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Time for a change: The Kimberly Bruckner Journal 2003
Last year the 2001 US Road Champion Kimberly Bruckner left the number one ranked women's team in the US after two years with Saturn and joined the growing force that is Team T-Mobile. With her sights firmly set on the Worlds in Hamilton and the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004, Kimberly's diary is sure to provide compelling reading.
Giro d'Italia Femminile, part nine: I suck at leadouts!
Stage 8 - July 12: Cento (FE) - Salzano (VE), 147 km
I've never been a big fan of pasta. It just doesn't excite me very much. And since I started racing in Europe, I found every single meal they serve you includes pasta... morning, noon, and night. Granted, the pasta here in Italy tastes a heck of a lot better than the pasta they over-cooked for us during the women's Tour in France last year. But still, I'm counting down the days I have left to eat pasta for dinner. I've got 17 to go.
Today was hot... as Kim Andersen likes to say, it was "Africa hot". I woke up feeling as if I was suffocating this morning. The hotel had finally turned on our air conditioning at 5pm yesterday, and it was great sleeping... until they turned it off again at 6am. I woke up at 7am feeling like someone was smothering me with a hot blanket. Who needs an alarm??
Our stage started in the same town square as our afternoon stage yesterday. These little Italian towns we've started in have been so cute! I would love to take a couple days and just walk around some of these towns, shop, and drink lattes. There was one particular shop in today's square that I really took at interest in. It was an Italian wedding dress shop. I'm getting married in October, and even though I've already picked out my dress, it was still so fun for me to look at these dresses and dream. They were absolutely beautiful!
Even though this was our longest stage, it still went along as so many other stages have: fast from the gun, lots of attacks, but nothing escaping more than 10-20 seconds up the road. The entire course was dead flat... MAYBE an altitude change of 5 to 10 meters occasionally, but nothing more than that. Good motor pacing session! So even though we were out there just under 4 hours, we came to the finish groupo compatto. We crossed the finish line the first time at 140km and then had 2 8km circuits. Our team's goal was to work on our lead-out train... which has been rather non-existent so far. It's funny... the girls think I am a lead-out queen because I was on a team last year that had a lead-out train of all lead-out trains. Little do they realize that because our lead-out train was so good last year, I was never even a part of it! I suck at leadouts!
So I'm definitely trying to work on it as well. My problem is that I have a very high self-preservation factor at work and getting mixed up in the final kilometers, jostling and pushing is not really my style. I definitely need to work on it. Anyway, we all did our best to get to the front and try and lead Mari out. It was a good effort on everyone's part. As it turned out, Zinaida Starhaskaia crossed the line first in front of Rochelle Gilmore from Acca Due. But Zinaida was relegated for some reason. She swerved violently or something like that, and Rochelle was given the stage win.
So the road stages are finished for this year's women's Giro. All that remains is the 25km time trial tomorrow from the town of Mare across the bridge to Venice. Overall first and second place are separated by only 5 seconds and both Edita Pucinskaite and Nicole Brandli are strong time trialists. So that will be the true battle. Amber and I are currently in 9th and 12th respectively, and if we post really good times tomorrow, we could move up several places. So I'm drinking my post-race recovery drink as I write. See you then!
