, along with my personal "business cards" made it all too easy to win the bet with him! I was laughing so hard all night, and the girls started getting aggressive when the cards ran out...

After the weekend was over and Easter lunch was finally digesting, it was time for us to head down to Eddy "the body's" place on the Georgia-Tennesse border, so after an 11 hour drive we arrived in the warm weather and up in the hills - the first we have seen in a while. And Eddy lived up to his nick-name, he looks like he has been carved out of stone at the moment, and seems to have pretty good form.

It is good to be down here in the warm weather training hard, and hopefully the form will be good come the crit series in a week or so. I have some sharpening up to do, and will be looking good after the fortnight in the sun! The team will be looking to get some good results in the crit series after unfortunately missing out on a start in Tour of Georgia, so will be out to impress, and on a personal level i would love to be able to win one of the crits, and hopefully get up on the podium more than once. I am starting to feel strong, and once we get to Athens Twilight, it will have been more than a month of not racing, so i will be jumping out of my skin and raring to go. It has been frustrating not racing, but i have been slamming the K's in, and it has been making me hungry for success.

Here is a photo of our first training ride in Georgia, I included it because it looks cool, and shows the nice roads we are training on for the next week or so. It was a pretty talented shot by Thor while riding along, and i know the friends reading this back in Australia like looking at photos.

Hopefully this satisfies the Brentmeister as he has asked me to hurry up and post a new update, and I thank all of the people who have posted comments, as they are motivating to read, and it is nice to know that there are people who do read this! So feel free to do that.

That's all for tonight, i have an early start tomorrow, sort of, but i plan on posting another update in the next two days because i have more photos i would like to publish, and i want to show you the team bike too, for those who haven'e yet seen it, so happy reading folks, and check out the next update in a few days.

Stay cool dudes...

Chill(ing) in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Hey dudes, there has been very little action here in the last week or so since I arrived, other than a lot of training, and cold weather. It has been great staying with Bob, the man behind Advantage Benefits - one of our team sponsors. We are staying in a great house, a bit out of town, and it is really peaceful and country-like here.

After recovering from our epic series of flights across the country (where you can see Rich and I made ourselves comfortable at the airport with the lap top set up as a movie theatre), we set out to find all of the good roads in the area to go training on. We are currently having a break from racing after the California leg of the NRC, and soon head off to Georgia to stay at teammate Eddy (the Body)'s house, where we will have a training camp and get ready for the criterium series that follows Tour of Georgia. Somehow our team missed a start in Georgia which is frustrating, but we will be out to prove we were worthy of a start through the rest of the season.

This is a photo of Rich and I at the top of one of the bigger hills in the area. As you may be able to see, it is an epic ordeal just to reach the top, and provides us with heaps of different options for our descent! This picture also depicts the great variety of scenery Michigan has to offer in the early Spring - basically dead trees, fresh off the snow season. Before arriving here, i was told the area was dead flat, but its far from it - you are always riding up or down, just like in the picture below, and all of the hills are 200-500m long, although i should say 600-1500ft!

When we went to the mall the other day on a particularly cold and wet day, as we got out of the car, we had to run to the mall entry to escape the snow fall - talk about cold! Its good too though, as that is one thing we dont get to experience too much in Australia!

After a lot of searching we have come up with a few circuits that cover all of the hardest roads in the area, and we will do laps of that during the week. Weekend rides start from Bob's house, and all of the members of his club team head out for a bunch ride. It is good to go training with a group to break things up, but we have to deal with constant attacks from the bunch with everyone trying to race us! One of the other potential hazards I have encountered while training is the 'deer stampede'. As Bob's house is out of town, there are plenty of wild animals about (including Bob), and three times this week I have had a heap of deer run out across the road in front of me, the first time there were at least ten, and the next two times about six or so - this only happens within a kilometre of getting home. In this picture, you may be able to make out the deer on the road between the two trees, they seem to like Bob's backyard, but are a bit camera shy, so i haven't been able to get up close yet.

Coming up now I will put in another solid week of training, and we will have our Priority Health media event on Thursday, so that should be good having an 'official' team launch, then we have Easter weekend, and then head off to Georgia to begin another couple of months on the road racing all over the place. I'm looking forward to leaving the winter gear at home and training in the sun down at 'The Body's' place. It will also be good to be back together as a team again and to have a bit of fun with all the boys.

Next entry should have some photos of the team presentation, our bikes, and the team kit we race in. -Laters