My Ride with the Pro's

Lots to catch up on from the last few weeks of riding, racing, and travelling but I needed to start this post with one of the most awesome rides I have had all year.  On a random Tuesday morning about a month ago I received an email from one of my teammates asking if anyone would want to host a few pro's on a bike ride that evening.  I immediately knew that I had to join, I mean how often do you get asked to host some of the best in the world at something that you like to do.

We met later that evening at our usual spot in Danville and after a few minutes the 2 pro's from the United Healthcare Cycling Team arrived.  Boy Van Poppel and Jay Thomson (the pro's) were in town for a sponsor event prior to the Tour of California and were looking to go on a ride but didn't really know the area.  Luckily, one of my teammates is friends with their team manager and we were asked to host them for the evening.  About 10 of my teammates had showed up and we decided on a ride up Mt. Diablo to showcase our local terrain.

We rolled out and after about 20 minutes of riding I was positioned next to Boy Van Poppel, a young Belgian with a pretty good sprint.  He had recently finished well on a couple of the stages at the Tour of Turkey and he went about describing how hectic the last 3km of the race was with crashes and turns wreaking havoc on the field.  He is conversational in English but it was apparent that some of the slang is still lost on him.  He also has a moderately thick accent that takes a little bit getting used to.

Jay Thomson on the left and Boy Van Poppel on the right.  I am sort of in the background.

We reached Mt. Diablo and the paced picked up for a few people but most people were more interested in cruising with the pro's as it was their rest day and they were taking it easy.  On the bottom part of Mt. Diablo we rode by a rattlesnake, the first that I had ever seen on Diablo and I got a little bit too close because it hissed at me to get away.  Boy had brought a camera and snapped a few pictures as this type of scenery wasn't native to his home country of Belgium.  He also took a few pictures of some large condor's that were flying overhead, all the while riding up Diablo at a pace I struggle to maintain on most rides.  It was actually quite comical to see him riding uphill, no hands on the bars, head pointing straight up at the sky and snapping pictures.  He was far more fascinated by the diverse wildlife than our company.

Once we reached the Junction we took a few more pictures of the group and I had the chance to catch up with Jay Thomson.  He is from South Africa and is a few years older than Boy.  He typifies the life of most professional cyclists in that he spends a vast majority of his time dragging races forward, he is the kind of guy with a "big engine" and can maintain a high pace for a very long period of time but will only win a race on very rare occasions.  He is the sacrificial lamb of the team.  Altogether they were both very nice and willing to answer all of my questions about the lives of professional cyclists.

We continued our journey further up Diablo as the light started to fade with Boy snapping more photos at every opportunity.  It often times gets lost on me that I do live in an amazing area of the country and that many of the pro's are now younger than me (including both Boy and Jay) and that most of the US is new to them.  After a cool descent down Diablo, we had a dinner prepared at one of my teammates houses.  I rode home first to shower and get out of my cycling kit.

Dinner was delicious and the topic of conversation soon turned to cycling and everyone's war stories of crashes and broken bones.  Jay took the cake as he was plowed into by a car and had spine damage that will haunt him for the rest of his life.  He lives half the year in South Africa during our cold months and spends his summers in either Europe or California.  In the summer it gets so hot in South Africa that he wakes up at 5AM to get his 6 hour training rides in before noon.  The quantity of time that they spend on the bike is just staggering but I guess if that is your job you probably would spend 6 hours on the bike everyday.