Our team's press guy, Sean Weide, hassled me this morning about not posting here in awhile. So here's an update. A lot has been happening. Adrienne's report was a good wrap-up of our initial time in Atlanta, but we're getting even more settled in at this point. Atlanta's a very different place than Portland. We're finding a lot of upsides, both people and places, and I think we'll definitely enjoy our time there, but the downsides are discouraging. The mass transit is extremely limited given the city's size, bike lanes are almost non-existent, and the sprawl is unbelievable. Even so, we're doing our best to replicate our Portland lifestyle in the center of this completely auto-dominated city, sticking mostly to walking and bike riding to find our way around. And I think that as we continue to find our niche here, many of the downsides will fade from view. It's not really our problem if a few million people want to sit in 10 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic.

School has also been exciting for me. I just had my first day of class at Emory on Friday, and the classes at Georgia Tech have been going for two weeks. I'm also in the process of trying to find a research adviser, which will really determine the track I follow over the course of the program. Though there's a lot yet to be determined, I'll most likely be involved in research studying the way in which the brain processes sensory data, or the manner in which the brain and spinal cord control posture and locomotion. Fascinating stuff either way, but I have a lot yet to learn in order to make my engineering background useful. My course at Emory is a basic neuroscience course that should partially catch me up on brain anatomy and function, and I'm taking another course at GT, taught by an engineer, that's focusing on the way in which the brain processes data. It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm genuinely excited about both the coursework and the future research.

Since we got to Atlanta a month ago, I've been living a dual life: student by day, bike racer in the evenings and weekends. I've spent a lot of time training indoors on a borrowed set of Inside Ride rollers (thanks Yann!), and I've been venturing out for a few group rides as well, which have been very helpful in allowing me to learn the roads. I've also done a little bit of track racing over the last couple of weeks. Jeff Hopkins, formerly of Jittery Joe's and now on the Inferno team, has taken up a management role at the Dike Lane Velodrome, and he talked me into going out two weeks ago. Since I hadn't been on the track since 2001 - and then only once as a Cat 5 - I had to start out as a C. But they moved me up through the categories pretty quickly and allowed me to ride the Cat A points race at the end of the first evening. I went back out this past Wednesday and started the night as a B, then finished with the Category A points race again. It's been a great way to get some midweek intensity in, and a lot of fun too. I wish I'd taken up track racing a few years ago.

I also made a trip out to Portland since my last post for the Health Net Twilight Criterium. Being as it would be my last race in Portland as a professional, I was very motivated to do well, but it unfortunately didn't work out for me. With two laps to go I put everything I had left into one big attack, but just like the previous week in Elk Grove, I clipped a pedal and hit the ground. Thankfully I didn't take anyone else down with me, and beyond re-opening my wounds from the week before, the damage to my body wasn't too bad either. But it was incredibly disappointing to end my last hometown race like that. Even so, it was great to get to spend one final evening as part of the Portland cycling community. I'm really going to miss being a part of that. Jonathan Maus wrote a really nice piece on BikePortland about the night. Again, Jonathan, I really appreciate all that you said. And thanks to everyone else that was out there cheering me on. I heard a lot of people yelling my name.

So now I'm in Greenville, SC for the USPRO championships, which happens tomorrow afternoon. I made the drive up from Atlanta last night and Adrienne will be coming up on Sunday to watch. I'm optimistic that the training I've been able to accomplish in Atlanta is enough to let me put in a good ride, but I really won't know for sure how I'm feeling until the race is underway. Fred and Tyler both have real shots of winning this race, and it'd be great to help them accomplish that.  After finishing the race tomorrow, Adrienne and I will drive back to Atlanta and we'll both do the US 10k Classic early Monday morning. She'll do the 10k run, and I'll do the 100k bike race. After that, I may be done. There's a chance I'll do a crit or two, and I'd like to do some cyclocross in the fall, so I won't stop training. But I'm not doing Britain or Missouri, so I definitely don't have any more stage races to look forward to. It'll be sort of a slow slide into retirement, and I won't really consider myself fully out of the sport until the end of the year.

But this post has grown far too long. I think this is enough for now. More later.