Dana Weber

Another awesome week has already gone by. The Champery world cup may have been the craziest race I’ve ever done. And mostly do to the toughness of the course and nasty condition it was in. Near the back we seriously ran close to ½ of the entire 1st lap. After that I got in 2 solid laps, and had moved up some to finish in the 130s out of 170 or so starters…

The few days since then have been spent with some amazing travels and great dinners. We spent 2 nights near Nice in a very cool town on the steep hills above the Sea. The beaches were nice, roads were crazy, and the neighborhood / town we were in was all cobbled walkways (no room for cars) between the houses and restaurants. After that we literally spent the night in a castle (all by ourselves) in the Piacenza region of Italy. It’s was crazy – too long of a story to go into now. 

Val di Sole (here in the Dolomites) is beautiful and weather perfect after a torrential downpour Thursday. It’s like a beautiful mountain valley in Colorado, only a much lower elevation. I only went over the bars twice while pre-riding yesterday since the course is a little less technical than last week! It’s still probably more technical than anything else I’ve raced this year. A bigger factor will be the steepness of the climbs. They’re all short, but there are about 10 per lap (for 6 laps…) and almost all of them will have me in my smallest gear! I’m hoping for good enough legs to improve on last week, but it will be tough since the field somehow increased to 205 riders for this afternoon!

Paying for internet by the hour here so I’ll have to wait to get home for some photos. Time to suit up…