from Dr. Allen Lim

It’s day 8 of the Tour and I’ve reached the point where I am deep in the minutia of the daily grind. Wake up, cook, pack, clean, transfer, traffic, mayhem, set up tech, transfer, analyze, cook, transfer, more mayhem, clean, unpack, analyze some more, write, and then prepare to do it all again. It is seriously cracking me.

I often tell people that the most romantic part about working this race involves looking at the pictures two months afterwards. It’s like that family vacation from hell, where you’d rather be at home with your friends riding your bike, but instead you’re getting dragged all over creation, staring out the window at 70 mph cornfields, and spending your nights in smoky motels where the blankets are either that funky thin Styrofoam or some nappy wool rag, just so your Dad can take rushed snap shots against temporary vistas that give the impression of a well traveled life. A run on sentence, for those runs on vacations, for this run on race.

The thing is, I look at those pictures all the time now, and as unhappy as I think I remember I was, it looks like we were having a lot of fun. I imagine, that the guys and the rest of the staff feel the same way. Even on a smaller scale, I see it. They come onto the bus, miserable and tired, often bitching and complaining about what went wrong, who made a stupid move, a feed they missed, or a flat that took too long to change. But within minutes, as they clean off, get some food, and watch the highlights on T.V., they’re laughing and joking, inventing ridiculous rhymes and hatching plans for the next day. As much as we all suffer to do our job, the pain is always temporary and always easy to forget. Sometimes, I wish it weren’t. Maybe it’s why we keep on going back to summer camp and why last year’s summer camp was better than this years. I don’t know.

What I do know is the guys look good right now. Christian, obviously, is killing it. David and Ryder are going to unleash. Martijn and Will are totally solid. Trent is starting to float. And despite Maggy’s bad day yesterday, it was just a bad day and I guarantee he will be flying in a few weeks. Less obvious is the Pate. Maybe it’s just his MO, but the Pate is discrete about the fact that he is a human weapon on a bicycle right now. For the first two hours yesterday his burn rate was the highest on the team at 1200 Kjoules an hour as he attempted to crack open the race. And today, he was in every attack and covered almost every move that went for the first 75 km, etching 350 Watts while pedaling into his 705 in the process – an effort that the other guys said left his PowerTap smoking. Cause it literally is like lighting yourself on fire, then running.

Always trying to put something human to all those lines of data, I asked him, as he got off the bus, how hard it was today. His reply was classic Pate. Strutting off and waving his hands with a body language that connoted some sort of lackadaisical skepticism, he simply answered, “It was like Giro hard man, but now I’m fit, so the pain this time was all self-inflicted.” And then he laughed. I laughed too. The kind of sentimental chuckle you get looking back at an old photo. That same picture your dad coerced out of you when you were suppose to have been hating life. But what he saw and what you see now is that for once in your life you were actually really living.