Our team's press guy, Sean Weide, hassled me this morning about not posting here in awhile. So here's an update. A lot has been happening. Adrienne's report was a good wrap-up of our initial time in Atlanta, but we're getting even more settled in at this point. Atlanta's a very different place than Portland. We're finding a lot of upsides, both people and places, and I think we'll definitely enjoy our time there, but the downsides are discouraging. The mass transit is extremely limited given the city's size, bike lanes are almost non-existent, and the sprawl is unbelievable. Even so, we're doing our best to replicate our Portland lifestyle in the center of this completely auto-dominated city, sticking mostly to walking and bike riding to find our way around. And I think that as we continue to find our niche here, many of the downsides will fade from view. It's not really our problem if a few million people want to sit in 10 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic.

School has also been exciting for me. I just had my first day of class at Emory on Friday, and the classes at Georgia Tech have been going for two weeks. I'm also in the process of trying to find a research adviser, which will really determine the track I follow over the course of the program. Though there's a lot yet to be determined, I'll most likely be involved in research studying the way in which the brain processes sensory data, or the manner in which the brain and spinal cord control posture and locomotion. Fascinating stuff either way, but I have a lot yet to learn in order to make my engineering background useful. My course at Emory is a basic neuroscience course that should partially catch me up on brain anatomy and function, and I'm taking another course at GT, taught by an engineer, that's focusing on the way in which the brain processes data. It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm genuinely excited about both the coursework and the future research.

Since we got to Atlanta a month ago, I've been living a dual life: student by day, bike racer in the evenings and weekends. I've spent a lot of time training indoors on a borrowed set of Inside Ride rollers (thanks Yann!), and I've been venturing out for a few group rides as well, which have been very helpful in allowing me to learn the roads. I've also done a little bit of track racing over the last couple of weeks. Jeff Hopkins, formerly of Jittery Joe's and now on the Inferno team, has taken up a management role at the Dike Lane Velodrome, and he talked me into going out two weeks ago. Since I hadn't been on the track since 2001 - and then only once as a Cat 5 - I had to start out as a C. But they moved me up through the categories pretty quickly and allowed me to ride the Cat A points race at the end of the first evening. I went back out this past Wednesday and started the night as a B, then finished with the Category A points race again. It's been a great way to get some midweek intensity in, and a lot of fun too. I wish I'd taken up track racing a few years ago.

I also made a trip out to Portland since my last post for the Health Net Twilight Criterium. Being as it would be my last race in Portland as a professional, I was very motivated to do well, but it unfortunately didn't work out for me. With two laps to go I put everything I had left into one big attack, but just like the previous week in Elk Grove, I clipped a pedal and hit the ground. Thankfully I didn't take anyone else down with me, and beyond re-opening my wounds from the week before, the damage to my body wasn't too bad either. But it was incredibly disappointing to end my last hometown race like that. Even so, it was great to get to spend one final evening as part of the Portland cycling community. I'm really going to miss being a part of that. Jonathan Maus wrote a really nice piece on BikePortland about the night. Again, Jonathan, I really appreciate all that you said. And thanks to everyone else that was out there cheering me on. I heard a lot of people yelling my name.

So now I'm in Greenville, SC for the USPRO championships, which happens tomorrow afternoon. I made the drive up from Atlanta last night and Adrienne will be coming up on Sunday to watch. I'm optimistic that the training I've been able to accomplish in Atlanta is enough to let me put in a good ride, but I really won't know for sure how I'm feeling until the race is underway. Fred and Tyler both have real shots of winning this race, and it'd be great to help them accomplish that.  After finishing the race tomorrow, Adrienne and I will drive back to Atlanta and we'll both do the US 10k Classic early Monday morning. She'll do the 10k run, and I'll do the 100k bike race. After that, I may be done. There's a chance I'll do a crit or two, and I'd like to do some cyclocross in the fall, so I won't stop training. But I'm not doing Britain or Missouri, so I definitely don't have any more stage races to look forward to. It'll be sort of a slow slide into retirement, and I won't really consider myself fully out of the sport until the end of the year.

But this post has grown far too long. I think this is enough for now. More later.

We've finally begun to settle into Atlanta and it seems like the both of us are beginning to acknowledge that this is going to be our home for the next couple of years. It hasn't been easy to make that realization but by doing so, it's made us a little more willing to accept the downfalls and highlights of living in this city.

