Racing in Italy... ClusterF&^%$!

WOW! Italy is great. I absolutely love it here- but I have always heard that racing here is a bit, uh, well, Italian. Chaos. Organized? Well, lets just call it chaos and leave it at that. The race starts at 3? That means that it can start at 3, 3:30, 4:00, 7, or 2. Today, I got to witness, firsthand, the cluster that is bike racing in Italy.

The Giro Toscana started today with a 5.5k team time trial along the beach. Our team is a very strong one, stacked with riders who will be racing Worlds at the end of the month and we are using it as a prep. But, despite having a really strong team, our focus on this race is as prep for Worlds and so we are not racing for the GC. We have Amber Neben, Ali Powers, Chrissy Ruiter (my partner in my “Grand Tour” here- she is the only other person doing Holland, Ardeche & Toscana), Mara Abbott, Lauren Franges and myself. Kristin and Katheryn are here, but not racing.

While we were back at our gorgeous Toscan Villa (i.e. the Team House where Joe Millionaire could be filmed), we were sipping on our Italian coffees and having a nice relaxing morning as Jim set off to pick up our race numbers and get things set for the afternoon. As we relaxed and leisurely chatted away the day, Jim was starting Stage 0: trying to get the race numbers. Although he had checked online the night before and there was no mention of the location of the managers meeting/race number pickup changing- it is Italy. So, after years of having it in one hotel, curve-ball number 1 had the meeting in another hotel. Long story short: chaos. He finally gets to the right place... only to find out that instead of allowing 8-10 riders to register (as they have in the past and as they had said online), they decided to change it to 6 riders. Hence, Katheryn not racing. OK, so now that he finally had the numbers and all was good to go, he headed back to the house to meet up with us.

We were to leave and ride about an hour to the race. Leave at 2:30. OOPS... 2:15 and we get notice from Jim that time table had changed and we needed to leave at 2:15. We got the message late and hurried to get there: riding hard at times to make up some ground.

We arrive and are told that the first riders are off at 4pm and that we are going off at 4:30 (or something like that). We went promptly to sign-in/team presentation and waved to our adoring fans (it is funny to wave to no one on those presentation days when no one is there but a photographer and some passing strangers who don’t look up- that was our sign in today). We had scarcely stepped off the presentation stage when we were informed that our start time was now at 3:50 and it was 3:35! THIS is racing in Italy. OOPS! No warm-up. No numbers pinned. No game plan (uh, lets just go as hard as we can). No food. We had to laugh about it since we were not too concerned about our times, but still!

We frantically chamoised up into our skin suits and pinned our numbers as quickly as we could. We mounted our bikes with no TT equipment of any sort and rolled past the teams on rollers, displaying their TT bikes, wheels and helmets. We got to the start gate, not even sure who would pull where or what order- really or anything at all. We did not know that the course had three turns until Jim told us. No one knew anything- this is racing in Italy.

We took it all in stride and knew that it would most likely not be our prettiest time trial. There was a horrendous wind coming from the side and the race was out along the ocean, turn around 180, come back, turn around 180- go out again and then come back for the finish.

Another long story short: we were pure clusterfuck! Lauren started with me on her wheel, but we had gapped the rest of the riders by several bike lengths. We can’t hear over the wind so we don’t slow quickly enough. That was basically it- we would try and get it together, but it was chaos! It felt good to go hard and open up the legs- but it was not exactly an image of a well-oiled machine! I took my last pull and then dropped back from the group in the last 1k and rode in with Ali. As much as it was total chaos- it really was almost amusing.

We still don’t know what the results are... they were still racing long into the night (AFTER the wind died down, by the way!), but we do know that T-Mobile only beat us by 30seconds or so and they had their full TT rigs. I know that it would have made a huge difference... not to mention, they had done it before. Us... well, it was our first time.

Tomorrow, we have a double day. A 57k race in the morning and then a second 66k race in the evening. Why they couldn’t just combine the two and do a 123k day, I do not know. But it should be fun. Today was an opener. Tomorrow... we race. We will race.