What Is Up Dog?

"Man, what did you do in here? It smells like updog...""What's updog?""I don't know, Dawg, what's up wit you?"Ha ha ha. When properly executed, it's a classic.After an epoch few days of travel (I use that word because one, it actually nearly makes sense and B, the word "epic" has officially been retired by the overuse-police, and 3, it's ironic and witty and I feel like it) I arrived in Asheville, NC last Sunday. Asheville is a smashingly fun town that I have formerly called home. Here's a shot from the spring of ought-eight on the Blue Ridge Parkway.I'm staying with friends, being accommodated by friends, hanging out with friends, and pretty much having a blasty blast with friends as I finalize my preparations for Nationals this Sunday. If you're in the area, definitely come out for an afternoon of being loud and getting me pumped for the race.August was basically a massive month of training, racing, and training through races. I would always go into races as fresh and prepared as possible with the circumstance, but I have a goal in mind and I'm trying hard to achieve it. Namely, I want go really fast at Nationals, Missouri, and Worlds. That's a fairly big risk for a handful of reasons:- as the only American on the Cervelo TestTeam, I'm going in without any team support. This can be both a blessing and a burden for reasons that I'll omit here, but allow you contemplate at length.- nationals is a one day race, which is always a toss up.- Missouri will feature a lot of strong international sprinters and I'm no sprinter. But I'm going to be on the lookout to help Thor and then just be an opportunist.- I'm not (yet?) selected to the USA worlds team. This would be my first worlds, so I'm hoping to go to support Team America and learn the ropes of a world championship race.So that's that. Now let's recap my travel that brought me to Asheville which will serve as awesome fodder for iamtedking trivia at your next cocktail party.I finished up the Tour of Limousin on Friday. Ridiculously hard race, which I equate to a four day mini Amstel Gold stage race. It's basically 170km of (b)all(s) out racing for four straight days. Plus it's the French trying to out-French each other which basically means attack hard and attack often and attack when attacking makes absolutely no tactical sense. But it was superb training. The race wen well with a few podiums for the team including a 3rd overall for Florencio, and an awesome smash session taking Florencio well away from a hard chasing peloton thoroughly securing his final podium spot. I digress...Limousin finished Friday, I then hoped into a rental car with Mike Friedman, we had an excellent 24 hours of hanging out with very in depth conversation about everything under the sun, including life after cycling and the history of the M&M, which, thanks to research in the car on our phones we learned is actually quite fascinating. Did you know in 1949 tan replaced violet as one of the six shell colors?! We drove to southern France, bunked up in a hotel, woke up the next day, drove to a northern Spanish airport, returned the car, taxi'ed back to Girona, (meanwhile, left the keys in our collective pants pocket... oops), rode our bikes, ate fresh figs directly from the trees on a recovery ride, and then I packed all afternoon. After a brief night of sleep - which I think can be categorized as more of a long nap - I then stayed awake the next 24+ straight hours as I woke up at 4:30am to catch another cab ride to Barcelona Sunday morning, flew to Munich, flew to Charlotte, stood in a horrendously long customs line where accosting travelers was the order of the day, got picked up by my dear friend Adam and drove to Asheville, went to dinner, went to a friend's house, and then passed out.Rather than offering some concluding paragraph, having now summarized my lengthy travel process, I will abruptly end this blog post with my favorite picture I took on a ride once in Asheville. I hope you can appreciate how strange this is... or else how popular Dan is that the sign maker assumes everyone knows Dan's phone number.Peace.