Christopher Jones: Jonez World

They say that there is no such thing as bad press, but after being reported in the live coverage as flatting and crashing yesterday I would disagree. I will stand by my flat and accept that it happened. The credit for the crash however, should be given to my pint sized Type 1 diabetic teammate Fabio. Poor guy was unlucky and in position right behind a rider who’s feed bag went into his front wheel. The guy crashed, took Fabio down, and stabbed him in the leg with his shifter.
Other than that, the tour has been going well.

TT1 sent two riders and a mechanic, (vaLarry, me, and Doug) down to preview stages 5&6 of next week’s Tour of Georgia. We rode stage 5, the tour’s longest, today after summiting Brasstown yesterday. Both stages would be tough on their own, but stacked back to back they are going to hurt. Yes Brasstown is as steep as the rumors you hear and stories you read say it is. The cat. 1 prior to ascending B-town will start the fun, the cat 2 will keep the lactate flowing, and Brasstown will suck any remaining life out of our legs. Expect to see quite a few TT1 jerseys in the final selections on these stages gunning for the stage win. While the riding up here in northern GA. is awesome and reminds me of nor-cal, the people are a little…different. At the local coffee shop this morning we overheard a lady explaining to the entire coffee shop how two horses escaped her ranch yesterday. By the time she found her four legged friends the cops had aprehended them. Yes, the cops arrested/ impounded the horses and charged the lady with five different citations for each horse. Outraged the lady proclaimed to her friends that it is time they tool a stand against such injustice. We just sat there speechless. Then this afternoon I saw this in a laundry mat window:

This little 1 pint of thirst quenching goodness cost me more than 1 gallon of regular unleaded.

Someone told me that all unlucky events happen in sets of 3. I hope they were right because we now have three riders out with broken wrists…

I’ll be writing a rider diary from Redlands for a German cycling website. Check it out here.

I survived another edition of the so-cal stage race world championships, aka San Dimas Stage Race. For those of you not familar with the San Dimas area, the town occupies a nice little corner of helLA. This year’s edition of the race had some highs and lows. I committed one of the classic blunders, no no I didn’t get involved in a land war over Asia. I committed the second only slightly lesser known blunder, don’t get dropped from the winning break. Yep, it wasn’t good. Thankfully our flying islander, Emile, won the field sprint for the last podium spot and covered for me. All of our TT1 riders are riding strong right now so look out for us at Redlands.

Today was one of THOSE days. You know the day where nothing is going right and you don’t really want to be doing what you’re doing at the moment, but you need to in order to reach a goal. As I was riding along in self pity a car with one of these drove by. It made me smile and reminded me that life isn’t so bad. How can you not smile at a cute guy like this hanging his head out of the window slobbering all over the place???

The Tour of Taiwan has now come to a close and we’re all headed home to see our loved ones and eat mountains of raisin bran. Shawn was about a bull ride shy of taking the overall, we won a stage, and I left only a minor skin sample on the pavement of Taipei so it was a successful trip. Since we arrived in Taipei ten days ago I’ve been looking forward visiting Taipei 101. Since we had some down time on Monday a few of us ventured on over and took a ride on the world’s fastest elevator to the top. Unfortunately the haze had set in over the city so we didn’t have the best views. It was worth the trip up to the the massive damper system designed to reduce building sway from wind. The building holds many world records and for the next 12 months will remain the world’s tallest building until construction on an even taller on is completed in the UAE.
Next up: Copperopolis - the Paris Roubaix of Nor-Cal

#1 accused me of whining about the food with eyes in it. So I decided to fix the situation with a trip down to the golden arches for a short stack of pancakes. Yummy.

Stage 6 was today and will go down as an epic in the books. It rained all day and the course ran out and back along the coast so there was plenty of wind too. Valery was in the main break again and took a well earned second place. It would have been great to see him win, but my buddy Kyle Gritters narrowly beat him at the line. Lots of crashes today including a rider going head on with an oncoming car. Ouch. Two stages left.

The team rode well again today and Shawn Milne won the stage. Not only is this the first victory for TT1 but this is the day that our DS Ed Beamon saved his nasty looking goatee off!