My initial read of Atlanta was a scary one. We had arranged to stay with some friends of Doug's in Decatur for a couple of days while we apartment hunted. Decatur is a city within Atlanta with a cute little downtown area. We were staying in the more suburban area, where houses were on big lots with large driveways and there were miles of rolling hills in-between main streets. I thought that this was Atlanta and we would soon find ourselves living in a similar situation. This did not excite me.

But our hosts were amazingly friendly and confirmed the stereotype of southern hospitality. Unfortunately, their dogs did not share in their generosity and one let me know how they felt about my arrival into their household by trying to eat the back of my leg. One could argue (that person being someone who's leg had not doubled as a chew toy) that they were just nervous because of the sudden disruption in their routine. Whatever their reason, I would run in the other direction whenever I saw them and let out loud whimpering noises whenever they barked at me. By the end of my stay, I think we had an understanding: they were the bosses of the house and if I was doing something that they didn't like, I would certainly stop immediately.

I guess that's life here. Our apartment is unpacked and the walls are still just as yellow as when we moved in. The last tenant had terrible tastes in paint. Doug and I are feeling the first true pains of returning to the world of renting. Do we spend our own time and money to repaint or do we develop an affinity for OSU orange colored kitchens and sunshine yellow living rooms?

Also: Scout arrived to Georgia on Saturday. Note to those out there: don't fly a 14-year old cat across the country unless you want to smell of urine for a week and have your sleep interrupted by the sounds of your panting asthmatic feline friend. Doug seems to think he deserves some recognition for flying her across the country. I've joked about it since, but I'm sure that the sensation of having cat urine ooze into the open wounds of the road rash created by Friday's tumble was not a pleasant one. Thank you Doug. I'm not sure that Scout is happy to be here but I know we're both happy to have her.

So it's and individual time trial on dry roads, I'm riding my road bike, and still I find a way to fall off. Worst of all, a photographer's there to capture it in embarrassing detail. That's how my weekend in Elk Grove began, and now it's being capped off by a canceled flight at O'Hare. Man. It wasn't all bad, though. Losing a bunch of time in the TT meant I was basically a non-factor in the race, but Fred still had a pretty good weekend. He got third in the final crit and fifth overall, which still means some decent prize money for us. Kelly Benefits absolutely cleaned up, though. Congratulations to them.

The crash captured above resulted from me forgetting that I'm not a time-trialist. I thought I might have been putting in a decent time, so I tried keeping my speed up by pedaling through the last corner. But I clipped my inside pedal on the pavement, adopted a horrible facial expression, then got a close-up look at the curb. Luckily I ended up with just some minor road rash. And a good picture. Please stop laughing.

So now I'm in O'Hare trying to get back to Atlanta. It's been a long day already, and it could get longer. There were some nasty thunderstorms this morning and there was hardly an on-time flight to be seen on the departures screen. The customer service line here at United is unbelievable. I had the good fortune of being on one of the first canceled flights, so I managed to beat most of the crowd and get booked on a flight late tonight with a couple earlier standby options. From the looks of things, a lot of people weren't so lucky.

Adrienne's been in Atlanta all weekend getting our new life setup. We found an apartment in Midtown, which seems like a pretty good place to be. But while I was off racing my bike and having fun (see above), she was stuck doing all the moving. Not fair. I'm looking forward to getting back and starting to figure out the city we'll be calling home for the next few years. The bike riding options look discouragingly limited, but hopefully I'm at least partially mistaken. I'll keep some updates coming.

Thanks for all of the emails and comments as a result of the last post. Adrienne and I made the drive from Portland to Atlanta in five days and arrived on Wednesday with no problems. But with four bikes on the roof, a heavily loaded trailer, and only a four cylinder Mitsubishi to move it all along, it was certainly slow going. This country's huge. It's easy to forget that when traveling around by airplane.

But as I said before, there's still some bike racing season left, so after only about 36 hours in Atlanta I was on the move again. Now I'm in suburban Chicago for a three day race in Elk Grove. We have a short time trial this evening, a road race tomorrow, then a criterium on Sunday. I haven't had much chance to test myself after coming back from China, but hopefully some rest did me good. This isn't the kind of race I'm likely to win, but some of my teammates certainly can. Hopefully I can be of some help.

I'm back in Portland after a long couple of flights. But I lucked out and got a first-class upgrade from SFO to PDX, which made the last leg of the trip much better.

