The first three stages of Nature Valley are in the books and let me say, all two or so hours of racing we’ve done have been “epic.” The first stage was Wednesday morning, a 6-mile time-trial.  The course went out for about 2.5 miles on a flat road, looped back, then finished at the top of a hill a little over a half-mile in length.  Having the hill at the end made the race a little tricky, I think the key to a fast time was making sure you had enough gas left to storm the hill because that was where you could potentially lose the most time if you blew up.  Paul Martin put in an impressive ride for 21^st place, earning him the green jersey for the best amateur rider.

An interesting feature of this time-trial was that only mass-start-legal or “regular” road bikes were allowed – no aero bars and no disc wheels allowed.  The goal, according to the promoters, was to keep the logistics reasonable for the smaller teams.  For our small team having to transport 6 extra bikes to the race would have been an expensive nightmare so I’m certainly glad for the rule, I hope it catches on!  Somewhat surprisingly the winning time was only 24 seconds slower than last year.  A few guys made small pads on the tops of their bars to rest their forearms on, I saw the officials ask a guy to remove a shoelace connecting his brake hoods that he was apparently going to hold on to, and the KBS team rode TT bikes refitted with standard road bars and shifters.  United Healthcare was apparently complaining about this (mostly because Scott Zwizanski of Kelly beat Rory Southerland of UHC) but I don’t really see a problem with it.  Really as long as the bikes follow the rules – which they did – it’s not any different than riding a Ridley Noah or an aero Cervelo road bike.  Remember Ivan Dominguez riding a Fuji TT frame when he was on Toyota-United?  In fact, it could have even been a slight disadvantage to the Kelly riders as they effectively ended up riding road bikes with heavier frames and extra-low handlebars.  This of course brought up an interesting debate on weather or not time-trial-specific bikes should exist at all in road racing.  Not all of us agreed on this one so all I’ll say here is that I think they shouldn’t.

The second stage was on Wednesday night, a crit in downtown St. Paul.  It’s difficult to describe how hard a crit like this is, with such a big and strong field, but I will say that I was unceremoniously dropped with about 10 laps to go.  On the bright side, Paul defended his jersey and as a spectator for the last 10 laps I got to see some great riding by Ryan Knapp.  Ryan was held up by a crash in the  penultimate lap and denied a chance at a really good finish but was mixing it up at the front when it mattered the most and really looked like he belonged there.

Stage three was an evening road race starting in the rural town of Cannon Falls, scheduled to be 66 miles.  However, after around 18 miles of windy racing were were waved to the side of the road by the officials and sent back to town because of a tornado warning!  Not very many people took this very seriously, especially since heading back into town meant heading directly into black skies and what appeared to be a storm.  We later found out that a record number of tornadoes (35!!!) touched down across Minnesota so it was definitely a good thing the race was canceled.  On the way into town we passed the United Healthcare team RV, a stark contrast to our arrangements which included my old VW Jetta that I had driven all the way from Ohio:

You may be wondering what else we’ve been up to, what with only about 2:15 of total racing in the books for the first half of the race.  Well, for starters the six of us are split into pairs and staying in host housing: I personally may never understand why people invite bike racers into their homes but we’re very grateful to Sarah, Tara, and “Skibby” for their hospitality.  Host housing is great because it allows us to meet interesting people, learn a little bit about the area we’re visiting, and it means that we don’t have to get up early and scramble off to try to get to McDonalds before breakfast closes.

While not racing, popular activities have included sitting by the pool and excessive use of the social networking service “Twitter.”  We’ve also gotten to see some of the local sites, including a bike shop/cafe called One on One Studios (http://www.oneononebike.com/ ) which was highly recommended by a number of people.  It was definitely worth the trip and if you’re ever in Minneapolis we highly recommend stopping by.  The shop has some cool bikes on display (including a lot of single-speed mountain bikes) and a great cafe but perhaps the coolest part is a huge “bike junkyard” in the basement:

There’s everything down there from POS dumpster bikes in heaps to vintage Eddy Merckx frames, most for sale on some kind of barter system where you can apparently build your own bike and attempt to name your own price.

It’s not all fun and games though, I would compare down time during a stage race to procrastinating on big projects in college:  You can distract yourself temporarily but the race always looms in the background.  We’ve got another evening crit coming up and then a 95-mile road race that’s supposed to be full of steep climbs so it’ll be back to business soon enough.

-Dan Campbell