randoms al dente

i've got 11 minutes
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Right Zell ... wrong day

PROMAN's Zell nailed that Wente Crit this weekend. She gave me shit before the start of it for picking her as a likely candidate as an upstart in the road race. She said she had good legs on Saturday, but was "asleep on the bike" when Touchstone's McLaughlin launched away from the universe to win the road race in style.

But on Sunday, the PROMAN outfit proved they are the NorCal's best criterium team. They controlled the field from the start and pushed all the right buttons to set up a 1, 3, 5, 6 heist of the Wente prize faults.
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Carnage

The Wente crit is NOT an unsafe course ... it's just one of those loops that lends itself to crashes. The worst i saw was in the Men's 45+. This was a fantastic race ... aggressive, extremely fast, with a kick-ass field sprint ending the game.

Unfortunately, there was a bunch up with 300m to go and a couple of errors were made ... sending 15-20 riders down instantly. It was one of those violent crashes that do the most damage to bodies and machines. There were some irked boys picking themselves up off the tarmac on that day.

I was soooo impressed with the sprint from the survivors, though. Disco's Metcalf (who did 3 crits that day ... shyte) lead it out for about 42 laps for his teammate Legend Lar Nolan. StanleyMorgan's Steve Gregarious was forced to jump first, however and began the sprint at about 220m. VOS (and sexy BellaBoy) Steve Gile(less) was sitting 3rd wheel and followed the initial acceleration.

As we all know, that gawdamn Wente sprint is about 5 thousand times longer than it looks when you factor in the face-punching headwind that slaps you with every pedalstroke taken. When Gregarios started the sprint, you could almost read his thought process that it was just that couple of heartbeats too early and he was giving his rivals, Gile(smoothy) and Nolan room to breath.

And ... if he wanted to - he could have shut the door on both of them by moving left into the gutter, effectively sealing them out of the sprint. But, it would have been irregular sprinting and he didn't. So, all three of them ... class acts ... drag raced that shit to the line.

what a finish.
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Blogroller is crap ... but, the self-ping is working again. Maybe someday the automated ping will roll online, but i'm not holding my breath. i've shot through a few of the blogs and pinged them as newly posted. Here's the form if you see a blog that has an update (title doesn't have to be accurate, just a letter will do ... but the url needs to be). help a brother out, yo.
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... as soon as i get more minutes ~ it's trash talk central around here, babay!