Now that I'm back, it seems like a good time to make a general announcement of some big plans that have been in the works for a little while now. This is going to be my last season as a professional road cyclist. I've made the decision to return to school to pursue my Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, and I'll be enrolling in a joint program at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Adrienne and I will be setting out on the move to Atlanta in just a few days, with the plan being for an August 1^st arrival. She'll be searching for an elementary education position while I finish out the racing season from there.

Though this decision was not arrived at easily, I'm confident it's the right time to move on in life. At 28, there's no doubt I could have kept riding for a number of years yet, but I was always determined to move on when I felt that I'd stopped markedly improving. Plus, it seems best to leave while I'm still having fun, as opposed to staying to the point where it just becomes a job. I was able to make a living as a cyclist for four years (plus a couple years of unpaid apprenticeship), during which time I saw both the US and the world, got to compete in some incredible races, and had the honor of being teammates with some of the best athletes in the world. It's been a great experience.

Just as difficult as the decision to leave bike racing, and perhaps more so, is the choice to leave Portland. Hopefully it's just temporary. We're having a small get together tomorrow night, July 24^th, at the Northwest Portland Lucky Lab (1945 NW Quimby) at 7ish. Anyone's invited who'd like to stop by and say goodbye. It'd be great to see as many people as possible. But everyone cannot buy us a beer. That'd be a bad idea. I'll also be back on August 8th for the Portland Twilight Criterium (thanks Brad!), so that'll be one more opportunity to catch up with everyone in the local bike community.

There're still a couple months of bike racing season left, so I'll save the full farewell until then. If anyone has any tips on training in Atlanta, drop me an email.

The final circuit race here in China finished up a couple hours ago and Tyler managed to hold onto his lead. As we hoped, there were enough teams interested in the sprint that we didn't have to work all that hard to keep things under control. Alex Rasmussen of Denmark won his fourth stage, and all five of us finished without incident. That was a long ten days.

Now we get to celebrate here in Xining before flying to Beijing tomorrow. I'll have about 24 hours there before flying home late Tuesday. I'm hoping to make it to the Great Wall, but I'm not sure if it'll work out. I'll get the better of the pictures posted here after I get back. Thanks for the comments and emails since this thing started.

We're back in Xining tonight and Tyler managed to hold on to his lead on today's final mountain day. That means we have only a 110km flat circuit race remaining tomorrow before this thing's over. Tyler's lead over second place is only ten seconds and there are time bonuses available midway through the race, as well as at the finish, so the lead certainly isn't sealed up. We're hoping that the sprinters will be fighting amongst themselves and we won't have to worry too much about the Polish climber, Rutkiewicz, gaining time. But nothing's being taken for granted.

Otherwise, there's not much to report. A couple of the teams got to their hotels last night and found that they had neither hot water nor electricity, so they ended up driving back here to Xining to spend the night. The race started two hours late to give them time to drive back to Menyuan in the morning. Sleeping in was a welcome change, but after 170 kilometers of racing, plus the hour and a half transfer back to Xining, there wasn't much day left. So that's all for tonight. Win or lose, I'll get something posted tomorrow.

Rapeseed, that is. In the most confusing and frightening translation snafu yet, a local student today showed me an essay he’d written in English about his hometown, the town in which we finished today, which contained the quote in the title of this post. Appalled, I asked him what he though that word meant. He pointed to the yellow flowers on the hill and said, ‘rapeseed.’ Otherwise, his essay was very good.

Beyond that, the big news of the day is that Tyler won the stage and took over the GC lead. That follows his second place finish two days ago. He’s been having a good run. It’s been tough racing, though. On the day he got second, he also flatted before the main climb of the day, then broke a spoke. Kayle and I gave up wheels, while Fred and Sergio came back to help him catch the field. Tyler obviously made it, but the other four of us didn’t. Fred and Kayle ultimately dropped out of the race, while Sergio and I chased uphill for the better part of two hours before finally catching the back of the race. It was a long day.

Yesterday too was long. 214km and basically flat. The Iranian team, Tabriz Petrochemical they’re called, held the lead but they refused to defend it. That meant we had to help keep things in check. It was hot, flat, and fast.

Today’s stage had a nasty climb late in the day, and I found myself in the early break along with one of the dangerous Iranian guys. I sat on and refused to work, which made everyone mad. Meanwhile, Mike and Sergio chased in the field to try to bring it back before the climb. They caught us just before the climb started, which meant that Tyler and Oscar were back in contention just as the race got difficult. As I mentioned above, things worked out well. Now we have two days left to defend Tyler’s lead. There’s one more hard mountain day tomorrow, then a flat circuit race back in Xining on Sunday. With only four of us to defend, it won’t be easy, but we’ll give it our best shot. I’m pretty confident we can pull it off.

