Tour of Belize Stage 5 update

From Kenny

Stage 5 Mountains Passed and Dirty Tricks

I'm tired. I'm not built for these types of stages anymore. My legs are so sore and knotted up and it's almost impossible to walk down a flight of stairs. At 5'10" and 165lbs, I'm the heaviest on the team and 10lbs over my fighting weight. But today I surprised even myself, pulling double duty of riding at the very front of the field over 3 hill passes, making sure Bain and Michael were out of the wind and out of danger and heading back to the car to bring up 12lbs of water and food for our top dogs. Heading up the biggest climb of the day reminded me what I forgot to take out of my bag that is stored back in Belize City... My climbing gears. I still have my big gears on my bike for the sprints and the high speed stuff, so I got dumped off the back of the field for the first time in this tour. I caught a group of 10, then drug them up to another 10, then caught about 15 more stragglers on the downhills. At one point I looked at my watch and thought, "OK it's 12:45pm now... I'll only pull this group of big non-climbers along until 1:15." That's how the rest of my day went and I'm beat. I lost 12 minutes.

Up the road Micheal Olheiser was on a mission along with the rest of the team to retain the Polka-dot Climbers jersey and move Bain up from 6th place in the general classification, possibly into the Yellow Jersey. But this tour is proving more and more to be about dirty pool and favoritism. I won't really go into specifics, but I don't want to sound like we are eating sour grapes, but Micheal O' won every sprint to the top of every hill where the points are awarded. At the end of the race, the results read that he had lost it and someone from a local team is now wearing it. With the teams help, he won 3rd place in a flat sprint, first place on a category 3 climb, first place on a category 2 climb, first place on another cat 3 and 6th place at the finish, but he still lost the jersey. Needless to say we are filing a protest, but the results are so late in being delivered to our hotel, that there is no time to handle up on things. Just an example, they have me placed 50 places lower than I am supposed to be. 50 places!

Well anyway, we are riding like champs. And we are being treated like rock stars. Especially after the stage win yesterday and the TTT performance on Thursday. This morning Mike O' and I walked out of the hotel into several people waiting to snap pictures as one guy said, "Hey Herring Gas! You guys did well yesterday. I've got a present for you. Come over here to my car." Now this big Rasta guy opens the back door of his car and out steps a tall Belizian woman who smiled big and gave us a wave that kinda meant... "Happy?" The guy then looks at me and says "hey we got girls for domistiques too. There's one on the other side." Mike and I looked at each other with disbelief and Mike responded politely, "Ummm, we're all full right now, but why don't you come see us next week.

Everyone is doing great... 4 of us in the top 20 which includes the ever present and ever attacking Woody Boudreaux in 17th, Frank Moak in 11th, Mike O' in 10th and of course our GC contender Bain in 6th. Tim Regan and Chris Alexander hung in there to bring up Mike after he flatted and Mike took a wheel from Woodie. Then Chris flatted and Chris gave his good wheel to Woody so Woody could keep his position in the General Classification. During Mike's chase back, Frank was waiting, but waited too long and Mike blew past him and Frank could never get back to speed and got caught in the race caravan as they had to slow almost to a stop for several one-lane bridges. It was frustrating as Frank lost a couple of minutes. After Mike caught up and got back to the front, Tim took over and repeatedly attacked the yellow jersey, completely wasting the guy for the next 10 miles. This allowed Mike and Bain to hold back for the final category two, 1.5KM climb to the finish line. Mike finished 6th and Bain 9th. Results for the others are sketchy at best.

Today's stage was a monster, just like they promised with the worst chip-sealed, gravely, pot holed roads that they could possibly create... 50 years ago. And they poured these roads down the steepest mountains they could find. But what might take off the sting is that we are in the most beautiful countryside you could wish for, covered with palm trees, orange and papaya groves and the occasional monkey. We are all almost too wiped out to enjoy it, but our support team is keeping us in check. We're lucky to have people like Mal and Perry along on a trip like this. And even luckier that Taylor, Candy and Tammy showed up to help out as well. And Scott is doing much better after his horrible crash.

Hopefully we'll get all this mess worked out in the morning, but we have yet to see results from today. We'll probably get them at the starting line. I'm so toasted and I need some sleep. Tomorrow we head back to Belize City for the final stage. We'll be on the same road where we were stuffed into the gutter at 35MPH the other day. I'm guessing if the wind is the same, we'll have a direct head wind for the entire 95 mile trip. We'll be on the attack the whole time. And for me, no climbing, so you can bet that I'll be out to hurt someone.

See you later,
Kenny

P.S. Sorry for the sometimes bad English, incomplete sentences, misspellings or typos. I have less than an hour each evening to peck this out, load up pictures, check references, find an internet café and wait for what seems like forever after I hit "send."

Tim

Chow time

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