today was a bit of a transfer day, just ride in the pack and get to the finish unscathed. sounds easy right? well, after yesterday i was a bit nervous about the several decents and the crosswind section; the race could turn hellish at any moment. my legs felt good on the main climb of the day and i had no problems getting over it, and then the euros were pretty tame on the decent compared to the Mt. Tam decent, and we all arrived at the bottom happy bikers.

Except for Emile, who went down again, but only got a bit dirty as he fell into a soggy embankment.

And Omer, who went in the break of the day from the first kilometer and had five minutes on the field.

And Scotty, who unfortunately had to pull out with food poisoning (not a crash, as was reported).

Having ridden the stage in practice came in to play over the next few hours, as we knew the important junctures where it was good to be up front, and the calm spots where saving energy was key. Discovery Channel rode a nice tempo and just escorted the pack around, though there was not much action in the crosswind sections: if someone had laid the smack down, the field would have splintered and there would have been some serious time gaps. As it was, we picked it up on the way into Sacramento and came flying into the finishing circuits. there was not much control at the head of the bunch, which made it a bit dangerous as everyone wanted to move up and the pack was 50 wide into every corner. in moments like these it's actually better to keep the speed high, the pack goes single file and everyone is pinned into position, which happened for maybe the last K as CSC took over and did a wicked leadout for JJ Haedo, who won easily. For the Priority Health Team, Garrett and myself were trying to help out Emile but the scrum of riders was churning a bit too strongly. every time i'd hit the wind to move up someone would nearly crash us or put Emile in the gutter and we just ran out of race to get a good run at the front.