The highlight of today’s stage for me came at the top of the KOM. Mike had started the climb a little in front of me, but the group I was in was slowly catching up to him as we went up. Just inside of 1k to the top, we lost sight of him as he turned a bend to the right. After I came around the bend, he was nowhere in sight, but there was a crowd of people on the left. After looking closer, I saw Mike’s bike laying in the road and Mike seated on a stool in the middle of the crowd playing one of the local’s drums. Classic Mike Creed.

But back to Menyuan. This is a relatively small town in a high mountain valley north of Xining. The streets are packed with people, and we’ve gotten by far our best reception yet. We can’t walk down the street without swarms of children asking us to autograph their notebooks, their hats, and their arms. One kid even had an autograph on her forehead. I think one of the Danish guys was responsible for that, but I’m not certain. Many of the kids speak English too, which explains the story at the beginning of this post. Mike Creed, Mike Lange from Jelly Belly, and myself were mobbed by the eager group containing the essay author (to my right here) while wandering around and looking in some of the shops. All of the kids were very excited to speak English with us, and one of them made me promise he could visit me if he ever comes to the US. I'm not sure how he thinks he’ll find me, but it made him very happy when I agreed.

That’s about enough for now. More pictures are up on Flickr.

One more day down in China, and it was the first time we’ve seen blue sky in a few days. It was treat getting to start without the rain jacket on. But the course itself was brutal. There was really just one climb, but it was predominantly uphill for about 50km. The climb topped out at over 12,000ft, which from what I’m told is the highest point that any UCI road race reaches. Not fun. I’d gotten in a break on the lower slopes of the climb, then Oscar and Tyler bridged up to me. In theory at least, I should have been able to help out for awhile at that point, but I actually only managed about 3 minutes of effort on the front before Oscar got impatient and left me behind, along with just about everyone else.

After finally making it over the top, the descent to the finish was incredible, and from the little I could take the time to check out, quite beautiful. At one point early on, I had to dodge a mountain goat that was standing in the road. Seriously. After that, it was 70km, almost all downhill, to the town of Guide, where we’re staying tonight. The hotel here is a little bit isolated, so I haven’t been able to see any of the town. That’s alright though, I’m pretty tired and content just to hang out here.

Tomorrow’s another big mountain day and should be a great opportunity for Oscar. The course profile is ridiculous, 55km up, then 55km back down. It’s shaped like a triangle. I’ll be looking out for more mountain goats.

More photos are up on Flickr. I've been having a good time documenting the poorly translated English over here, especially in the buffet lines. Here are some of my favorites:

"cooked in soy bean sauce West the Bacon mushroom juice spaghetti evnies"
"the vanilla mutton leg volume"
"The juice chicken to dig up"
"West on the soup radish silk"
"The white bean swallows takes the fish salad"
"The foie gras approves Envies"
"Law Juice"

Needless to say, I've been eating lots of rice. Law Juice makes me nervous.

Things here in China have been interesting. We’ve finished four stages now, including the prologue. The first road stage climbed to almost 12,000ft before dropping into the Qinghai Lake basin at just over 10,000ft. We’ve done two road stages now on our way around the lake, and for those that have never experienced it, racing at this altitude is unbelievably difficult. The slightest bit of overexertion leads to panicked hyperventilating. At least for me. The rain and crosswinds only add to the misery. But some of these guys seem to deal with it just fine.

One of those guys is Oscar. He had a nasty crash at the end of stage 1 when a spectator stepped onto the course to photograph the sprint. But though it initially looked like he’d broken both wrists, he’s been able to keep going. And he looks strong. He’s currently sitting fifth, but there should be some opportunities to move up in the coming days. My only goal for the remaining week will be to help him and the rest of the team. And not to black out from lack of oxygen.

I’ve also been doing my best to take in as much of the local culture as possible. The area around this lake is incredible. We’ve had people in traditional Mongolian dress on horseback cheering us from the side of the road, and I’ve spotted a number of tent communities out in the grasslands that look like they belong to nomadic shepherds. The little towns are also full of great people who seem incredibly excited to see us. It’s been a great experience so far.

More pictures are up now on the Flickr page. Thanks for the tips on linking to this site. My internet usage is on a time limit now, so I’ll wait to experiment with it, but go check them out over there for now.